by F. W. Harvey
Bill Trigg, though he could not be said to rival in breeding the aristocracy of Buttercup, yet suggested by his appearance Frederick William the Great, grown poor and honest. His side whiskers, his despotism … But he was built on a rather smaller plan than was the old emperor: and he wore corduroys.
A reprobate juicy old man … He loved the children. And the children rather liked him.
He had served their grandpa, and having (he proclaimed) helped ‘Master Howard’ through many a youthful scrape, was permitted to do his own jobs in his own way even when that way was not wholly to his master’s liking.
‘Kim oop!’ he cried to Buttercup, and the old mare moved daintily forward with the load of hampers and ladders.
Entering the orchard with the two little boys following, Bill, Buttercup, and Timmy Taylor who had joined them, stopped: ladders were propped against trees: the mare unharnessed to graze; and the fruit-picking begun.
Eric quietly seated himself in dappled grass to play, and to eat the fallen plums. Willie followed Bill Trigg up a ladder to do the same, and to put questions concerning things in general which provoked a voluble reminiscence in the jovial old picker.
‘Are the wasps flies?’
‘Wasps’, said Bill evading the question, ‘was the little baggers with hot feet – and don’t ’e forget it.’ Willie, like the unskilful debated, was side-tracked on to this new argument. He did not believe that wasps’ feet were hot. Clemmy had shown him a wasp killing a fly. After he had killed it, Clemmy had killed the wasp, and made the wasp work his sting too, and the sting was in his tail.
Clemmy, answered Bill, was a bitch
‘A what?’
If Willie didn’t believe that there about wasps’ feet could let one stand on him ver a while.
Willie wouldn’t.
Why were wasps’ feet hot then?
Why, from using ’em too much, an’ walking sideways up windows and back’ard head down over ceilings and such. Willie had only to walk back’ard head down on a ceiling to find out for himself.
‘I know where a wasp nest is,’ interjected Willie, ignoring the impossible challenge.
Wasp-nestes! – Bill had taken hundreds, thousand on ‘em.
‘What for?’
To sell their maggots in Gloucester, and to fishermen. This entailed an explanation (derided by Willie) that a wasp’s young ’uns wer grubs, and good to bait hooks with because fish like eating them (yutting ’em).
Bill passed on to wasps’ houses which were of brown paper ‘made special by the wasps themselves’ out of ‘bark and stuff’, and shaped into hundreds of cells, or cradles for the babies …
‘They’ll make ’em anywhere a’most.’
‘The one I know of is in a bank,’ volunteered Willie – ‘by the blackberry bushes, over the pond.’
‘Aye, they most an’ generally goes there,’ agreed the old man, ‘but I’ve knowed ’em in very queer places, where a man mon ’oudn’t expect ’em to be nohow. Thee dost know old John Helps the cider maker: zees un in church a Zunday I warn’t, Well, he did find a nest in a queer place. Five years ago last fall a was making sweet some old barr’ls and hogsheads fer the new drink which were uncommon plenteous, so as they had to pull out from the back of a shed all the old extra casks fer to hold it. Well, they was a rolling of these ’ere out, and a rinsing of ’em; and John, a wer sat over the bung-hole o’ the last ready to stave in the end on’t – when what? A feels a prick in the seat of his trousers. A gets up. Out comes the wasps buzzing angry at bein’ rolled about, and all their babies made giddy. Everybody run. But old John didn’t run. What’d he do? He sat down again on the hole. ‘I’ll be stung in one place,’ he says, ‘not everywhere!’ The old mon said that; and ‘bring a bung,’ says he, hardly wriggling, ‘and we’ll lock ’em up’ – ‘Tyunt reasonable,’ says he, ‘to give liberty to wasps as have been treated as these ’uns have. Human beings wouldn’t stand it neither.’
