Part 16

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 consistently 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.

On Bonfire Night the lads of the village lit a great fire on the space opposite “The White Hart.” Snow was falling; it was not freezing weather, but the snow lay in a soft thin mat upon the road. Dan was returning on his bicycle from a long journey and the light from the bonfire was cheering. It lit up the courtyard of the inn genially and curiously, for the recumbent hart upon the balcony had a pad of snow upon its wooden nose, which somehow made it look like a camel, in spite of the huddled snow on its back which gave it the resemblance of a sheep. A few boys stood with bemused wrinkled faces before the roaring warmth. Dan dismounted very carefully opposite the blaze, for a tiny boy rode on the back of the bicycle, wrapped up and tied to the frame by a long scarf; very small, very silent, about five years old. A red wool wrap was bound round his head and ears and chin, and a green scarf encircled his neck and waist, almost hiding his jacket; gaiters of grey wool were drawn up over his knickerbockers. Dan lifted him down and stood him in the road, but he was so cumbered with clothing that he could scarcely walk. He was shy; he may have thought it ridiculous; he moved a few paces and turned to stare at his footmarks in the snow.

“Cold?” asked Dan.

The child shook its head solemnly at him and then put one hand in Dan’s and gazed at the fire that was bringing a brightness into the longlashed dark eyes and tenderly flushing the pale face.

“Hungry?”

The child did not reply. It only silently smiled when the boys brought him a lighted stick from the faggots. Dan caught him up into his arms and pushed the cycle across the way into his own home.

Plump Meg had just shredded up two or three red cabbages and rammed them into a crock with a shower of peppercorns and some terrible knots of ginger. There was a bright fire and a sharp odour of vinegar—always some strange pleasant smell in Meg Pavey’s home—she had covered the top of the crock with a shield of brown paper, pinioned that with string, licked a label: “Cabege Novenbr 5t,” and smoothed it on the crock, when the latch lifted and Dan carried in his little tiny boy.

“Here he is, mother.”

Where Dan stood him, there the child remained; he did not seem to see Mother Pavey, his glance had happened to fall on the big crock with the white label—and he kept it there.

“Whoever’s that?” asked the astonished Meg with her arms akimbo as Dan began to unwrap the child.

“That’s mine,” said her son, brushing a few flakes of snow from the curls on its forehead.

“Yours! How long have it been yours?”

“Since ’twas born. No, let him alone, I’ll undo him, he’s full up wi’ pins and hooks. I’ll undo him.”

Meg stood apart while Dan unravelled his offspring.

“But it is not your child, surely, Dan?”

“Ay, I’ve brought him home for keeps, mother. He can sleep wi’ me.”

“Who’s its mother?”

“’Tis no matter about that. Dan Cupid did it.”

“You’re making a mock of me. Who is his mother? Where is she? You’re fooling, Dan, you’re fooling!”

“I’m making no mock of anyone. There, there’s a bonny grandson for you!”

Meg gathered the child into her arms, peering into its face, perhaps to find some answer to the riddle, perhaps to divine a familiar likeness. But there was nothing in its soft smooth features that at all resembled her rugged Dan’s.

“Who are you? What’s your little name?”

The child whispered: “Martin.”

“It’s a pretty, pretty thing, Dan.”

“Ah!” said her son, “that’s his mother. We were rare fond of each other—once. Now she’s wedd’n another chap and I’ve took the boy, for it’s best that way. He’s five year old. Don’t ask me about her, it’s _our_ secret and always has been. It was a good secret and a grand secret, and it was well kept. That’s her ring.”

The child’s thumb had a ring upon it, a golden ring with a small green stone. The thumb was crooked, and he clasped the ring safely.

For a while Meg asked no more questions about the child. She pressed it tenderly to her bosom.

