Mockery Gap (2 page)

A
GROUP
of men and women, who all looked as if they had come out for a very important reason, but didn’t wish to appear to be doing anything unusual, removed themselves one sunny day in March—each holding an
umbrella
or an overcoat—from a large and
many-seated
pleasure car that had stopped upon a grassy down which overlooked both the inland country spaces and the sea waves.

A fox is known by its brush, a lemur by its scream, and a postman by his loud, sharp knock; and our ladies and gentlemen can be known at once, by the extreme care that each bestows upon finding his own stick or umbrella, as the field club of the county.

Once safely out of the car, and grateful for being still in possession of their movable property, the company stood about in threes, and for want of anything better to do they looked at the sea.

Each member of the party looked at the sea as if it had been placed there on purpose to interest them, but was, now that they saw it, a very poor kind of show and hardly worth the journey to view.

There was simply the ordinary blue, with the rocky island beyond, that Mr. James Tarr had so often given them lectures about, that
was connected, they knew, to the mainland by a broad and continuous line of heaped and stupid pebbles of a flat shape.

The sea, with its rocky island behind it, had so little to say to one member of the field club—Miss Frances Ogle—that she looked in the other direction towards the land.

There she saw wide spaces, hills in the distance, and woods a little nearer. The wide spaces, as she looked to the right or to the left, became other wide spaces, and the hills became merely other hills. When Miss Ogle tried to look further, she encountered a dimness that might have been anything from a cloud to a church tower, or whatever else the onlooker’s fancy might wish it to be.

Miss Ogle now drew her gaze in a little and looked at the wide sweep of the nearer downs that shone green and clear in the midday March sunshine. She noticed some sheep lying down at a distance, and so imbued was she with the learned discoveries in the matter of old transformations made by Mr. Roddy, the president of the club, that for a moment Miss Ogle believed the sheep to be a muster of ancient stones.

The sheep, however, were good enough to express themselves as moderns by rousing and scattering at the loud barking of the shepherd’s dog.

Miss Ogle was glad she hadn’t spoken, and
turned quickly to the sea and pointed at some thing—in order to put herself right with the learned as well as with nature—that, if it wasn’t a whale, must be a stone.

The object that Miss Ogle was pointing at appeared to be the one thing that pushed itself out of all the garish prettiness of the spring day, and was something that was consciously itself.

This was a black rock.

‘Look‚’ said Miss Ogle, unable to contain her ideas any longer, ‘there’s a petrified cow in the sea; please, Mr. Roddy, do get it up one day and put it in your museum.’

Miss Ogle had gone a little away from the others when she made this remark, and those who heard her speak merely supposed that she was exclaiming about the beautiful view. But however wrong Miss Ogle had been about the sheep, she was right this time, for the rock that she had pointed to was called ‘The Blind Cow.’ For the simple Mockery minds who lived in the near neighbourhood of the cow had always supposed, and the story was handed down from one generation to another, that a cow which had lost its sight had walked out upon a hot midsummer day upon the sands, as cows will do sometimes. But this one being blind, and thinking that it was merely crossing a little river to reach green meadows upon the other side, swam out of its depth
and was drowned. And so the rock came by its name.

But however important to our story Miss Ogle’s discovery had been, none of the
assembled
company noticed it, because each was wondering what kind of learned remark would be first uttered, and whether Mr. James Tarr or Mr. Roddy would be the first to utter it. Meanwhile, and until the learned thing came, the company stood about and gazed at the distant sea a little disparagingly, as though they said, ‘If only we had gone on driving in the car, we might have been still listening to conversation that certainly would have been of more interest than the sound of distant waves.’ For the car drive upon such an
occasion
as the present would provide exactly the proper whirl and swing to loose the pretty tongues of scandal, that would wag merrily, although Squire Roddy, the senior member and head of the party, would look sadly at his new gloves and allow five minutes to pass without saying one single word.