So we brings a bung – a big un, and shapes un slantwise so as to fit in any hole, and as soon as old John gets up Bang! In a goes. And there was a cask full o’ raging captives. ‘Whop! Old John’s hand claps his behind and there lies a cluster of forty wasps as had bin a-hanging on to him head downward by their tails.
‘Aha!’ shouted Willie, ‘I knew ‘t wasn’t their feet.’
‘Bist a smart monkey bisn’t?’ replied Bill. ‘Down thee goes! I wants fer to shift this ladder round a bit.’
‘What happened to the wasps in the cask?’ asked the child descending.
‘Left ‘em there,’ was the answer, ‘and there they be now fer aal I knows – starved to death, or yutting one another.’
‘But where be young Eric?’ enquired the narrator, looking round as he stepped off the ladder, ‘you’d best go and find ‘ee, else e’ll be getting into summat.’
But where was Eric? Timmy Taylor had seen him toddling off in the direction of the farm (he thought) ‘to find his mam’. They left it at that; but on returning an hour later for the cider which had been forgotten, they found that no one there had tidings of him.
‘Drat the bwoys,’ cried Trigg. He added that it was a wonder as their poor mother didn’t jump up in the air and never come down.
But where was Eric?
The servants had not seen him in the house. The workmen had not seen him outside. His name was cried through all the rooms, the farm buildings, and the Barn.
Then a single cry of astonishment and alarm directed the searchers to a stable, and peering over the half door they beheld at first a darkness, then ‘Mustard’ the huge chestnut cart-horse who had kicked Sam, and lastly, embracing the hocks of this irritable and exasperated beast, a tiny figure crooning to himself and the animal a little song. It was Eric. They called to him in whispers to come away. And Eric came – reluctantly.
Then ‘Damn us all!’ cried Trigg, touching his hat to Mrs. Harvey, to indicate that the oath carried no disrespect – ‘Damn us all! this ‘un must be a soldier. Nothing won’t harm ‘ee ‘tis certain. Make ‘un a brave soldier ma’am. No bullet with kill ‘ee!’
But – Bill Trigg lied.
CHAPTER III
It is necessary to hurry on. But there are things which must be said.
The farm lay in Severn Valley; a region of rich, well-fruited land, attached to a city famous in history, inhabited first by the little long-headed dark Iberians; built, destroyed and rebuilded again and again. Caer Glow, Glevum, Gloucester – call it what you will – it had echoed the tragedies and the comedies of a thousand years of rich life.
Tall and bright; like a lily in the hands of Morning – the tower of its exquisite and enduring cathedral dominated for a surrounding ten miles the low meadows, and influenced powerfully, if in diverse ways, the thoughts of those who worked therein.
Its chimes were perhaps a call to God; perhaps a ringing from faery, a call to bait, a musical snore of the church, a floating heaven-dropped word to conscience, a hail to the rustic Whittington eager of success, a solace to such (alike weary) as had found, or failed to find that bauble, a renunciation of sin, an invitation to it.
It stood, to some, for escape; to some, for sweet content. A beacon-fire of Christ: a beacon-blaze of the devil – all things to all men; there it stood!
Beyond it the high Cotswolds, scarred white with quarries, and enveloped in mist like the bloom on the ripened plums, stretched mile after mile in sharp though shadowed outline …
Such, on one coast was the ocean of influence (for it is with influences that a novelist is concerned) surrounding that farm which has been spoken of, with deliberation, as an island.
On other sides, the royal Forest of Dene, the Cherry-country, and the Bristol Channel, lisped round or sang like seas near or remote their songs of strangeness and romance to marooned inhabitants.
The isle was one of a few outlying upon the village of Minsterworth, whose name sufficiently explains its ancient usage as the worth or farm of the monks at Gloucester – a parish con
sisting mainly of riverside pasture subject on passing into private ownership to many strange species of tithe since commuted to monetary value.
