Donkey Boy (12 page)

“In the Dorcas Society, Ernest?”

“Assuredly so, my dear Ethelburga; for the Dorcas Society arises in good works for the poor; and the poor are of a lower stratum of society; and society is human, and the human mammal has its basis in geology. We are but the rocks in animation; we are but dust from dust, with the flowers of the field. But I cannot improve on the major poetry of the Old Testament.”

The Vicar spoke with mellifluous charm, tipping his empty hock glass as though it were a planetary sphere uncertain of its axis after Higher Purpose had launched it into space. He looked up suddenly towards Richard, peering over the top of imaginary spectacles.

“Cockles, Maddison, cockles! First the great sea, the wine-dark sea long before the coming of the grapes of Aeschylus and Virgil; and descending from the sublime to the particular, the sea covering Kent, Surrey, Sussex, part of Hampshire, Essex, Suffolk, part of Norfolk—extending over what now we call the German Ocean—together with the Bristol Channel, and north-west France—the sea which deposited, in our own small locality, what we now call London Clay. Vast rivers fed this sea, which was warm in the cooling of the earth, and overcast by fogs——”

“Are you going to join the Antiquarian Society, Mr. Maddison?” Violet eyes looked with frank friendliness into Richard’s.

“If I am not black-balled, Miss Gould. I have one grey hair, discovered over my right ear this very morning, and so I am just qualified.” Richard thought this remark somewhat funny; then before he could wonder if it implied discourtesy to his host, the Vicar exclaimed, as he went round with the tapered bottle, “Fortunate youth to be the possessor of even one! Mine have long since been returned to geological impulse.”

He went back to his chair at the head of the oval table, and poured himself a glass of wine.

“Above the Thanet gravel lies the Woolwich bed. This gives us our local character and no doubt colouring on occasion; it is the bed on which we lie, and within which we lie, which both supports and encloses our mortal shells. In places it is a red and purple mottled clay——” Richard thought of the face of Mr. Turney, and chuckled to himself—“elsewhere blue, flaky, estuarine clay containing layers of shells of cyrena cuneiformis, a bivalve somewhat resembling the cockle—and here we are back where we began, at the cockles of the heart.” And his hand rested a moment affectionately upon that of Miranda MacIntosh.

H’m, said Richard to himself.

Then Miss MacIntosh said with engrossed seriousness, “Were not some teeth of sharks found in a new road being excavated beside the Randisbourne, Vicar, quite recently?”

“Yes, Miranda. And—greater triumph!—we excavated, with them, some thigh-bones of Bostaurus, the great wild ox Urus of Roman historians. Who knows, my dear Maddison, that this calcined relic was not the direct progenitor of the famous wild cattle still kept at Chillingham in Northumberland? We have also found bones of the long-faced wild black ox, resting on clay at the base of a gravel bed rolled by the stream, and obviously deposited in an eddy. But that is not all! One condyle of the longest bone was
sawn
off!”

“How was that done, do you suppose, sir?” enquired Gerard Rolls, caressing his cavalry moustache opposite Richard. Mr. Rolls was by occupation a traveller in bristles.

“With a saw, of course, Gerard, what else would it be done with, do you suppose?”

“Yes, but what
kind
of a saw, that is the question to my mind,
Vicar,” and the young man gave an upward fondle of his own natural bristles.

“A saw is a saw, I have seen saws in butchers’ shops, and choppers, too. The men bang them down so hard on the wooden blocks, they soon chop them away. Don’t you agree with me?” and the bright dark violet eyes of Flora Gould were turned winsomely to Richard’s.

“Yes, but did the ancient Britons have saws in those days—before the Bronze Age—am I correct, sir?” Richard, flustered by such eyes, appealed to Mr. Mundy.

“Let us hear your views, Maddison,” replied the Vicar, “Let us hear all sides to the question. Miss Gould has seen saws in butchers’ shops. Are we all agreed? Ah yes, someone may enquire, but were there butchers’ shops and were they equipped with saws in those days?”

Fortunately for Richard, Miss Gould supplied the answer.

“Well, the Romans had houses with hollow walls, up which heat from fires passed to heat them, and Papa says they were wonderful people, so they must have had saws.”

“Mr. Mundy is speaking of the Pleistocene Age, dearest,” said Mr. Rolls, tolerantly, across the candle-lit table.

“But he said the bone was
sawed
in two, so it must have been sawed, you noodle, you!” and Miss Flora Gould blew her lover a kiss over the wavering flames. “Silly billy, that proves my point, doesn’t it, Mr. Mundy?”

