Donkey Boy

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by Henry Williamson


  The Vicar, who won the doubles with his wife as partner, wondered what had occurred so to upset the young fellow. For obviously he was depressed, judging by the aloofness of a manner, the more pronounced by an almost punctilious politeness. Manners makyth man indeed, but mannerisms indicated that all was not well with the soul. Here was a young man who had yet to come to know God, thought Mr. Mundy, as he set off to prepare his sermon after tea. It was St. Michael and All Angels, he remembered. He would like to preach on the theme that a man came to God by way of St. Michael and all Angels, these being the instincts and senses of man. He had read his William Blake, and also the revolutionary works of Havelock Ellis—both behind the shut door of his study.

  *

  The Reverend (and reverent) Ernest Hamilton Pepys Mundy in youth had sailed before the mast round the Horn, he had seen blue whales blowing upon the ocean main of Melville’s Moby Dick; he had made his way across more than one continent, driven on by an austere and self-denying quest for God. Then, after his travels, he had returned for ordination, working by choice as a curate in a poor East End working-class district. At the age of thirty he had married, and been given the living of St. Simon Wakenham. Possessed of private means, he had been able to help the poor of his parish practically, and gradually it had come to him that the spirit was almost entirely an emanation of the condition of the body.

  The soul was the divine spark, which was given and taken away; but body and mind were of the earth. Yea, verily the earth, the very soil, was the mother of man, and woe to mankind when that truth was overlaid, and forgotten! And by the selfsame section of the population which was the most complacent, self-satisfied, and assured that all was for the best in the best of all possible worlds—the middle-class mind emanating from expanding industrialisation and increasing money profits therefrom. The modern multi-headed Midas, everything it touched was turned to—soot! One could but fear this mentality, which had buried its natural instincts under a pall of respectability; and for more than one reason. But if discretion were the better part of valour, it certainly was the only hope in a middle-class parish.

  Mr. Mundy had a secret. He loved the young woman who was his amanuensis, and she responded with like naturalness. And why not, indeed? The Bible itself, if one excepted certain glossed and falsified passages in the Jacobean translation—such as the captions in the Song of Solomon—had none of the modern constrictions about natural love!

  Even so, Ernest Mundy was troubled by an occasional sense of guilt that disturbed him. After all, every man was a child, a reflection of, his age. His wife, dear woman, was content to live her detached existence, as his very good friend; and while he was not guilty of such bad taste as to confide his satisfaction with Miranda to her, he suspected that she knew about it, and regarded it with unconcern. Had it not made him, in every way, a better man? Until the coming of Miranda MacIntosh, he had slowly felt himself to be withering away, to be dying on his feet with ennui. She had saved him. Was not God love?

  This tolerance shown to himself was of the same tolerance shown to others, an understanding of the problems and perplexities of others, which revealed itself in his sermons: the essential tolerance and fairness of Jesus, as exemplified by all his teachings. Never once, he was wont to declare, did our Lord say ‘Thou shalt not’. Christianity was positive, it was almost, in a modern advanced term, muscular. It was a religion, a way of life, for manly men. Beset by an old restrictive order based on fear and revenge and deadlock, the teachings of the Son of Man were divine in the sense of the clarity and generosity of God, the Father, all-seeing, all-knowing, all-understanding. God was love, and it was no sin to love one another—but this was perhaps a little too advanced for his contemporaries, so, having understanding, the Vicar limited his sermons to the spirit, not passing beyond into the feelings of the human heart. Even so, he was disapproved of in some places. He was a student of William Blake, a little known eccentric Cockney poet and artist, whom his age had declared, by its own faults of judgement, to be mad. The proper study of mankind was man—in other words history, ever present, for the past lived in the present, and was of it: and the history of man’s achievement was in the earth, in the soil, in the arms of the mother of all living. Almost, he would like to say, in the arms of Eve!

