The Hurly Burly and Other Stories

by A. E. Coppard

  “Yes,” Mr. Tottel was saying, “it’s very interesting to see interesting things, no matter if it’s man, woman, or an object. The most interesting man as I ever met in my life I met on my honeymoon. Years ago. He made a lifelong study of railways, that man, knew ’em from Alpha to . . . to . . . what is it?”

  “Abednego,” said someone.

  “Yes, the trunk lines, the fares, the routs, the junctions of anywheres in England or Scotland or Ireland or Wales. London, too, the Underground. I tested him, every station in correct order from South Kensington to King’s Cross. A strange thing! Nothing to do with railways in ’imself, it was just his ’obby. Was a Baptist minister, really, but still a most interesting man.”

  Loughlin could stand it no longer, he hurried away into the garden. He could not find her. Into the kitchen—she was not there. He sat down excited and impatient, but he must wait for her, he wanted to know, to know at once. How divinely she could swim! What was it he wanted to know? He tried to read a book there, a ragged dusty volume about the polar regions. He learned that when a baby whale is born it weighs at least a ton. How horrible!

  He rushed out into the fields full of extravagant melancholy and stupid distraction. That! All that was to be her life here! This was your rustic beauty, idiots and railways, boors who could choke an ox and chop off its horns—maddening doubts, maddening doubts—foul-smelling rooms, darkness, indecency. She held him at arm’s length still, but she was dovelike, and he was grappled to her soul with hoops of steel, yes, indeed.

  But soon this extravagance was allayed. Dim loneliness came imperceivably into the fields and he turned back. The birds piped oddly; some wind was caressing the higher foliage, turning it all one way, the way home. Telegraph poles ahead looked like half-used pencils; the small cross on the steeple glittered with a sharp and shapely permanence.

  When he came to the inn Orianda was gone to bed.

  IV

  The next morning an air of uneasy bustle crept into the house after breakfast, much going in and out and up and down in restrained perturbation.

  Orianda asked him if he could drive the horse and trap to the station. Yes, he thought he could drive it.

  “Lizzie is departing,” she said, “there are her boxes and things. It is very good of you, Gerald, if you will be so kind. It is a quiet horse.”

  Lizzie, then, had been subdued. She was faintly affable during the meal, but thereafter she had been silent; Gerald could not look at her until the last dreadful moment had come and her things were in the trap.

  “Good-bye, ’Thaniel,” she said to the innkeeper, and kissed him.

  “Good-bye, Orianda,” and she kissed Orianda, and then climbed into the trap beside Gerald, who said “Click click,” and away went the nag.

  Lizzie did not speak during the drive—perhaps she was in tears. Gerald would have liked to comfort her, but the nag was unusually spirited and clacked so freshly along that he did not dare turn to the sorrowing woman. They trotted down from the uplands and into the windy road over the marshes. The church spire in the town ahead seemed to change its position with every turn of that twisting route. It would have a background now of high sour-hued down, now of dark woodland, anon of nothing but sky and cloud; in a few miles farther there would be the sea. Hereabout there were no trees, few houses, the world was vast and bright, the sky vast and blue. What was prettiest of all was a windmill turning its fans steadily in the draught from the sea. When they crossed the river its slaty slow-going flow was broken into blue waves.

  At the station Lizzie dismounted without a word and Gerald hitched the nag to a tree. A porter took the luggage and labelled it while Gerald and Lizzie walked about the platform. A calf with a sack over its loins, tied by the neck to a pillar, was bellowing deeply; Lizzie let it suck at her finger for a while, but at last she resumed her walk and talked with her companion.

  “She’s a fine young thing, clever, his daughter; I’d do anything for her, but for him I’ve nothing to say. What can I say? What could I do? I gave up a great deal for that man, Mr. Loughlin—I’d better not call you Gerald any more now—a great deal. I knew he’d had trouble with his wicked wife, and now to take her back after so many years, eh! It’s beyond me, I know how he hates her. I gave up everything for him, I gave him what he can’t give back to me, and he hates her; you know?”

  “No, I did not know. I don’t know anything of this affair.”

  “No, of course, you would not know anything of this affair,” said Lizzie with a sigh. “I don’t want to see him again. I’m a fool, but I got my pride, and that’s something to the good, it’s almost satisfactory, ain’t it?”