During the drive the merry tongues had settled upon two families, the Pinks and the Pattimores, who lived in Mockery village, that was likely to be visited amongst other places where old things might be found.

‘I for one wouldn’t put up with such
treatment
,’ Miss Ogle had said sternly to Mr. Gollop, who was at the moment deeply
wonder
ing
whether Miss Ogle’s income was really as high as it was said to be, so that if he married her they could afford a pretty servant.

‘No,’ said Miss Ogle, as the car swayed a little to the side of the road, ‘if my husband treated me as Mr. Pattimore does his wife—I should leave him.’

‘But it’s Mr. Pattimore’s open opinion‚’ said Mr. Roddy harmlessly, ‘and one that is founded upon the Scriptures, that married people should live as though they were not married.’

‘But she’s so nice‚’ said Miss Ogle,
looking
at Mr. Gollop, ‘and he’s not fit to be a clergyman.’

‘Why not?’ inquired Mr. James Tarr, who always liked to put people to rights; ‘for I do not understand why a man who happens to believe in chastity shouldn’t be a clergyman.’

‘But the clergy have such clever families,’ said Miss Ogle.

Mr. James Tarr stared hard at a church they were passing. ‘They can’t help that,’ he said.

‘I have been told,’ said Miss Ogle, for the motion of the car always kept her talking, ‘that Mr. Pattimore sleeps far away from her in an attic——’

Mr. Roddy looked up from his gloves.

‘Mr. Pink, you know is my agent, and he lives near to the sea, and that’s where we’re going,’ he said quietly.

‘Oh yes, I’ve heard about him‚’ Miss Ogle replied, laughing.

Mr. Roddy held out his gloved hand and touched a tree that the car swayed nearly into as it passed a cart in the road. It was always like that during the drive: there were things that could be said, but when once the goal was reached and the green grass trod upon, or the castle stones, and the real business of the day commenced, the very simplest conversation was always out of reach and scandal was silenced.

And now that the drive was over, even Miss Ogle felt the same difficulty as all the other members of the party about what should be said or done.

But Miss Ogle was a resourceful lady, and so she dropped her walking-stick. Mr. Roddy picked it up, and Miss Ogle, in an offhand manner that no one but she would have dared to use upon such an important occasion, invited Mr. Roddy to climb a large tumulus that happened to be there, and to tell them how rocks were made.

Although this setting of Mr. Roddy up above all the others was quite unseemly and utterly out of the order of the day at that point in the proceedings, yet Mr. Roddy climbed the mound, abstracting from his pocket as he did so a parcel of typed notes relating to the life-history of cliffs, valleys, hills, and rivers.
Even extremely gifted people, who wear really expensive stockings, at least the gentlemen, and the ladies with their fine walking-shoes, must look at something besides gorse bushes and rabbit-holes. And our fine ones, each surrounded with a cloak of the grand manners, having eyes, watched. And what they saw was—and they all blamed Miss Ogle for
bringing
about a scene so discreditable to the common decencies practised by field societies—that Mr. James Tarr had begun to climb the tumulus at the same moment as Mr. Roddy, only from the other side. Mr. James Tarr was a gentleman of an argumentative temper, whose favourite remark was, ‘I wish to do it my own way.’ And his own way in this case was to spring in leaps up the mound, and to encounter, with his rugged and determined countenance looking more grim than usual, mild Mr. Roddy at the top of it.

‘You can’t both talk at once, you know,’ Miss Ogle most shamefully called out, ‘though you may want to.’

Every one looked anywhere but at Miss Ogle.

‘Don’t you two begin to fight up there,’ she called louder than ever.

It was most fortunate that Mr. Gollop was of the party.

‘Come,’ he said, leading Miss Ogle gently but firmly away by the arm, ‘do look at those birds in the bushes.’

Every one now was relieved, and also most grateful to the Rev. Alfred Gollop for having saved their ears, at least at the moment, from any more of Miss Ogle.

