"Any objection to "Saucy Mr. and Mrs. Tackleton"?"
"Rather not."
The soldier sang "Saucy Mr. and Mrs. Tackleton." It is really a work for two voices, most of the sauciness disappearing when taken as a solo.
Nor is Mrs. Tackleton"s name Em"lv.
"I call it a jolly rotten song," said Stephen crossly. "I won"t stand being got at."
"P"r"aps y"like therold song. Lishen.
""Of all the gulls that arsshmart, There"s none line pretty--Em"ly; For she"s the darling of merart""
"Now, that"s wrong." He rode up close to the singer.
"Shright."
""Tisn"t."
"It"s as my mother taught me."
"I don"t care."
"I"ll not alter from mother"s way."
Stephen was baffled. Then he said, "How does your mother make it rhyme?"
"Wot?"
"Squat. You"re an a.s.s, and I"m not. Poems want rhymes. "Alley" comes next line."
He said "alley" was--welcome to come if it liked.
"It can"t. You want Sally. Sally--alley. Em"ly-alley doesn"t do."
"Emily-femily!" cried the soldier, with an inspiration that was not his when sober. "My mother taught me femily.
""For she"s the darling of merart, And she lives in my femily.""
"Well, you"d best be careful, Thomas, and your mother too."
"Your mother"s no better than she should be," said Thomas vaguely.
"Do you think I haven"t heard that before?" retorted the boy. The other concluded he might now say anything. So he might--the name of old Emily excepted. Stephen cared little about his benefactress"s honour, but a great deal about his own. He had made Mrs. Failing into a test. For the moment he would die for her, as a knight would die for a glove. He is not to be distinguished from a hero.
Old Sarum was pa.s.sed. They approached the most beautiful spire in the world. "Lord! another of these large churches!" said the soldier.
Unfriendly to Gothic, he lifted both hands to his nose, and declared that old Em"ly was buried there. He lay in the mud. His horse trotted back towards Amesbury, Stephen had twisted him out of the saddle.
"I"ve done him!" he yelled, though no one was there to hear. He rose up in his stirrups and shouted with joy. He flung his arms round Aeneas"s neck. The elderly horse understood, capered, and bolted. It was a centaur that dashed into Salisbury and scattered the people. In the stable he would not dismount. "I"ve done him!" he yelled to the ostlers--apathetic men. Stretching upwards, he clung to a beam. Aeneas moved on and he was left hanging. Greatly did he incommode them by his exercises. He pulled up, he circled, he kicked the other customers. At last he fell to the earth, deliciously fatigued. His body worried him no longer.
He went, like the baby he was, to buy a white linen hat. There were soldiers about, and he thought it would disguise him. Then he had a little lunch to steady the beer. This day had turned out admirably. All the money that should have fed Rickie he could spend on himself. Instead of toiling over the Cathedral and seeing the stuffed penguins, he could stop the whole thing in the cattle market. There he met and made some friends. He watched the cheap-jacks, and saw how necessary it was to have a confident manner. He spoke confidently himself about lambs, and people listened. He spoke confidently about pigs, and they roared with laughter. He must learn more about pigs. He witnessed a performance--not too namby-pamby--of Punch and Judy. "Hullo, Podge!" cried a naughty little girl. He tried to catch her, and failed. She was one of the Cadford children. For Salisbury on market day, though it is not picturesque, is certainly representative, and you read the names of half the Wiltshire villages upon the carriers" carts. He found, in Penny Farthing Street, the cart from Wintersbridge. It would not start for several hours, but the pa.s.sengers always used it as a club, and sat in it every now and then during the day. No less than three ladies were these now, staring at the shafts. One of them was Flea Thompson"s girl.
He asked her, quite politely, why her lover had broken faith with him in the rain. She was silent. He warned her of approaching vengeance. She was still silent, but another woman hoped that a gentleman would not be hard on a poor person. Something in this annoyed him; it wasn"t a question of gentility and poverty--it was a question of two men. He determined to go back by Cadbury Rings where the shepherd would now be.
He did. But this part must be treated lightly. He rode up to the culprit with the air of a Saint George, spoke a few stern words from the saddle, tethered his steed to a hurdle, and took off his coat. "Are you ready?"
he asked.
"Yes, sir," said Flea, and flung him on his back.
"That"s not fair," he protested.
The other did not reply, but flung him on his head.
"How on earth did you learn that?"
"By trying often," said Flea.
Stephen sat on the ground, picking mud out of his forehead. "I meant it to be fists," he said gloomily.
"I know, sir."
"It"s jolly smart though, and--and I beg your pardon all round." It cost him a great deal to say this, but he was sure that it was the right thing to say. He must acknowledge the better man. Whereas most people, if they provoke a fight and are flung, say, "You cannot rob me of my moral victory."
There was nothing further to be done. He mounted again, not exactly depressed, but feeling that this delightful world is extraordinarily unreliable. He had never expected to fling the soldier, or to be flung by Flea. "One nips or is nipped," he thought, "and never knows beforehand. I should not be surprised if many people had more in them than I suppose, while others were just the other way round. I haven"t seen that sort of thing in Ingersoll, but it"s quite important." Then his thoughts turned to a curious incident of long ago, when he had been "nipped"--as a little boy. He was trespa.s.sing in those woods, when he met in a narrow glade a flock of sheep. They had neither dog nor shepherd, and advanced towards him silently. He was accustomed to sheep, but had never happened to meet them in a wood before, and disliked it.
