The Quick and the Dead (8 page)

I think it must have been on this same visit that I saw the dancing bear, only a few hundred yards from the Claybrook farmhouse. I was startled but fascinated; and not so much afraid of the great lumbering beast—which, curiously enough, I felt vaguely sorry for—as of its master, a small man with bushy eyebrows and an enormous nose. The pole he carried was nearly twice as tall as himself; there was something gnome-like about him; and a gap in his row of large yellow teeth gave him a sinister air which his amiable manner did not altogether neutralize. He had an expansive smile and a foreign singsong way of speech. ‘He good bear. He not hurta the little gentleman. Come stroka him.' These, or something like them, were his words, as he shuffled about in the middle of the road on his loose limbs. They did not encourage me to go nearer. I did not run, for one does not see a bear every day; but I gathered my smallness into a narrower compass, and standing close to the hedge, out of harm's way, made, I suppose, large eyes at the astonishing spectacle. How I came to be in the street alone is more than I can now say.
Nor do I remember the issue of that encounter; but I remember that later in the morning my bear-master presented himself at the house and begged to be allowed to sleep that night in a barn with his bear. From the safety of our friendly domestic interior I watched and listened to him, and suddenly found him lovable. It was an agony of suspense for me to wait for my Uncle Claybrook's answer; to see him consider the matter, scratching his bristly cheek and frowning in thought. And when at last he said ‘Very well. You can keep the animal under proper control, I suppose?' I felt a warm gush of pride and pleasure and gratitude, as though I had suddenly been given a shilling. ‘Oo, isn't it lovely, uncle!' I said, slipping my hand unexpectedly into his. I did not say, nor did I know, precisely what I felt to be so lovely.

And so, by a devious route, we come to my Uncle Claybrook. But he is worth, I protest, an even longer journey. In my childish eyes Uncle Claybrook was a man twice as large as life, very loud and friendly and funny: godlike, for he held incomparable gifts in his hand; yet a kind of celestial clown, for in his endeavour to entertain a little boy he made nothing of his dignity. Above all (and so
much above all as to be beyond my conscious perception) he was the embodiment of all the joys that the word
farm
held for me. The pigs and geese, the horses and the cattle, the rides in the dogcart, the garden and the fields and flowering hedges, the chalky lanes and the white fences of the railway station, the haystacks, the rabbits, the field-mice, the chance-seen loping fox, the pleasure of watching Aunt Claybrook and her maids at the churning, the sight of cows lumbering home to be milked, the roaming of the garden and the swinging in the hammock and the stick of celery at supper-time: all these were by with and from my Uncle Claybrook, and each contributed a constituent element to the magical sum of him. He was a tall, sturdy, ruddy-faced man, with dark-brown hair but with a glint of red in his whiskers, which were cut in the mutton-chop style. When he smiled, the flesh about his eyes wrinkled numerously; and much smiling had left a fine network of lines to bear witness to a cheerful temperament. But he was by no means always smiling: indeed his face in repose, or wearing an expression of intentness, or pursed in thought, held a hint of fierceness, a hint which his barking voice and curt articulation did nothing to contradict. But these things were
superficial, and his geniality, I am confident, was the flower of a deep-rooted kindness. He must, I suppose, have possessed more sober and Sunday-going clothes; yet (but for one unique occasion that remains to be told) I cannot remember seeing him except in his brown tweed jacket, riding-breeches with a check pattern as boisterous as himself, and highly-polished brown-leather gaiters. It would not, in those days, have greatly surprised me to learn that he slept in that garb, so completely did I identify it with his personality. His wife, my mother's eldest sister, was a wraith beside him: rather gentle, rather timid, rather inclined to labour any point she wished to make: everything ‘rather'. It is a puzzle to know why he married so colourless a person, unless it was the attraction of opposites that united them, and his sense of that physical beauty in her of which, at times, a faded version, a kind of faint pencil-sketch, was still to be found in her prim and somewhat anxious features. The blue of her eyes gave her, sometimes, a wistful look; and when she could be persuaded to laugh, and even to blush, one could believe what seemed at other times incredible—that she was indeed my mother's sister. It was probably a disappointment to them both, perhaps a grief, that they
were childless, the only child of their marriage having been stillborn; and no doubt I came in for a good deal of petting to which the child lost and the children unborn had a better claim. For the rest, it was a prosperous household, well appointed and well staffed. In the matter of food and drink my uncle treated himself handsomely, and his guests no less; he had the hearty man's suspicion of small or even moderate appetites, regarding such eccentricities—‘Nonsense! Of course you will, my poor Essie! Haven't come here to starve yourself, have you?'—either as a symptom of approaching illness or as a polite affectation. If illness, then that illness must be warded off by making a hearty meal; if affectation, you must be bullied out of it. My mother, I fancy, found these tactics of his a little trying; and on this last visit, which I must now come to, her very apathy defeated him. Some sickness in my mother there certainly was, on this occasion; and not all his barking could persuade her that eating was the remedy.