‘Those birds aren’t larks,’ said Mr. Gollop, letting go the lady’s arm and going nearer to the gorse bushes so that he could see the birds more distinctly.

‘What are they, then?’ inquired the lady.

‘I think they’re sparrows,’ said Mr Gollop innocently, but the lady had turned to the mound again.

And there Mr. Roddy—for Mr. James Tarr had descended again—was explaining in a mild and almost an apologetic voice, very different from His that made it, what the seemingly stupid affairs of nature were really all about.

Pointing with his glove, he was saying when Miss Ogle returned from watching the sparrows, ‘To the westward, by Weyminster Bay, there the oolites live, which form a cushion; below these are potter’s and pile clay, firebricks, bituminous shales, sheep and cattle, potatoes and cider, and for the meadows the catch-water plan is used.’

‘And what kind of plan is that?’ asked Miss Ogle simply.

Mr. Roddy shook his head and came down; he saw the vital necessity, if Miss Ogle
continued
to come to their meetings, of impressing her with the real seriousness of these occasions.

The most simple way to do this appeared to Mr. Roddy to be to make himself look grand in her eyes.

In order to do so in the way that he thought to be most telling, Mr. Roddy picked up from the grass a handful of little white shells.

These little shells he showed to Miss Ogle. ‘They are called by my name‚’ he said; ‘they are Roddites, and I am the discoverer of them.’

Miss Ogle looked at the shells carelessly. ‘Pretty Roddites‚’ she said, and then without a word to the discoverer of them she called out, ‘And now I’ve seen the Roddites I want Mr. James Tarr to tell me about that little church in the valley.’

Mr. Tarr sprang to the top of the mound again in three leaps.

‘Mockery Church‚’ he said, taking out some notes, though written ones, as Mr. Roddy had done, and pointing down into the valley with them, ‘is a cruciform edifice of stone; it possesses an embattled tower that contains only one bell, while the church itself affords one hundred and eighty-two sittings.

‘The word Mockery is derived, of course, from Monksbury, and that word explains itself.’

‘It doesn’t explain itself to me.’ interrupted Miss Ogle, who was the only listener who had really listened to Mr. Tarr.

Mr. Tarr stepped down; to be interrupted
at all was more than he could usually bear, but to be interrupted by a lady who had only joined the club a week before, and didn’t belong to any county family, was no petty rudeness but a high aggravation.

And now something occurred that went near to breaking up the party, out of sheer horror at the incident; for Miss Ogle mounted the tumulus in the place of Mr. Tarr, and said, excitingly waving her walking-stick, that she wanted to speak too.

When he saw that she really meant to address them, Mr. Roddy began collecting the Roddites again, and making a little heap of them that he intended to carry home with him later; while Mr. James Tarr, whose temper was of another colour, said boldly to those near to him that ‘he would throw Miss Ogle into the sea, if the sea had only the decency to flow up to the tumulus as it once did one hundred million years ago.’

When Miss Ogle had reached a point in her discourse and was talking about the edible octopus, a fish that a poor fisherman of Mockery, Mr. Dobbin, had once offered her—when trying to sell his catch in the town—for a shilling, she happened to look below her and saw that the hill was deserted.

T
HE
Assyrian, when he came down ‘like a wolf,’ so the poet says, could never have shown such a spying audacity as our learned society when it strayed about, each member going his or her own way, in the little village called Mockery Gap.

They found the country people, as Miss Ogle said during the drive home, ‘so nice to talk to, and so ready‚’ the lady added, ‘to show you the way to the church.’

Having never been visited before so
wholeheartedly
by the learned, the people of Mockery had lived for generations most patiently, and, when the passions from on high or from below allowed them time, both mildly and
contentedly
. But now, alas! all—at least for a few months—would be different, the old order giving place to new error, and merely because it wasn’t in Mr. James Tarr’s habit of life to leave well alone.

