Читать книгу They Seek a Country - Francis Brett Young - Страница 7

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On the first day of October in the year eighteen hundred and thirty-six, fog lay over England. Though fog was the island’s natural portion in winter, its inhabitants felt that they had some cause for resentment when the infliction arrived so early; but that summer had been wetter than any in living memory. In June roving thunder-storms had laid the ripening grass. In July rains that seemed as if they would never cease had soaked the cut hay till the swathes lay blackened and rotted. By the end of August corn stood sprouting in the ear, and common folk, who had to think first of their stomachs, shook their heads; for scarcity, they knew, made a speculator’s paradise, and the price of wheat, which had fallen from five pounds ten in the Year of Waterloo to less than half that figure in the Year of Reform, was certain to rise. Bitter cold in the air; in men’s hearts an equal bitterness: for the Reform Bill was Law—and yet the millennium had not come. And the winter, too, old men said, was like to be cruel cold as well as hungry; for the hedges were heavily berried with hips and haws—God having more thought for the birds of the air than Lord Melbourne had for the people. In September the farmers scraped together the remnants of ruined harvest, none was left for gleaners; and now, as the first Arctic draughts crept insensibly over the sodden land, the raw, moisture-laden air turned to a mist so dense that even in broad daylight men must grope their way as blindly as if it were already dark, or sit sulkily by their firesides waiting for rain to disperse it or for wind to blow it away. For three days and nights England lay fog-bound, utterly obscured by a blanket of white vapour, uniform and unsullied save where the smoke of hidden cities flawed its sunlit surface with yellowish stains like spills on a soiled tablecloth, or where the summits of wolds, moorlands and mountains, emerging triumphantly, pierced the unsubstantial stuff with high peaks and ridges that lay glittering with the first snow. But these no men, save, perhaps, lonely shepherds, saw.

Over no part of the land did the fog cling and settle more densely than in the valley of Severn where the cliffs of Cotswold and Malvern rose sharply, defining the limits of that ancient firth. Here summer floods had saturated the stiff marls to the depths where the cold clay subsoil held water. The Hirondelle coach, whose ranking team of four normally covered the hundred and thirty-six miles from Cheltenham to Liverpool in nine hours and a half, was held up at Worcester. Three times on the Evesham turnpike, where mists rising from the swollen Avon thickened the air, the Hirondelle had pulled up to give aid to ditched transport-wagons top-heavy with pockets of hops. When, two hours behind time, the guard slid on the drags and the coach screeched slowly down the hill into Worcester, where the new gas-lamps stretched away in a wan procession, their bleared haloes vaguely indicating the line of the empty High Street but giving little more light than the candle-points flickering like will-o’-the-wisps behind steamed shop-windows, there rose in the hearts of its pair of lonely passengers a feeling of escape and relief.

At the “Star and Garter” Hotel in the Foregate the coach came to a halt and these comrades in distress dismounted. One was a haggard gentleman, with a long, cadaverous face and a skinny nose from which a dewdrop depended, who moved gingerly, as though his limbs were frozen to brittleness. The other, a short, stout, bustling fellow, in a brown beaver hat, with shrewd, humorous eyes, a ruddy complexion, and a figure that strained the buttons of his caped and waisted melton surcoat, jumped out with an air of impatience and accosted the driver.

“How long do you give us to thaw?” he asked briskly.

The man slewed round sullenly. His face, blotched with cold, was ill-humoured, and globules of condensed fog spangled his tousled flaxen wig. One would have guessed he was drunk.

“How long?” he repeated. “That’s a fine question to ask, sir! I can tell you I’ve had a bellyful! You don’t catch me taking the road again afore I can see where I’m going. One thing’s certain sure: my cattle and me are stabled in Worcester this night!”

The stout gentleman grunted. “Provoking ... damnition provoking! Is there any other coach, do you know, running north to Kidderminster? I happen to be in a hurry. Time means money to me.”

“I know naught about no coaches but mine,” the man answered surlily. “Other coaches are none of my business, nor answering questions. If you want information you’ld better ask inside. Mr. Collins will tell you all you want, behappen. Come on, Joe, give us a hand!”