And now that I have caught up with my story again, you see us, I hope, my mother and me, alighting from the train at Lutterthorpe Station, being welcomed by a radiant Uncle Claybrook, and driven to the farm in
time to sit down to an enormously high tea. You will hear, too, in imagination, as I in memory, the usual family exchanges. My aunt greets us both with a kindly peck. I am told that I am a big boy for my age, which is something between fourteen and fifteen. My uncle roars a joke at me, and slaps his knee in self-appreciation. And so, in tolerably high spirits, we suffer ourselves to be led to the table, where await us ham, boiled eggs, plates piled high with bread and butter, an enormous fruit-cake, honey, various jams, a bowl or two of scald cream, and my aunt's large silver teapot that was her mother's before her.

‘And how,' said my aunt, as we all sat down to this feast, ‘how is poor Robert managing?'

My mother lifted an eyebrow.

‘All by himself,' said my aunt in amplification. ‘What a pity you couldn't have brought him, too, dear! We should have been
so
pleased to see him. Shouldn't we, Franky?' She glanced at her husband with an air of anxious appeal which the circumstances certainly did not warrant; for no one in his senses could have questioned my Uncle Claybrook's eagerness to entertain his brother-in-law.

‘Bless the woman!' roared my uncle, in humorous exasperation. ‘Essie knows that without being told, don't she!'

‘I
do
hope he'll manage,' murmured my aunt, in the tone of one who fears the worst but is resolved to be brave about it.

‘I didn't like leaving him, you may be sure,' said my mother, weary of having to explain. ‘But he was set on my coming away. And when he makes up his mind to a thing, he can be as stubborn as the rest.'

‘He didn't
care
to shut up the shop and come too, I suppose?' asked my Aunt Claybrook. ‘But I expect he'll manage,' she added dolefully, not waiting for an answer.

‘I found somebody to cook and clean for him,' my mother assured her. ‘A nice daily woman from The Freehold. I only hope she doesn't bring anything with her … '

‘Eh?' said my uncle.

But his wife understood all too clearly. ‘My dear Essie, you don't mean to
say
… '

‘Well,' said my mother, ‘she lives in a dreadful slum, so there's no knowing, is there?'

‘I see.' My aunt struggled with a problem. ‘Was it quite a
suitable
choice, dear?'

‘Let the poor girl get on with her meal,' said my uncle, intervening. ‘No time for talk at teatime. What do
you
say, Claud? Hey?'

‘Yes, it was the best possible choice,' said my mother. ‘I spent a lot of trouble on it.
Elderly and stout and looks honest. And I've never seen a plainer woman in my life. The very thing I wanted.'

‘Oh Essie dear!' murmured my aunt reproachfully. ‘I'm sure
that
wasn't necessary. I'm sure dear Robert—'

My mother interrupted with a wry face. ‘Of course. There's nothing you can tell me about Robert, Bertha. But you don't know our neighbours, darling. Does she, Claud?'

It shocked my Aunt Claybrook, set her in quite a twitter, that I, a mere boy, should be not only privy to so scandalous a conversation, but actually invited to add my voice to it. There fell a somewhat strained silence. I said nothing. But I exchanged a conspiratorial glance with my mother, whose eyes—as I saw with a thrill of delight and alarm—were dancing with mischief.

