Innocent Birds

by T. F. Powys

  Besides counting the milestones—and Fred, mistrusting for the first time in his life his own memory, put a tiny stone into his pocket whenever he passed one—he saw before him Madder upon the Sunday. His father—Fred smiled, for he knew all about his father’s doubt—would be leaning over the meadow gate, and, though apparently watching mere nothingness, would see all that went on. Polly would come out of the rectory with her head bent a little, as if she wasn’t quite certain of the habits of her new hat. She would walk with Maud to Dodderdown church and talk, of course, about Fred and Derby.

  When Fred’s stones began to grow heavy, he kept one large one for a hundred, and went on again counting the units. Sometimes he slept in the same sort of lodging that he was used to in Derby, and at other times upon warmer nights under a convenient haystack.

  Passing one day through a long straggling village of farms and cottages, and going by a large green where geese were feeding, Fred knocked at a cottage door near to a farmhouse with a high roof and red tiles and a white gate that reminded him of Mr. Solly’s. He asked for food.

  ‘You bain’t never farmer’s boy Jim come home, be ’ee?’ inquired excitedly the woman who opened the door.

  ‘No, said Fred.

  ‘Then go along,’ said the woman.

  Fred went along; but ‘going along’ wasn’t food, so that at the next cottage, a lime-washed one a hundred yards away, he knocked again.

  At this cottage Fred was asked, in almost the same words as at the last, if he were Jim.

  The farther he went down the country the more he thought what his own happiness would be like when he reached Madder. He looked curiously at every country hill as if to try to discover any resemblance to the hill at Madder.

  If Fred passed any person, simple-minded and poor enough to be walking as he was, whose moustache in the least resembled Mr. Solly’s, he would tell him ‘how he was Fred Pim, a shepherd who once had the charge of a large flock of sheep, and was just then employed in walking home from Derby.’

  As Fred proceeded farther he became more and more expectant, and looked excitedly at the rooks. When the rooks flew the way he was going, he fancied that they were his sheep and that he was driving them to Madder, but when they wheeled round and began to fly in another direction, he called out that they were ‘all as bad as Miss Pettifer,’ and threw his cap at them.

  In one village at nightfall, a village that slept beside a deep green hill, that appeared to hold the cottages in its lap and be always crying over them, Fred saw in a window a lamp burning that reminded him of Susy’s.

  The look of that lamp, with a mere glass and no globe, and with one side blackened by smoke as Susy’s always was, told Fred more truly than any map could have done that he was nearing home, and he couldn’t help waiting a moment or two to look at that lamp.

  And the next day, after a night in a woodshed, he met a man with a club foot, a farmer, who informed Fred, when he asked him, that he and Farmer Barfoot of Madder possessed the same great-grandmother.

  Just as a voyager upon unknown seas beholds signs that betoken the presence of land near, so did Fred Pim meet men and other matters that told him that he was nearing his home.

  And even when a clergyman, who had lost his sermon on the way to church, told Fred, who found it for him, that he wasn’t Mr. Tucker’s brother but only his second cousin, Fred’s gladness was so great that he hindered an hour in listening to the sermon, that was both long and dull.

  A few miles from Madder, when Fred had two large stones in his pocket and many little ones, he came upon the first man whose face he knew. This man’s name was Pring, who was a mender of roads.

  The Fred who had counted Polly’s tears, and carried his bundle over the hill to go to Derby, was a different Fred now. His beard had grown raggedly, to keep in countenance, out of kindness no doubt, the other rags that he wore. His cheeks were sunken, and his body grown so thin that his own, or supposed father, could never have known him. Fred, who had not looked into any mirror since he left Derby, hardly realised his altered appearance until he met Pring, but coming near to the road-mender, he saw plainly enough that he was not recognised.

  Beside Mr. Pring there was half a loaf of bread and some cheese, left over from his dinner. Pring, whose work for the day was over, placed his spade across his knees, and looked at the implement with thoughtful affection.

  Fred was hungry and sat down beside Mr. Pring. Fred knew Madder ways pretty well, and hoping to get a bite he looked at the spade too, as though it were the one and only thing that he had travelled to and from Derby in order to see.

  Mr. Pring handed the spade to Fred, who looked at it still more attentively. The spade was old and worn.

