Part 2

Then the parson flushed very red and bade the man be gone. Not another scrap of help should Slouch have from him.

And, indeed, Timothy found the whole district up in arms against him, and ready to kick him out of it, and would have done so—only that it pitied and respected Sela.

“Out he must go,” said the Squire. “He had notice to quit at Lady Day, and on Lady Day he goes and into no cottage of mine shall he come.”

Whither did he go? He wandered seeking shelter; every house was refused, till he came to John French.

A few hours later, Mrs. French exclaimed: “John! you don’t mean to tell me that you have let those good-for-naughts—the Slouches—into your cottage?”

“I have, mother, they cannot lie in the road under a hedge, and they were turned out to-day. Timothy has, at last, found an occupation—he is taken on to break stones for the road. He cannot go wrong in that. It is what any fool can do. As to the cottage, it is unoccupied, and has been for a twelvemonth. I have let him move his few sticks of furniture into it, and he is to pay me a weekly rent of a shilling. There is a bit of garden——”

“Which he will neglect.”

“Sela kept the garden where they were before, and she will attend to this. She has poultry.”

“Well—may you not regret it.”

So Sela and Tim and the children were admitted into French’s cottage, and with them moved a great number of cocks and hens, geese and ducks. Sela was a clever woman with fowls. Indeed, it was through her poultry that she had maintained herself and children, and had paid the rent. She sold eggs to the regrater every week, and spring chickens were readily purchased by the gentry around.

When it was known that the Luppencotts were given a new spell of occupation in the neighbourhood, that neighbourhood sighed, and said with one voice, “Well, we _did_ think we were quit of Slouch, but we should have been sorry to lose Sela.”

Now it might have been supposed that on the roads, cleaning water-tables, scraping, in winter breaking stones, in autumn spreading them, gave work that it was not possible for Slouch to fail to execute satisfactorily. In fact, he was seen for one entire winter engaged on stone heaps, with a long-handled hammer cracking stones.

But then the heaps knew him no more. He was again out of work. He had thrown it up in a fit of spleen, because an old man was employed as well, to save his “coming on the parish,” and this Timothy regarded as a slight. Added to this, he heard that a new blacksmithery was being started in an adjoining parish, and, sanguine that he could obtain occupation there, he threw up his engagement on the roads before he had secured that at the forge.

And, naturally, he did not get the place on which he had calculated. He was too well known to be given it. Then ensued the familiar ramble in quest of employment, but no farmer, no landowner would give him any.

The family would have starved, but for Sela and her poultry. She did not make much by her fowls, as corn was dear, but they had, and were allowed, the run of the fields and arishes of John French. Then, also, she got plenty of skimmed milk from the farm, that was only a halfpenny per quart, and with milk none can starve. Sela had gleaned at harvest, and gleaned sufficient wheat to make bread for herself and children.

Mrs. French often saw her—sent for her to assist in cleaning the house, gave her a spare-rib when she killed a pig—showed her many little kindnesses. But the old woman had, as she said, no patience with Tim, and with him would not change a word.

Sela had a cool and clean hand, and was invaluable in butter-making. That Mrs. French ascertained; so in this new cottage the Slouches got on well, but no credit attached to Tim for that.

One day Tim was climbing along a rafter of an old outhouse in quest of eggs, as one of his wife’s hens had stolen a nest, when the rafter snapped—it was rotten—and down fell Tim on his head, and broke his neck. He was taken up dead.

The entire neighbourhood at once rushed to one conclusion: “It is just as well. He never was of any use to any one when alive.”

And once again John French said to his mother: “There’s an end of him, and I’d precious like to know what was Tim’s place in the world, and what his mission?”

And the rector said to the Squire, after the funeral, “Well, at last poor Slouch has found the hole in which he must stick. I have wondered, and do wonder still, what he was sent here for.”

* * * * *

A year passed, and to the surprise of most people, John French married Sela Luppencott.

“It’s a wonderful lift in life for her,” said some.

