Mockery Gap (7 page)

N
O ONE
in Mockery, if we except Mr. Pattimore, was more anxious than Miss Pink to see the new fisherman.

She told her brother that she hoped the fisherman would drive away from that part of the coast the horrid beast that Mr. Tarr had spoken of.

‘The children,’ she said, ‘call the
fisherman
the Nellie-bird, but that is only another name for the beast, who I hope will never come to me.’

‘To-day is Friday,’ said Miss Pink, when she had put the plates away after their midday meal; ‘and as it’s Mrs. Pattimore’s
sewing-party
, I’m sure that something will happen.’

‘Yes,’ said Miss Pink; ‘it was on one of those days that I slipped down and hurt my nose. And on the other day, when Mr. Pattimore read a story called “The Modest Lovers,” Mr. James Tarr came to the village and told us all about the horrible thing.’

Before she went out, Miss Pink peeped into the tiny office where Mr. Pink spent so much of his time.

‘The estate accounts,’ said Miss Pink, opening the door a very little, though enough for her small head, ‘mustn’t be interrupted.’

Mr. Pink was standing at his desk and writing. He looked as if the writing, or
whatever
it was he was at work upon, had carried him a very long way off from this base world.

‘It’s an agreement,’ said Mr. Pink, hastily putting a large new sheet of blotting-paper over his work; ‘it’s the agreement between Mrs. Moggs and Mr. Roddy concerning the new lease upon her cottage. She is to have it for ever, if only—and I was just putting in the clause—she will consent to go down and look at the sea.’

‘She will never do that,’ said Miss Pink.

‘Then we’re all of us damned,’ said the agent decidedly.

Miss Pink shivered. ‘I hope that’s not what’s going to happen to-day,’ she thought as she closed the door.

Miss Pink opened it again. ‘If he comes,’ she said, ‘the front room’s ready.’

‘Yes, yes,’ said Mr. Pink, ‘I know.’

He did know, for this front room was Miss Pink’s especial care. It was always dusted and the lamp trimmed and lit of an evening. Nothing was ever seen out of place in Miss Pink’s front room. Even Mr. Caddy told his ducks about it all, and how Mr. Pink and she would sit in their kitchen upon a winter evening with only one candle burning, while the front room would be always lit up with a bright and well-trimmed lamp.

But only Miss Pink knew who was expected.

Mrs. Cheney and Mrs. Topple were already settled in chairs in the vicarage dining-room when Miss Pink was shown in by Rebecca Pring, who was herself to sit there soon as one of the party.

Mrs. Topple was already busy; she was embroidering, with green silk, clover leaves at each corner of a tablecloth. And the leaves were each four upon one stalk. Mrs. Topple didn’t appear to take any notice of the other ladies who were in the room; and even when Miss Pink remarked to Mrs. Cheney that she believed something was going to happen, Mrs. Topple went on sewing and heeded nothing but her longed-for leaves.

Mrs. Cheney sat stoopingly, and pushed her needles into her knitting as if she pushed a fork into the ground. She looked very old, and replied to Miss Pink’s remark by saying she hoped if anything happened that it wouldn’t hurt her Simon.

Mary Gulliver and Dinah Pottle came in next. Mary’s eyes were very wide open this afternoon, and she came in and sat down suddenly as though she were hunting the thimble and had seen it at once—upon the Dean’s picture.

There were now angry sounds in the vicarage hall, as if two people were saying unpleasant things about one another, and Rebecca Pring
thrust her mother into the room, hoping to prevent the words turning into blows.

Mrs. Pottle followed, very red in the face, as if she had been beating the ground again, and, muttering grimly that ‘our clock don’t never stop so long as ’tis wound,’ she sat
herself
at a safe distance from her enemy.

Mrs. Pring was taken two ways by her thoughts: she wished to hate and she wished to look, because she carried with her in her head a very important mission from her husband.

Like so many more fathers, Mr. Pring believed nothing whatever that his daughter said; and so when she would come home and tell him how much the picture of the Dean knew about a girl’s clothes and all other matters connected with young women, Mr. Pring would only remark that ‘brother George of Dodder did use to say that no woon don’t know nothing in Mockery.’

Mrs. Pring gazed at the Dean. She had heard and believed all that Rebecca said, and now it was her clear duty to convince her husband.

The Dean looked at her as a fine portrait of a man will usually do.