The inhabitants of this pastoral island (known to surveyors as Maycote farm) numbered about a dozen souls living in close contact. Foraging expeditions were made almost daily by the master whose business strategy was to dispose of rough ‘two year olds’ to Cotswold farmers, who trained them to work, and sold them back at the profit a couple of years later. These fully grown and well disciplined horses then proceeded to fatten themselves on Minsterworth pasture prior to being sold to Breweries, Corporations, Railways and so forth.
Without keeping an elaborated system of books, the memory of Willie’s father regarding animals, and his knowledge of what they would have grown into in given spaces of time, was so dependable, that in receiving a prospective buyer’s demand for so many ‘pitters’ ‘vanners’ ‘shunters’ or brewery horses, he could always locate, procure, and sell them to him – at a profit.
Everybody was pleased – the farmer who had got two years work, and ten pounds above what he spent, the buyer who had only to write saying what kind of horses he wanted, to get it; and the dealer who on a single animal had earned two profits by expert knowledge.
Horse dealers have a bad name, and some deserve it, but it would be hard to discover a trade or profession which so prosecuted united better a personal profit with the general interest in days when horses were of national importance.
Willie’s father was ostensibly selling horse-flesh – and so by common inference, buyers; but what he actually sold was a very personal skill and judgement which was profitable to all concerned.
Do the learned professions always do so much?
On top of this he was supplying his island with life and the means of living it naturally and wholesomely in companionship that only Shakespeare could fully appreciate.
To the sceptical (maddened with the life of modern cities) it may be remarked that there were on that island degrees, but no differences – and no poverty! The horrible separation of kind, so common with them, was unknown to these. A mellow humanity rather than any remnants of the feudal system, which at its best served the same turn, (those with knowledge will admit the truth of that statement) made each responsible for all.
Another distinction between that life and the accepted travesty of life in crowded cities was the permanent possibility of solitary adventure; and indeed the possibility of being solitary at all.
Adventure may be actual, or imaginary; it may affect the flesh or the spirit: and it is this latter kind which is of the greater potency to make and to mould character.
The following may stand as a type of spiritual adventure and shall be related in Willie’s own words – written years after in the heart-breaking time when he was trying to live by his pen – honestly. (The difficulty, good people, lies simply in that last word; as the sting of the wasp lies in its tail!)
That the big-little adventure was considered unfit for publication, and in fact refused by no less than eight editors, is a reason neither for nor against its inclusion as a colour in this larger picture where it illustrates better than anything else the ting with which we are at present chiefly concerned – namely, the atmosphere which surrounded and influenced the childhood of these two little beings.
That is all right. The fault to be found with it is none of those enumerated by the refusing editors – lack of plot, oddness, tenuity, and so forth.
The fault is rather this: that Willie, remembering his childhood’s strange experience and writing it down years after despaired of acceptable explanations (as if they were necessary!) and sank here and there into the cowardice of attempting a justification though only by allusion to minds sophisticated – with which minds his own had become numbered.
He felt (one suspects) a desire to justify the tale – the truth – not only to others, but even to himself!
This is ‘the contagion of the world’s slow slow stain.’
The important point is that what Willie attempted to describe was something that actually occurred to him. From which let no reader conclude that Willie was an abnormal child.
He was an ordinary, country-bred, healthy, little boy fallen in circumstances as nearly perfect as is possible in this age (or perhaps in any other) for living his own healthy little life.
He was abnormal only in the sense that all children would be if so bred, and given liberty to discover with their own eyes the sleeping beauty of the world.
That terrifying Beauty which at the touch of genius from time to time has turned uneasily in her slumber, never yet has awakened to look with clear eyes upon us men, and cause us to gaze back into her own.
Maybe she will never do so, yet in that is our hope, undying through all aeons of years – our one hope.
That is a single interpretation. Maybe it was the vision of Beauty to be awakened in the world. Maybe it was a child’s perception of something far different lying in the heart of nature and awaiting its hour. Reply it was both. Willie never discovered what it was. Only it happened. It happened so.