  As the train was signalled she left him and went into the booking office. He marched up and down, her sad case affecting him with sorrow. The poor wretch, she had given up so much and could yet smile at her trouble. He himself had never surrendered to anything in life—that was what life demanded of you—surrender. For reward it gave you love, this swarthy, skin-deep love that exacted remorseless penalties. What German philosopher was it who said Woman pays the debt of life not by what she does, but by what she suffers? The train rushed in. Gerald busied himself with the luggage, saw that it was loaded, but did not see its owner. He walked rapidly along the carriages, but he could not find her. Well, she was sick of them all, probably hiding from him. Poor woman. The train moved off, and he turned away.

  But the station yard outside was startlingly empty, horse and trap were gone. The tree was still there, but with a man leaning against it, a dirty man with a dirty pipe and a dirty smell. Had he seen a horse and trap?

  “A brown mare?”

  “Yes.”

  “Trap with yaller wheels?”

  “That’s it.”

  “O ah, a young ooman druv away in that . . .”

  “A young woman!”

  “Ah, two minutes ago.” And he described Lizzie. “Out yon,” said the dirty man, pointing with his dirty pipe to the marshes.

  Gerald ran until he saw a way off on the level winding road the trap bowling along at a great pace; Lizzie was lashing the cob.

  “The damned cat!” He puffed large puffs of exasperation and felt almost sick with rage, but there was nothing now to be done except walk back to “The Black Dog,” which he began to do. Rage gave place to anxiety, fear of some unthinkable disaster, some tragic horror at the inn.

  “What a clumsy fool! All my fault, my own stupidity!” He groaned when he crossed the bridge at the half distance. He halted there: “It’s dreadful, dreadful!” A tremor in his blood, the shame of his foolishness, the fear of catastrophe, all urged him to turn back to the station and hasten away from these miserable complications.

  But he did not do so, for across the marshes at the foot of the uplands he saw the horse and trap coming back furiously towards him. Orianda was driving it.

  “What has happened?” she cried, jumping from the trap. “O, what fear I was in, what’s happened?” She put her arms around him tenderly.

  “And I was in great fear,” he said with a laugh of relief. “What has happened?”

  “The horse came home, just trotted up to the door and stood still. Covered with sweat and foam, you see. The trap was empty. We couldn’t understand it, anything, unless you had been flung out and were bleeding on the road somewhere. I turned the thing back and came on at once.” She was without a hat; she had been anxious and touched him fondly. “Tell me what’s the scare?”

  He told her all.

  “But Lizzie was not in the trap,” Orianda declared excitedly. “She has not come back. What does it mean, what does she want to do? Let us find her. Jump up, Gerald.”

  Away they drove again, but nobody had seen anything of Lizzie. She had gone, vanished, dissolved, and in that strong warm air her soul might indeed have been blown to Paradise. But they did not know how or why. Nobody knew. A vague search was carried on in the afternoon, guarded though fruitless enquiries were made, and at last it seemed clear, tolerably clear, t
hat Lizzie had conquered her mad impulse or intention or whatever it was, and walked quietly away across the fields to a station in another direction.

  V

  For a day or two longer time resumed its sweet slow delightfulness, though its clarity was diminished and some of its enjoyment dimmed. A village woman came to assist in the mornings, but Orianda was now seldom able to leave the inn; she had come home to a burden, a happy, pleasing burden, that could not often be laid aside, and therefore a somewhat lonely Loughlin walked the high and the low of the country by day and only in the evenings sat in the parlour with Orianda. Hope too was slipping from his heart as even the joy was slipping from his days, for the spirit of vanished Lizzie, defrauded and indicting, hung in the air of the inn, an implacable obsession, a triumphant foreboding that was proved a prophecy when some boys fishing in the mill dam hooked dead Lizzie from the pool under the hornbeam tree.