‘’E do say,’ decided Mrs. Pring, committing her thoughts to memory, ‘that wine and women be what ’e do know most about. ’E do know what a girl be like and a wine-bottle.’

Mrs. Pring blushed. The Dean stared at
her. ‘Rebecca be right about ’e,’ she
whispered
to the sewing in her lap; ‘they eyes be everywhere.’

While Mrs. Pring was so wisely and truly deciding what the chief dignitaries of the Church are fondest of, Mrs. Pottle was looking at her with the same gleam in her eye as when she struck at the kittens, calling each one as she killed it ‘Mrs. Pring.’

Mrs. Pottle hoped to see the lady of her hatred utterly shamed and naked. She noticed a tiny darn in the back of Mrs. Pring’s blouse that wasn’t well sewn. She fancied how nice it would be to get her nails into that place and to rip the whole garment down, and then all the ladies in the room could see Mrs. Pring’s dirty under-bodice. ‘’T would show off she’s manners to the public,’ thought Mrs. Pottle.

But while watching Mrs. Pring, Mrs. Pottle noticed that she often looked at the large picture and smiled noddingly, as if she were inviting the man to change places with the sewing and to sit in her lap.

Mrs. Pottle now began to look at the Dean too….

Mrs. Pattimore was reading
Martha’
s
Choice
aloud, a work well chosen for the occasion, for it described how Martha
preferred
virginity and heaven, to hell and Mr. Robinson—a fine and noble gentleman who wore silk next to his skin and liked oysters.

Mrs. Pattimore always read in a sad, low tone, and when Martha bid her gentleman go—‘anywhere, so long as she was left with her Bible’—she nearly cried, feeling, like Martha, that a book isn’t a baby.

Mrs. Pattimore stopped reading, and looked up and sighed.

Miss Pink sighed too; she had fancied the Martha as herself, and she had been trying to blow her nose that was almost too small to find.

‘I am afraid something is going to happen,’ said Miss Pink.

Rebecca Pring looked at the Dean.

Sometimes in early summer an unexpected cloud rises out of a perfectly blue sky and darkens the land. A moment before the cloud comes all the land is still and shining. No wind ruffles the early corn, the sea glitters, and the green trees of Mockery wood are awake with beauty. And then all is changed: a creeping dimness arises out of nowhere and covers gloomily both the sea and the wood.

Mockery vicarage, as we have before hinted, was set a little higher than the rest of the village, so that from one of the
dining-room
windows the sea could be seen. But as it was always there, and was only the sea, very little notice was taken of it by the ladies who attended the work-party.

Miss Pink shivered; the dimness that had
overcast the sky could have no other meaning than that something was coming.

Miss Pink was sitting near to the window; she could see the Mockery bay, and the Blind Cow Rock.

The blind cow appeared more real in shadow than it had been a moment or two before in the sunshine. Miss Pink looked at the rock with fear. ‘Suppose,’ she thought, ‘
something
jumped out of the sea and stood upon the rock—a nasty thing—what should she do?’

Whenever she was frightened, Miss Pink’s usual plan was to hide under her large scarf that was so like a shawl and wait in patience with her tiny nose hidden until her fears left her. But she couldn’t do so now, because her shawl was left upon one of Mrs. Pattimore’s hall chairs.

And now, too, as though to add to the gloom of the day and to Miss Pink’s fears, Mrs. Pattimore had stopped reading. No one spoke, either, for a silence had arrived that usually precedes a queer and unlooked-for event.

Even Mrs. Pottle, who as a rule took no notice of such subtle intimations of danger, felt a weight upon her that made her uneasy. And Mrs. Pring, who looked at the Dean, fancied that the eyes of the portrait rolled in its head, and its right hand moved threateningly.

And now, with the cloud above growing
darker than ever, the figure of a man—the new fisherman—opened the vicarage gate, exactly as any fisherman would do who had fish to sell, and entered the gravel drive.

The fisherman appeared very much the same in looks as when Mrs. Pattimore had seen him drifting in his boat in the bay. He now wore a cap, and showed as he walked the light step, the unhesitating manner, of a young man who knows what he is doing.

Mary Gulliver, who had felt in no small measure the queer silence, had looked as soon as the gate had clicked to see who it was, expecting, perhaps, to behold one of those horrid monsters that according to her father’s map inhabited the known world.

