The Hurly Burly and Other Stories

by A. E. Coppard

  And then, as I said, the insurance man and the parson began to call again on that foolish woman, but she would not alter her ways for any of them. Not one bit. The things she had once enjoyed before her marriage, the things she had wanted her own husband to do but were all against his grain, these she could nohow bring herself to do when he was dead and gone and she was alone and free to do them. What a farce human nature can be! There was an Italian hawker came along with rings in his ears and a coloured cart full of these little statues of Cupid, and churches with spires a yard long and red glass in them, and heads of some of the great people like the Queen and General Gordon.

  “Have you got a head of Lord Beaconsfield?” Molly asks him.

  He goes and searches in his cart and brings her out a beautiful head on a stand, all white and new, and charges her half a crown for it. Few days later the parson calls on the job of persuading her to return to his flock now that she was free to go once more. But no. She says: “I can never change now, sir, it may be all wrong of me, but what my man thought was good enough for me, and I somehow cling to that. It’s all wrong, I suppose, and you can’t understand it, sir, but it’s all my life.”

  Well, Twamley chumbled over an argument or two, but he couldn’t move her; there’s no mortal man could ever more that woman except Ted—and he didn’t give a damn.

  “Well,” says parson, “I have hopes, Mrs. Wickham, that you will come to see the matter in a new light, a little later on perhaps. In fact, I’m sure you will, for look, there’s that bust,” he says, and he points to it on the mantelpiece. I thought you and he were all against Gladstone, but now you’ve got his bust upon your shelf; it’s a new one, I see.”

  “No, no, that isn’t Gladstone,” cried Molly, all of a tremble, “that isn’t Gladstone, it’s Lord Beaconsfield!”

  “Indeed, but pardon me, Mrs. Wickham, that is certainly a bust of Mr. Gladstone.”

  So it was. This Italian chap had deceived the silly creature and palmed her off with any bust that come handy, and it happened to be Gladstone. She went white to the teeth, and gave a sort of scream, and dashed the little bust in a hundred pieces on the hearth in front of the minister there. O, he had a very vexing time with her.

  That was years ago. And then came the fire, and then the bullseye shop. For ten years now I’ve prayed that woman to marry me, and she just tells me: No. She says she pledged her solemn word to Ted as he lay a-dying that she would not wed again. It was his last wish—she says. But it’s a lie, a lie, for I heard them both. Such a lie! She’s a mad woman, but fond of him still in her way, I suppose. She liked to see Ted make a fool of himself, liked him better so. Perhaps that’s what she don’t see in me. And what I see in her—I can’t imagine. But it’s a something, something in her that sways me now just as it swayed me then, and I doubt but it will sway me for ever.

  The Poor Man

  ONE OF THE COMMONEST SIGHTS IN THE VALE WAS A certain man on a bicycle carrying a bag full of newspapers. He was as much a sound as a sight, for what distinguished him from all other men to be encountered there on bicycles was not his appearance, though that was noticeable; it was his sweet tenor voice, heard as he rode along singing each morning from Cobbs Mill, through Kezzal Predy Peter, Thasper, and Buzzlebury, and so on to Trinkel and Nuncton. All sorts of things he sang, ballads, chanties, bits of glees, airs from operas, hymns, and sacred anthems—he was leader of Thasper church choir—but he seemed to observe some sort of rotation in their rendering. In the forepart of the week it was hymns and anthems; on Wednesday he usually turned to modestly secular tunes; he was rolling on Thursday and Friday through a gamut of love songs and ballads undoubtedly secular and not necessarily modest, while on Saturday—particularly at eve, spent in the tap of “The White Hart”—his programme was entirely ribald and often a little improper. But always on Sunday he was the most decorous of men, no questionable liquor passed his lips, and his comportment was a credit to the church, a model even for soberer men.

  Dan Pavey was about thirty-five years old, of medium height and of medium appearance except as to his hat (a hard black bowler which seemed never to belong to him, though he had worn it for years) and as to his nose. It was an ugly nose, big as a baby’s elbow; he had been born thus, it had not been broken or maltreated, though it might have engaged in some pre-natal conflict when it was malleable, since when nature had healed, but had not restored it. But there was ever a soft smile that covered his ugliness, which made it genial and said, or seemed to say: Don’t make a fool of me, I am a friendly man, this is really my hat, and as for my nose—God made it so.

