Chapter 9

My mired boots played havoc with the neatly sanded floor; but the old woman dusted a chair for me as carefully as if I had worn robes of state, and set it on the other side of the hearth. Then she put the kettle to boil, and unhitching a cup from the dresser, took a key from it, and opened a small cupboard between the fireplace and the wall. That which she sought stood on the top shelf and she had to climb on a chair to reach it. I offered my help: but no--she would get it herself. It proved to be a small green canister.

The tea that came from this canister I wish I could describe. No sooner did the boiling water touch it than the room was filled with fragrance. The dotard in the chair drew a long breath through his nostrils, as though the aroma touched some quick centre in his moribund brain. The woman poured out a cup, and I sipped it.

"Smuggled," I thought to myself; for indeed you cannot get such tea in London if you pay fifty shillings a pound.

"You like it?" she asked. Before I could answer, a small table stood at my elbow, and she was loading it with delicacies from the cupboard. The contents of that cupboard! Caviare came from it, and a small ambrosial cheese; dried figs and guava jelly; olives, cherries in brandy, wonderful filberts glazed with sugar; biscuits and all manner of queer Russian sweets. I leant back with wide eyes.

"Feodor sends us these," said the old woman, bringing a dish of Cornish cream and a home-made loaf to give the feast a basis.

"Who's Feodor?"

"Feodor Himkoff." She paused a moment, and added, "He's mate on a Russian vessel."

"A friend?"

The question went unnoticed. "Is there any you fancy?" she asked. "Some o't may be outlandish eatin'."

"Do _you_ like these things?" I looked from her to the caviare.

"I don't know. I never tried. We keeps 'em, my man an' I, for all poor come-by-chance folks that knocks."

"But these are dainties for rich men's tables."

"May be. I've never tasted--they'd stick in our ozels if we tried."

I wanted to ask a dozen questions, but thought it politer to accept this strange hospitality in silence. Glancing up presently, however, I saw her eyes still fixed on me, and laid down my knife.

"I can't help it," I said, "I want to know about Feodor Himkoff."

"There's no secret," she answered. "Leastways, there _was_ one, but either God has condemned or forgiven afore now. Look at my man there; he's done all the repentin' he's likely to do."

After a few seconds' hesitation she went on--

"I had a boy, you must know--oh! a straight young man--that went for a soldier, an' was killed at Inkerman by the Rooshians. Take another look at his father here; you think 'en a bundle o' frailties, I dessay. Well, when the news was brought us, this poor old worm lifts his fist up to the sun an' says, 'God do so to me an' more also,' he says, 'if ever I falls across a Rooshian!' An' 'God send me a Rooshian--just one!' he says, meanin' that Rooshians don't grow on brambles hereabouts. Now the boy was our only flesh.

"Well, sir, nigh sixteen year' went by, an' we two were sittin', one quakin' night, beside this very fire, hearkenin' to the bedlam outside: for 'twas the big storm in 'Seventy, an' even indoors we must shout to make ourselves heard. About ten, as we was thinkin' to alley-couchey, there comes a bangin' on the door, an' Isaac gets up an' lets the bar down, singin' out, 'Who is it?'

"There was a big young man 'twixt the doorposts, drippin' wet, wi' smears o' blood on his face, an' white teeth showin' when he talked. 'Twas a half-furrin talk, an' he spoke a bit faint too, but fairly grinned for joy to see our warm fire,--an' his teeth were white as pearl.

"'Ah, sir,' he cried, 'you will help? Our barque is ashore below-- fifteen poor brothers! You will send for help?--you will aid?'

"Then Isaac stepped back, and spoke very slow--'What nation?' he asked. 'She is Russ--we are all Russ; sixteen poor brothers from Archangel,' said the young man, as soon as he took in the question. My man slewed round on his heel, and walked to the hearth here; but the sailor stretched out his hands, an' I saw the middle finger of his right hand was gone. 'You will aid, eh? Ah, yes, you will aid. They are clingin'--_so_--fifteen poor brothers, and many have wives.' But Isaac said, 'Thank Thee, God,' and picked up a log from the hearth here. 'Take 'em this message,' said he, facin' round; an', runnin' on the sailor, who was faint and swayin', beat him forth wi' the burnin' stick, and bolted the door upon him.