“Yes, my flower of evolution. The clay was derived from the decomposition of felspathic rocks, and the river or rivers—of which only our small Randisbourne and its tributaries remain—some alas—” and the Vicar looked sadly round the table—“shortly to be enclosed in sewers for evermore—where was I?”

“You were going to tell us who sawed the bone, I think, Ernest,” said his wife.

“I am coming to that in a moment, dearest Ethelburga. Meanwhile, the London Clay Sea must needs have passed through regions where such rocks are exposed. Sir Charles Lyell thought it was a large river which drained a continent lying to the west or south-west of Britain.”

Here Richard saw a chance to raise himself from the obscurity of ignorance.

“Atlantis—the lost continent!”

“Yes indeed, Maddison. Now not to tease the ladies further, let me say at once that a little while ago we had the greatest pleasure in finding in the Randisbourne gravel on Reynard’s Common a small saw made from a thin flint-flake, by which the operation in question might have been performed. Marrow, extracted from the larger bones of mammals, has ever been a
bonne
bouche
to primitive peoples.”

“I always eat the marrow in my chops,” said Flora Gould. “It gives me energy!” and she waggled a forefinger at her lover, then blew him a kiss.

“It gives you those bright eyes, my dear. It was, judging by fragments in our little museum, in most cases obtained by the simple process of smashing off the condyles; but the longer bone probably fell to the lot of a chieftain who preferred to have his marrow free from splinters. But how his slave, with that little flint saw, would deal with marrow bones of Elephas primigenius, the Mammoth, or of the Great Two-Horned Woolly Rhinoceros, we must leave to conjecture, even as I now observe that our gracious hostess is preparing to leave us, gentlemen, to our filberts and wine.”

And Mr. Mundy, followed by Richard Maddison and Gerard Rolls, arose dutifully to his feet, while Richard hastened to open the door, with a correctly perceptible bow, for Mrs. Mundy.

O
N A LATE
November night the first fog of the winter descended upon London. Matter floating from factory louvre and domestic chimney during the windless hours of a hazy day fell with the afternoon condensation of moisture upon river, roof, and cinder flat. As the hour of four was struck upon the cracked bronze rim of Big Ben an acid mist in the half-empty streets began to corrode oppidanal prospects sombre as steel-engravings. The lamplighters stepped rapidly upon their rounds; carriages of the leisured classes, coachmen in front and tiger-boys behind, drove their masters and mistresses homewards to roaring red coal-fires, and themselves to comfortable quarters above stable and mews. Street vendors by shallow and tray in the poorer districts cursed, but remained with their wares exposed above the gutter; thieves rejoiced; within thousands of counting-houses and offices middle-class anxiety increased behind thoughts of policies, bills, cover notes, invoices, and other patterns of commerce expressed in paper and ink.

Richard Maddison, glancing out of the tall glass windows of the Town Department of the Moon Fire Office in the City, hoped that a pea-souper would not come down, at least before his train reached Wakenham station; for that evening he was giving a lecture upon ‘Local Lepidoptera' to the Antiquarian Society. The very idea of it during the preceding weeks and days, had given him quaking moments akin to panic; for he had never so much as made a speech in public in his life before. And a lecture to last one hour, without magic-lantern slides! He tried to forget it, and to concentrate entirely upon the policy he was preparing from its proposal form.

He sat on a tall mahogany stool against a long mahogany desk or counter, one of several clerks seated likewise along its length. A ground-glass partition divided the counter into two sections, by which opposing faces were concealed from one another. Above the screen arose porcelain globes supported on lacquered brass
pipes, out of which issued gas, by means of improved non-corrosive jets. The pot-bellied stove by the far wall, beside the messenger's lodge, gave forth a steady radiation of heat. It was, by the clock above the inner swing doors before the main entrance, a quarter after four o'clock. The rumble of wheeled traffic opposite the Royal Exchange down the street had sunk to a deeper growl, as the pace of the vehicles was slowed.

“Looks as though we are in for a London particular,” remarked Journend, the pleasant little colleague on his right.

“Yes,” said Richard, “I am afraid you are right,” glancing up before continuing his work.

Outside the London day was decaying rather than dying. Westward the sun was still visible above the Houses of Parliament, a livid orb in the manufactured air. Gradually the enwreathed rim was sinking to wreckage upon the pinnacles of the building which had constituted itself guardian of the free world served by navy and merchant shipping paramount upon the seven seas. Through the poisonous atmosphere the sun's colour was as of the redness of dyed tainted meat offered for sale in the poorer quarters of London.