  The six hamlets which he supplied with newspapers lie along the Icknield Vale close under the ridge of woody hills, and the inhabitants adjacent to the woods fell the beech timber and, in their own homes, turn it into rungs or stretchers for chair manufacturers who, somewhere out of sight beyond the hills, endlessly make chair, and nothing but chair. Sometimes in a wood itself there may be seen a shanty built of faggots in which sits a man turning pieces of chair on a treadle lathe. Tall, hollow, and greenly dim are the woods, very solemn places, and they survey the six little towns as a man might look at six tiny pebbles lying on a green rug at his feet.

  One August morning the newspaper man was riding back to Thasper. The day was sparkling like a diamond, but he was not singing, he was thinking of Scroope, the new rector of Thasper parish, and the thought of Scroope annoyed him. It was not only the tone of the sermon he had preached on Sunday, “The poor we have always with us,” though that was in bad taste from a man reputed rich and with a heart—people said—as hard as a door-knocker; it was something more vital, a congenital difference between them as profound as it was disagreeable. The Rev. Faudel Scroope was wealthy, he seemed to have complete confidence in his ability to remain so, and he was the kind of man with whom Dan Pavey would never be able to agree. As for Mrs. Scroope, gloom pattered upon him in a strong sighing shower at the least thought of her.

  At Larkspur Lane he came suddenly upon the rector talking to an oldish man, Eli Bond, who was hacking away at a hedge. Scroope never wore a hat, he had a curly bush of dull hair. Though his face was shaven clean it remained a regular plantation of ridges and wrinkles; there was a stoop in his shoulders, a lurch in his gait, and he had a voice that howled.

  “Just a moment, Pavey,” he bellowed, and Dan dismounted.

  “All those years,” the parson went on talking to the hedger; “all those years, dear me!”

  “I were born in Thasper sixty-six year ago, come the twenty-third of October, sir, the same day—but two years before—as Lady Hesseltine eloped with Rudolf Moxley. I was reared here and I worked here sin’ I were six year old. Twalve children I have had (though five on ’em come to naught and two be in the army) and I never knowed what was to be out of work for one single day in all that sixty year. Never. I can’t thank my blessed master enough for it.”

  “Isn’t that splendidly feudal,” murmured the priest, “who is your good master?”

  The old man solemnly touched his hat and said: “God.”

  “O, I see, yes, yes,” cried the Rev. Scroope. “Well, good health and constant, and good work and plenty of it, are glorious things. The man who has never done a day’s work is a dog, and the man who deceives his master is a dog too.”

  “I never donn that, sir.”

  “And you’ve had happy days in Thasper, I’m sure?”

  “Right-a-many, sir.”

  “Splendid. Well . . . um . . . what a heavy rain we had in the night.”

  “Ah, that was heavy! At five o’clock this morning I daren’t let my ducks out—they’d a bin drownded, sir.”

  “Ha, now, now, now!” warbled the rector as he turned away with Dan.

  “Capital old fellow, happy and contented. I wish there were more of the same breed. I wish . . .” The parson sighed pleasantly as he and Dan walked on together until they came to the village street where swallows were darting and flashing very low. A small boy stood a
bout, trying to catch them in his hands as they swooped close to him. Dan’s own dog pranced up to his master for a greeting. It was black, somewhat like a greyhound, but stouter. Its tail curled right over its back and it was cocky as a bird, for it was young; it could fight like a tiger and run like the wind—many a hare had had proof of that.

  Said Mr. Scroope, eyeing the dog: “Is there much poaching goes on here?”

  “Poaching, sir?”

  “I am told there is. I hope it isn’t true for I have rented most of the shooting myself.”

  “I never heard tell of it, sir. Years ago, maybe. The Buzzlebury chaps one time were rare hands at taking a few birds, so I’ve heard, but I shouldn’t think there’s an onlicensed gun for miles around.”