  ‘Thik spade bain’t a spade,’ said the road-mender, ‘for ’tis a maiden. Though I bain’t no man to talk to strange tramping folks, I’ll tell ’ee who spade be.’

  A car came by, and Mr. Pring rubbed some dirt that the car had thrown up out of his eyes.

  ‘Spade’s name be Rose,’ he said.

  Another car came by, and Mr. Pring looked at it as he always did at every car ever since he had worked upon the roads. This car cast more mud than ever at Mr. Pring.

  The road-mender took the spade upon his knees again and stroked the handle; his eyes blinked because of the mud that had been thrown into them.

  ‘Rose be got wooden,’ he said; ‘but she did use to ’ave pretty ways when biding wi’ we.’

  Mr. Pring looked across the road at a stile in the hedge. He took up his loaf and knife, and cutting off a large slice, handed this to Fred.

  ‘Rose did tell I to give it ’ee,’ he said.

  Fred walked another mile or two and sat down to eat his bread. He felt at home again.

  It had all been so real in Derby; even the very pavement told true stories about life, true stories about the girls that Fred had never counted. How real that one was under the bridge—much too real. All the real things of the city had bitten into Fred, with their dull crooked fangs; but he was now come again to where Miss Pettifer alone struck the note of reality.

  A mouse peeped out of its hole and began to eat of the crumbs that Fred had let fall. As the mouse ate it looked at Fred inquisitively.

  ‘You bide at home,’ said Fred to the mouse. ‘Don’t you never listen to Miss Pettifer, and don’t you never go to no Derby.’

  The mouse looked round nervously, finished the crumb, and ran into its hole again.

  ‘Miss Pettifer’s only a cat,’ said Fred, and threw his cap in the air.

  The evening was turned to night as Fred Pim walked up the hill towards Madder. He knew he wasn’t returned rich, and Mr. Pring had not even known him as ‘Fred.’

  ‘But at least,’ he thought, ‘I shall see my father.’ For Fred had never believed more than to smile at his father’s doubts. And then there would be his Polly at Miss Pettifer’s, and the dog Timmy up at the farm. Would the sheep be there too, the one that he had thought so much of at Derby? Perhaps it was even now letting all the others out into the turnips.

  Near to the top of the hill, and beside the high banks, Fred picked up a package in the lane.

  This was the margarine that had slipped out of Polly’s parcel when she was dragged to the wood.

  When Fred reached the top of the hill he threw the packet into the fields.

  ‘It’s Miss Pettifer’s,’ said Fred aloud. ‘But she’ll have to give Polly fresh butter to-morrow.’

  Something moaned behind him in the little wood. Fred stopped, turned for a moment; but the sound not being repeated, he walked on again down the hill.

  Chapter xxviii

  MISTER PIM

  MR. PIM waited a moment. He had climbed the garden stile before Chick. Mr. Chick had stood back a little, because he knew that Pim had a son who would some day come home very rich from Derby in Spain.

  Mr. Chick remarked, as he stood back there too to let Mr. Pim enter the inn first, ‘that he thought it was going to snow.’

 
; Mr. Chick had a habit of always saying ‘it was going to snow’ when the weather was unusually mild.

  Mr. Pim sat at the head of the table, where he could be easily seen by any one who wished to have the honour of filling his cup, and where he could see the black glove left behind by the former landlord, Mr. Told, and preserved for his own hoped-for use by Mr. Bugby.

  This glove—a symbol of his happy wishes—Mr. Bugby kept upon the picture of the member of Parliament for the Weyminster district, a gentleman who was once found at a social gathering shaking hands with the overcoats.

  Farmer Barfoot now knocked with a shilling upon the table, and Wimple, who was sitting near by, nodded at the shilling. Farmer Barfoot called for some drink. Mr. Pim withdrew his eyes from the black glove when Mrs. Bugby brought in the jug, and looked at her. Wimple looked at her too, and made a gesture as if he held out a tape measure to get her right length for the grave.

  Mrs. Bugby took down the mugs from their nails and placed them on the table. The men watched her. She still lived.

  It is always nice to live in the exciting expectation of a startling event. It is pleasant, too, to exchange opinions around an inn table as to exactly how and where the event will take place. And even if one is the person doomed—and lucky to live in Madder such a doomed one is—he or she can often wallow in the same morbid pool as well as the other watchers.