"After that we sat quiet, he an' I, all the night through, never takin' our clothes off. An' at daybreak Isaac walked down to the shore. There was nothin' to see but two bodies, an' he buried them an' waited for more. That evenin' another came in, an' next day, two; an' so on for a se'nnight. Ten bodies in all he picked up and buried i' the meadow below. An' on the fourth day he picked up a body wi' one finger missin', under the Nare Head. 'Twas the young man he had driven forth, who had wandered there an' broke his neck. Isaac buried him too. An' that was all, except two that the coastguard found an' held an inquest over an' carr'd off to churchyard.

"So it befell; an' for five year' neither Isaac nor me opened mouth 'pon it, not to each other even. An' then, one noonday, a sailor knocks at the door; an' goin' out, I seed he was a furriner, wi' great white teeth showin' dro' his beard. 'I be come to see Mister Isaac Lenine,' he says, in his outlandish English. So I called Isaac out; an' the stranger grips 'en by the hand an' kisses 'en, sayin', 'Little father, take me to their graves. My name is Feodor Himkoff, an' my brother Dmitry was among the crew of the _Viatka_. You would know his body, if you buried it, for the second finger was gone from his right hand. I myself--wretched one!--chopped it by bad luck when we were boys, an' played at wood cuttin' wi' our father's axe. I have heard how they perished, far from aid, and how you gave 'em burial in your own field: and I pray to all the saints for you,' he says.

"So Isaac led 'en to the field and showed 'en the grave that was staked off 'long wi' the rest. God help my poor man! he was too big a coward to speak. So the man stayed wi' us till sundown, an' kissed us 'pon both cheeks, an' went his way, blessin' us. God forgi'e us-- God forgi'e us!

"An' ever since he's been breaking our heads dro' the post-office wi' such-like precious balms as these here." She broke off to settle Isaac more comfortably in his chair. "'Tis all we can do to get rid of 'em on poor trampin' fellows same as yourself."

YORKSHIRE DICK.

"See here, you'd best _lose_ the bitch--till tomorrow, anyway. She ain't the sight to please a strict man, like your dad, on the Sabbath day. What's more, she won't heal for a fortni't, not to deceive a Croolty-to-Animals Inspector at fifty yards; an' with any man but me she'll take a month."

My friend Yorkshire Dick said this, with that curious gypsy intonation that turns English into a foreign tongue if you forget the words and listen only to the voice. He was squatting in the sunshine, with his back against an oak sapling, a black cutty under his nose, and Meg, my small fox-terrier, between his thighs. In those days, being just fifteen, I had taken a sketch-book and put myself to school under Dick to learn the lore of Things As They Are: and, as part of the course, we had been the death of a badger that morning--Sunday morning.

It was one of those days in autumn when the dews linger in the shade till noon and the blackberry grows too watery for the _connoisseur_. On the ridge where we loafed, the short turf was dry enough, and the sun strong between the sparse saplings; but the paths that zigzagged down the thick coppice to right and left were soft to the foot, and streaked with the slimy tracks of snails. A fine blue mist filled the gulf on either hand, and beneath it mingled the voices of streams and of birds busy beside them. At the mouth of each valley a thicker column of blue smoke curled up like a feather--that to the left rising from the kitchen chimney of my father's cottage, that to the right from the encampment where Dick's _bouillon_ was simmering above a wood fire.

Looking over Dick's shoulder along the ridge I could see, at a point where the two valleys climbed to the upland, a white-washed building, set alone, and backed by an undulating moorland dotted with clay-works. This was Ebenezer Chapel; and my father was its deacon. Its one bell had sounded down the ridge and tinkled in my ear from half-past ten to eleven that morning. Its pastor would walk back and eat roast duck and drink three-star brandy under my father's roof after service. Bell and pastor had spoken in vain, as far as I was concerned; but I knew that all they had to say would be rubbed in with my father's stirrup-leather before nightfall.

"'Tis pretty sport," said Dick, "but it leaves traces."

Between us the thin red soil of the ridge was heaped in mounds, and its stain streaked our clothes and faces. On one of these mounds lay a spade and two picks, a pair of tongs, an old sack, dyed in its original service of holding sheep's reddle, and, on the sack, the carcase of our badger, its grey hairs messed with blood about the snout. This carcase was a matter of study not only to me, who had my sketch-book out, but to a couple of Dick's terriers tied up to a sapling close by--an ugly mongrel, half fox-half bull-terrier, and a Dandie Dinmont--who were straining to get at it. As for Dick, he never lifted his eyes, but went on handling Meg.

