So it went on, and Mr Bidmead, kind old feller that he was, began to consarn hisself more than ever before with the comforts and pleasures of Mr Hutchinson, bringing out the cribbage cards at all hours, and losing on purpose every mortal game that he put his hand to; fixing up the backgammon board, and going at it hammer and tongs, whether the liddle hog wished it or no; laughing like a nigger at the tricks with matches; and fetching in the elderberry wine whensumdever the pig looked a liddle bit hipped in the eye.
And on top of this, by Job, Stanley discovered that his mother’s eyes were beginning to sparkle again; but this time he could see um in the paraffin lamp that the old man had bought out of the pig-money, and in the patches of light that twinkled on the new cups and sarcers and plates of Chailey china; and sometimes, when the nights were very sleepy and hot, the old man would fall into a doze, with a smile upon his lips, and after a while his mouth would hang open, so that all of a sudden the room would fetch up with a snore as loud as a hog’s. And at last Stanley Hutchinson couldn’t abide it a moment longer. So one day near the beginning of June, he went to Mr Bidmead, and gave it in how he would go searching for the lost coin.
‘I justabout can’t tell ’ee what makes me think so,’ said the liddle pig, ‘but I have an idea,’ said he. . . . ‘ I dunno but what,’ he continued, ‘I’ll sure find that golden coin far, far away.’
Then the old man looked at him, and said:
‘If so be as I thought there was any truth in these words o’ your’n, Stan, why then, I reckon I’d tell ’ee to go and search for the coin, surelye. But how can a chap,’ said the old man thoughtfully, ‘go searchin’ for a golden coin what he’s never seen, what he’s never knowed the date of, what he’d never even heard tell of before that morning many weeks ago when I runned upstairs to my bedroom for to git me a pocket-handkercher?’ So he went on, talking and talking, and all the time he was thinking to hisself most miserably: ‘Stan could tell me summat about that golden coin, I reckon.’ For the pig didn’t know that the butcher had written again from Parham, a month earlier, asking Mr Bidmead why he hadn’t acknowledged the liddle parcel. Mr Bidmead had gone to the postman; and, hearing the most disturbing news that waun’t entirely disconnected with Stanley Hutchinson, ever since that time the old chap had been beezled as to whether he should go prying further, for fear he might bring the most terrible shame upon hisself and the liddle cottage. Eh, by Job, it was a frightening thought! Mr Hutchinson! His own Stanley! The cleverest pig in the village! And now, looking down at his toes, then round the parlour, and again at the liddle pig, Mr Bidmead reckoned all at once how it would be wiser to ask no tom-fool questions about the matter, being as he’d onny get perky answers or maybe a few witty jokes that would leave him nowhere. So he said nothing. But he took a basket, and in it he put brown bread; and he put a pound of butter in it, and he put some cheese in it, and then he put some eggs in it, and then he put some salt and pepper in it, and a liddle elderberry wine, and then he put some apples in it, and then he said goodbye, and the pig went.
He went on a fine, blowy day in summer, and Slindon village knew him no more. Eh, dear oh me, how sudden it all was. And how they wondered whether he would ever come back. . . . But I can tell you a liddle of his journey; I can foller him as far as my eyes reach.
In spite of the wind, it was a very hot day, for it was a very hot wind; and by the time he had come to the bottom of Slindon Hill, lawk-a-mussy-me, the basket was empty, clean holler it was, and Stanley Hutchinson sat upon his haunches, lifted his snout, and set up a most dismal cry.
Well, there waun’t nothing for it but that he must go begging, which he done, and so purtily, that, by Job, he was able to get as much again as he had eaten, and he ate that too; and so it went on, until you couldn’t have told him from a balloon-ball; and then he disappeared beyond the corner; and after that . . . he took hisself . . . I feel so certain sure . . . towards the place where they go killing and curing pigs. . . .