Presently we shall be visiting an ancient lady known as Aunt Mary, or Aunt Westrup, the aunt of my Uncle Claybrook and no true relative of mine or my mother's. She grew smaller as I grew older, for it was at long intervals that I saw her. At our first meeting, as I remember even now, my chin reached only to the silver-mounted head of the ebony stick on which she leaned. But no, not ‘leaned': she was none of your bent old crones, but a very small, slight, perfect figure of an old lady. She was something of an historic monument, her husband having been killed in the Crimean War, when she was a young woman. It happened, this encounter, one Sunday evening. For a reason that is now too far to seek I had been taken to evensong, and during the long sermon my wandering attention became fixed on two gargoyles, which stared down from their opposite corners into the chancel. Outside, as I knew, there were others, still more hideous; but these two, meanwhile, were lively enough to engage a small child's imagination. They looked like
the heads of men who had died by violence and in anger. But they were not dead. In some fashion I supposed them to be both human and alive. Not human as the Mr Peacock the Vicar was human, not alive as I was alive … yet there they were, two faces visibly real, expressive, and terrifying. I suppose that at that tender age my mind made no distinction between a powerful fancy and a definite belief: a respect in which, very likely, I resembled the great majority of my pew-companions of whatever age. Certainly I can recall no conflict, no considering of evidence, no perplexity. I did not, so far as I remember, attempt to reconcile my ‘belief' with the elementary facts that contradicted it. That the gargoyles were of stone, for example, must have been (one would suppose) a fact within my knowledge even then; but, if so, it was a piece of knowledge that dwelt in isolation, unrelated to my fancy. If I could have brought them together, the one would have destroyed the other; but it no more occurred to me to do this than it occurred to Mr Peacock to examine his mainly mediæval creed in the light of common knowledge and common sense. His mind, like mine, could accommodate contradictions without the least discomfort, because the
x
group of beliefs and the
y
group, though mutually exclusive, could exist very happily in the strict segregation he imposed on them. In my gargoyles, then, for the duration of evensong at least, I was a true believer; and, little as she herself deserves it, my memory has never quite succeeded in dissociating the idea of gargoyles from that of Aunt Mary, to whom, in the churchyard just after the service, I was presented while still in the grip of my terrors. All this, you must understand, was part of my Lutterthorpe. On later visits, and on the last visit of all (to which, in its own time, my narrative will return), these memories, slight though they must seem to anyone but myself, and submerged though they may have been under the flowing tide of the present, contributed each its delicate essence to the flavour, the idea, the complex of experiences, that was Lutterthorpe. The place was a world in itself, populated almost entirely by uncles and aunts. For at no great distance from my Uncle Claybrook's—it took only an hour and a half in the trap—lived Uncle Percy Caundle, a learned venerable personage, and his wife, Aunt Hilda, a sister of Uncle Claybrook's. Dr. Caundle (for such was his awful designation) kept a boarding ‘college' of some twenty or thirty boys, whom he undertook to prepare
for the church, the army, or any other sphere of real usefulness. He was stout, white-bearded, and pompously jovial. Always, when he talked, he had the air of making a speech to the school. His words were chosen carefully, with hesitation; he drummed with his fingers on the nearest available solid object, which in the earlier days of our acquaintanceship was not seldom my own head; or else he toyed with a pair of what he called ‘nip-noses', which at other times were fixed low on his nose, his serious, surprised, pensive eyes gazing over them. Aunt Hilda was always too busy ‘mothering the boys', as my Uncle Claybrook said, to be or do anything on her own account. She was small, with a plump olive-complexioned face and black hair dressed quakerishly and parted in the middle; and her behaviour, which was that of a typhoon, was the more surprising by reason of the placid appearance she presented in her rare moments of rest and calm.

These, however, were but minor characters; for we all, Claybrooks and Caundles and Calamys alike, regarded Aunt Mary Westrup as in some sense the chief of our tribe. We permitted ourselves to smile at her prejudices, and to shake our heads over her audacities of speech; but we went in some awe of
her, none the less; for at the age of eighty-two she had still the trick of making even the eldest among us, my Uncle Claybrook, feel like a not too intelligent schoolboy.