He had the gypsy's secret with animals, and the poor little bitch hardly winced under his touch, though her under-lip was torn away, and hung, like a red rag, by half an inch of flesh.

We had dug and listened and dug again for our badger, all the morning. Then Dick sent his mongrel in at the hole, and the mongrel had come forth like a projectile and sat down at a distance, bewailing his lot. After him the Dandie went in and sneaked out again with a fore-paw bitten to the bone. And at last Meg stepped in grimly, and stayed. For a time there was dead silence, and then as we pressed our ears against the turf and the violets, that were just beginning their autumnal flowering, we heard a scuffling underground and began to dig down to it, till the sweat streamed into our eyes. Now Dick's wife had helped us to bring up the tools, and hung around to watch the sport--an ugly, apathetic woman, with hair like a horse's tail bound in a yellow rag, a man's hips, and a skirt of old sacking. I think there was no love lost between her and Dick, because she had borne him no children. Anyway, while Dick and I were busy, digging like niggers and listening like Indians--for Meg didn't bark, not being trained to the work, and all we could hear was a _thud, thud_ now and then, and the hard breathing of the grapple--all of a sudden the old hag spoke, for the first time that day--

"S'trewth, but I've gripped!"

Looking up, I saw her stretched along the side of the turf, with her head resting on the lip of the badger's hole and her right arm inside, up to the arm-pit. Without speaking again, she began to work her body back, like a snake, the muscles swelling and sinking from shoulder to flank in small waves. She had the strength of a horse. Inch by inch she pulled back, while we dug around the mouth of the hole, filling her mouth and eyes with dirt, until her arm came to light, then the tongs she held; and then Dick spat out a mighty oath--

"It's the _dog_ she's got!"

So it was. The woman had hold of Meg all the time, and the game little brute had held on to the badger. Also the badger had held _her_, and when at last his hold slipped, she was a gruesome sight. She looked round, reproachfully, shook the earth out of her eyes and went in again without a sound. And Dick picked up a clod and threw it in his wife's face, between the eyes. She cursed him, in a perfunctory way, and walked off, down the wood, to look after her stew.

But now, Meg having pinned her enemy again, we soon dug them out: and I held the sack while Dick took the badger by the tail and dropped him in. His teeth snapped, a bare two inches from my left hand, as he fell. After a short rest, he was despatched. The method need not be described. It was somewhat crude, and in fact turned me not a little sick.

"One o'clock," Dick observed, glancing up at the sun, and resuming his care of Meg. "What're ye trying to do, youngster?"

"Trying to put on paper what a badger's like when he's dead. If only I had colours--"

"My son, there's a kind of man afflicted with an itch to put all he sees on paper. What's the use? Fifty men might sit down and write what the grey of a badger's like; and they can't, because there's no words for it. All they can say is that 'tis badger's-grey--which means nought to a man that hasn't seen one; and a man that _has_ don't want to be told. Same with your pencils and paints. Cast your head back and look up--how deep can you see into the sky?"

"Miles."

"Ay, and every mile shining to the eye. I've seen pictures in my time, but never one that made a dab of paint look a mile deep. Besides, why draw a thing when you can lie on your back and look up at it?"

I was about to answer when Dick raised his head, with a queer alertness in his eyes. Then he vented a long, low whistle, and went on binding up Meg's jaw.

Immediately after, there was a crackling of boughs to the left and my father's head appeared above the slope, with the red face of the pastor behind it. We were caught.

On the harangue that followed I have no wish to dwell. My father and the pastor pitched it in by turns, while Dick went on with his surgery, his mouth pursed up for a soundless whistle. The prosecution had it all its own way, and I felt uncomfortably sure about the sentence.

But at last, to our amazement, Dick, having finished the bandaging, let Meg go and advanced. He picked up my sketch-book.

"Gentlemen both," said he, "I've been listening respectful to your talk about God and his wrath, and as a poor heathen I'd like to know your idea of him. Here's a pencil and paper. Will you be kind enough to draw God? that I may see what he's like."