IV
Now, that ain’t the end of the story. It’s no more the end of the story than this story is the end of the world. But the disappearance of Stanley Hutchinson was the end of Mr Bidmead, poor man. Two days after the pig had left him, the golden coin came back, and Mr Bidmead couldn’t hardly contain hisself for joy, but started to run from room to room of the liddle cottage, up and down the liddle cottage he runned, for it’s a strange thing how much more pleased he was with the one sovereign than with all the money that he had got for the pigs. There was a bit of the miser in Mr Bidmead, I reckon; yet no one can say that the old chap was selfish, and his eyes shone like gold when he thought to hisself: ‘My Stan will be follering soon.’ So he arranged a lot of surprises for his pig Stan. He bought some fish, and ice to keep it as fresh as a daisy; and he bought some eggs, and heaped um in a pyramid on a plate; and he give the elderberry wine a taste, to see if it hadn’t turned a liddle; and he brought some roses from the garden, and stood um out in ornaments and jugs; and he shuffled all the cribbage cards, and even went so far as to shake the backgammon dice, ready for throwing; and the pig never came. That was in June. In July the old man couldn’t hardly shamble up to his bedroom; in August he waun’t no better than a clodpate; near the middle of autumn the villagers shook their heads over the fire.
‘He had no ought to take up with a pig like Stan,’ they muttered; ‘that business has catched a holt of him, surelye.’
But bless ye, I disremember half the things they said of Bidmead, who onny put his fingers in his ears, like, and fared his own way. His clothes went to pieces, the garden grew, he ate where he would, never spreading the tablecloth; and his nose sniffled for want of a hankercher. One night he gazed oddly over the parlour; he kept on blinking his liddle pig-eyes as though he’d no ought to be there.
‘ ’Tis no use, hangin’ on in this purty place,’ he muttered; ‘I justabout don’t remember what everything’s for.’ So he shuffled out of his chair; then, seeing the cribbage cards, put um idly into his pocket. Afterwards he turned out the light, and left the cottage for the last time.
The wind blew, and clouds rushed over the sky; the moon kept peeping out at shortish intervals, and during one of um the old man put his hand into his pocket, and took out the golden coin. It was all he had left, the rest of his money was clean gone, and as he looked at it he thought how he’d like to swaller it. But the fag end of his eddication got the better of him, and he thought how he’d give the coin a liddle lick; so he give it a liddle lick; and with that, he went shuffling and padding to the bottom of the garden.
The wind was tossing through the trees. Sometimes it sounded like human laughter, and sometimes like the voices of all kinds of animals, from geese to elephants. The shape of the sty rose up before him; and when he opened the door, and peeped inside, he give a grunt of satisfaction.
‘Gruntin’,’ said a liddle voice. ‘Now, ain’t that very nice?’ And, by Job, there was Stanley Hutchinson’s ghost; and from that day to this, nobody never goes near the sty, nobody never goes near it, because of the voices that can be heard there, in the small hours, grunting and laughing together over the cribbage cards.
And if you don’t believe this story, you ought to, and if you don’t believe it, you can be no lover of pigs, and if you don’t believe it, that’s a pity; why, everybody in Slindon will tell you how it was all true. And maybe that’s the onny virtue in it. For it ain’t Shakespeare, by a long chalk, and it ain’t Milton, and it ain’t even Bunyan, though I suppose at a pinch it might be called the story of a Pig’s Progress.
The Six
‘DRUNK again,’ the landlord muttered, watching him rise and go. ‘Eli, you’re drunk!’
They grinned and spat; the lamp shone on their faces.