  And having more or less familiarised himself with what he would preach on the morrow—though to be muffled a little in the pedantic idiom, confound it, lest he set one and all about his years—Ernest Mundy, scholar of Winchester and graduate of Christ Church of the University of Oxford; mast-and-yards man; prospector for gold in Australia; backwoodsman in Canada; barman in San Francisco; ordained priest in charge of St. Simon Wakenham, and President of the Antiquarian Society; aged sixty years and weighing ten stone eight pounds for the past twenty years, returned to the presence of his wife and friend, Ethelburga, and that of his secretary and rejuvenator Miranda, who surely was the equal of her namesake character in the most sweet and true play ever written—The Tempest, by William Shakespeare. The Rev. Mundy felt like leaping over the gate when he saw again the figure in white through the hedge, and heard once more the singing swoop of Atalanta’s racquet.

  *

  He seated himself beside the queerly repressed, almost stilted young man whom he wanted to help.

  “Yes, my dear Maddison, the lowest formation exposed in our district is the chalk which is the uppermost member of the Cretaceous system, which, as you know, concludes the Mesozoic Geological Period”.

  And the uppermost member of the Turney family, thought Richard, concludes the happy Hillside Road period.

  “We are always in the process of history. Where will we be—where will our bones be—the very stones of St. Simon!—when the Atlantic over-runs its present bed, and where we stand now is sea bottom once again?”

  Presumably our bones will be submerged, thought Richard. He was conscious of Miss MacIntosh, in the finals of the Ladies’ Singles, serving over-arm, a very Amazon among the ewe-flock, led by the bell-wether of—a tea urn!

  “A greyish mud,” continued the Vicar, warming to his subject, “is in course of deposition on the floor of the North Atlantic. This is the Globegerina ooze, the Globerinae being, as you are aware, a large genus of the order Foraminifera. Probably this ooze, accumulating in the light-years of universal time, will eventually displace the waves, and so constitute the chalk formation of a yet unborn continent, of which our bones will be in part foundation. And talking of foundation, which to all mammalia is a good square meal, will you give us the pleasure of your company at supper tonight?”

  Feeling himself to be extremely daring, and in some way disloyal to Hetty, Richard accepted.

  “Good man. This Globegerina ooze is now being deposited at the rate of a foot every hundred years. If the chalk at Dover, say, which is a thousand feet deep at least, was deposited at the same rate, then but a hundred thousand years was occupied in the deposition. Rather alarmingly rapid, is it not?”

  “I can feel the weight of an entire new range of hills, the New Atlantis Downs, pressing upon my skull, Mr. Mundy.”

  The Vicar approved this reply, indeed he was delighted. He was a lonely man, despite his popularity based on the practice of geniality and consideration for others. There were not many of his own class living in the neighbourhood, and though a man was a man for a’ that, it was pleasant to be in the company of one’s own sort now and again: and the fact that Richard Maddison’s grandfather and great-grandfather had been at college in Winchester was a thought predisposing him toward the young man beleaguered in the suburbs like himself. How he would be execrated, in the blessed neighbourhood of Wakenham, as hypocrite, Adamite, Pagan, free-thinker, seducer, and even blasphemer, if his thought and private life were suddenly exposed, as in a camera obscura! Bless his sweet Miranda!

  To Richard the supper party of six people in the Vicarage was a wonderful evening. If only his father had been like Mr. Mundy he thought as, seated next to Mrs. Mundy, he ate Bradenham ham with pick
led pears and drank a hock wine from the Moselle valley. The name on the label upon the tall slender green bottle startled him—Liebfraumilch: he had never heard of it, or seen it, before. And in a parson’s home, of all places! It was rather crude, like all German humour. He replied politely, almost carefully, to Mrs. Mundy’s remarks. She thought he was nice but dull. Richard felt he was dull; but the wine warmed the cockles of his heart, bringing back within the open empty shells, open as little wings of partridge chicks flying, or flown, to eternity, the authentic bivalves of the mud. Cockles, cockles! Boyhood holidays upon the sea coast, ragworm casts and cockle holes streaming with chain-bubbles of air as the tide came in over the flats. How the cockles in the mud rejoiced as the water returned to them! The sea that was life to them, the vast flats where little stint, greenshank, and dotterel piped and flitted, and beyond, the great liners coming up Southampton water from the Orient, from the Americas! Mr. Mundy filled his glass again. And as though reading his thoughts, he said, “A good little hock, this, warms the cockles of the heart, my boy.”

