Unknown (112 page)

Ned Athling was making his plans to leave his parents at Middlezoy and take a job which Geard had offered him in the town, the alluring job of editing an official Glastonbury newspaper—to come out every week. Ned was to have a completely free hand as editor of this paper, which was to deal with every aspect, political, economical, social, poetical, mystical, of the life of the town.

Lady Rachel's feminine relatives, especially the old Lady in Bath, had been pressing her father with every kind of importunity to bring to an end" her stay in Glastonbury. Day by day however she had assiduously been drinking those chalybeate waters, several springs of which could be reached in various places in the town much nearer than the hillside where they originated, and her health was obviously making such improvement that Dr. Fell had had little difficulty in persuading Lord P* to disregard his family's clamourings.

It was a question, however, how far this attitude of his would change;—Lady Rachel had now passed her nineteenth birthday— when it reached his ears that Ned Alhling was in town and that the girl was assisting him, as she fully intended to do, in his editorial labours. It was about this peril to their exciting project that they were now talking, with their heads close together, as they came drifting along that tow-path, far too engrossed in each other to notice the man and the little girl under the poplar tree or the child's wild escape across the field.

The first number of the Glastonbury paper was to come out in a month from now. The printing presses, the type-setting materials, the machinery and the office furniture were already in working order in a very old building in the outskirts of Paradise, one of the oldest buildings in that neighborhood and one much easier to adapt to their purpose than anything they could have found in the centre of Glastonbury. The only point where the Mayor had not given his editor a free hand was in the matter of the name of the paper. Mr. Geard wished it to be called The Wayfarer.

Philip had no desire just then to encounter “Lady Rachel and her young man,” as everyone in Glastonbury called them; but his searching fen-man's eyes, unconsciously combing the landscape on every side for signs of living creatures, was arrested now by the figures of two men advancing along the same tow-path from the opposite direction. Philip recognised one of these men at once as Sam Dekker; but the other puzzled him for a time. At last he decided, and decided correctly, that it was young Jimmy Rake, a subordinate of Mr. Stilly's in the Glastonbury bank.

Sam had begun to make it a custom of his to befriend the friendless in Glastonbury, of which there were, he very quickly discovered, more and queerer specimens than he had ever surmised existed in the days before he was caught in his Vita Nuova. Jimmy Rake was one of the loneliest of all these friendless ones. The other lads persecuted him at the bank. Mr. Stilly found him incompetent. His landlady in George Street regarded him as “not all there.”

The truth was that James Rake, an orphan from the little town of Ilchester, was a youth paralysed by shyness. His miserable shyness was indeed his only claim to his landlady's view of him and the principal cause of Mr. StilVs contempt for him. In other respects his character was simple, colourless and commonplace. If what is called “distinction” by virtuosos in human qualities was the chief hope of the lad's salvation, Jimmy Rake was undoubtedly damned. “Rake is a Fool” was what one of the little boys at the Oreylands Preparatory had scrawled in chalk one morning on the headmaster's blackboard; and even that indulgent gentleman, as he wiped these marks away with the duster kept on his desk, made no denial of this popular verdict.

Rake was a fool. He was a fool at cricket, a fool at football, a fool at examinations, and the worst fool of all with women and girls. There was an old canal in the marshes some six miles from Glastonbury on the borders of Huntspill Moor and because of a rare kind of water-mint that grew there this was a place where Sam and his father had for two or three seasons, and as late as October too, found specimens of the Large Copper butterfly. James Rake was interested in butterflies. He was not stirred over them to the passionate intensity of the two Dekkers; but he was interested; and he had made a gallant effort to overcome his shyness when Sam invited him to this walk on early-closing day.

They had gone by way of Meare, and Westhay Level, and Catcott Burtle, and the northern fringe of Edington Heath; and they were now returning by way of Meare Heath and Stileway.

Sam had quickly discovered that there was a solid, compact mass of what might be described as “honest wood” in Jimmy Rake's nature. The lad had the power of walking steadily on, for miles and miles, without uttering a syllable; nor were his remarks, when he did speak, of any very vivid or original character. The most striking observation he had made today in the whole of their ten-mile walk was what he remarked as they were crossing some fallen branches in a spinney near Edington Junction, on the Burnham and Evercreech Railway, “The white ones” —he was speaking of toadstools—“seem to grow on the dead wood; and the black ones on the living wood.” Sam had taken advantage of this remark to expatiate at some length on the toadstools of the neighbourhood, in which he and his father had specialised together for one whole autumn a couple of years ago; but his discourse seemed only to prove that the abundant “woodi-ness” in the nature of Rake the Fool was not the kind upon which either black or white fungi spontaneously flourished.

