Chapter 20

Old Man Badger

Ragamuffin was old, but his heart was good. Directly his mistress asked him he snatched for his head and went away smooth and swift as a racing boat.

Boy pulled off to the right and made for the clump of trees half-way up the hill.

The gypsy's mare was grazing by herself behind them.

The girl steadied to a halt and watched her critically, calling Billy Bluff to heel.

She didn't want the boisterous young dog to worry the old mare just now, and it was clear that Four Pound didn't want it either.

As Billy Bluff skirmished about, she put back her ears and lowered her head with an irritable motion; but she was far too lazy to make the charge she threatened.

The girl's inspection made, and conclusions drawn, she pursued her way up the hill, popped her pony over the low post and rails which fenced off the Paddock Close from the untamed Downs, and walked leisurely over the brow, the gorse warm and smelling in the sun.

Beneath her a valley stretched away to the sea. There the cliff rose steeply to a lighthouse, standing on a bare summit; dipped, and rose again. In the hollow between the two hills a white coastguard station sentinelled the Gap, across which the line of the sea stretched like a silver wire.

Nobody was yet astir save a ploughman driving a team of slow-moving oxen to the fields. To Boy the beauty of the early morning lay in the fact that she had the hills and heavens and seas to herself, and could enjoy them in her own way without thought of interference from a world too frivolous, too feverish, and above all too loud, to understand.

As she rode along, her young face was uplifted to catch the rivulets of song that came pouring down on her from the blue.

She dropped down the hill, disturbing the rabbits busy in the dew, and bursting through the cables of gossamer that tried to stay her. A kestrel hovered over the gorse, and she marked a badger on the hillside shuffling home before Man and his Dogs began the old rowdy-dowdy game once more.

Happily Billy Bluff, who was always too much absorbed in the object immediately beneath his nose to take long views, did not see him. And the girl was glad. Sport, in so far as it meant killing the creatures of the wilderness for pleasure, made no appeal to her. She had no desire whatever to see a fight between the badger and Billy Bluff. The badger had in her judgment many qualities. She respected his desire for freedom and determination to go his own way. Also if the pair fought, the girl shrewdly suspected that Billy Bluff, big though he was, and bold as a lion, might be worsted. For Billy, after all, was decadent according to the standards of the wilderness.

He lived on a chain, protected by the police, and fed by hand. Every man was not his enemy, and he had not to hunt for each meal or go without. Billy Bluff, however fine a fellow he might be in his own eyes, was a poor creature in that of Warrior Badger. Civilization, if it had given him much of which the badger recked nothing, had also taken her toll of him.

Thinking vaguely thus, the girl once down the hill caught hold of Ragamuffin and spun him along the valley between the hills till she came to the coastguard station, straggling like a flock of sheep across the Gap.

At the mouth of the Gap was a familiar post.

She slipped Ragamuffin's rein over it, and ran down the steep, uneven way through the chalk cliff, her bob-tail baying at her side.

Right athwart the Gap, peering into it, shining-eyed and splendid, lay the sea, calling her.

"I'm coming!" her heart answered with a thrill, and she swooped toward it with a whoop and widespread arms.

Her feet crashed into the jolly shouting shingle, and she ploughed her way through it, to the rocks under the cliff which made her bathing tent.

The tide was brimming and beautiful. It came welling up, curled and fell with a soft, delicious swish on the answering beach.

Calm and full, twinkling still through faint mists, its shining surface was ruffled faintly by a light-footed breeze.

Swift as a bird the girl, blue-clad now, came rushing out from her hiding-place, her fair hair bunched in a cap, the sea in her nostrils, and exaltation in her heart.

This surely was heaven!

A moment she hovered on the brink, testing the waters with a tentative foot.

Then with a sigh of content she trusted herself to the deep. It closed about her like the arms of a friend.

She had not bathed since November, and it seemed to her the ocean welcomed her, clinging to her, lifting her, loving her, holding her close.

She buried her face in it, rose dripping, shaking the water off her eyes and face and hair, and swam out to sea with long and steady strokes.

She did not shout, she did not splash, she did not play the fool, and did not want to; rejoicing deeply in the quiet of her great friend, heart to heart and flesh to flesh, while the waters made music all about her.

The first bath was for her a kind of sacrament. She drew from it the deep and tranquil exaltation that she supposed Elsie Haggard drew from Communion.

Fifty yards out to sea she turned and trod water.

Billy Bluff, the old ass, was fussing about on the edge of the tide, barking at her.

"William!" called the head on the water. "Come on!"

Billy fiddled and flirted and could not bring himself to make the plunge.

Boy watched him with amused resentment. It was his domesticity which was his undoing. Old Man Badger on the hillside would never have dillied or dallied like that.

"Come on!" she ordered deeply. "Or I'll come and lug you in."

Billy marked the imperious note in his young mistress's voice. He ran this way and that, excused himself, pranced, whined, whimpered, yapped, barked, tasted the water and didn't like it, tried a dip, and withdrew, and finally made the effort and shoved off.

He swam rather low. His long, black back lay along the shining surface, his hair floating like seaweed on either side of him, while he left a little eddying wake behind him, as he pushed swiftly toward the girl.

As he came nearer she splashed him and he barked joyfully. He made for her, to paw and sprawl upon her. She evaded him.

Awhile girl and dog sported together in the deep, happy and laughing as two children.

Then they raced for the shore. He reached it first and, a caricature of his usual shaggy self, ran up toward her clothes, flinging off showers of drops.

"Keep off, creature!" she ordered, her big voice emerging strangely from her wisp of dripping figure, as she walked delicately up the shingle.