  “I’m not thinking so much of guns. Farmer Prescott had his warren netted by someone last week and lost fifty or sixty rabbits. There’s scarcely a hare to be seen, and I find wires wherever I go. It’s a crime like anything else, you know,” Scroope’s voice was loud and strident, “and I shall deal very severely with poaching of any kind. O yes, you have to, you know, Pavey. O yes. There was a man in my last parish was a poacher, cunning scoundrel of the worst type, never did a stroke of work, and he had a dog, it wasn’t unlike your dog—this is your dog, isn’t it? You haven’t got your name on its collar, you should have your name on a dog’s collar—well, he had a perfect brute of a dog, carried off my pheasants by the dozen; as for hares, he exterminated them. Man never did anything else, but we laid him by the heels and in the end I shot the dog myself.”

  “Shot it?” said Dan. “No, I couldn’t tell a poacher if I was to see one. I know no more about ’em than a bone in the earth.”

  “We shall be,” continued Scroope, “very severe with them. Let me see—are you singing the Purcell on Sunday evening?”

  “He Shall Feed His Flock—sir—like a Shepherd.”

  “Splendid! Good-day, Pavey.”

  Dan, followed by his bounding, barking dog, pedalled home to a little cottage that seemed to sag under the burden of its own thatch; it had eaves a yard wide, and birds’ nests in the roof at least ten years old. Here Dan lived with his mother, Meg Pavey, for he had never married. She kept an absurd little shop for the sale of sweets, vinegar, boot buttons and such things, and was a very excellent old dame, but as naive as she was vague. If you went in to her counter for a newspaper and banged down a half-crown she would as likely as not give you change for sixpence—until you mentioned the discrepancy, when she would smilingly give you back your half-crown again.

  Dan passed into the back room where Meg was preparing dinner, threw off his bag, and sat down without speaking. His mother was making a heavy succession of journeys between the table and a larder.

  “Mrs. Scroope’s been here,” said Meg, bringing a loaf to the table.

  “What did she want?”

  “She wanted to reprimand me.”

  “And what have you been doing?”

  Meg was in the larder again. “’Tis not me, ’tis you.”

  “What do you mean, mother?”

  “She’s been a-hinting,” here Meg pushed a dish of potatoes to the right of the bread, and a salt-cellar to the left of the yawning remains of a rabbit pie, “about your not being a teetotal. She says the boozing do give the choir a bad name and I was to persuade you to give it up.”

  “I should like to persuade her it was time she is dead. I don’t go for to take any pattern from that rich trash. Are we the grass under their feet? And can you tell me why parsons’ wives are always so much more awful than the parsons themselves? I never shall understand that if I lives a thousand years. Name o’ God, what next?”

  “Well, ’tis as she says. Drink is no good to any man, and she can’t say as I ain’t reprimanded you.”

  “Name o’ God,” he replied, “do you think I booze just for the sake o’ the booze, because I like booze? No man does that. He drinks so that he shan’t be thought a fool, or rank himself better than his mates—though he knows in his heart he might be if he weren’t so poor or so timid. Not that one would mind to be poor if it warn’t preached to him that he must be contented. How can the poor be contented as long as there’s the rich to serve? The rich we have always with us, that’s our responsibility, we are the grass under their feet. Why should we be proud of that? When a man’s poor the only thing left him is hope—for something better: and that’s called envy. If you don’t like your riches you can always give it up, but poverty you can’t desert, nor it won’t desert you.”

  “It’s no good flying in the face of everything like that, Dan, it’s folly.”

  “If I had my way I’d be an independent man and live by myself a hundred miles from anywheres or anybody. But that’s madness, that’s madness, the world don’t expect you to go on like that, so I do as other folks do, not because I want to, but because I a’nt the pluck to be different. You taught me a good deal, mother, but you never taught me courage and I wasn’t born with any, so I drinks with a lot of fools who drink with me for much the same reason, I expect. It’s the same with other things besides drink.”