The young man’s shadow, cast by the light of the village inn, lay very faintly on the ground in front of him, for dusk was scarcely beginning to slip into the lane. Eli Lethbridge knew he was drunk. They knew he was drunk by the quiet and unperturbed manner in which
he walked: whenever he stretched out an arm, exceedingly calmly and slowly, delicately shaping his fingers, it was always as though he had no need to steady himself, but to steady the thing that he touched. He walked to the farm that his father had left him, a lonely place, very seldom in the world’s eye now, with fields running down to the tamarisk hedge by the sea. On his way there, he saw in the distance a party of nuns from a neighbouring town; their dark dresses, and white heads looking like the wings of birds, added a feeling of destination to the landscape. He walked for half an hour in his neglected garden, staring at the broken fences, through which farm animals wandered to and fro; after that he went indoors and reached for his rifle and hitched it under his arm—the lightweight Winchester repeater, without which he was never completely happy—and after that he turned his back on the village. As he went, the clock began to strike in the church tower; when the last note was ended, everything seemed quieter than it had been before, and presently he heard nothing but the waves lapping far out on the sands.
The road that he was following led to a break in the tamarisk hedge; then it shelved between banks of sea-kale, and merged into the shingle. The crunching of his boots on the stones was a sound that never failed to plunge him at once into a world of his own. From that moment, everything seemed full of purpose. ‘Here we are!’ he said: never ‘Here I am!’—but he could not have told you why he spoke of himself in the plural whenever he was alone on the shore. It was neap-tide now. The thin line of surf, growing grey in the dusk, was interrupted here and there by drifts of seaweed, or merely by the extreme lethargy of the waves. Eli Lethbridge stood suddenly still, and watched and heard the surf-line fritter away six times before his boots began to crunch again on the shingle.
When he was far out on the sands, midway between the shingle and the sea, he started to walk eastwards, and his shadow was now thrown darkly by the light in the west. Tamarisk bordered the coast. He could not remember the time when the smell and taste of tamarisk were unknown to him; but he did remember the day when he was basking on the sunny bank beneath the shrub, and a lizard had scuttled away by his feet, almost before he had seen it. The young man, walking to the east, ran his eye over the interminable length of hedge and the interminable margin of the sea, which were fading quickly into the dusk. Breakwaters ran down the shingle, and tapered far out on to the sands. Groyne after groyne: as far as his sight could reach, there were groynes, closing together with the distance, and he had seen them, clambered over them, stepped over them into white puddles, or skirted the ends of them, all the years of his life.
Here and there, on some of the shorter and seaward posts of the groynes, a gull was perching. Hardly a season went by when the sand was not sprinkled with gulls, or the air pierced with their screams; but tonight, when only a listless breeze was stirring, very few could be seen or heard. He did not often shoot the gulls. He liked to see them riding on long and passive wings above his head, or settling on the sands with their incomparable lightness and grace. Eli Lethbridge pressed his elbow into his side, and laughed. He knew no greater comfort than the feel of his rifle under his arm. The whole of his life had been spent in shooting—shooting at marks on the shore when the tide was out, shooting at lumps of white chalk on the posts of the breakwaters—until his eye had become as keen as a gull’s. It was his hobby, and no one had ever been able to take it away from him. Even in his father’s time a life of leisure had been granted to him, and he had spent it in shooting, in drinking, in walking alone along these sands of countless breakwaters, with his rifle hanging on his arm.
Of those numberless days, there was little to be remembered save here and there an exceptional shot, or an unwonted flight of sea-birds, or a week of storms, when sometimes a ship would be driven on to the coast; therefore such occurrences—he called them, to himself, ‘adventures’—often came to his mind, and they came there now. They, and the close evening, and the spirits that he had drunk, gathered to his head, while the young man continued to walk into the east, from which quarter the light was ebbing quickly and as quickly building up a curtain of crimson behind his back. After a while, the weight of the rifle began to turn him from thought to action, and several times he stopped and fired, and the distant mark was scattered in a spray of chalk and the crack of the rifle was sucked away by the sands. Far to his left lay the feathery tamarisk, and the fringe of it was already ruffled into the grey-green of the sky; southward ran the sea, still ebbing, without a moon, and the sound of it was scarcely louder than the ebbing of the daylight. Though his mind was mellow, and he kept on breaking into songs, his eyes and ears were never at rest, but always searching, always ready to catch the ultimate sight and sound of the evening. And presently, in the distance ahead, he saw six gulls standing on six posts of a breakwater, motionless, as he had so frequently seen them before.