“But it is such a come down for him,” said others.

What John French said of it was this. He said it to his mother: “Do you mind what I asked some time agone about that Tim Slouch; whatever could have been his work and mission in the world? It often puzzled me. But I have found it out. He was the making of Sela. His very helplessness made her industrious, his thriftlessness made her saving, his dreadfully trying ways made her patient and enduring, his imprudence made her foreseeing. I do believe the work and mission of that fellow was just this—to make for me the very model and perfection of a farmer’s wife, and then to break his neck.”

“Aye,” said Mrs. French; “and the way he shifted about till he’d settled down close by us. ’Twere all ordained, I believe.”

“Upon my word,” said the rector one day to the Squire, “the proper thing to do, Tim has done at last: to break his neck and leave his widow to John French.”

“Aye,” replied the Squire, “and Tim has found his hole at last into which he will remain pegged.”

DOBLE DREWE

DOBLE DREWE

Doble Drewe was plumber, glazier, paperhanger, and house-painter; chiefly plumber, but also a most excellent house-painter.

Whatever Doble undertook in his profession he executed in the very best manner. If any fault appeared, it was in the quality of the material used, not in his use of it; and, consciously, he never would employ for his work any material but what he believed to be the very best. He spared himself no pains, he cut no time short over his work. The work he undertook, he undertook to do as well as it was possible for him to execute it, and I really believe he had not his superior in his own line in England, and if not in England then certainly not in Europe, and if not in Europe then—it goes without saying—not in the round world.

But he took, it must be conceded, a very long time over his task. Most persons who employed him lost patience because he was so slow. But slow he was not when one considered the quality of his workmanship. He scamped nothing. When he painted even a railing, he took infinite pains to holystone the wood till he had cleaned off every particle of old paint and had got the wood perfectly smooth. And each coat of paint was laid on with the greatest nicety. There was a carved oak table that once stood in our drawing-room. The fashion had set in for satin-wood, so the room was done up, doors, cabinets, tables, all to look like satin-wood. And all was done by Doble Drewe.

Most lovely make-believe satin-wood he produced. That was before the days of the “Seven Lamps of Architecture,” when Mr. Ruskin turned his bull’s-eye on shams, and showed that they were morally wrong. At the period of which I write everything _must_ be a sham or it was not fashionable. Wood was painted to look like marble, and cement to imitate wood.

Well—about this carved table.

The other day I sent it to a furniture-dealer to remove the paint and develop the oak.

After a while it returned to me, and with it came the bill.

“Really, sir,” said the dealer, “I am ashamed at having asked so much, but it is incredible what labour it has taken my men to clean that table. Never saw nothing like it before. The paint simply wouldn’t come off. It was like taking the skin off a living man.”

“Ah!” said I, “Doble Drewe’s work.”

But if Doble was slow over his tasks, he was slower in sending in his bills. Why he did not make them out and transmit them to his customers till three, four, even six years had elapsed, I cannot tell, but it is a fact. And this lost him customers who could pay, because they did not relish having to give out money over items every one of which had passed from their memories. The only customers he gained were those thriftless creatures who did not want to pay there and then, and who hoped they might be more flush of money in a few years’ time than they were in the present. And some of his customers died, others became bankrupt, or left the neighbourhood without leaving their addresses, before Doble Drewe’s bills were ready. I know that mine came in for work done for my father five years after my father was dead, and I had thought all had been settled, probate paid, with deductions for bills, and Doble’s, of course, not deducted because I did not know it was due.

Now although scrupulously conscientious over his plumbing and glazing, his paper-hanging and painting, and though whilst on his work he had all his faculties engaged upon it, yet Doble had a soul for something very much above lead and paint and putty.

I found it out one day in this wise.

My mother had a marvellously lovely voice, and she was sitting in the drawing-room that had been satin-wooded, at the piano playing and singing, whilst Drewe was in the hall labouring at painting the panels to look like pollard willow, stippling, brushing, graining, putting in plenty of knots where no knots really were, and running the grain across the direction where its course by nature lay.