CHAPTER IV
A few words of Mr. and Mrs. Harvey – parents of these boys. (Patience! I know what you want. There shall be ‘action’ enough presently!)
Let it be stated at once that save as large kind impersonal forces, the children at this time knew little of them.
Yet had these two people died (as one did) before their personalities had been explored and recorded in the memories of their children, their influence would still have been a large thing in their lives.
Personality is often exaggerated. It is, in truth, but the fascinating divergence of mankind. Humanity is the great river running steadily through.
Though the differences of men is their interest, it is their sameness which is divine. Our great mother – the Earth – what comparison of difference is permitted to her? Yet she is beloved of her children whom she feeds and takes to her breast.
So humanity, though broad and impersonal, is God-like. Humanity is an influence. Personality is but an interest.
Yet as this story is not (alas!) for babes whose desire is ‘Father’, and ‘Mother’, but for grown-ups, thinking in terms of Mr. and Mrs. Harvey; more must be revealed to them than the children themselves knew, or ever wanted to know.
Howard Harvey was the third son of a large farmer of the country who, starting poorly, had laid field to field and built barns after the fashion of the man in the Bible – but honestly, and by dint of something more than a cold perseverance, for his industry was hot iron sweating sparks to kindle things around with a similar heat, rather than steel cutting a path for itself.
It was said that he was ambitious. But a closer investigation shows that his ‘ambition’ was to drive a horse which could be passed by nothing upon the road prior to the days of bicycles and motors – always referred to indiscriminately as ‘those damned things.’ This ambition was easily attained. His later success was due rather to ‘something spontaneous and pushing in his inside,’ which combined with a genuine capacity for farming and managing land.
The hard times were not over when his children were boys, and Howard, with the rest, had to work hard, developing a natural industry under the dynamic energy of the old man.
That wonderful force acting through environments and also through heredity was transmitted to bodily frames less sturdy than his own in those of his sons, who wore out while the generator of it, and then, lived hardily on, a ‘character’ – almost a landmark of the country.
That towering rustic figure of eighty years; the tall white hat black-banded in perpetual mourning for its predecessors; the paunch directing attention to its unvarying cover of moleskin crossed with long gold links of a watch-chain; the short brown cloth gaiters worn to shield the trousers; the five foot holly-stick which made a crutch for the thumb of his right hand; these were known at every fair throughout the country, and to grand-children whose fathers were already in their graves, exhauste
d by the restless energy of this old man.
And the same fire of vitality then flickering in him; quenched already in two of his sons, flamed out again in the third generation.
Take away your tables of genealogy, burn your Burkes! This, or nothing, is all that is meant by good breeding. And you – the little scientific know-alls, forbear to talk in your damned superior fashion of Mendel and his law which anyway you don’t understand! Listen merely for once and you shall hear what is more convincing than your generalities, namely, that both children and grandchildren of this old man were in every way (save one) totally different to one another and to him, and that this common factor was to be found Where? – in an original dynamic energy transmitted by one man. This energy which was one, diversified itself in its application under other minds. Thus we come to Howard. Now, what was his ambition? That question can be answered shortly – his wife and his children. His method of providing for them has already been dealt with.
Howard was as unlike his father as could well be imagined. Substitute for the great bluff farmer a small though sturdy figure; for the round ruddy countenance a lined face – strong but a little anxious; change the forceful overbearing disposition to one of extreme gentleness; the temper ever liable to flare in short-lived violence, to a steady brilliance of courage. Substitute the broad boisterous man’s humour with a child’s twinkling gaiety. Keep only the unresting energy which is wearing out its sheath in a high-strung nature; and there, nervously gnawing his moustache even when playing at cricket with his boys, home for the holidays – there you have him.
Perhaps nothing could better show the difference between the two men than the fact that he did play cricket with his children. Imagine the old man ever doing it. What! The young varmints should be out at work! Only the tearful pleadings of their mother procured for them the small education they obtained. And she paid for it. Leisure!