“Ah, I should like to be sure of it!” she continued. “I have not found kindly people in the cities—they do not even seem to notice a fine day!—I have not found them anywhere, so why should they be in Tull? You are a wise man, tell me, is Tull the exception?”
“Yes, Mrs. Cronshaw. You must come and visit us whenever you’ve a mind to; have no fear of loneliness.”
“Yes, I will come and visit you,” she declared, “soon, I will.”
“That’s right, you must visit us.”
“Yes, soon, I must.”
But weeks passed over and the widow did not keep her promise although she only lived a furlong from his door. Pettigrove made no further invitation for he found excuses on many evenings to visit her. It was easy to see that she did not care for his wife, and he did not mind this for neither did he care for her now. The old wish that he had never been married crept back into his mind, a sly, unsavoury visitant; it was complicated by a thought that his wife might not live long, a dark, shameful thought that nevertheless trembled into hope. So on many of the long winter evenings, while his wife dozed in her bed, he sat in the widow’s room talking of things that were strange and agreeable. She could neither understand nor quite forgive his parochialism; this was sweet flattery to him. He had scarcely ever set foot outside a ten-mile radius of Tull, but he was an intelligent man, and all her discourse was of things he could perfectly understand! For the first time in his life Pettigrove found himself lamenting the dullness of existence. He tried to suppress this tendency, but words would come and he was distressed. He had always been in love with things that lasted, that had stability, that gave him a recognition and guidance, but now his feelings were flickering like grass in a gale.
“How strange that is,” she said, when he told her this, “we seem to have exchanged our feelings. I am happy here, but I know that dark thought, yes, that life is a dull journey on which the mind searches for variety, unvarying variety.”
“But what for?” he cried.
“It is constantly seeking change.”
“But for why? It seems like treachery to life.”
“It may be so, but if you seek, you find.”
“What?”
“Whatever you are seeking.”
“What am I seeking?”
“Not to know that is the blackest treachery to life. We are growing old,” she added inconsequently, stretching her hands to the fire. She wore black silk mittens.
“Perhaps that’s it,” he allowed, with a laugh. “Childhood’s best.”
“Surely not,” she protested.
“Ah, but I was gay enough then. I’m not a religious man, you know—and perhaps that’s the reason—but however—I can remember things of great joy and pleasure then.”
And it seemed from his recollections that not the least pleasant and persistent was his memory of the chapel, a Baptist hall long since closed and decayed, to which his mother had sent him on Sunday afternoons. It was a plain, tough, little tabernacle, with benches of deal, plain deal, very hard, covered with a clear varnish that smelled pleasant. The platform and its railing, the teacher’s desk, the pulpit were all of deal, the plainest deal, very hard and all covered with the clear varnish that smelled very pleasant. And somehow the creed and the teacher and the attendants were like that too, all plain and hard, covered with a varnish that was pleasant. But there was a way in which the afternoon sun beamed through the cheap windows that lit up for young Pettigrove an everlasting light. There were hymns with tunes that he hoped would be sung in Paradise. The texts, the stories, the admonitions of the teachers, were vivid and evidently beautiful in his memory. Best of all was the privilege of borrowing a book at the end of school time—Pilgrim’s Progress or Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
For a while his recollections restored him to cheerfulness, but his dullness soon overcame him again.
“I have been content all my life. Never was a man more content. And now! It’s treachery if you like. My faith’s gone, content gone, for why?”
He rose to go, and as he paused at the door to bid her good-night she took his hand and softly and tenderly said: “Why are you depressed? Don’t be so. Life is not dull, it is only momentarily unkind.”
“Ah, I’ll get used to it.”
“John Pettigrove, you must never get used to dullness, I forbid you.”
“But I thought Tull was beautiful,” he said as he paused upon the doorsill. “I thought Tull was beautiful . . .”
“Until I came?” It was so softly uttered and she closed the door so quickly upon him. They called “Good-night, good-night” to each other through the door.
He went away through the village, his mind streaming with strange emotions. He exulted, and yet he feared for himself and for the widow, but he could not summon from the depths of his mind what it was he feared. He passed a woman in the darkness who, perhaps mistaking him for another, said “Good-night, my love.”
The next morning he sat in the kitchen after breakfast. It wanted but a few days to Christmas. There was no frost in the air; the wind roared, but the day, though grey, was not gloomy; only the man was gloomy.
“Nothing ever happens,” he murmured. “True, but what would you want to happen?”
Out in the scullery a village girl was washing dishes; as she rattled the ware she hummed a song. From his back window Pettigrove could see a barn in a field, two broken gates, a pile of logs, faggots, and a single pollarded willow whose head was strangled under a hat of ivy. Beside a barley stack was a goose with a crooked neck; it stood sulking. High aloft in the sky thousands of blown rooks wrangled like lost men. And Pettigrove vowed he would go no more to the widow—not for a while. Something inside him kept asking, Why not? And he as quickly replied to himself: “You know, you know. You’ll find it all in God-a-mighty’s own commandments. Stick to them, you can’t do more—at least, you might, but what would be the good?”
