Читать книгу The Eyes of Love - Warwick Deeping - Страница 7

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The episode of the thieving of Mr. Moker’s apples symbolised Slim Wetherell’s attitude towards the world. Society, the whole organised scheme of things, had for him the significance that the farmyard has for the fox. Hard facts had developed in Slim a spirit of vicious antagonism. Muscularly he was not a strong lad, and a rough school had taught him that cunning alone can compensate for lack of physical strength. Many thrashings and much bullying had sharpened his wits, and made him spiteful and vindictive. He had learnt to take a pride in his own guile, and in his ingenuity for mischief. So far as the criminal virtues were concerned, Slim had many of them. He could hold his tongue, climb like a monkey, run fast and noiselessly, plan an adventure with great cunning as to detail. Sometimes he thieved because he was hungry, sometimes for the vicious joy of pitting his wits against the organised tyranny of his elders.

The Moker affair had been an absolute debacle. True, chance had played him a scurvy trick by bringing old Moker home at an hour when no decent man should return from work. But facts were facts. He had been yanked down out of an apple-tree, and taken home by the ear to watch wrath and contempt gather on Sam Wetherell’s face. His father’s contempt had hurt him more than his blows, for Slim hated his father with a great and bitter hatred, and to be shamed before him was ignominy indeed.

Vindictiveness was a powerful motive force with such a lad as Slim. He was too much afraid of his father to retaliate upon him, and his spite concentrated itself against old Will Moker. As for Ann’s attempts at mothering him, Slim staved them off with a sulky “Shut it!” He was not to be touched by tenderness. The only thing that appealed to him powerfully was a person’s ability to inflict pain.

William Moker’s cottage was a solitary, single-storeyed hut standing on a high bank above a solitary lane. The cottage and garden were surrounded by a thick hedge, and overshadowed on two sides by the oaks of Goldhanger Wood. No one lived within half a mile of the place; no one overlooked it. The rutty grass-grown lane was used only by the wagons and country carts that went to and from one or two lonely farms.

Slim knew every ditch and hedge-row in the neighbourhood. In fact he had specialised in ditches, using them often as sunken ways when they were dry in summer and early autumn. Sam Wetherell had driven into Lymnor, and Slim knew that old Will Moker was working as a roadman two miles on the other side of Ashhurst. So Slim started out blackberrying, made for Goldhanger Wood, and worked through it till he saw the brown thatch of old Moker’s cottage.

The boy did an immense amount of reconnoitring before he ventured into the garden. This time he would leave nothing to chance. He had even borrowed a pair of his father’s boots in case some intelligent person should think of looking for footmarks. But Slim found the place deserted. His nimble spite stood on tip-toe to seize every opportunity.

There were pig sties and a rough tool-shed at the end of the garden. Slim found the shed unlocked. He looked in and considered.

One of the first things to suggest many possibilities was a bucket of tar. A long-handled tar-brush stood in a corner amid rakes and hoes. Slim emerged with bucket and brush, and stood contemplating the pig sties. In one an old white sow lay asleep in the muck. In the other sundry young pigs grunted and scuffled, and snorted with pink noses between the palings. Slim put the bucket down, and dipped the brush in the tar.

Those pigs were an original sight when Slim had done with them. And the game was so ludicrous that the boy’s eyes were wet. He had streaked, and blobbed, and splashed the beasts, routing them round and round with the tar-brush, and emitting noiseless and desperate mirth. Slim adjourned with the tar-bucket half empty. Old Moker’s crop of winter greens stood up for martyrdom. Slim went into the shed for a reaping-hook, and made a clean sweep of cabbages, broccoli, and kale.

As yet he had not tried the cottage, and as he had expected, the door was locked. A loose brick in the porch caught his eye. Slim lifted it, and found the old man’s hiding-place for his key.

He clutched it, and emitted gurgles of exultation.

“Gawd! What a swipe!”

He took a look around, and then unlocked the door. Old Moker’s cottage was brick-floored, with whitewashed walls, and wonderfully clean. Its very cleanliness invited ravishment.

“Yoh, be’unt the old fool tidy!”

A grandfather clock went tick-tack, tick-tack beside the door. Slim glimpsed it, and went for a dishcloth hanging on the mantel bracket.

“Here, who spoke to you? You shut it!”

And he opened the case door, and stuffed the cloth into the clock’s works.

“Reckon that’s given un t’ belly ache!” and he spread his thumb and fingers at the clock.

Then he made hay. Drawers were pulled open and upset; the geraniums on the window-sill deposited in the oven. Slim collected old Moker’s clean linen and rammed it under the copper with a broomhandle. The old man’s clean, quilt-covered bed, carefully made before he had gone to work, was too tempting to be ignored. Slim went for the tar-bucket, turned back the sheets, sluiced the tar in, and covered it, exulting hugely.