‘Oh, it’s only the fisherman,’ gasped Mary, trying to allay by this simple disclosure of who had really come the strange and uneasy feeling that pervaded the room. But the ominous sense of something odd wasn’t to be driven off so easily, for the presence of the fine tall and bearded figure, though clad in the usual
fisherman’s
jersey, and going past the window to the back door with a basket of mackerel in his hand, had already become an important figure at the meeting, and intended to stay there very unforgettably.

As the fisherman passed the window, a clap of thunder that appeared never to end—
continued
to reverberate around the Mockery
hills for some seconds—made Miss Pink start so violently that her ball of wool (for she was knitting) rolled all along the room and hid itself at last under Mrs. Pring’s skirts.

And then the knock came at the back door.

Nothing in this world can so terrify a group of simple people, each more nervous than the other, than a knock at the back door.

It may be, and I daresay that this is the case, that we fancy that any knock, even though we think we know who the knocker really is, may be the post that we all wot of, that is to call us hence once and for ever.

The fisherman knocked again. The silence in the vicarage dining-room was more intense than ever, though each lady thought—and even Mrs. Pring and Mrs. Pottle forgot to hate one another in consideration of such an exciting situation—that something ought to be done.

For no one, the ladies rightly felt—no, not even a seller of things, and those things fishes—should be allowed to remain knocking at the back door without any notice being taken of his being there.

Rebecca had once mildly risen and looked at her mistress, who however gave her no command, and so the girl sat down.

As well as the servant, each one in the room—and even Mrs. Topple had raised her head from her flowers—had looked at Mrs.
Pattimore
when the fisherman went by the window.
Mrs. Pattimore blushed as scarlet as if some one had set a match to her, but she made no motion and said no word as to what should be done. The first knock had been a gentle one, but each one of the company expected, having her own experience at back doors to go by—and even Mrs. Pattimore had been forced round to the Cheneys’ back door more than once—that the second would be louder.

And so it was; and then the third came—not angrily, but merely such a knocking as implied the natural desire of the knocker to be attended to.

To relieve her suspense as to what would happen, Rebecca looked hard at the Dean; ‘Would he,’ she wondered—he looked so
lifelike
—‘step out of the frame and kindly go to open the door?’ But as he didn’t—and Rebecca explained that by merely saying to herself, ‘’Tain’t no girl who be knocking’—she couldn’t help wishing that Mrs. Moggs had allowed herself to leave her shop to attend the sewing meeting.

‘Mrs. Moggs would ’ave seen to ’e,’ thought Rebecca.

A moment later, when the dining-room door opened, Miss Pink drew up her legs, and tried at the same moment to hide her nose and herself with her knitting, believing that the horned beast had leaped from the Blind Cow Rock to the vicarage dining-room in one bound.

‘It’s only Mr. Pattimore,’ said Mary Gulliver.

And so it was, for Mr. Pattimore, who was busy in his attic about his next Sunday’s sermon, having removed himself from the dining-room when the visitors arrived, had been disturbed by the knocking. He now said, though a little pettishly for so chaste a man: ‘How can I work at this text, Dorcas—“I say again, Let no man think me a fool”—while all this loud knocking goes on at the back door?’

Rebecca rose from her seat, but Mrs.
Pattimore
, who trembled now as well as blushed, stopped her going out.

‘I think I had better go,’ she said.

Mr. Pattimore had already begun to climb the stairs to his attic; he hadn’t dared to look at his wife.

‘For the mackerel may not be fresh enough for my husband, and if they aren’t fresh it would be better for him to be as though he had none.’ In her extreme nervousness Mrs. Pattimore had caught at another of his favourite texts.

She went out and softly shut the door after her. Mrs. Cheney, bent and withered, was the sort of woman who never has much to say, all her affairs being so wrapped up in the fine young god that she worshipped—her son Simon. When it thundered, she feared that her Simon might be harmed by it, or at least
get a wetting, with no young woman to shield him, for Mrs. Cheney had an entire mother’s belief that everything in the world should be sacrificed in the cause of her wonderful boy. Mrs. Cheney now began to explain how very important a matter it was, buying fish at the back door, and that when she bought them for Simon—she had no need to mention Mr. Cheney, who was but another worker in the cause of the pretty god—she always took them into her hands to see if the shining, slippery things were as stiff as they should be. And if like that—and Mrs. Cheney nodded as if she were telling Simon to be careful about the bones—they must have been caught, as the fishermen always say they are, in the early hours of the morning. Or if limp and
dull-coloured
, they would have been purchased at Weyminster and merely carried to Mockery to sell again.