  ‘Betty do tell I,’ said Farmer Barfoot in a low tone when Mrs. Bugby was gone, ‘that the poor ’oman will walk woon day, when the sun do shine, up to wold owls’ barn and hang sheself.’

  ‘’Tis a barn,’ remarked Wimple in a discreet voice, just to show how right the farmer always was, ‘w’ere a rope do hang that poor Job did make use on because there weren’t but one apple on ’s tree in ’s garden, and ’e did used to swear to all ’twas a good tree.’

  ‘They poor gloomy owls do perch there,’ said Pim, ‘for when I was a poor man, and used to work for farmer, I did see they on thik large beam in barn.’

  Mr. Chick stretched out his legs and looked sadly at the sacking that was bound about them.

  ‘I do see,’ he said, in a tone that the prophet Jeremiah might have been proud of, ‘a wide rushing river, that do run under the arches of a wold bridge; ’tis to wide deep river that poor ’oman will go.’

  ‘She be always looking into garden well,’ said Farmer Barfoot, leaving Betty, because of the excitement of the subject, out of the conversation; ‘an’ no doubt there be water in en.’

  ‘There be deep water in en,’ said Chick.

  ‘True, there be,’ remarked Pim grandly.

  Mrs. Bugby, being nicely placed where the deep water was, the company looked at Mister Pim.

  Confirmation had come about Pim’s riches that very day, undoubted proofs being received by Farmer Barfoot and by Susy, the church cleaner.

  At Stonebridge market that very afternoon, when Farmer Barfoot, with Betty safely tucked into the trap, was taking the reins into his hands, John the hostler, whose roundness grew rounder each market day, and his nose redder, inquired excitedly, ‘Do ’ee know Pim of Madder, who did use to go about town asking a question of nature?’ Farmer Barfoot, taking a rein in each hand, nodded.

  ‘Questioning Pim be Mister Pim now,’ said John, stepping out of the way of the wheel.

  In the morning, too, old Teddy, whose fancy amongst other oddities was to go about the country saying that Miss Pettifer was in love with him, and that he wasn’t going to be like good Joseph, called at Susy’s cottage to try and sell her a pair of bootlaces. Teddy found Susy sitting upon a box in her woodshed, looking more wide than ever because of the lowness of the shed, and employing her time in teaching a puppy, the same puppy that Polly had played with, to say the Lord’s Prayer.

  ‘Our Father,’ repeated Susy.

  ‘Bain’t bootlaces,’ said Teddy, who had changed his position from the cottage door to the woodshed without being noticed by Susy.

  ‘No, ’e bain’t bootlaces,’ said Teddy, and Susy smiled, knowing well enough, though she was so simple, that God didn’t mind what Teddy said.

  The puppy barked, being annoyed at this interruption of its lesson.

  ‘If I were as rich as Mr. Pim,’ remarked Teddy, ‘’twould be Our Father Teddy, wi’ most of next year’s babies.’

  Susy laughed, for both she and God Almighty liked poor Teddy.

  ‘I be getting too wold for they manners,’ she said.

  ‘Not when nights be dark,’ replied Teddy, showing his bootlaces to the little dog, and telling it how much they cost him to buy, and how little he got when he sold them.

  Teddy’s belief and the hostler’s remark now bore the human thoughts at ‘The Silent Woman’ to Mr. Pim.

  ‘How will rich Fred come to Madder?’ asked Farmer Barfoot of Pim.

  ‘Riding,’ replied Pim.

  With their imagination quickened by the beer, the company saw this event in different ways.

  Farmer Barfoot, who had seen a picture paper that morning, expected Fred to come riding upon an Indian elephant, as the young prince in the picture was doing; Wimple, who remembered a word or two in Mr. Tucker’s last sermon, saw Fred’s carriage as a fiery chariot; and Chick saw it as a great car filled with strap leggings, and all intended for him.

  Clouds of tobacco wreaths, like haloes, hung about each man’s head, the most dense and blue-coloured encircling Mr. Pim as if to show to all present that he was above the common. His mind was filled with great and rich thoughts. Even the very mugs upon the table took upon them a new grandeur when he looked at them, as though they were made of gold. Indeed his thoughts of late had risen high: he lived as a gentleman.