I happened to be in another part of the hall to that where was the painter on his knees engaged at his work. He did not know that I was there—so quiet was I, engaged on Captain Maryatt’s “Snarley Yow, or the Dog Fiend.”

If I remember aright my mother was singing Haynes Bayley’s “We met, ’twas in a crowd.”

It was not a song for a soprano or for a woman, and though she went through with it, seemed unsatisfied, put the book away and was for a while engaged in finding another piece.

I thought I heard a sound from the corner where the painter was. I looked up from “Snarley Yow,” but seeing nothing particular, looked again at the entrancing book.

Then my mother broke out in the song from the “Creation,” “With verdure clad.”

Before she had got half-way through I was sure that I heard something from Doble. It was a sob.

I stood up—but he put back his hand to stay me as I approached.

I waited till my mother’s singing and the chords of the piano had ceased to vibrate, and then I said to him:

“Are you unwell, Mr. Drewe? Is there anything I can get for you?”

He had a choke in his voice, and I saw as he turned that his cheeks were wet with tears.

“Excuse me, young gentleman,” said he. “Don’t mind me. I cannot help it. Indeed, indeed, I cannot refrain. When I hear music, good, beautiful music, it makes me cry like a woman—like a woman. You’ll excuse me. Go on with your book and don’t mind me.”

I had many a talk with the plumber after this, and I found that it was so with him. When he heard good music he passed into a transport, an ecstasy. But then, how seldom it was that he did hear and could hear good music! He lived in a little village some ten miles from a town, and that a sleepy, stagnant country town, and no railway within thirty miles.

Nowadays we have in our little centres all over England good choral societies, and concerts are given not only by amateurs, that may sing well, but often only think that they do so, but also by touring professionals.

It was not so when I was a boy. Then there were no such things as choral unions and concerts, out of the capital of the county, that was accessible only by coach.

Then locomotion was not easy; and the utmost length of a villager’s journey was to the market town and that only on a market day.

At that time the parish church indeed had its orchestra and its choir, but oh! what appalling, agonising productions were the concerted pieces there produced.

Poor Doble Drewe suffered acutely when an instrument was out of tune, and a piece played out of time; and when were all the instruments in the west gallery either in tune or in time the one with the other?

Doble’s sole ambition was to obtain a piano, and he did purchase one out of the savings of many years, to discover that he was powerless to play it, that his ardent musical soul could not relax his stiff fingers and enable them to play even a simple piece. He had not learned as a boy, and now it was too late. “Now look you here,” said Doble. “This is a terrible disappointment to me, but I’ll not be beat. I’ll have good music in my house somehow. I’ll marry a wife, and get a little boy or girl; it don’t matter which, and I’ll have that there child taught so soon as ever it has the sense to know its notes; and when I’m an old man I’ll just sit by the fire and listen, and my lad or my little maid shall play to me by the hour. I’ll have Handel, and Haydn, and Bishop, and Mozart. Ah! them will be times worth living for. I’ll go about it at once.”

And he did. He married a young woman, not because she could play a piano, for at that period there were none to be had in his walk of life who could finger an instrument, but with the prospect of becoming a parent of one who could be educated into a skilful player.

“You see,” said he, “there is the piano. All it wants is some one to play on it. It is only a matter of waiting some fifteen or eighteen years, and then—then my time of enjoyment will have come. Then—then I shall have music.”

But no. Again he encountered disappointment. No child was given to him, and the wife he had selected, instead of producing harmony in the home, was a fruitful source of discord. She had a tongue and she had a temper, and she was no idealist, and could not abide just those two things which made Doble what he was—a painstaking, scrupulous workman, and withal a dreamer.

“Why, Doble,” she would say, “what’s the good of your doing your jobs so slow and so fine? There’s other chaps get twice the work you do by just slurring along.”

“I cannot do other. It would go against my conscience.”

“And as to your dratted music. You ain’t got none, and you can’t have none, so just lump it and be joyful.”