So that evening he went along to the Christmas lottery held in a vast barn, dimly lit and smelling of vermin. A rope hung over each of its two giant beams, dangling smoky lanterns. There was a crowd of men and boys inspecting the prizes in the gloomy corners, a pig sulking in a pen of hurdles, sacks of wheat, live hens in coops, a row of dead hares hung on the rail of a wagon. Amid silence a man plunged his hand into a corn measure and drew forth a numbered ticket; another man drew from a similar measure a blank ticket or a prize ticket. Each time a prize was drawn a hum of interest spread through the onlookers, but when the chief prize, the fat pig, was drawn against number seventy-nine there was agitation, excitement even.
“Who be it?” cried several. “Who be number seventy-nine for the fat pig?”
A man consulted a list and said doubtfully: “Miss Subey Jones—who be she?”
No one seemed to know until a husky alto voice from a corner piped: “I know her. She’s from Shottsford way, over by Squire Marchand’s.”
“Oh,” murmured the disappointed men; the husky voice continued: “Day afore yesterday she hung herself.”
For a few seconds there was a pained silence, until a powerful voice cried: “It’s a mortal shame, chaps.”
The ceremony proceeded until all the tickets were drawn and all the prizes won and distributed. The cackling hens were seized from the pens by their legs and handed upside down to their new owners. The pig was bundled squealing into a sack. Bags of wheat were shouldered and the white-bellied hares were held up to the light. Everybody was animated and chattered loudly.
“I had number thirty in the big chance and I won nothing. And I had number thirty-one in the little chance and I won a duck. Number thirty-one was my number, and number thirty in the big draw; I won nothing in that, but in the little draw I won a duck. Well, there’s flesh for you.”
Some of those who had won hens held them out to a white-faced youth who smoked a large rank pipe; he took each fowl quietly by the neck and twisted it till it died. A few small feathers stuck to his hands or wavered to the floor, and even after the bird was de
ad and carried away it continued slowly and vaguely to flap its big wings and scatter its lorn feathers.
Pettigrove spent most of the next day in the forest plantation south of Tull Great Wood, where a few chain of soil had been cultivated and reserved for seedlings, trees of larch and pine no bigger than potted geraniums, groves of oaks with stems slender as a cockerel’s leg and most of the stiff brown leaves still clinging to the famished twigs; or sycamores, thin but tall, flourishing in a mat of their own dropped foliage that was the colour of butter fringed with blood and stained with black gouts like a child’s copy-book. It was a toy forest, dense enough for the lair of a beast, and dim enough for an anchorite’s meditations, but a dog could leap over it, and a boy could stand amid its growth and look like Gulliver in Lilliput.
“May I go into the wood?” a voice called to Pettigrove. Looking sharply up he saw Mrs. Cronshaw, clad in a long dark blue cloak with a fur necklet, a grey velvet hat trimmed with a pigeon’s wing confining her luxuriant hair.
“Ah, you may,” he said, stalking to her side, “but you’d best not, ’tis a heavy marshy soil within and the ways are stabbled by the hunters’ horses. Better keep out till summer comes, then ’tis dry and pleasant-like.”
She sat down awkwardly on a heap of faggots, her feet turned slightly inwards, but her cheeks were dainty pink in the cold air. What a smart lady! He stood telling her things about the wood, its birds and foxes; deep in the heart of it all was a lovely open space covered with the greenest grass and a hawthorn tree in the middle of that. It bloomed in spring with heavy creamy blossom. No, he had never seen any fairies there. Come to that, he did not expect to, he had never thought of it.
“But there are fairies, you know,” cried the widow. “O yes, in old times, I mean very old times, before the Romans, in fact before Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob then, the Mother of the earth had a big family, thousands, something like the old woman who lived in a shoe she was. And one day God sent word to say he was coming to visit her. Well, then! She was so excited—the Mother of the earth—that she made a great to do you may be sure, and after she had made her house sparkle with cleanliness and had baked a great big pie she began to wash her children. All of a sudden she heard the trumpets blow—God was just a-coming! So as she hadn’t got time to finish them all, she hid those unwashed ones away out of sight, and bade them to remain there and make no noise or she would be angry and punish them. But you can’t conceal anything from the King of All and He knew of those hidden children, and he caused them to be hidden from mortal eyes for ever, and they are the fairies, O yes!”
“No, nothing can be concealed,” Pettigrove admitted in his slow grave fashion, “murder will out, as they say, but that’s a tough morsel if you’re going to swallow it all.”
“But I like to believe in those things I wish were true.”
“Ah, so, yes,” said Pettigrove.
It was an afternoon of damp squally blusters, uncheering, with slaty sky; the air itself seemed slaty, and though it had every opportunity and invitation to fall, the rain, with strange perversity, held off. In the oddest corners of the sky, north and east, a miraculous glow could be seen, as if the sun in a moment of aberration had determined to set just then and just there. The wind made a long noise in the sky, the smell of earth rose about them, of timber and of dead leaves; except for rooks, or a wren cockering itself in a bush, no birds were to be seen.