The stout gentleman entered the inn and called for the landlord. A flustered fat man in an apron and shirt-sleeves appeared and tried to be polite.

“We’re all at sixes and sevens,” he said. “The fog’s lying thicker up north. I’ve five coach-loads of passengers shot in on me unexpected and my wife abed, poor creature, with a heavy cold on the chest, you know what that means, sir. Kidderminster? You’ll never get there this day, I can tell you that. There’s coaches held up all along the road, and I can’t say I blame them. If you care to make yourself comfortable in the Assembly Room, I’ll let you know the minute there seems any hope.”

“I must get to Grafton Lovett this evening,” the traveller persisted.

“Grafton Lovett? But that’s nearer Worcester than Kidderminster, and well off the road.”

“I am well acquainted with Grafton Lovett. I’m a friend of Colonel Abberley’s.”

“A friend of Squire Abberley’s?” The landlord’s tone changed. “Well, I shall have to see what I can do for you in that case. Any friend of Squire Abberley is welcome in this house. I might find somebody willing to drive you to Grafton—that is, if you don’t mind paying for it.”

“I’m willing to pay anything in reason. But I’m in a hurry. I have parliamentary business waiting for me in London.”

“Indeed ...” The landlord was impressed. “If I might know your name, sir ...”

“Vizard. Mortimer Vizard. I’m Colonel Abberley’s lawyer.”

“Then if you’ll oblige by stepping this way, sir, I’ll do my best for you.”

He led Mr. Vizard upstairs and along a creaking passage that smelt of must and fog and stale beer, then ceremoniously threw open the door of a long, dim, barn-like chamber with a vast spread of uncarpeted floor and a high ceiling suspended from which the lights of six candles shone pitifully through the all-pervading fog. At either end of it stood a fireplace crammed with a brisk fire of sulphurous Staffordshire coal; and around these, in two huddled semi-circles, were clustered the unfortunate six coach-loads of wayfarers who shared Mr. Vizard’s fate. In spite of the landlord’s ceremonious introduction nobody made room for him. They sat there dazed with the fatalistic apathy of two parties of shipwrecked sailors, distrustful of each other and victims of a stupor that made them all dumb. Since there was no chair unoccupied, Mr. Vizard contented himself with a brisk prowling to and fro over the echoing boards of the icy space between the two fireplaces and hoped for the best.

For a quarter of an hour he paced impatiently to and fro, his portfolio under his arm, or gazed hopelessly through the windows into the fog that was so dense that he could not even discern the houses over the street, taking the watch from his fob occasionally and examining it under the candles to check the incredible slowness of the passage of time. At the end of this period the landlord reappeared. Out of respect to Colonel Abberley’s friend he had removed his apron and put on a coat. As he entered the two clusters of castaways sprang to their feet simultaneously, each man hoping that the coach in which he had been travelling was about to start.

“Mr. Vizard, sir!” he called.

Mr. Vizard hurried to the door.

“I’ve done it,” the landlord whispered, “I’ve got a conveyance. You’re in luck, sir. There’s not many folk that’ld care to poke their noses out of doors for love or money this day, though the roads in these parts are safe enough, generally speaking—which is more than I could have sworn to, mind you, a few years since, when the rick-burning and machine-breaking was on and a lot of odd characters hanging about and waiting to take their chance. It wasn’t harm they was meaning, not even then: only a parcel of ‘Brummagem Radicals’ got stirring them up and setting fools’ minds again’ their own interest. All that country folk need—and I speak as one country-born, sir—is a steady hand: the sort of treatment gentlemen like Squire Abberley gives them: a-driving them on the snaffle, but letting them know that you’ve got the ribbons in one hand and the whip in t’other. I fancy you mentioned, sir, that you were a Parliament gentleman? Well, this Malt Tax, now ...”

“You say you have got me a chaise?” Mr. Vizard said smoothly, interrupting the spate.

“To be sure, sir. The thought of that there damned Malt Tax put it out of my head. Not exactly a chaise, sir. I found a chap in our tap-room, Jim Hollies by name, with a dray of cider-casks going to Mr. Ombersley’s at Chaddesbourne. It won’t be not more than a mile or so out of his way to drop you at Grafton; and though he’ll go slow, slow is sure, if you take my meaning, and the slower the better on such a day as this and with Jim a bit bosky.”