Mr. James Tarr was the last gentleman in the world, with the exception perhaps of one other, to allow any earthly paradise, where wild roses scent the air in June, to remain without ambitions as every real paradise should.

Mr. Tarr liked to be remembered as one who carried with him, and handed it free and gratis to those he met, a fine zeal in the matter
of discoveries. And not discoveries alone, for Mr. Tarr, when he sniffed the air of a new village, would delight to darkly insinuate that something might be going to happen, or else some one might be going to come, that would throw into the shade all events heretofore, and prepare the place for new happenings of terror or excitement. Besides general
prognostication
, Mr. Tarr would set the minds of simple people running in other ways, too, than by
foretelling
momentous things. He believed that he alone in all the world really knew what to recommend to give another person a proper incitement to live, which was, as Mr. Tarr would be sure to point out, to hunt for
something
that was almost, if not entirely, impossible to be found.

Mr. Tarr was, amongst all men, the one who knew, and the one who could start in the mind of the most harmless hedge-priest maybe the rather foolish idea that the poor man might one day become a person of importance.

‘If you spend your whole life‚’ Mr. Tarr would say impressively, ‘in looking for a
centipede
with only ninety-nine legs, you will be happy.’

He had given a young portrait-painter whom he had once met in an Essex marsh this advice, who took it literally, and spent the rest of his life upon his knees in damp rushes and low deserted hollows.

When the company quitted the mound upon which was Miss Ogle, Mr. James Tarr, with his head thrust a little forward, looked down upon Mockery, and settled determinedly that it was a place that must be excited into action.

A man at work in a field, near to the smaller of the two village farms, caught his attention. Mr. Tarr looked at the motions of this man, who was spreading manure in a slow and thoughtful manner, and he thought he knew him.

‘That’s Gulliver,’ said Mr. Tarr, going down the hill in the man’s direction, ‘and those heaps are dung and not mole-hills; and I’ve got a present for him.’

Mr. Tarr lived at Maidenbridge, where Mr. Gulliver, the small farmer of Mockery, would drive sometimes to sell his butter, and Mr. Tarr had noticed the earnest manner and the gentle care with which the smallholder handled his goods at the doors of his customers’ houses.

Mr. Tarr didn’t spend much time in talking to Mr. Gulliver, because he meant to set on fire with new ideas other minds too, so he merely handed to Mr. Gulliver an envelope that contained, he said, a map of the world for him to look at in the evenings.

‘Your name is Gulliver, you know,’ said Mr. Tarr impressively, as he turned away and strode jauntily in the direction of the village school.

With such visitors about, so that the
excitement
in Mockery Gap had grown intense, the school-children, whose general endeavours went the natural way of much noise and
shouting
, were for a moment or two stilled, and especially those who stood near to Mr. James Tarr when he talked to the schoolmistress, Mrs. Topple.

Mr. James Tarr had walked at the school wall as if he intended to walk through it, but stopped suddenly just as he was going to strike his head, and eyed a stone that had jutted out a little, and informed Mrs. Topple that the stone was a Saxon one.

Mrs. Topple was a lady, pale and sad
looking
, and no wonder with those children about; and she supposed that every gentleman who wasn’t Mr. Hunt the town postmaster, or Mr. Best the school inspector, was a doctor. And so, as soon as Mr. Tarr had finished telling her about the stone she told him about her bad leg. Mr. Tarr looked over the heads of the listening children, who were quieted for the moment, into the green fields of Mockery, as though seeking inspiration. He wished to give to Mrs. Topple a lasting remembrance of himself, and so he said, with the certainty that his character was famed for, ‘Surely, madam, if you searched in all those green fields, that I am told go all the way down to the sea, you might find a stalk of clover with four leaves.’

Mrs. Topple’s face brightened. Here was a fine doctor indeed!

‘All your woes will go then, when you once find that clover‚’ said Mr. Tarr.