At the moment when Philip's long-sighted vision was conce^ trated upon the man and the woman approaching from the south and the two men approaching from the west, Sam himself realised to what an encounter he was leading his shy friend and he looked about him, wondering how to avoid this couple who were directly in their path. Ned Athling too became just then aware of a group of three men standing in the field to the north of them and a couple of men advancing from the northwest. There was a small unimportant bridge over the Brue just at that place, called Cold Harbour Bridge, and it was quite close to this spot that Philip was now standing. A little tributary of the river left the main stream at this point and flowed southeast to Northload Bridge, and thence lost itself among the orchards of the town. This Cold Harbour Bridge formed, in fact, the centre of an imaginary circle on the circumference of which these three groups of human beings were now arrested in a threefold consciousness of one another's presence.

To the surveyor from Evercreech there was nothing in the least remarkable about the fact that two men should be approaching Cold Harbour Bridge from the west, and a man and woman from the south, following the same tow-path. The contractor was wondering whether he would be permitted to bring his own workmen from Taunton for the construction of the new road or whether the town council of Glastonbury would insist on his employing local labourers upon the job. The surveyor from Evercreech was wondering if his wife's father, now suffering from an attack of pleurisy, would leave them his small dairy farm of four Jersey cows, when he came to die.

But there was, as a matter of fact, no geographic section of the environs of Glastonbury that had not been so often the stage of portentous human encounters that chance itself seemed, in the weariness of her long experience, to have found it easier to slide events through the smooth grooves of fate than to shake them into her favourite surprises; for from under Cold Harbour Bridge which was the precise centre of the equilateral triangle formed by these now quite stationary groups of people, all wondering how they should avoid contact with one another, arose the tall lean shape of Mother Legge's aged doorkeeper. Young Tewsv. holding in one hand a large blood-stained fish which he had just killed and in the other a long fishing-rod.

"I've a caught he! I've a caught heP he kept repeating and gazed round him with the frantic gestures of one demanding an audience.

Philip looked from the surveyor to the contractor with the air of a monarch who asks his courtiers to rid him of an intrusive churl.

“He's a tramp,” said the Taunton man.

“He's one of the town's idiots,” said the gentleman from Ever-creech who was hoping for the death of his father-in-law in order to inherit four Jersey cows.

But Young Tewsy was so anxious to tell the whole world of his successful kill that he climbed up upon Cold Harbour Bridge and held his catch in the air; waving it first in the direction of Sam and Jimmy and then in the direction of Lady Rachel. It was enough for Lady Rachel that an old dilapidated beggar was appealing to her in some way. She ran forward at top-speed to the bridge, followed at a slow and indeed at a sulky pace by Mr. Athling who began to feel extremely uneasy at the presence of so many people. People seemed to be appearing from every quarter of the horizon. Mr. Athling could see Sam and Jimmy in one direction, Philip and his two companions in another, while in addition to these he could perceive in the distance, on the other side of the big field, a group of children, an old man, and a cow with its head outstretched between wooden railings.

The sun was breaking through the clouds in so irregular a manner that one stream of light fell upon the tall beggar waving the fishing-rod and another upon the children and the cow. If Rachel Zoyland followed her hereditary instinct by rushing to the spot where a flag of appeal or of disturbance had been raised, Sam Dekker followed his hereditary instinct by running at top-speed to where sn excited a fisherman was brandishing a great fish. Poor Jim Rake, however, though not from pique or sulkiness like Athling, but from a paralysing spasm of nervousness followed Sam at a snail's pace. He looked neither to the right or to the left, for fear of being summoned to shake hands with someone, but kept his eyes fixed on the blood-stained fish, whose own eyes, which five minutes before had been searching the vistas of flowing water through the weed stalks of the Brue, had already taken upon them that glazed lidless stare of a dead creature upon a marble slab.

“You have caught a wonderful fish!” panted Rachel, when she reached Young Tewsy's side upon the narrow bridge.