  His indignation lasted throughout the afternoon as he sat in the shed in his yard turning out his usual quantity of chair. He sang not one note, he but muttered and mumbled over all his anger. Towards evening he recovered his amiability and began to sing with a gusto that astonished even his mother. He went out into the dusk humming like a bee, taking his dog with him. In the morning the Rev. Scroope found a dead hare tied by the neck to his own door-knocker, and at night (it being Saturday) Dan Pavey was merrier than ever in “The White Hart.” If he was not drunk he was what Thasper calls “tightish,” and had never before sung so many of those ribald songs (mostly of his own composition) for which he was noted.

  A few evenings later Dan attended a meeting of the Church Men’s Guild. A group of very mute countrymen sat in the village hall and were goaded into speech by the rector.

  “Thasper,” declared Mr. Scroope, “has a great name for its singing. All over the six hamlets there is surprising musical genius. There’s the Buzzlebury band—it is a capital band.”

  “It is that,” interrupted a maroon-faced butcher from Buzzlebury, “it can play as well at nine o’clock in the morning as it can at nine o’clock at night, and that’s a good band as can do it.”

  “Now I want our choir to compete at the county musical festival next year. Thasper is going to show those highly trained choristers what a native choir is capable of. Yes, and I’m sure our friend Pavey can win the tenor solo competition. Let us all put our backs into it and work agreeably and consistently. Those are the two main springs of good human conduct—consistency and agreeability. The consistent man will always attain his legitimate ends, always. I remember a man in my last parish, Tom Turkem, known and loved throughout the county; he was not only the best cricketer in our village, he was the best for miles around. He revelled in cricket, and cricket only; he played cricket and lived for cricket. The years went on and he got old, but he never dreamed of giving up cricket. His bowling average got larger every year and his batting average got smaller, but he still went on, consistent as ever. His order of going in dropped down to No. 6 and he seldom bowled; then he got down to No. 8 and never bowled. For a season or two the once famous Tom Turkem was really the last man in! After that he became umpire, then scorer, and then he died. He had got a little money, very little, just enough to live comfortably on. No, he never married. He was a very happy, hearty, hale old man. So you see? Now there is a cricket club at Buzzlebury, and one at Trinkel. Why not a cricket club at Thasper? Shall we do that? . . . Good!”

  The parson went on outlining his projects, and although it was plain to Dan that the Rev. Scroope had very little, if any, compassion for the weaknesses natural to mortal flesh, and attached an extravagant value to the virtues of decency, sobriety, consistency, and, above all, loyalty to all sorts of incomprehensible notions, yet his intentions were undeniably agreeable and the Guild was consistent
ly grateful.

  “One thing, Pavey,” said Scroope when the meeting had dispersed, “one thing I will not tolerate in this parish, and that is gambling.”

  “Gambling? I have never gambled in my life, sir. I couldn’t tell you hardly the difference between spades and clubs.”

  “I am speaking of horse-racing, Pavey.”

  “Now that’s a thing I never see in my life, Mr. Scroope.”

  “Ah, you need not go to the races to bet on horses; the slips of paper and money can be collected by men who are agents for racing bookmakers. And that is going on all round the six hamlets, and the man who does the collecting, even if he does not bet himself, is a social and moral danger, he is a criminal, he is against the law. Whoever he is,” said the vicar, moderating his voice, but confidently beaming and patting Dan’s shoulder, “I shall stamp him out mercilessly. Good-night, Pavey.”

  Dan went away with murder in his heart. Timid strangers here and there had fancied that a man with such a misshapen face would be capable of committing a crime, not a mere peccadillo—you wouldn’t take notice of that, of course—but a solid substantial misdemeanour like murder. And it was true, he was capable of murder—just as everybody else is, or ought to be. But he was also capable of curbing that distressing tendency in the usual way, and in point of fact he never did commit a murder.

  These rectorial denunciations troubled the air but momentarily, and he still sang gaily and beautifully on his daily ride from Cobbs Mill along the little roads to Trinkel and Nuncton. The hanging richness of the long woods yellowing on the fringe of autumn, the long solemn hills themselves, cold sunlight, coloured berries in briary loops, the brown small leaves of hawthorn that had begun to drop from the hedge and flutter in the road like dying moths, teams of horses sturdily ploughing, sheepfolds already thatched into little nooks where the ewes could lie—Dan said—as warm as a pudding: these things filled him with tiny ecstasies too incoherent for him to transcribe—he could only sing.