  ‘Had he not been picked out from all Madder,’ thought Pim, ‘as the one to be envied?’ His first separation from the crowd came with the shining glass and black varnish of the wonderful carriage that brought Annie. And was not he, ‘Pim,’ known in all that part of the country as the man who couldn’t believe that it really was doing ‘just thik,’ with the kindly aid of one or other of the pretty Annies, that brought a child into the world? And who was it but Mr. Pim that was bold and orthodox enough—although the Church had always insisted that the thing was possible—to credit to the Father of all for the second time in two thousand years a human begetting? Even though he was called from the stony ground of the Madder hills, Pim’s new theology had carried him far; as far, indeed, as any countryman with a walking-stick, and a rich gait copied from Squire Kennard and landlord Bugby, could go.

  Nothing now could burst the bubble of Pim’s glory, unless it were the unlucky return of Fred in poverty; but the chance of such an unlikely ending never entered Mr. Pim’s head for one moment.

  Farmer Barfoot now took his pipe out of his mouth, and knocked it gently upon his odd-shaped boot as though he knocked at the door of Betty’s mind. Bending down his head sideways, in a way that might have appeared comical to any sober gentleman, had one been there, Mr. Barfoot listened, and nodded three times. Raising his head again, the farmer coughed. Evidently Betty must have spoken. Moving back a little in order to give himself more room, Farmer Barfoot slowly raised Betty and placed her upon the table amongst the mugs. This raising of Betty being done with all proper care and ceremony, as a priest would elevate the Host, Mr. Barfoot, with a faith that would gladden the heart of any true Catholic, remarked mysteriously that ‘Betty be talking.’

  ‘What be it Betty do say?’ asked Mr. Chick, with a befitting gravity.

  ‘Betty do say,’ affirmed the farmer, ‘that though all we do fill Pim’s mug for ’e, yet there be something that they rich men do always fancy that Pim bain’t a-gotten.’

  Mr. Chick looked at his legs; he wondered whether Betty was going to say ‘gaiters.’

  ‘Women!’ shouted Farmer Barfoot.

  The farmer turned to Pim in triumph, who in his turn regarded Betty with a slight but unmistakable frown.

  ‘Be they tothers,’ he inquired, ‘made different to me Annie who were brought h
ome to Madder so proper?’

  ‘Betty do say,’ said Farmer Barfoot, ‘that the difference bain’t all in their clothes.’

  Mr. Pim’s frowns left him, and he grew thoughtful.

  ‘I do mind Minna,’ said Mr. Pim, with a sigh that showed that even a rich father could regret the past at certain times; ‘’twas the day of the Norbury flower-show.

  ‘’Twas a rainy day, and Minna did say to I, “Wold Potten’s shed be a good dry place for we two to go to.”

  ‘“T’ other maidens bain’t same as I,” Minna did say, when we were sitting in a coffin that were stuck up against shed wall.

  ‘“’Tis a white frock you be wearing,” I did tell she.

  ‘“But grandfer do say that though I be different, I be nice.”

  ‘“John be the woon for thik nice,” I did tell she. An’ ’twas a pity coffin were stuck up so silly, for ’e did fall sideways and brought Potten back into shed.’

  ‘Betty be speaking,’ said the farmer, holding up his hand to silence Pim. ‘’Twould be right an’ proper—they be Betty’s words—for rich Pim to ’ave all they young maidens drove upstairs to ’im in flocks an’ herds’—‘And teams,’ said Chick, who was a carter—‘then all they differences an’ doubtings would be clear as heavenly sun to ’im.’

  ‘So ’twould,’ said Wimple, whose imagination ran high in Pim’s service.

  Pim looked at Betty and slowly shook his head.

  ‘But be poor Annie real gone?’ he inquired in a soft voice of the farmer’s deformed foot; ‘for Mr. Thomas Tucker do sometimes name a place called “heaven” in ’s sermon, and maybe ’tis there that me Annie do bide and wait for I.’

  ‘No, ’tis in ground she do bide,’ said Wimple, who didn’t like the idea of his mystery being encroached upon by any heavenly vision.

  But Mr. Pim’s unbelief in nature’s affairs overcame Wimple’s earth-born argument.

  ‘Annie bain’t gone for always,’ he said sternly.

  ‘But a rich man must do same as t’ others,’ remarked Chick, who had a secret fear that the piety of Pim’s last remark might lead him to forget the promised gift.