“Yah, what about black feet! Only wish I could stay t’ see.”

He surveyed his handiwork, and then retreated, locking the door after him, and throwing the key down the well. The whole campaign had not lasted forty minutes. And in half an hour Slim was two miles away, picking blackberries for dear life, and emitting occasional snorts of laughter. He worked right down to Willow End, and made a point of exhibiting himself at the various cottages along the road.

“Provin’ a ‘hally-buy,’” he said to himself, realising that the blackberry juice matched any tar that was on his fingers.

“Them pigs!” and he would sizzle like a baked apple.

But he made several mental notes during the day.

“Get at t’ paraffin tin, and clean yer fingers.”

“Get as quick as yer can out o’ t’ old man’s boots.”

Autumn scents were in the air, and the smell of a weed fire drifted across the Fox Farm orchard as Jesse came out of the old black tool-shed, with a spade over his shoulder, and a sack in his hand. He had reached the field gate when he heard Kate calling him from an upper window.

“Jesse! Jesse!”

He turned and looked towards her.

“Where’s that wood? We haven’t a stick in the shed.”

“I’ll carry some in when I get back.”

He suspected that she was saying, “Drat the man,” but they had quarrelled that morning, and Jesse felt stubborn. His wife was always belabouring him into action, pouring energy into his ears, and trying to make him more disgusted with himself. Sometimes he felt very tired, as though Kate sapped his vitality, and talked away his strength.

“I’ll bring the wood in when I come back, or send one of the men up.”

“Any time does for you,” and she disappeared, shutting the casement noisily.

Jesse felt infinitely depressed that morning. He had shut Brick into the stable, and he could hear the dog barking and whining with strange and appealing persistence. But Brick would be in the way that morning, and Jesse went on down the fields alone. His depression took the form of gloomy apathy, a mood that bowed his great shoulders and made his face look dull and expressionless. Even the autumn colours seemed crude and raw, and too suggestive of decay. The sinking of the sap might have brought lassitude and sadness upon the land.

What was wrong with him and the world? Why did he and his wife drift into absurd quarrels? How was it that he had always made a mess of things? What the devil did men mean by wanting such a thing as money?

Jesse’s thoughts turned to old Smunk and showed him one of the figures of success. Certainly the mean, sly, unlovable people were the people who had succeeded best in Ashhurst. He grouped his acquaintances, and indulged in generalisations. Smunk, Catlack the lawyer, Benskin the butcher, were the most powerful men in the neighbourhood. Their influence went down deep beneath the surface, for the tiny rootlets of golden ore converged from all directions towards their stiff, upstanding forcefulness. The Furze Park people were treated with an easy civility that owed them nothing; they were of no real importance, even in politics. Then Jesse thought of James Bentall, gentlest of men, a bird-lover, wise in the ways of Nature, driven to the last breath to stave off bankruptcy. George Molt, that quiet, steadfast philosopher, was dying of cancer at three and forty, and suffering hellish pain. Rushholm, the local doctor, grey, meagre, but compassionate, had a drunken wife, five sickly children, and worries that had left him sad-eyed and silent. What was the use of decrying the golden dross, and trying to live above the plane of pelf? Money was the blood of the modern world. And those whose blood was thin were doomed to suffer.

A man’s mind is a world in itself, and in it also is reflected an image of the greater world like a landscape in miniature seen in a hand mirror. Moreover some men are very sensitive to the impulses of the age; they live into its thoughts, its beliefs, and its denials. Even in the depths of the Fox Farm fields Jesse was a modern among the moderns. He knew that mediævalism had passed away, that the earth had become heaven and hell, that the old systems were broken. He had read and he had thought, and he smiled at the clamour some of the good Christians raised over the “strange indifference of mankind.” England called itself Christian, though the younger men said in their hearts that the religion of Christ was doomed. A god had fallen, and an inter-reign was at hand. Men questioned their own hearts, and looked sadly for some Great Idea to take the throne and reign. There were prophets and preachers, and many high-sounding words. Humanity, Progressive Amelioration, Science, Solidarity—Empire. Some men sought for the Joy of Life, others for knowledge, others for money. It was an age of great discoveries and great disillusionments, a grand age for the strong and the fortunate, a sad age for those who were the creatures of evil coincidences.

Near Lymnor there was a College of Jesuits, and Jesse had often seen black figures wandering in threes along the roads. They seemed to trudge miles, these Jesuits, with their eccentric, swarthy, foreign faces, and their appearance as of peasants who had been tumbled into queer, ill-fitting clothes. Jesse had stood and marvelled at these men. He wondered how it was possible for them to believe what they believed; in fact, he disbelieved in their credulity. He pictured them kneeling at their prayers, praying with a faith that was so fervent that their fleshly hands could almost touch the warm flesh of their God! After all, was it not a question of temperament? Some men loved beer, others hated it; some were adulterous by blood, others cold and unprovoked.