But the long-kept secret, as Dan soon discovered, began to bristle with complications. The boy was his, of course it was his—he seemed to rejoice in his paternity of the quiet, pretty, illegitimate creature. As if that brazen turpitude was not enough to confound him he was taken a week later in the act of receiving betting commissions and heavily fined in the police court, although it was quite true that he himself did not bet, and was merely a collecting agent for a bookmaker who remained discreetly in the background and who promptly paid his fine.

There was naturally a great racket in the vestry about these things—there is no more rhadamanthine formation than that which can mount the ornamental forehead of a deacon—and Dan was bidden to an interview at the “Scroopery.” After some hesitation he visited it.

“Ah, Pavey,” said the rector, not at all minatory but very subdued and unhappy. “So the blow has fallen, in spite of my warning. I am more sorry than I can express, for it means an end to a very long connection. It is very difficult and very disagreeable for me to deal with the situation, but there is no help for it now, you must understand that. I offer no judgment upon these unfortunate events, no judgment at all, but I can find no way of avoiding my clear duty. Your course of life is incompatible with your position in the choir, and I sadly fear it reveals not only a social misdemeanour but a religious one—it is a mockery, a mockery of God.”

The rector sat at a table with his head pressed on his hands. Pavey sat opposite him, and in his hands he dangled his bowler hat.

“You may be right enough in your way, sir, but I’ve never mocked God. For the betting, I grant you. It may be a dirty job, but I never ate the dirt myself, I never betted in my life. It’s a way of life, a poor man has but little chance of earning more than a bare living, and there’s many a dirty job there’s no prosecution for, leastways not in this world.”

“Let me say, Pavey, that the betting counts less heavily with me than the question of this unfortunate little boy. I offer no judgment upon the matter, your acknowledgment of him is only right and proper. But the fact of his existence at all cannot be disregarded; that at least is flagrant, and as far as concerns your position in my church, it is a mockery of God.”

“You may be right, sir, as far as your judgment goes, or you may not be. I beg your pardon for that, but we can only measure other people by our own scales, and as we can never understand one another entirely, so we can’t ever judge them rightly, for they all differ from us and from each other in some special ways. But as for being a mocker of God, why it looks to me as if you was trying to teach the Almighty how to judge me.”

“Pavey,” said the rector with solemnity, “I pity you from the bottom of my heart. We won’t continue this painful discussion, we should both regret it. There was a man in the parish where I came from who was an atheist and mocked God. He subsequently became deaf. Was he convinced? No, he was not—because the punishment came a long time after his offence. He mocked God again, and became blind. Not at once: God has eternity to work in. Still he was not convinced. That,” said the rector ponderously, “is what the Church has to contend with; a failure to read the most obvious signs, and an indisposition even to remedy that failure. Klopstock was that poor man’s name. His sister—you know her well, Jane Klopstock—is now my cook.”

The rector then stood up and held out his hand. “God bless you, Pavey.”

“I thank you, sir,” said Dan. “I quite understand.”

He went home moodily reflecting. Nobody else in the village minded his misdeeds, they did not care a button, and none condemned him. On the contrary, indeed. But the blow had fallen, there was nothing that he could now do, the shock of it had been anticipated, but it was severe. And the pang would last, for he was deprived of his chief opportunity for singing, that art in which he excelled, in that perfect quiet setting he so loved. Rancour grew upon him, and on Saturday he had a roaring audacious evening at “The White Hart” where, to the tune of “The British Grenadiers,” he sung a doggerel:

Our parson loves his motor car His garden and his mansion, And he loves his beef for I’ve remarked His belly’s brave expansion; He loves all mortal mundane things As he loved his beer at college, And so he loves his housemaid (not With Mrs. parson’s knowledge.)

Our parson lies both hot and strong, It does not suit his station, But still his reverend soul delights In much dissimulation; Both in and out and roundabout He practises distortion, And he lies with a public sinner when Grass widowhood’s his portion.

All of which was a savage libel on a very worthy man, composed in anger and regretted as soon as sung.