To that he made no reply. No answer he could have made would have been comprehensible by her.

So time went on.

Doble’s back became bent. His look became more abstracted. His was an earnest face, with a questioning, craving, seeking look upon it.

Then came a chance.

In the cathedral city the “Messiah” was to be performed, and the choir of the minster were to take part, also sundry amateurs, and Formes and Albani were to sing.

I gave myself a treat. I went up, and took the plumber with me.

I do not think that Drewe had any conception of what massive chorus singing could be, or what cultured voices could effect in solos. Remember, he never had heard good music in his own village; only direful failures to achieve something that was supposed to be music. His only—I really believe his only previous acquaintance with good singing was his hearing my mother sing.

As to describing how Doble looked through that concert, I cannot. He was as one not himself, rigid, rapt, not of this earth, with the great tears rolling down his thin, worn cheeks; he sat with his hands folded between his knees and never moved—no more than had he been of stone.

Nor did Doble speak much after it; he went back to his lodging as in a dream.

And as we returned by coach next day he was reticent. I knew what was passing within the man, and did not tease him with questions, but as he left the coach at his door, he squeezed my hand and said: “Sir, I shall live on _that_ all the rest of my days.”

In after years I have often pondered over Doble. It has seemed to me one of those unfathomable mysteries of life that there should be in a poor little country village a man created by God, endowed by God with high-strung musical faculties, yet absolutely incapacitated by position and circumstances for making any use of his great gift, for deriving any enjoyment from it. Why was not Doble placed somewhere else? Why was Doble given a faculty he could not use?

Many years passed, and I was cast into a far distant portion of England, yet I may say that this problem continually troubled me.

Once I came across a farmer’s wife in a low and peculiarly ugly portion of the East coast of England, and she had the same sort of craving soul after beautiful scenery. “I feel,” she said to me once, “as though I would like to look on the Alps—and die.”

It is the same throughout the world of men. It must have been so through countless ages. There must have been Mozarts and Purcells in the ages that were before musical instruments were made, and the laws of harmony laid down and concerted music was made possible. Hundreds and thousands of Doble Drewes over all the earth and in all time. A mystery! A perplexing problem I could not solve. It haunted me. It distressed me.

A few years ago I was at my old home, and I was talking to the curate of the parish in which Doble Drewe had lived.

“So,” said I, “poor old Drewe is dead.”

“Yes, and buried.”

“I wish——”

“You were not in this neighbourhood then?”

“No. Tell me something about the old fellow.”

“I really do not think I have anything to tell.”

“Was his wife a little less nagging as he grew older and faded away?”

He shook his head. “Tongues grow sharper the more they are used.”

“And—at the last? Had he much pain?”

“I was with him when he died. The woman was quiet then. He lay for some hours as though insensible, and I thought the end might be at any moment. All at once he moved, held up his hand, assumed a listening attitude, a wonderful light and smile broke out over his face; he seemed to be hearkening attentively. Then he said, ‘NOW,’ laid his head on the pillow, and was dead.”

That night, after the curate was gone, I rocked in my chair, musing, looking into the fire. I muttered, “Poor old Doble!” then after a pause, said, “Happy Doble!” and then, “Now I also understand.”

Thereupon I took down a little book I had of Dr. Alexander’s poems, and read:

“Down below, a sad mysterious music, Wailing through the woods and on the shore, Burdened with a grand majestic secret, That keeps sweeping from us evermore. Up above, a music that entwineth With eternal threads of golden sound, The great poem of this strange existence, All whose wondrous meaning hath been found.”

MARY TREMBATH

MARY TREMBATH

This is a sketch—no more—of a woman who was to me, and is still, a problem for a casuist to solve. How so, you shall hear in the sequel. But, to begin, you must know her life’s story.

Mary was, when a young married woman in a Cornish fishing-village, occupying a cottage at some little distance from the harbour. She must have been a fine woman then, she is fine in her old age.