  Then it was that Loughlin’s soul discovered to him a mass of feelings—fine sympathy, futile sentiment, a passion for righteousness, morbid regrets—from which a tragic bias was born. After the dread ordeal of the inquest, which gave a passive verdict of Found Drowned, it was not possible for him to stem this disloyal tendency of his mind. It laid that drowned figure accusatively at the feet of his beloved girl, and no argument or sophistry could disperse the venal savour that clung to the house of “The Black Dog.” “To analyse or assess a person’s failings or deficiencies,” he declared to himself, “is useless, not because such blemishes are immovable, but because they affect the mass of beholders in divers ways. Different minds perceive utterly variant figures in the same being. To Brown Robinson is a hero, to Jones a snob, to Smith a fool. Who then is right? You are lucky if you can put your miserable self in relation at an angle where your own deficiencies are submerged or minimized, and wise if you can maintain your vision of that interesting angle.” But embedded in Loughlin’s modest intellect there was a stratum of probity that was rock to these sprays of the casuist; and although Orianda grew more alluring than ever, he packed his bag, and on a morning she herself drove him in the gig to the station.

  Upon that miserable departure it was fitting that rain should fall. The station platform was piled with bushel baskets and empty oil barrels. It rained with a quiet remorselessness. Neither spoke a word, no one spoke, no sound was uttered but the faint flicking of the raindrops. Her kiss to him was long and sweet, her good-bye almost voiceless.

  “You will write?” she whispered.

  “Yes, I will write.”

  But he does not do so. In London he has not forgotten, but he cannot endure the thought of that countryside—to be far from the madding crowd is to be mad indeed. It is only after some trance of recollection, when his fond experience is all delicately and renewingly there, that he wavers; but time and time again he relinquishes or postpones his return. And sometimes he thinks he really will write a letter to his friend who lives in the country.

  But he does not do so.

  The Handsome Lady

  TOWARDS THE CLOSE OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY the parish of Tull was a genial but angular hamlet hung out on the north side of a midland hill, with scarcely renown enough to get itself marked on a map. Its felicities, whatever they might be, lay some miles distant from a railway station, and so were seldom regarded, being neither boasted of by the inhabitants nor visited by strangers.

  But here as elsewhere people were born and, as unusual, unconspicuously born. John Pettigrove made a note of them then, and when people came in their turns to die Pettigrove made a note of that too, for he was the district registrar. In between whiles, like fish in a pond, they were immersed in labour until the Divine Angler hooked them to the bank, and then, as is the custom, they were conspicuously buried and laboured presumably no more.

  The registrar was perhaps the one person who had love and praise for the simple place. He was born and bred in Tull, he had never left Tull, and at forty years of age was as firmly attached to it as the black clock to the tower of Tull Church, which never recorded anything but twenty minutes past four. His wife, Carrie, a delicate woman, was also satisfied with Tull, but as she owned two or three small pieces of house property there her fancy may not have been entirely beyond suspicion; possession, as you might say, being nine points of the prejudice just as it is of the law. A year or two after their marriage Carrie began to suffer from a complication of ailments that turned her into a permanent invalid; she was seldom seen out of the house and under her misfortunes she peaked and pined, she was troublesome, there was no pleasing her. If Pettigrove went about unshaven she was vexed; it was unclean, it was lazy, disgusting; but when he once appeared with his moustache shaven off she was exceedingly angry; it was scandalous, it was shameful, maddening. There is no pleasing some women—what is a man to do? When he began to let it grow again and encouraged a beard she was more tyrannical than ever.

  The grey church was small and looked shrunken, as if it had sagged; it seemed to stoop down upon the green yard, but the stones and mounds, the cypress and holly, the strangely faded blue of a door that led through the churchyard wall to the mansion of the vicar, were beautiful without pretence, and though as often as not the parson’s goats used to graze among the graves and had been known to follow him into the nave, there was about the ground, the indulgent dimness under the trees, and the tower with its unmoving clock, the very delicacy of solitude. It inspired compassion and not cynicism as, peering as it were through the glass of antiquity, the stranger gazed upon its mortal register. In its peace, its beauty, and its age, all those pious records and hopes inscribed upon its stones, seemed not uttered in pride nor all in vain. But to speak truth the church’s grace was partly the achievement of its lofty situation. A road climbing up from sloping fields turned abruptly and traversed the village, sidling up to the church; there, having apparently satisfied some itch of curiosity, it turned abruptly again and trundled back another way into that northern prospect of farms and forest that lay in the direction of Whitewater Copse, Hangman’s Corner, and One O’clock.