With the sun's disappearance there arose as out of sweating paving-stone, sooted building, wet bedunged asphalt street, and dripping branch of plane tree supporting puffed and dingy-rock-dove—the pigeon of the Londoner—an emanation as of solar death. Sulphurous whiffs caught the breathing; acid inflamed the membranes of eyes; detritus lodged under lids, inflamed haws, to be removed, if the muttering pedestrian were fortunate, with hook of nail or rubbing of finger-tip. The pea-souper dreaded by Richard, together with nearly two million other Londoners, was beginning to drift in slow swirl and eddy into the streets from the direction of the Thames estuary. It was to be seen billowing past the street lamps, enclosing them at once in clammy thickness; it moved upon central London from its gathering places over the industrial east both north and south of the river, as though sucked upon the tide moving in from Gravesend and the marshes of Sheppey and distant Nore. At six o'clock, when it was at its most dense, more than four hundred tons of organic and inorganic matter were in suspension within the area called Greater London; double night lay upon the City, more terrible because it was made by man who least desired it.

At half-past six the southward march across London Bridge of black-coated workers was at its greatest press. The granite sett-stones of the road between the sidewalks bore the grind and percussion of thousands of iron wheels and shoes. Lamps were visible but a pace distant and then as yellow spots within cocoons. Richard walked, worsted-gloved hand over mouth and nose, with coat buttoned and collar up against pickpocket and cold. The starched cuffs of his shirtsleeves were encased with white paper; a muffler was round his neck. Coughs were audible everywhere in the bobbing ranks of benighted travellers: these were the only human noises, the only complaints, as though amplified by the mechanical hoots and blares of foghorns upon the river below.

The bridge itself was in movement. The mass of masonry was transmitting into the flood-tide constant vibrations from its submerged piers which shrimps and prawns resident in the weed clustered to the sterlings periodically discerned with their feelers: the vibrations of tens of thousands of human feet, of multitudinous wheels hooped with iron beating upon flag-stone and granite sett. The tide of human beings was crossing the tide of Thames, the one on the ebb to the suburbs, the other to the German Ocean.

There was inevitable delay in both the higher and lower levels of the railway station. Great jets of steam screeched from the safety valves of delayed engines, the noise momentarily decapitating the body hurrying to find a seat, peering into carriages already packed tight, with men standing between wooden seats covered with hard, dull and durable upholstery. Tobacco smoke reeked with fog; fifteen men unspeaking, almost unmoving—like the train. It was inevitable. It could not be altered. It had always been, and always would be.

Reports sounded muffled down the line. Richard, standing with the top of his head not far from the pale blue flame in the glass cover in the middle of the roof, was thinking that he could not possibly be at St. Simon's hall at eight o'clock, washed and changed and having supped. Would the train never start? What train was it? No matter, the fog had upset the entire time-table. Should he go directly to the hall; or go home first?

The feeling of being unclean decided him. The membranes of his eyes were inflamed, specks of carbon and metal felt to be enormous and untidy in their irritation. He would go home first,
wash and change his clothes, and have his supper later. Why had he undertaken to give the damned lecture at all? There was no time for that sort of thing any more: butterflies belonged to youth gone past.

At last the train started. Standing figures braced themselves against the jerk following the guard's whistle; thereafter was dull endurance, amidst the detonation of signals, until finally the train stopped at the familiar, but ghostly, station. He hurried out into the cold murk of the night, walking as fast as he dared, hands held out before him, up Foxfield Road leading from the station to the Hill. It was already twenty minutes to eight.

He walked in the middle of the road, to avoid blundering into iron railings and scraping himself against brick walls of gardens. As he climbed up Foxfield Road the fog became less dense, so that the lights on lamp-posts began to be visible a dozen yards away. Fumbling along as fast as he dared, he crossed Twistleton Road, coming to Cranefield Road, and the next turning to the right would lead up to the gates of the Hill, which would be lightless.

The fog was thinner as he came to the end of the last rows of houses. He could see an occasional rectangular blur on either side of him. He stepped high over the kerb, and felt the pebbles of the gravel of the path under the thin leather soles of his boots. He must get them repaired; it was false economy to wear them through to the inner sole.

A colder air was in movement upon the Hill. He felt a wet mist condensing upon his eyelashes. A star was visible overhead; the black trunks of the elms where the rooks nested in spring, and where once he had seen a Camberwell Beauty in the beam of his dark lantern, loomed on his right hand. He felt easier: he would just have time to wash and change, and return for his address. Any ruffians accosting him, as on the occasion when he had lost the Camberwell Beauty, would have another man to reckon with, he assured himself, as his chin thrust itself forward and the hair on his neck rose. Richard never passed the elms without memory bringing before him that scene of nearly five years before.

The path forked to the right beyond the trees, passing the dark square of the West Kent Grammar School. Another couple of hundred yards, and he would be at the top of the broad way leading down to Hillside Road.