“Ah!” said she, “you have been to Maker? Did you go about in a boat there?”

“Yes.” I had boated whilst staying in the place.

“And did you see the Lady Rock?”

“Yes, it was pointed out to me.”

“And the Dead Man’s Rock?”

“I think so.”

“Well, it is all along of the Lady Rock that I was a widow.”

“How so?”

“You have heard tell about the Lady?”

I had. The Lady is a little piece of white feldspar in a cliff that rises out of the sea, with a shelf before it, and this piece of quartz or feldspar bears a singular resemblance to the shape of a woman draped in white. Whenever the fishermen return with their trawls, they cast a few of the mackerel or herring they have caught on to the shelf before the White Lady, and, unless this be done, this oblation made, ill-luck will attend the fishermen on their next expedition; their nets will be caught and torn as by invisible hands in the deep, or no fish will enter the seines, or, worse still, the boat will capsize and possibly the fishermen on board will be drowned. The Dead Man’s Rock is another portion of cliff nearly horizontal, sometimes washed by the waves, and on this lies a mass of the same white spar, bearing something approaching the form of a corpse. But it demands more fancy to distinguish the corpse than the Lady.

“I will tell you the whole story, sir,” said Mary. “My husband, Thomas Trembath, was a fine standing-up man as you’d see anywhere. He was a fisherman, and a daring fellow. I don’t say he did not do a bit of smuggling now and then, but, lor’, sir! they all did, and if they didn’t, more shame to them, with their opportunities. Well, sir, I don’t say he was a Free-thinker, because he wasn’t, but he was a sort of no-thinker—no ways, if you can understand me. Well then, one day, as they was coming in after there had been a shoal, there was a lot of boats out that day, and as the boats went by, all the cap’ns threw a few whiting on to the ledge afore the Lady. But my Thomas he was a daring unconsiderate chap, and they’d caught a young dog-fish that day—the fishermen sometimes bring ’em home and gets a few pence by showing ’em, for they’re terrible mischievous beasts, and eat a lot of mackerel and whiting and just anything they can. Well, sir, will you believe it, when Thomas comes alongside of the Lady Rock, what did he do, in a fit o’ daring, but heave the dog-fish on to the shelf afore her!”

Mary paused and looked at me, expecting me to appear aghast at such an outrage.

“The other men, they was astounded and afraid after that—no man would go in the boat with him. And next time he wanted to go, they shook their heads, and said they weren’t going to court ill-luck. So Thomas—he was that reckless and regardless—he said he would go alone. And go alone he did. There was no wind and the sea was smooth—but he never came back. I reckon he alone couldn’t manage the boat and something went wrong. What it was I can’t tell—but he never came back. That’s what followed chucking of a dog-fish at the White Lady.”

After her husband’s death, Mary took to peddling. She was a middle-aged woman when I knew her, stoutly built, broad shouldered, with a hale and ruddy face; she wore short skirts, a man’s long greatcoat over her back, and a man’s hat on her head. Slung across her shoulder by a strap was a case that contained needles, thread, pins, and tape. She carried a staff, some four feet long, in her hand, not of bamboo but of ash, and she strode along the roads faster than a horse could walk.

There was not a farm, not a cottage within miles around, in which Mary was not known, and where she did not do business.

How she picked up a living on the things she sold was a marvel to me. The profits on each item can have been only small, and the amount of country she travelled over to sell these little articles was so great, that she must have worn out much shoe-leather.

She was abroad in all weathers and at all hours.

I said to her one day: “Why, Mary, are not you afraid in the lone lanes, at night?”

“Lor’, sir, not I. If there were a man as were imperent, I’d lay my stick across him, and he’d bite the dust. And as to spirits, I never meddles with them, and so they don’t meddle with me.”

“Spirits! Why, you never have the chance of interfering with their little games.”

She shook her head. “I won’t say that, sir,” she answered. “There’s queer things about at night, but I always gives ’em a good word and a text of Scriptur’, and they don’t hurt me.”