  But all Richard could say was, “Yes, indeed, sir.”

  On Richard’s other side sat a vivacious young girl, named Flora Gould. She was dark, with violet eyes, and a face of beautiful contour. She was affianced, he understood, to the young fellow opposite him across the table, who dressed and looked like a cavalry officer, with his dark hair parted in the middle, and his gaily brushed moustache, the ends of which now and then he twirled between finger and thumb. Their parents lived next door to one another in Twistleton Road. Flora Gould and Gerard Rolls were to be married in the coming spring. Unknown to Richard, Mr. Gould, a leather merchant with a tanning yard in Bermondsey, had bought the topmost house in Hillside Road for his daughter’s wedding present.

  “To our bones!” said the Vicar, raising his glass. “To our universal mother Eve, the earth! From the ooze we came, to the ooze we return!”

  “Come, Ernest,” remarked Mrs. Mundy, “No time like the present.”

  “The present, m’am, is a flux of the so-called past. We are but the descendants of Protozoa, Foraminifera and Radiolaria, of their testas sunk to the sea floor, impregnated by lime and silica, to become chalk and flint. To the Thanet sand that covered them, flushed there by the sea!”

  “Really, Ernest!” said Mrs. Mundy indulgently as to a child, as she raised her glass.

  “To the Antiquarian Society, and happy days to come!”

  “Do not forget my Dorcas Society!”

  “Of course not, my love! Are not the Woolwich and Reading beds superimposed upon the Lower Tertiary Thanet sands?”

  “It is a little obscure to me, but no doubt there is a connexion, Ernest.”

  “Verily so, my dear Ethelburga!” The Vicar raised his glass. “For William Blake wrote that Nature was the Devil—and a Devil not so far removed from the empyrean, I might add—and Darwin proves the evolution of species, and so science may soon prove the inculcation of matter with spirit and the soul—that will be a great day when religion and science join hands.”

  “In the Dorcas Society, Ernest?”

  “Assuredly so, my dear Ethelburga; for the Dorcas Society arises in good works for the poor; and the poor are of a lower stratum of society; and society is human, and the human mammal has its basis in geology. We are but the rocks in animation; we are but dust from dust, with the flowers of the field. But I cannot improve on the major poetry of the Old Testament.”

  The Vicar spoke with mellifluous charm, tipping his empty hock glass as though it were a planetary sphere uncertain of its axis after Higher Purpose had launched it into space. He looked up suddenly towards Richard, peering over the top of imaginary spectacles.

  “Cockles, Maddison, cockles! First the great sea, the wine-dark sea long before the coming of the grapes of Aeschylus and Virgil; and descending from the sublime to the particular, the sea covering Kent, Surrey, Sussex, part of Hampshire, Essex, Suffolk, part of Norfolk—extending over what now we call the German Ocean—together with the Bristol Channel, and north-west France—the sea which deposited, in our own small locality, what we now call London Clay. Vast rivers fed this sea, which was warm in the cooling of the earth, and overcast by fogs——”

  “Are you going to join the Antiquarian Society, Mr. Maddison?” Violet eyes looked with frank friendliness into Richard’s.

  “If I am not black-balled, Miss Gould. I have one grey hair, discovered over my right ear this very morning, and so I am just qualified.” Richard thought this remark somewhat funny; then before he could wonder if it implied discourtesy to his host, the Vicar exclaimed, as he went round with the tapered bottle, “Fortunate youth to be the possessor of even one! Mine have long since been returned to geological impulse.”

  He went back to his chair at the head of the oval table, and poured himself a glass of wine.

  “Above the Thanet gravel lies the Woolwich bed. This gives us our local character and no doubt colouring on occasion; it is the bed on which we lie, and within which we lie, which both supports and encloses our mortal shells. In places it is a red and purple mottled clay——” Richard thought of the face of Mr. Turney, and chuckled to himself—“elsewhere blue, flaky, estuarine clay containing layers of shells of cyrena cuneiformis, a bivalve somewhat resembling the cockle—and here we are back where we began, at the cockles of the heart.” And his hand rested a moment affectionately upon that of Miranda MacIntosh.

  H’m, said Richard to himself.