The pastor's jaw dropped. My father went grey with rage. Dick stood a pace back, smiling; and the sun glanced on the gold rings in his ears.

"No, sirs. It ain't blasphemy. But I know you can't give me a notion that won't make him out to be a sort of man, pretty much like yourselves--two eyes, a nose, mouth, and beard perhaps. Now my wife says there's points about a woman that you don't reckon into your notion; and my dog says there's more in a tail than most men estimate--"

"You foul-tongued poacher--" broke out my father.

"Now you're mixing matters up," Dick interrupted, blandly; "I poach, and that's a crime. I've shown your boy to-day how men kill badgers, and maybe that's wrong. But look here, sir--I've taught him some things besides; the ways of birds and beasts, and their calls; how to tell the hour by sun and stars; how to know an ash from a beech, of a pitch-dark night, by the sound of the wind in their tops; what herbs will cure disease and where to seek them; why some birds hop and others run. Sirs, I come of an old race that has outlived books and pictures and meeting-houses: you belong to a new one and a cock-sure, and maybe you're right. Anyhow, you know precious little of this world, whatever you may of another."

He stopped, pushed a hand through his coarse black hair, and, as if suddenly tired, resumed the old, sidelong gypsy look that he had been straightening with an effort.

"Your boy'll believe what you tell him: he's got the strength in his blood. Take him home and don't beat him too hard."

He glanced at me with a light nod, untied his dogs, shouldered his tools, and slouched away down the path, to sleep under his accustomed tree that night and be off again, next day, travelling amongst men and watching them with his weary ironical smile.

THE CAROL.

I was fourteen that Christmas:--all Veryan parish knows the date of the famous "Black Winter," when the _Johann_ brig came ashore on Kibberick beach, with a dozen foreigners frozen stiff and staring on her fore-top, and Lawyer Job, up at Ruan, lost all his lambs but two. There was neither rhyme nor wit in the season; and up to St. Thomas's eve, when it first started to freeze, the folk were thinking that summer meant to run straight into spring. I mind the ash being in leaf on Advent Sunday, and a crowd of martins skimming round the church windows during sermon-time. Each morning brought blue sky, warm mists, and a dew that hung on the brambles till ten o'clock. The frogs were spawning in the pools; primroses were out by scores, and monthly roses blooming still; and Master shot a goat-sucker on the last day in November. All this puzzled the sheep, I suppose, and gave them a notion that their time, too, was at hand. At any rate the lambs fell early; and when they fell, it had turned to perishing cold.

That Christmas-eve, while the singers were up at the house and the fiddles going like mad, it was a dismal time for two of us. Laban Pascoe, the hind, spent his night in the upper field where the sheep lay, while I spent mine in the chall[1] looking after Dinah, our Alderney, that had slipped her calf in the afternoon--being promised the castling's skin for a Sunday waistcoat, if I took care of the mother. Bating the cold air that came under the door, I kept pretty cosy, what with the straw-bands round my legs and the warm breath of the cows: for we kept five. There was no wind outside, but moonlight and a still, frozen sky, like a sounding board: so that every note of the music reached me, with the bleat of Laban's sheep far up the hill, and the waves' wash on the beaches below. Inside the chall the only sounds were the slow chewing of the cows, the rattle of a tethering-block, now and then, or a moan from Dinah. Twice the uproar from the house coaxed me to the door to have a look at Laban's scarlet lantern moving above, and make sure that he was worse off than I. But mostly I lay still on my straw in the one empty stall staring into the foggy face of my own lantern, thinking of the waistcoat, and listening.

I was dozing, belike, when a light tap on the door made me start up, rubbing my eyes.

"Merry Christmas, Dick!"

A little head, bright with tumbled curls, was thrust in, and a pair of round eyes stared round the chall, then back to me, and rested on my face.

"Merry Christmas, little mistress."

"Dick--if you tell, I'll never speak to you again. I only wanted to see if 'twas true."

She stepped inside the chall, shutting the door behind her. Under one arm she hugged a big boy-doll, dressed like a sailor--from the Christmas-tree, I guessed--and a bright tinsel star was pinned on the shoulder of her bodice. She had come across the cold town-place in her muslin frock, with no covering for her shoulders; and the manner in which that frock was hitched upon her made me stare.