From that time forward Dan gave up his boozing and devoted himself to the boy, little Martin, who, a Thasper joker suggested, might have some kinship with the notorious Betty of that name. But Dan’s voice was now seldom heard singing upon the roads he travelled. They were icy wintry roads, but that was not the cause of his muteness. It was severance from the choir; not from its connoted spirit of religion—there was little enough of that in Dan Pavey—but from the solemn beauty of the chorale, which it was his unique gift to adorn, and in which he had shared with eagerness and pride since his boyhood. To be cast out from that was to be cast from something he held most dear, the opportunity of expression in an art which he had made triumphantly his own.

With the coming of spring he repaired one evening to a town some miles away and interviewed a choirmaster. Thereafter Dan Pavey journeyed to and fro twice every Sunday to sing in a church that lay seven or eight miles off, and he kept it all a profound secret from Thasper until his appearance at the county musical festival, where he won the treasured prize for tenor soloists. Then Dan was himself again. To his crude apprehension he had been vindicated, and he was heard once more carolling in the lanes of the Vale as he had been heard any time for these twenty years.

The child began its schooling, but though he was free to go about the village little Martin did not wander far. The tidy cluster of hair about his poll was of deep chestnut colour. His skin—Meg said—was like “ollobarster”: it was soft and unfreckled, always pale. His eyes were two wet damsons—so Meg declared: they were dark and ever questioning. As for his nose, his lips, his cheeks, his chin, Meg could do no other than call it the face of a blessed saint; and indeed, he had some of the bearing of a saint, so quiet, so gentle, so shy. The golden ring he no longer wore; it hung from a tintack on the bedroom wall.

Old John, who lived next door, became a friend of his. He was very aged—in the Vale you got to be a hundred before you knew where you were—and he was very bent; he resembled a sickle standing upon its handle. Very bald, too, and so very sharp.

Martin was staring up at the roof of John’s cottage.

“What you looking at, my boy?”

“Chimbley,” whispered the child.

“O ah! that’s crooked, a’nt it?”

“Yes, crooked.”

“I know ’tis, but I can’t help it; my chimney’s crooked, and I can’t putt it straight, neither, I can’t putt it right. My chimney’s crooked, a’nt it, ah, and I’m crooked, too.”

“Yes,” said Martin.

“I know, but I can’t help it. It _is_ crooked, a’nt it?” said the old man, also staring up at a red pot tilted at an angle suggestive of conviviality.

“Yes.”

“That chimney’s crooked. But you come along and look at my beautiful bird.”

A cock thrush inhabited a cage in the old gaffer’s kitchen. Martin stood before it.

“There’s a beautiful bird. Hoicks!” cried old John, tapping the bars of the cage with his terrible finger-nail. “But he won’t sing.”

“Won’t he sing?”

“He donn make hisself at home. He donn make hisself at home at all, do ’ee, my beautiful bird? No, he donn’t. So I’m a-going to chop his head off,” said the laughing old man, “and then I shall bile him.”

Afterwards Martin went every day to see if the thrush was still there. And it was.

Martin grew. Almost before Dan was aware of it the child had grown into a boy. At school he excelled nobody in anything except, perhaps, behaviour, but he had a strange little gift for unobtrusively not doing the things he did not care for, and these were rather many unless his father was concerned in them. Even so, the affection between them was seldom tangibly expressed, their alliance was something far deeper than its expression. Dan talked with him as if he were a grown man, and perhaps he often regarded him as one; he was the only being to whom he ever opened his mind. As they sat together in the evening while Dan put in a spell at turning chair—at which he was astoundingly adept—the father would talk to his son, or rather he would heap upon him all the unuttered thoughts that had accumulated in his mind during his adult years. The dog would loll with its head on Martin’s knees; the boy would sit nodding gravely, though seldom speaking: he was an untiring listener. “Like sire, like son,” thought Dan, “he will always coop his thoughts up within himself.” It was the one characteristic of the boy that caused him anxiety.