  Then Miss MacIntosh said with engrossed seriousness, “Were not some teeth of sharks found in a new road being excavated beside the Randisbourne, Vicar, quite recently?”

  “Yes, Miranda. And—greater triumph!—we excavated, with them, some thigh-bones of Bostaurus, the great wild ox Urus of Roman historians. Who knows, my dear Maddison, that this calcined relic was not the direct progenitor of the famous wild cattle still kept at Chillingham in Northumberland? We have also found bones of the long-faced wild black ox, resting on clay at the base of a gravel bed rolled by the stream, and obviously deposited in an eddy. But that is not all! One condyle of the longest bone was sawn off!”

  “How was that done, do you suppose, sir?” enquired Gerard Rolls, caressing his cavalry moustache opposite Richard. Mr. Rolls was by occupation a traveller in bristles.

  “With a saw, of course, Gerard, what else would it be done with, do you suppose?”

  “Yes, but what kind of a saw, that is the question to my mind, Vicar,” and the young man gave an upward fondle of his own natural bristles.

  “A saw is a saw, I have seen saws in butchers’ shops, and choppers, too. The men bang them down so hard on the wooden blocks, they soon chop them away. Don’t you agree with me?” and the bright dark violet eyes of Flora Gould were turned winsomely to Richard’s.

  “Yes, but did the ancient Britons have saws in those days—before the Bronze Age—am I correct, sir?” Richard, flustered by such eyes, appealed to Mr. Mundy.

  “Let us hear your views, Maddison,” replied the Vicar, “Let us hear all sides to the question. Miss Gould has seen saws in butchers’ shops. Are we all agreed? Ah yes, someone may enquire, but were there butchers’ shops and were they equipped with saws in those days?”

  Fortunately for Richard, Miss Gould supplied the answer.

  “Well, the Romans had houses with hollow walls, up which heat from fires passed to heat them, and Papa says they were wonderful people, so they must have had saws.”

  “Mr. Mundy is speaking of the Pleistocene Age, dearest,” said Mr. Rolls, tolerantly, across the candle-lit table.

  “But he said the bone was sawed in two, so it must have been sawed, you noodle, you!” and Miss Flora Gould blew her lover a kiss over the wavering flames. “Silly billy, that proves my point, doesn’t it, Mr. Mundy?”

  “Yes, my flower of evolution. The clay was derived from the decomposition of felspathic rocks, and the river or rivers—of which only our small Randisbourne and its tributaries remain—some alas—” and the V
icar looked sadly round the table—“shortly to be enclosed in sewers for evermore—where was I?”

  “You were going to tell us who sawed the bone, I think, Ernest,” said his wife.

  “I am coming to that in a moment, dearest Ethelburga. Meanwhile, the London Clay Sea must needs have passed through regions where such rocks are exposed. Sir Charles Lyell thought it was a large river which drained a continent lying to the west or south-west of Britain.”

  Here Richard saw a chance to raise himself from the obscurity of ignorance.

  “Atlantis—the lost continent!”

  “Yes indeed, Maddison. Now not to tease the ladies further, let me say at once that a little while ago we had the greatest pleasure in finding in the Randisbourne gravel on Reynard’s Common a small saw made from a thin flint-flake, by which the operation in question might have been performed. Marrow, extracted from the larger bones of mammals, has ever been a bonne bouche to primitive peoples.”

  “I always eat the marrow in my chops,” said Flora Gould. “It gives me energy!” and she waggled a forefinger at her lover, then blew him a kiss.

  “It gives you those bright eyes, my dear. It was, judging by fragments in our little museum, in most cases obtained by the simple process of smashing off the condyles; but the longer bone probably fell to the lot of a chieftain who preferred to have his marrow free from splinters. But how his slave, with that little flint saw, would deal with marrow bones of Elephas primigenius, the Mammoth, or of the Great Two-Horned Woolly Rhinoceros, we must leave to conjecture, even as I now observe that our gracious hostess is preparing to leave us, gentlemen, to our filberts and wine.”

  And Mr. Mundy, followed by Richard Maddison and Gerard Rolls, arose dutifully to his feet, while Richard hastened to open the door, with a correctly perceptible bow, for Mrs. Mundy.

  Chapter 9

 

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