“You mean the fellow is drunk?” Mr. Vizard enquired with alarm.

“Oh, I wouldn’t say that, sir, not drunk. He’s had about as much as a weak-headed chap can carry comfortable. But drunk or dry, Jim knows his way home right enough; and even if he didn’t you can be certain his horses do. Wonderful knowledgeable creatures horses be. I’d sooner trust them than most men in a fog like this.”

“And what do I give this fellow?” Mr. Vizard asked cautiously.

“That rests with you, sir. But if you choose to take my advice you’ll not overpay him. A carter’s wage is round about ten shillings a week. If you spoil these chaps they gets saucy in no time.”

In front of the inn the Chaddesbourne dray stood waiting. It was, in fact, a bulky wain with four enormous mud-caked wheels, piled high with hogsheads and drawn by two shaggy-fetlocked plough-horses. Jim Hollies himself showed a stunted, misshapen figure enveloped in sacking that covered his head with a cowl from beneath which, withdrawn like those of a hedgehog, two small, bright, bloodshot eyes blinked at his fare distrustfully. Mr. Vizard regarded the vehicle and its sub-human driver with equal distaste; but it seemed he had no choice in the matter, so, lifting his coat-skirts, he set his neatly-shod foot on a spoke of the near forward wheel and hauled himself on to the fog-damp sacking at Jim Hollies’s side. The landlord, bowing obsequiously, wished him a pleasant journey, and with a heavy rumbling and a squeaking of wheels the wagon rolled forward.

At the end of the Foregate, a hundred yards from the inn, the last gas-lamp winked its good-bye. For another two hundred the ghosts of tall houses defined the street. At this point, with a bump and a convulsive lurch, the unsprung wagon passed from the city’s paved road on to the country highway. A phantasmal turnpike-keeper threw wide his gate and waved them on. The empty road was so deeply rutted and so beset with puddled pits and crevasses that the wagon, for all its weight, rolled from side to side like a ship in a heavy sea. Mr. Vizard, still clutching his portfolio, was hard put-to to keep his seat, and the fog grew so thick that he could no longer see the leader’s ears. Slow as the horses were, he wished they were even slower. Remembering the hop-wagons ditched on the Evesham road, he was prepared at any moment to find himself flung into the invisible hedgerow. Mr. Vizard regretted his separation from the Hirondelle’s buoyant springs. He regretted equally the proximity of Jim Hollies, who, accustomed, no doubt, and adapting himself automatically in his sleep to this riotous type of locomotion, swayed sideways with each lurch and leaned, with the most neighbourly abandon, against Mr. Vizard’s shoulder, inflicting on his town-bred nostrils an all too rustic aroma of byre and midden. There hung also upon the air a strong odour of pomace or cider, though how much of this was exhaled from Jim Hollies’s person and how much arose from the hogsheads and the heaps of empty sacks in which bruised and rotten apples had been stored, Mr. Vizard could not decide. In any case, what with the continued jolting and swaying and the cold which, gradually ascending from his feet, was approaching the more delicate area vulnerable to his hereditary enemy lumbago, he soon reached a stage of suffering and of apprehension so numbing to the sensibility that he almost ceased to feel or to care what happened. Indeed, despite his appearance of drunken stupor, Jim Hollies’s hedgehog-eyes were more keenly aware than he judged; for suddenly, with an alarming precipitance which made Mr. Vizard fear an encounter with footpads or desperate poachers or even highwaymen, he leapt from his seat and seizing the leader’s bridle led the horses right-handed down a steep pitch of lane that deserted the high road and then through a swollen water-splash, and then, urging them onward with agonized, inarticulate cries, up an even steeper and apparently endless hillside, at the summit of which Mr. Vizard, to his amazement, emerged into a new and relatively fogless air in which an avenue of elms, invisible a moment before, towered like gigantic spectres above and on either side, discovering, through the end of the tunnel their leafy masses enclosed, a range of bright windows enclosed in the sombre shape of a huge stone house with a pillared portico and pediment which he recognized, almost incredulously, as his journey’s destination.