"I got out of bed again and dressed myself," she explained. "Nurse is in the kitchen, dancing with the young man from Penare, who can't afford to marry her for _ever_ so long, father says. I saw them twirling, as I slipped out--"

"You have done a wrong thing," said I: "you might catch your death."

Her lip fell:--she was but five. "Dick, I only wanted to see if 'twas true."

"What?" I asked, covering her shoulders with the empty sack that had been my pillow.

"Why, that the cows pray on Christmas-eve. Nurse says that at twelve o'clock to-night all the cows in their stalls will be on their knees, if only somebody is there to see. So, as it's near twelve by the tall clock indoors, I've come to see," she wound up.

"It's quig-nogs, I expect. I never heard of it."

"Nurse says they kneel and make a cruel moan, like any Christian folk. It's because Christ was born in a stable, and so the cows know all about it. Listen to Dinah! Dick, she's going to begin!"

But Dinah, having heaved her moan, merely shuddered and was still again.

"Just fancy, Dick," the little one went on, "it happened in a chall like ours!" She was quiet for a moment, her eyes fixed on the glossy rumps of the cows. Then, turning quickly--"I know about it, and I'll show you. Dick, you must be Saint Joseph, and I'll be the Virgin Mary. Wait a bit--"

Her quick fingers began to undress the sailor-doll and fold his clothes carefully. "I _meant_ to christen him Robinson Crusoe," she explained, as she laid the small garments, one by one, on the straw; "but he can't be Robinson Crusoe till I've dressed him up again." The doll was stark naked now, with waxen face and shoulders, and bulging bags of sawdust for body and legs.

"Dick," she said, folding the doll in her arms and kissing it-- "St. Joseph, I mean--the first thing we've got to do is to let people know he's born. Sing that carol I heard you trying over last week-- the one that says 'Far and far I carry it.'"

So I sang, while she rocked the babe:--

'Naked boy, brown boy, In the snow deep, Piping, carolling Folks out of sleep; Little shoes, thin shoes, Shoes so wet and worn'-- 'But I bring the merry news --Christ is born!

Rise, pretty mistress, In your smock of silk; Give me for my good news Bread and new milk. Joy, joy in Jewry, This very morn! Far and far I carry it --Christ is born!'

She heard me with a grave face to the end; then pulling a handful of straw, spread it in the empty manger and laid the doll there. No, I forget; one moment she held it close to her breast and looked down on it. The God who fashions children can tell where she learnt that look, and why I remembered it ten years later, when they let me look into the room where she lay with another babe in her clay-cold arms.

"Count forty," she went on, using the very words of Pretty Tommy, our parish clerk: "count forty, and let fly with 'Now draw around--'"

"Now draw around, good Christian men, And rest you worship-ping--"

We sang the carol softly together, she resting one hand on the edge of the manger.

"Dick, ain't you proud of him? I don't see the spiders beginning, though."

"The spiders?"

"Dick, you're very ig-norant. _Everybody_ knows that, when Christ was laid in a manger, the spiders came and spun their webs over Him and hid Him. That's why King Herod couldn't find Him."

"There, now! We live and learn," said I.

"Well, now there's nothing to do but sit down and wait for the wise men and the shepherds."

It was a little while that she watched, being long over-tired. The warm air of the chall weighed on her eyelids; and, as they closed, her head sank on my shoulder. For ten minutes I sat, listening to her breathing. Dinah rose heavily from her bed and lay down again, with a long sigh; another cow woke up and rattled her rope a dozen times through its ring; up at the house the fiddling grew more furious; but the little maid slept on. At last I wrapped the sack closely round her, and lifting her in my arms, carried her out into the night. She was my master's daughter, and I had not the courage to kiss so much as her hair. Yet I had no envy for the dancers, then.

As we passed into the cold air she stirred. "Did they come? And where are you carrying me?" Then, when I told her, "Dick, I will never speak to you again, if you don't carry me first to the gate of the upper field."

So I carried her to the gate, and sitting up in my arms she called twice:

"Laban--Laban!"

"What cheer--O?" the hind called back. His lantern was a spark on the hill-side, and he could not tell the voice at that distance.

"Have you seen him?"

"Wha-a-a-t?"

"The angel of the Lo-o-ord!"