  It was that prospect which most delighted Pettigrove, for he was a simple-minded countryman full of ambling content. Not even the church allured him so much, for though it pleased him and was just at his own threshold, he never entered it at all. Once upon a time there had been talk of him joining the church choir, for he had a pleasant singing voice, but he would not go.

  “It’s flying in the face of Providence,” cried his exasperated wife—her mind, too, was a falsetto one: “You’ve as strong a voice as anyone in Tull, in fact stronger, not that that is saying much, for Tull air don’t seem good for songsters if you may judge by that choir. The air is too thick maybe, I can’t say, it certainly oppresses my own chest, or perhaps it’s too thin, I don’t thrive on it myself; but you’ve the strength and it would do you credit; you’d be a credit to yourself and it would be a credit to me. But that won’t move you! I can’t tell what you’d be at; a drunken man ’ull get sober again, but a fool . . . well, there!”

  John, unwilling to be a credit, would mumble an objection to being tied down to that sort of thing. That was just like him, no spontaneity, no tidiness in his mind. Whenever he addressed himself to any discussion he had, as you might say, to tuck up his intellectual sleeves, give a hitch to his argumentative trousers. So he went on singing, just when he had a mind to it, old country songs, for he disliked what he called “gimcrack ballads about buzzums and roses.”

  Pettigrove’s occupation dealt with the extreme features of existence, but he himself had no extreme notions. He was a good medium type of man mentally and something more than that physically, but nevertheless he was a disappointment to his wife—he never gave her any opportunity to shine by his reflected light. She had nurtured foolish ideas of him first as a figure of romance, then of some social importance; he ought to be a parish councillor or develop eminence somehow in their way of life. But John was nothing like this, he did not develop, or shine, or offer counsel, he was just a big
, solid, happy man. There were times when his childless wife hated every ounce and sign of him, when his fair clipped beard and hair, which she declared were the colour of jute, and his stolidity, sickened her.

  “I do my duty by him and, please God, I’ll continue to do it. I’m a humble woman and easily satisfied. An afflicted woman has no chance, no chance at all,” she said. After twelve years of wedded life Pettigrove sometimes vaguely wondered what it would have been like not to have married anybody.

  One Michaelmas a small house belonging to Mrs. Pettigrove was let to a widow from Eastbourne. Mrs. Cronshaw was a fine upstanding woman, gracefully grave and, as the neighbours said, clean as a pink. For several evenings after she had taken possession of the house Pettigrove, who was a very handy sort of man, worked upon some alterations to her garden, and at the end of the third or fourth evening she had invited him into her bower to sip a glass of some cordial, and she thanked him for his labours.

  “Not at all, Mrs. Cronshaw.” And he drank to her very good fortune. Just that and no more.

  The next evening she did the same, and the very next evening to that again. And so it was not long before they spoke of themselves to each other, turn and turn about as you might say. She was the widow of an ironmonger who had died two years before, and the ironmonger’s very astute brother had given her an annuity in exchange for her interest in the business. Without family and with few friends she had been lonely.

  “But Tull is such a hearty place,” she said. “It’s beautiful. One might forget to be lonely.”

  “Be sure of that,” commented Pettigrove. They had the light of two candles and a blazing fire. She grew kind and more communicative to him; a strangely, disturbingly attractive woman, dark, with an abundance of well-dressed hair and a figure of charm. She had carpet all over her floor; nobody else in Tull dreamed of such a thing. She did not cover her old dark table with a cloth as everybody else habitually did. The pictures on the wall were real, and the black-lined sofa had cushions on it of violet silk which she sometimes actually sat upon. There was a dainty dresser with china and things, a bureau, and a tall clock that told the exact time. But there was no music, music made her melancholy. In Pettigrove’s home there were things like these but they were not the same. His bureau was jammed in a corner with flowerpots upon its top; his pictures comprised two photo prints of a public park in Swansea—his wife had bought them at an auction sale. Their dresser was a cumbersome thing with knobs and hooks and jars and bottles, and the tall clock never chimed the hours. The very armchairs at Mrs. Cronshaw’s were wells of such solid comfort that it made him feel uncomfortable to use them.