He retired, slowly at first, then fast; and the flock, in a dense ma.s.s, pressed after him. His terror increased. He turned and screamed at their long white faces; and still they came on, all stuck together, like some horrible jell--. If once he got into them! Bellowing and screeching, he rushed into the undergrowth, tore himself all over, and reached home in convulsions. Mr. Failing, his only grown-up friend, was sympathetic, but quite stupid. "Pan ovium custos," he sympathetic, as he pulled out the thorns. "Why not?" "Pan ovium custos." Stephen learnt the meaning of the phrase at school, "A pan of eggs for custard." He still remembered how the other boys looked as he peeped at them between his legs, awaiting the descending cane.
So he returned, full of pleasant disconnected thoughts. He had had a rare good time. He liked every one--even that poor little Elliot--and yet no one mattered. They were all out. On the landing he saw the housemaid. He felt skittish and irresistible. Should he slip his arm round her waist? Perhaps better not; she might box his ears. And he wanted to smoke on the roof before dinner. So he only said, "Please will you stop the boy blacking my brown boots," and she with downcast eyes, answered, "Yes, sir; I will indeed."
His room was in the pediment. Cla.s.sical architecture, like all things in this world that attempt serenity, is bound to have its lapses into the undignified, and Cadover lapsed hopelessly when it came to Stephen"s room. It gave him one round window, to see through which he must lie upon his stomach, one trapdoor opening upon the leads, three iron girders, three beams, six b.u.t.tresses, no circling, unless you count the walls, no walls unless you count the ceiling and in its embarra.s.sment presented him with the gurgly cistern that supplied the bath water. Here he lived, absolutely happy, and unaware that Mrs. Failing had poked him up here on purpose, to prevent him from growing too b.u.mptious. Here he worked and sang and practised on the ocharoon. Here, in the crannies, he had constructed shelves and cupboards and useless little drawers. He had only one picture--the Demeter of Onidos--and she hung straight from the roof like a joint of meat. Once she was in the drawing-room; but Mrs. Failing had got tired of her, and decreed her removal and this degradation. Now she faced the sunrise; and when the moon rose its light also fell on her, and trembled, like light upon the sea. For she was never still, and if the draught increased she would twist on her string, and would sway and tap upon the rafters until Stephen woke up and said what he thought of her. "Want your nose?" he would murmur. "Don"t you wish you may get it" Then he drew the clothes over his ears, while above him, in the wind and the darkness, the G.o.ddess continued her motions.
Today, as he entered, he trod on the pile of sixpenny reprints. Leighton had brought them up. He looked at the portraits in their covers, and began to think that these people were not everything. What a fate, to look like Colonel Ingersoll, or to marry Mrs. Julia P. Chunk! The Demeter turned towards him as he bathed, and in the cold water he sang--
"They aren"t beautiful, they aren"t modest; I"d just as soon follow an old stone G.o.ddess,"
and sprang upward through the skylight on to the roof. Years ago, when a nurse was washing him, he had slipped from her soapy hands and got up here. She implored him to remember that he was a little gentleman; but he forgot the fact--if it was a fact--and not even the butler could get him down. Mr. Failing, who was sitting alone in the garden too ill to read, heard a shout, "Am I an acroterium?" He looked up and saw a naked child poised on the summit of Cadover. "Yes," he replied; "but they are unfashionable. Go in," and the vision had remained with him as something peculiarly gracious. He felt that nonsense and beauty have close connections,--closer connections than Art will allow,--and that both would remain when his own heaviness and his own ugliness had perished.
Mrs. Failing found in his remains a sentence that puzzled her. "I see the respectable mansion. I see the smug fortress of culture. The doors are shut. The windows are shut. But on the roof the children go dancing for ever."
Stephen was a child no longer. He never stood on the pediment now, except for a bet. He never, or scarcely ever, poured water down the chimneys. When he caught the cat, he seldom dropped her into the housekeeper"s bedroom. But still, when the weather was fair, he liked to come up after bathing, and get dry in the sun. Today he brought with him a towel, a pipe of tobacco, and Rickie"s story. He must get it done some time, and he was tired of the six-penny reprints. The sloping gable was warm, and he lay back on it with closed eyes, gasping for pleasure.
Starlings criticized him, snots fell on his clean body, and over him a little cloud was tinged with the colours of evening. "Good! good!" he whispered. "Good, oh good!" and opened the ma.n.u.script reluctantly.
What a production! Who was this girl? Where did she go to? Why so much talk about trees? "I take it he wrote it when feeling bad," he murmured, and let it fall into the gutter. It fell face downwards, and on the back he saw a neat little resume in Miss Pembroke"s handwriting, intended for such as him. "Allegory. Man = modern civilization (in bad sense). Girl = getting into touch with Nature."
In touch with Nature! The girl was a tree! He lit his pipe and gazed at the radiant earth. The foreground was hidden, but there was the village with its elms, and the Roman Road, and Cadbury Rings. There, too, were those woods, and little beech copses, crowning a waste of down. Not to mention the air, or the sun, or water. Good, oh good!
In touch with Nature! What cant would the books think of next? His eyes closed. He was sleepy. Good, oh good! Sighing into his pipe, he fell asleep.
XIII
Glad as Agnes was when her lover returned for lunch, she was at the same time rather dismayed: she knew that Mrs. Failing would not like her plans altered. And her dismay was justified. Their hostess was a little stiff, and asked whether Stephen had been obnoxious.