He did not often shoot the gulls. He felt that he had no wish, just now, to shoot six gulls. But they were many groynes away, glimmering, tremulous in the dusk that was almost darkness, and distance always cast a spell over him in the end. He dropped to his knee, and looked along the barrel at the beautiful, phosphorescent things, and fired, aiming low on account of the dusky light, passing quickly and evenly from one target to another, giving no thought to the wanton thing that he was doing, shooting because he must.
By this time, sombre clouds were blotting out the light in the west, and the young man’s shadow seemed to fill up the whole of the sands. On his way to the distant breakwater, he paused, and stared over the sea. The eye of a lightship, seven miles out, sending no beam, and as clear as though it were a spark within a few feet of his face, burned suddenly on the rim of the horizon, remained for a period, and was gone. He had often watched this light in the evenings; and now, deliberately, cruelly, before continuing on his way, he watched it come and go six times, once for each of the gulls he had killed. . . .
Eli Lethbridge had never heard of Wordsworth’s evening, ‘quiet as a nun’. This, indeed, was as quiet as a nun, and it was quieter—it was as quiet as six nuns. They were sitting on the sands, with their hands in their laps, and their feet pointing to the east. Their heads, clothed in their lovely flying coifs, were still showing above the short posts of the breakwater. It was clear that they had been sleeping. The six were dead.
I and My Wife Isobel
ONE evening in late September, I and my wife Isobel were walking the six miles from Mullington to Froon, over the Mendip Hills, and my old bones were beginning to tell on me. Silence, and a mingling of each other’s thoughts (a power created by the twilight, no less than by years of matrimonial bliss) had long ago fallen between us; we could still hear the parson’s voice, and now it seemed to roll and rise and sink appropriately over the sombre hills and dales; for I must tell you that we had been to a friend’s funeral, and could still see the graveyard lying out under the three yews as darkly as the church floor under the roof; and could still smell the tinkling flock of sheep in the lane as the mourners flowed out like a black river through the lichgate when all was said and done. Some of these people had walked back with old Mercer, to the bakemeat and the wine, others had hurried home to their firesides, but I and my wife Isobel had taken the lonely road to Froon.
There was no escaping from its loneliness when the mist began to hide the eastern plain, for then we could see no spark, no spire, no drift of smoke in the landscape below us, and clearly enough we seemed to hear the parson’s voice presiding at the burial of the world. The clouds assembled about the hill-tops; and I started thinking of our house at Froon, its windows shuttered and its curtains drawn in sympathy for our departed friend; and my thoughts dwelt for a moment on our lodger, Bidolack (we like to turn an extra coin wherever possible); and presently the black hill running on our left hand fell away, and westwards I could see the final flush above the Plain of Somerset, and a streak of red on the estuary of the Severn.
As darkness stole into the Mendip Hills, so did the note of a bell steal into the darkness; but so g
radually, that we could not tell when day was gone, nor silence broken. At first I thought of the sheep and their tinkling bells outside the church at Mullington; then I heard the trotting of a horse behind me: my wife Isobel looked back, and so did I: and there we stood until the Morrisons pulled up and offered us a lift to Froon.
We heard the note of unction in their voices: What were the flowers like? Did old Mercer cry? Their feeble lamp shone down on us, and in its glass I saw my long face hideously distorted.
The horse was lame, and I began to fear that its capricious clatter might destroy the harmony of my surroundings that till now had charmed me on the road that runs from Mullington to Froon.
Once, indeed, my peaceful thoughts were rudely shattered by that brat, young Barney Morrison, who sat at the back of the vehicle with his mother and my wife Isobel. ‘Why don’t these people buy a trap of their own?’ he demanded, lifting his half-witted leer to the sky. I took no notice of the child, beyond glaring at him once over my shoulder.
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