“Ain't I, your ladyship,”—for he knew her well by sight— “ain't I?” gasped the old man. “ Tis the girt chub of Lydford Mill come upstream for they autumn flies. I've a-dipped for he every mornin' since September and every noon when Missus could spare I to come out—and now I've a-hooked 'un. There 'un be, your ladyship—there 'un be, Mr. Dekker”—for Sam, bowing awkwardly to Rachel, was now on the bridge too—“and 'twere I what hooked 5un! Ain't he summat to see? Looksee what a girt mouth!”

“You've killed it too roughly, Tewsy,” said Sam. “You shouldn't have bloodied it so.” He took the fish in his hands. “Yes, he's right,” he remarked to Rachel. “I've seen you myself, haven't I?” he added, this time addressing the fish, as he lifted up its dorsal fin with his forefinger. “I've seen you, down at Lydford in your own Mill Pool; but I never thought to hold you in my hands on Cold Harbour Bridge.”

Philip, Jimmy Rake, and Ned Athling were all standing on the tow-path now, while Young Tewsy, supported by Lady Rachel and Sam, remained above them on the bridge. Philip took off his hat to Lord P.'s daughter and made some laconic remark about the nourishing quality of Brue mud.

“Look, Jimmy!” cried Sam, holding up the fish for his friend's inspection.

“It won't be nourishing much longer, Mr. Crow, if your chemicals begin to get into it,” said Ned unkindly, venting his vexation upon the manufacturer.

“My chemicals!” murmured Philip, “I assure you, Athling, that nothing from my-------”

“This is Mr. James Rake. Lady Rachel.” said Sam. handing back the fish to Young Tewsy.

Mr. Rake tried to remember that it was best to take his cap off by the front rather than to clutch it by the top. The lad's cheeks got very red when Rachel remarked that she had seen him in the bank.

The man from Evercreech, forgetting about the four Jersey cows, now approached the group, while the contractor in order to retain his self-respect began writing in his notebook. His Wesl-Country awareness of the presence of Lord P.'s daughter, however, made him feel so self-conscious that all he could write down were the words “Saunders Brothers, Builders and Contractors, Taunton.”

So deep however were the centuries-old grooves, into which fate had moulded the historic atmosphere round Lake Village Field, that chance now, playing at being fate, brought to the lips of Young Tewsy a significant retort, as if to compel someone among these people to take note of what was going on. The contractor from Taunton had just added to the words “Saunders Brothers” the words “Due from Mr. Philip Crow,” when Philip, putting his hand into one of his trouser pockets and bringing out a lot of loose silver, said to Young Tewsy, who was endeavouring to take his rod to pieces—“I'll give you ten shillings for that chub, my good fellow!” Philip had been hesitating between mentioning five shillings or ten; but he had decided on this enormous sum, because of the presence of Lady Rachel, to whom, as soon as he had obtained it, he intended to offer the fish as a chivalrous gift.

It was then that Young Tewsy had uttered the following remark.

“Tis for Missus, Sir. Tain't for sale, Sir. Missus 'ave been hinterested, Sir,”—Tewsy in his excitement was reverting to his North London accent—"hever since I began fishing for the fish. The fish 'ave been on Missus', mind, Sir. She 'ave dreamed of the fish, Sir. She wants to heat the fish, Sir. She says—yes, my Lidy, 'tis Mrs. Legge I be speaking of—she says, Sir, when she was little, Sir, they 'ad a sighing in town about the fish. She said they used to sigh:

'When Chub of Lydford do speak like human On grass where Joseph has broken bread, Be it a man or be it a woman, In the Isle of Glaston they'll raise the Dead.'

And this 'ere fish“—he had laid the chub down upon the grass while he pulled his rod apart and wound up the line—”this 'ere fish cried 'Whew! Whew! Whew!' just like a dying Christian, when I 'it its 'ead to stop its floppin' on grass. Missus 'as been all wrought-up, Sir, in a manner of speaking, by thinking on this 'ere fish. If I were to sell 'ee the fish, thanking 'ee kindly, Sir, all the sime; or sell it to your Lidyship, thanking you kindly all the sime, Missus 'ud be terrible fretted. She do yearn to put 'er 'ands on this 'ere fish's tile and to scratch 'erself with this 'ere fish's fins, and to thrust 'er thumb down this 'ere fish's throat. Tis meat and marrow to Missus to 'old this 'ere fish to 'er bosom. So thankin' you, Sir, all the sime and thankin' you, my Lidy, it 'ud never do for me to let a living soul 'ave this 'ere ancient fish, save only Missus."