It was then, after setting a light to Mrs. Topple, that Mr. Tarr turned upon the children and told them about the
Nellie-bird
.

‘Voyagers mention,’ he began, in the same buoyant tone in which he addressed the society, ‘according to Stanley’s history of birds, a species of albatross called the Nellie-bird,
Diomedea
spadicea.
One day or one night that bird will come to Mockery; watch for it.’ And Mr. Tarr strode off.

There was a portion of an old building that is sometimes found that always, more than any other part or portion, interested Mr. Tarr, and this was a buttress.

He was examining one of these that helped to hold up the old wall of the great Mockery barn, when he was aware that his investigation—he was pushing the buttress in a friendly way to see how firm it was—was being closely regarded by the eyes of Mr. Cheney, the largest Mockery farmer.

Mr. Cheney, who evidently fancied that the gentlemanly visitor was really intending to overturn the buttress, remarked feelingly: ‘’Tain’t likely, do ’ee think, that there be any golden coins hidden under they wold brick
leanings, for ’tis only silver that me poor boy Simon do ’ave for ’is spending wi’ they maidens.’

Mr. Tarr looked triumphantly at the farmer—here was a fine soil indeed in which to plant the exciting seeds of ambition. He motioned to Mr. Cheney to step back a pace or two; from whence the tumulus, that was left
solitary
and at the mercy of only Miss Ogle, who was still standing there, could be plainly seen.

Mr. Tarr pointed to the mound.

‘Under the mound,’ he said, ‘where you see that woman’—Miss Ogle descended as though she had heard herself mentioned so rudely—‘all the golden earrings that the concubines of the ancient Britons would wear so grandly are hidden; you have only to dig there deeply enough to find—gold.’

Leaving the farmer standing and still
looking
inquiringly up at the mound, Mr. James Tarr strode happily along the Mockery lanes. He wasn’t the moon, and yet he had started tides flowing; he wasn’t the king, and yet he had put thoughts and ambitions into virgin hearts. He was still desirous, and he looked. He looked into the tiny Mockery shop that was also the post-office, and entered to buy a stamp and to entice out of Widow Moggs the shopkeeper all her hopes and feelings. Mrs. Moggs, who had already been visited by nearly every one in the party, stood nervously behind
her counter and shook her bells, the two curls that hung on either side of her head.

‘You are lonely here, Mrs. Moggs,’ said Mr. Tarr to her, having noticed her name upon the door, ‘and you want a pair of white mice to keep you happy.’

Mrs. Moggs rung her bells. She rather liked Mr. Tarr; he was evidently quite another person from the ill-mannered postmaster who sometimes came from Maidenbridge in his motor.

‘Mr. Pink says,’ replied Mrs. Moggs timidly, ‘that I ought to go one summer’s day and look at the beautiful sea.’

‘Perhaps you should,’ said Mr. Tarr, taking up the stamp that he had bought but forgotten to pay for; ‘but you will never really be happy without those white mice.’

As soon as any village or tract of the
countryside
had yielded up all its ancient history, culled from the gravestones, its grassy terraces, and its silent valleys, to the prying eyes and
hammer-taps
of the grand and learned, then would these fine hunters, with one accord, as eagles to the carcass, crowd into the vicarage dining-room for tea.

Here they would be welcomed by the lady of the house and by the gentleman, both wishing to give them all the honour that they could, and currant cake.

And here to the Mockery vicarage came Mr.
James Tarr, who read plainly enough—being taller than the others—the writing, or rather the painting, upon the wall of the dining-room.

This painting was the portrait of a Dean who was believed to be, and truthfully so, Mr. Pattimore’s relation.

‘That’s what he wishes to be,’ said Mr. Tarr to himself, allowing Mr. Pattimore’s whole past and future to remain agape for preferment, and for ever to be so.

Passing him by as so settled, Mr. Tarr did just notice Mrs. Pattimore, a very child in her looks and blushes, whose lips, red as cherries, asked for better things than to reply to Miss Ogle’s questions about chair-covers.