He thought of his mother, how she had died radiantly, Bible in hand. What a contrast between two generations! Organised superstition had ceased to exist for the son.

In its place he might have sought to set a beautiful humanism, the service of man to man. For Jesse had started his thinking life as an idealist. He had believed that the world was better, cleaner, kinder than it had ever been. Health, and the joy of living, these were the things to be desired.

Then, whatever was sanguine and hopeful in him had been given blow on blow. Nothing that he had done or had striven to do had seemed to matter. He had found the personal purpose of his life contradicted and re-contradicted by coincidences. At first he had striven, rallied himself, persevered. But the relentless succession of mischances had gone on and on. That was how Jesse had been driven towards fatalism. Sometimes he read astronomy, and it comforted him. When one took a glimpse of the vastness of space, the loss of a pig did not seem to matter.

Jesse came to the corner of Clay Bottom field where the old oak had stood for centuries in the wind and rain. It was a huge, grey shell, breaking above into a few dead and stunted arms. A large cleft gaped in the bole. The roots were twisted and covered with bosses, and there were hollows in which rain-water stood. One ragged bough still carried a few leaves, the last flutter of life under autumn skies.

Jesse stood his spade in the ground and laid his sack beside it. He went close to the old tree, looked into the chasm of its heart, felt the dead wood, and wondered. How long had it stood there? Perhaps eight hundred years. It had been a sapling when Rufus the King had lain dead in the New Forest. Wild swine had fed on the acorns under its branches. It had budded green in one of Chaucer’s Springs. Lovers in quaint, bright-coloured clothes, had kissed there. It had heard the thunder of Spanish guns. And now in its gigantic decrepitude a little man came with a tin full of powder to blast it into fragments.

Jesse stood and meditated. A sense of shame came over him, that he should lift his hand against this tree. It was like destroying a Gothic bell-tower, or burning strange and ancient books. Sentiment has made life liveable, and lifted it above the scramblings of beasts. And Jesse felt that he could not touch the tree.

He turned away irresolutely, put his hand on the spade, and hesitated once more. Jim Purkiss’s grinning face obtruded itself upon his thoughts. He heard the men saying to one another, “Muster Jesse be a soft ’un!” Kate, too, influenced him from Fox Farm. “I’m glad you’re going to clear a bit of rubbish away, Jesse. Why people make a fuss about mouldy old things, I can’t think. They might as well treasure one of their great-grandfather’s shirts!”

And Jesse hesitated. That fatal weakness of his, that inclination to drift with the whims of others, showed in his mind. After all, everything came to an end. Millions of splendid trees were serving in out-houses and under floors. Death and disintegration were inevitable. Man’s puny breath of sentiment was but a puff of smoke from a chimney.

Jesse took off his coat, folded it, and laid it under a hedge. He picked up the spade, thought awhile, and then began to dig close to the trunk of the tree, cutting through a rotten root, and excavating a narrow tunnel under the huge stub. When he had finished his tunnelling, he returned to the sack, took out a canister full of gunpowder, two inches of candle, some string soaked in paraffin, an old metal powder-flask, and a lidless wooden box.

Then he set about making his mine, by packing the canister into the tunnel, and drawing a train from it with the powder-flask. He carried the train to a point about five yards from the tree, wound the oiled string round the piece of candle, set the candle in the shelter of the box, and then laid the other end of the string on the powder train. So he made his fuse.

Jesse looked at the tree awhile, before he lit the candle and walked off towards the ditch. The ditch was a deep one, and Jesse took cover in it about fifty yards from the tree. He sat down so that he could see everything, and waited.

Three minutes passed before a spurt of flame went running towards the tree. Jesse crouched, and waited for the explosion, and the silence was like the holding of a long-drawn breath.

The moments went by, and nothing happened. Jesse raised his head. The powder train must have failed. Very possibly some earth had slipped and fallen on it in the tunnel, and prevented the flame reaching the canister. Jesse sat in the ditch awhile, and waited, to give the mine a fair chance.

Nothing happened. Jesse climbed out of the ditch and crossed the ground towards the tree. A black line showed where the flame had run along the powder train into the mouth of the tunnel. Some earth must have fallen and smothered the powder. He would have to clear it away, and start again.

Jesse was within three yards of the tree when the explosion came. Some earth had fallen on the powder train, but before the flame had been extinguished, it must have set some rotten wood a-smouldering. The smoulder had spread until a spark had fallen on the little pool of powder at the mouth of the canister.