Letting his spade fall Pettigrove sat down beside the widow and kissed her. She blushed red as a cherry and he got up quickly.
“I ought not to ha’ done it, I ought not to ha’ done that, Mrs. Cronshaw!”
“Caroline!” said she, smiling the correction at him.
“Is that your name?” He sat down by her again. “Why, it is the same as my wife’s.”
And Caroline said “Humph! You’re a strange man, but you are wise and good. Tell me, does she understand you?”
“What is there to understand? We are wed and we are faithful to each other, I can take my oath on that to God or man.”
“Yes, yes, but what is faith—without love between you? You see? You have long since broken your vows to love and cherish, understand that, you have broken them in half.”
She had picked up a stick and was drawing patterns of cubes and stars in the soil.
“But what is to be done, Caroline? Life is good, but there is good living and there is bad living, there is fire and there is water. It is strange what the Almighty permits to happen.”
A slow-speaking man; scrupulous of thought and speech he weighed each idea before its delivery as carefully as a tobacconist weighs an ounce of tobacco.
“Have some cake?” said Caroline, drawing a package from a pocket. “Will you have a piece . . . John?”
She seemed to be on the point of laughing aloud at him. He took the fragment of cake but he did not eat it as she did. He held it between finger and thumb and stared at it.
“It’s strange how a man lets his tongue wag now and again as if he’d got the universe stuck on the end of a common fork.”
“Or at the end of a knitting needle, yes, I know,” laughed Caroline, brushing the crumbs from her lap. Then she bent her head, patted her lips, and regurgitated with a gesture of apology—just like a lady. “But what are you saying? If there is love between you there is faithfulness, if there is no love there is no fidelity.”
He bit a mouthful off the cake at last.
“Maybe true, but you must have respect for the beliefs of others . . .”
“How can you if they don’t fit in with your own?”
“Or there is sorrow.” He bolted the rest of his cake. “O you are right, I daresay, Caroline, no doubt; it’s right, I know, but is it reasonable?”
“There are afflictions,” she said, “which time will cure, so they don’t matter; but there are others which time only aggravates, so what can we do? I daresay it’s different with a man, but a woman, you know, grasps at what she wants. That sounds reasonable, but you don’t think it’s right?”
In the cold whistling sky a patch of sunset had now begun to settle in its proper quarter, but as frigid and unconvincing as a stage fireplace. Pettigrove sat with his great hands clasped between his knees. Perhaps she grew tired of watching the back of him; she rose to go, but she said gently enough: “Come in to-night, I want to tell you something.”
“I will, Caroline.”
Later, when he reached home, he found two little nieces had arrived, children of some relatives who lived a dozen miles away. A passing farmer had dropped them at Tull; their parents were coming a day later to spend Christmas with the Pettigroves.
They sat up in his wife’s room after tea, for Carrie left her bed only for an hour or two at noon. She dozed against her pillows, a brown shawl covering her shoulders, while the two children played by the hearth. Pettigrove sat silent, gazing in the fire.
“What a racket you are making, Polly and Jane!” quavered Carrie.
The little girls thereupon ceased their sporting and took a picture book to the hearthrug where they examined it in awed silence by the firelight. After some minutes the invalid called out: “Don’t make such a noise turning over all them leaves.”
Polly made a grimace and little Jane said: “We are looking at the pictures.”
“Well,” snapped Mrs. Pettigrove, “why can’t you keep to the one page!”
John sat by the fire vowing to himself that he would not go along to the widow, and in the very act of vowing he got up and began putting on his coat.
“Are you going out, John?”
“There’s a window catch to put right along at Mrs. Cronshaw’s,” he said. At other times it had been a pump to mend, a door latch to adjust, or a jamb to ease.
“I never knew things to go like it before—I can’t understand it,” his wife commented. “What with windows and doors and pumps and bannisters anyone would think the house had got the rot. It’s done for the purpose, or my name’s not what it is.”
“It won’t take long,” he said as he went.
The wind had fallen away, but the sky, though clearer, had a dull opaque mean appearance, and the risen moon, without glow, without refulgence, was like a brass-headed nail stuck in a kitchen wall.
The yellow blind at the widow’s cot was drawn down and the candles within cast upon the blind a slanting image of the birdcage hanging at the window; a fat dapper bird appeared to be snoozing upon its rod; a tiny square was probably a lump of sugar; the glass well must have been half full of water, it glistened and twinkled on the blind. The shadowy bird shifted one foot, then the other, and just opened its beak as Pettigrove tapped at the door.
They did not converse very easily, there was constraint between them, Pettigrove’s simple mind had a twinge of guilt.
“Will you take lime juice or cocoa?” asked the widow, and he said: “Cocoa.”
“Little or large?”
And he said: “Large.”
While they sat sipping the cocoa Caroline began: “Well, I am going away, you know. No, not for good, just a short while, for Christmas only, or very little longer. I must go.”
She nestled her blue shawl more snugly round her shoulders. A cough seemed to trouble her. “There are things you can’t put on one side for ever . . .”
“Even if they don’t fit in with your own ideas!” he said slyly.
The Hurly Burly and Other Stories Page 5