‘Mr. and Miss Pink, this is Mr. Tarr,’ exclaimed Mr. Roddy, seeing Mr. Tarr desire to catch those two simple ones in a corner.

Mr. James Tarr being thus introduced, sat in front of his meek prey as if to prevent the least chance of their escape, and said, looking sternly at Mr. Pink, who was if anything the meeker of the two, ‘Something will happen here, I feel sure, Mr. Pink.’

No one had taken the trouble to hand to Mr. Pink the least portion of currant cake, and so now with hunger in his heart he turned to his sister, hoping that she would answer this
gentleman
from the town, who looked a fierce one.

Mr. Tarr turned too to Miss Pink. ‘There is something about Mockery Gap‚’ he said,
speaking loudly, so as to be heard above the clatter of tongues and tea-cups, ‘that is very dreadful and ominous. I am certain that one day something will happen here. I shouldn’t be surprised if one dreadful day something might be seen.’

Miss Pink couldn’t shut her eyes, so she looked down; she saw a flower in the carpet that took the shape in her mind of a horrid beast with horns and a tail.

‘It’s that beast,’ she thought, ‘that will come—the dreadful beast from the book of Revelation.’

Miss Pink had all her life been afraid of crawling things; she had always expected to meet a spider one day in Mockery with a head like Farmer Cheney’s bull, and now here was the very horror being expected by a rich and angry gentleman from Maidenbridge.

‘Will it come from the sea?’ she asked, looking up timidly at Mr. Tarr.

Mr. Tarr nodded impressively.

‘Oh,’ sighed Miss Pink, ‘how dreadful!’

Mr. Tarr looked at Mr. Pink, and decided that he would be happy as a Methodist preacher.

‘The country people are ignorant here,’ he remarked forcefully; ‘they are low in the scale of being; they are like underdone mutton, they want to be baked by salvation, they’re all bloody.’

‘I fear they’re not always as kind to one another as they should be‚’ said Mr. Pink; ‘and as I am Mr. Roddy’s representative, I am forced to hear a great deal that I am sorry for.’

‘The people want salvation,’ said Mr. Tarr.

‘They want kindness‚’ said Mr. Pink.

Mr. Pink leaned forward, so that his simple, placid face, long and sallow, and hung with a yellow moustache like a faded and dusty
curtain
, almost touched Mr. Tarr’s ruggedness. A look of wistful hope came to him, and he said, looking first to see that Mr. Pattimore was as far away as the length of the vicarage dining-room allowed him to be, ‘Yes, yes, you are right: they want to be saved from those children, Mr. Tarr.’

‘That are such a trouble to poor Mrs. Moggs,’ sighed Miss Pink, ‘and to Mrs. Topple.’

A silence now came to the vicarage
dining-room
that left only Miss Ogle speaking.

‘I have learnt so much to-day,’ said Miss Ogle, ‘that I feel quite another person.’

Mr. Gollop looked at the servant, who was a pretty one; he also peered about amongst the crumbs under the table—he had lost his handkerchief.

Miss Ogle found it for him.

‘We had better be going now, I think,’ said Mr. Roddy, shaking hands with Mr. Pattimore
and looking up at the Dean; ‘because we have the hill to climb, you know.’

‘And the Roddites to collect‚’ whispered Miss Ogle, and laughed sillily.

Vaguely, and with no enthusiasm now, for a coldness had crept into their hearts from the sea perhaps, the company, with the exception of Mr. Tarr, who met Mr. Gulliver in the lane and had a last word with him about his travels, climbed the hill and settled themselves in the car again.

‘Mr. Tarr’s always the latest to come,’ said Mr. Roddy, when that gentleman at last seated himself beside the driver.

‘That’s because he’s so clever‚’ whispered Miss Ogle to Mr. Gollop.

The car started, and the blind cow out at sea saw the hill bare again.