“Never take pattern by me,” he would adjure him, “not by me. I’m a fool, a failure, just grass, and I’m trying to instruct you, but you’ve no call to follow in my fashion; I’m a weak man. There’s been thoughts in my mind that I daren’t let out. I wanted to do things that other men don’t seem to do and don’t want to do. They were not evil things—and what they were I’ve nigh forgotten now. I never had much ambition, I wasn’t clever, I wanted to live a simple life, in a simple way, the way I had a mind to—I can’t remember that either. But I did not do any of those things because I had a fear of what other people might think of me. I walked in the ruck with the rest of my mates and did the things I didn’t ever want to do—and now I can only wonder why I did them. I sung them the silly songs they liked, and not the ones I cherished. I agreed with most everybody, and all agreed with me. I’m a friendly man, too friendly, and I went back on my life, I made nought of my life, you see, I just sat over the job like a snob codgering an old boot.”

The boy would sit regarding him as if he already understood. Perhaps that curious little mind did glean some flavour of his father’s tragedy.

“You’ve no call to follow me, you’ll be a scholar. Of course I know some of those long words at school take a bit of licking together—like elephant and saucepan. You get about half-way through ’em and then you’re done, you’re mastered. I was just the same (like sire, like son), and I’m no better now. If you and me was to go to yon school together, and set on the same stool together, I warrant you would win the prize and I should wear the dunce’s cap—all except sums, and there I should beat ye. You’d have all the candy and I’d have all the cane, you’d be king and I’d be the dirty rascal, so you’ve no call to follow me. What you want is courage, and to do the things you’ve a mind to. I never had any and I didn’t.”

Dan seldom kissed his son, neither of them sought that tender expression, though Meg was for ever ruffling the boy for these pledges of affection, and he was always gracious to the old woman. There was a small mole in the centre of her chin, and in the centre of the mole grew one short stiff hair. It was a surprise to Martin when he first kissed her.

Twice a week father and son bathed in the shed devoted to chair. The tub was the half of a wooden barrel. Dan would roll up two or three buckets of water from the well, they would both strip to the skin, the boy would kneel in the tub and dash the water about his body for a few moments. While Martin towelled himself Dan stepped into the tub, and after laving his face and hands and legs he would sit down in it. “Ready?” Martin would ask, and scooping up the water in an iron basin he would pour it over his father’s head.

“Name O’ God, that’s sharpish this morning,” Dan would say, “it would strip the bark off a crocodile. Broo-o-o-oh! But there: winter and summer I go up and down the land and there’s not—Broo-o-o-oh!—a mighty difference between ’em, it’s mostly fancy. Come day, go day, frost or fair doings, all alike I go about the land, and there’s little in winter I havn’t the heart to rejoice in. (On with your breeches or I’ll be at the porridge pot afore you’re clad.) All their talk about winter and their dread of it shows poor spirit. Nothing’s prettier than a fall of snow, nothing more grand than the storms upending the woods. There’s no more rain in winter than in summer, you can be shod for it, and there’s a heart back of your ribs that’s proof against any blast. (Is this my shirt or yours? Dashed if they buttons a’nt the plague of my life.) Country is grand year’s end to year’s end, whether or no. I once lived in London—only a few weeks—and for noise, and for terror, and for filth—name O’ God, there was bugs in the butter there, once there was!”

But the boy’s chosen season was that time of year when the plums ripened. Pavey’s garden was then a tiny paradise.

“You put a spell on these trees,” Dan would declare to his son every year when they gathered the fruit. “I planted them nearly twenty years ago, two 'gages and one magny bonum, but they never growed enough to make a pudden. They always bloomed well and looked well. I propped ’em and I dunged 'em, but they wouldn’t beer at all, and I’m a-going to cut ’em down—when, along comes you!”

Well, hadn’t those trees borne remarkable ever since he’d come there?

“Of course, good luck’s deceiving, and it’s never bothered our family overmuch. Still, bad luck is one thing and bad life’s another. And yet—I dunno—they come to much the same in the end, there’s very little difference. There’s so much misunderstanding, half the folks don’t know their own good intentions, nor all the love that’s sunk deep in their own minds.”