He was half-way down the gulley when he heard the sound of someone sniffing. Recently seats had been placed by the London County Council on both sides of the gulley, against low iron railings enclosing plantations of hawthorns on the steep slopes above. Someone was sitting there alone. Richard had just passed the seated figure, pale blur of face, when he heard sobbing. He stopped; and was about to pass on, mindful of the foolishness of interference, when a strangled voice said, “It's only me, sir.”

“Is that you, Mona? Is anything the matter?”

There was no reply. Drippings from the bushes pattered down.

“Mona? What are you doing there? Are you alone?”

“Please sir, yes sir. Oh, oh,” and unrestrained weeping joined the melancholy patterings from the trees.

He walked to the seat, saying in a gentler tone, “Come, do not be afraid of me. Do you not feel very well? You ought to be indoors on a night like this, you know.”

“I ain't doin' no wrong, please sir. It's—it's me half day off, please sir.”

Poor little thing, thought Richard, his heart touched. “Well, I am afraid it is not a very pleasant one. It is yours to do what you like with, of course, but then you are not very old, and we cannot have you getting pneumonia, you know. Come along, there's a good girl. You should not be alone on the Hill. Come along now.”

More sobbing. “I dursen't, please sir. Missis is angry wi'me. I couldn't help it, please sir.”

“Oh, some little trouble? Well, it cannot be so serious, I am sure. Mrs. Maddison is not one to be angry very long, Mona.” He thought that perhaps she had broken a plate or cup, or even dropped a tray.

“Come along now, be sensible. It is hardly a night for a dog to be out.” The girl did not move. “Well, if you will not come, I suppose you will stay there.” He moved away, his sympathy lessening.

A despairing cry came out of the murk. “Gawd's sake, sir, don't go and tell me farver, sir. He'll kill me, sir.”

He began to feel impatient with the girl's hysteria, as he thought of it to himself. “Come along, Mona, I am sure you have not done anything really very bad. What is it, a broken plate or a cup? Well, that is not very terrible. Just come along
home now, and I will try and put things right for you. Come along there's a good girl, you must be very cold, come in and have a cup of hot cocoa by the kitchen fire.”

“Thank you, sir. I'm sorry, sir, I didn't mean no harm, sir, promise you won't tell me farver, sir?”

She was in such a state that Richard promised. She followed him, sniffing and blubbering, down the broad gulley, through the spiked iron gates padlocked open, and so to the asphalt pavement of Hillside Road.

Richard let himself in with his latch key, and whistled as he opened the door. Hetty came out of the kitchen. “Go on in, Mona, there's a good girl,” she heard him say. “We must not let the fog come in, must we? Wipe your boots on the mat, there's a good girl—heels and sides, and then the soles. Well, Hetty, I found your little helpmeet sitting on the Hill, and thought it was time she came in. I must hurry back for the address; have you some soup all ready?”

“Yes, dear, some Scotch broth, it won't take a minute. I'll put it on a tray, and bring it down to the sitting-room.”

“I must wash first.”

“Yes, dear, I'll have it all ready for you when you come down.”

When he came downstairs he went into the kitchen to change his boots. Mona was sitting, in coat and hat, on a chair by the fire.

“Come, cheer up, Mona,” he said, “you must not go around looking like a wet week, you know.” Whereupon Mona hung her head, and began, once more, to weep silently.

Carrying his other pair of boots, to warm them by the sitting-room fire, Richard, with concealed impatience, went down into that room, waiting in his armchair while Hetty poured out a bowl of broth.

She remained anxiously quiet while he sipped the welcome soup. She did not want him to be upset in any way before the lecture, which he had been preparing, with the aid of his notebooks and various volumes containing hand-coloured woodcuts and plates, during the past few evenings. She knew that it meant a great deal to him. And how glad she had been that Mamma was next door, to advise her what to do about Mona. Mamma had suggested telling Dickie when he came back after his lecture.

“Your little maid of all work is not very happy, what is the matter?”

“Yes, dear, she is a little upset over something. I will tell you of it later, it really is not very important.”

“Then if it is not very important, why mention it at all?”

“Yes, you are quite right, dear, it was stupid of me. Would you like some biscuits and cheese after the broth?”

“I haven't time. Well, you women are contradictory creatures, I must say: you arouse a man's curiosity, and then you refuse to say anything about the cause of it. What is the mystery, pray?”

“Only a little trouble Mona has got into, Dickie. Really, I did not mean to worry you at all. I sent Mona home, to tell her mother, and have been expecting to hear from her.”

“Got herself into trouble, has she? If you mean what I think those words mean, I should not call it a little trouble. She is scarcely turned fourteen, too. Is that what you mean?”