Jinny the Carrier

“Sounds bully,” he observed politely.

“Bully’s the word, my young American friend,” said the Showman. “What a pity the mail-coach was late—we might have had ’em stuck up for the ordinary and caught some shilling patrons. You’re staying here for the night, I hope.”

“No—I’ve got to go on.”

“What a pity! I was about to offer you a front seat.”

“Me? Why?”

“Must fill up somehow,” said the Showman frankly. “People never go to a play unless they think they can’t get in. And as we only open to-night, there’s not been time to advertise our bumper houses. You see, sonny, we lay up here for the winter, and if we’d started before this heat-wave we’d have caught more colds than coppers.”

“Is it open-air then?”

“No, but the next thing to it—a tent! By squinting out of that window you’ll see the whole caboodle rising on the meadows like a giant mushroom. Why not stop here and pick up a young lady? I’ll give you two seats.”

“Don’t want more than one seat when I’ve got a girl,” laughed Will. Then the face of the girl in the parcel-shed came up, at once alluring and rebuking, and he repeated that seriously he must be off.

“Never mind—better luck next act,” said the Showman, and tugged furiously at the bell-pull, and the waiter appeared with a glass of brandy and water, as though he added thought-reading to his conjuring accomplishments.

“Well, here’s to our better——!” began the Showman. His eye, raised towards Will at the window, caught suddenly something in the courtyard, and setting down his untasted glass and snatching up his posters he disappeared almost as frantically as the dog.

“He’s forgot he ain’t dressed,” chuckled the waiter.

“Seems to be a merry gent,” said Will.

“Lives here all the while the show is on,” said the waiter, not without pride. “Pays me a shilling every time I go in.”

“I hope on the same principle Mother Gander will pay me,” said Will, laughing, and ordered his bill: which he found as unreasonable as the food was excellent. He did not, however, mulct the waiter of the handsome tip, designed to show him not a woman but a man and a gentleman at that, and the waiter finally disappeared with congees instead of with conjurings.

“I know you will excuse me, old fellow,” said the Showman, re-entering, “but business before pleasure. Fact is, I got up too late to catch the carriers, but now I’ve got the postman to leave my bills at all the public-houses on his next round. Good fellow, Bundock, though why he should boast so over killing two frogs with one stone, I don’t understand. It seems an operation as cruel as it is simple.” Here he swigged at his neglected glass. “He made a point, too, of my not employing the Bellman.”

“You’d have done better with the Bellman here in Chipstone and over at Latchem,” volunteered Will. “Where Bundock mostly goes, you’ll never get ’em to come.”

“That’s what Bundock said. But don’t you believe it, sonny.” He held up a huge hairy forefinger, half gilded with a great ring. “They’re only a canting lot o’ sons of slow-coaches. They’ve never had the chance of knowing what they like. Temptation’s the thing.”

The diaconal sibilance that greeted this sinister sentiment fell unheeded on the Showman’s ear, or rather he did not distinguish it from the worthy Mawhood’s general medley of guttural and nasal noises.

“There’s no greater temptation,” added the Showman, “than Shakespeare and the Ballet.”

Will shook his head. “They don’t know one from t’other. Did—I mean, if they did”—he had slipped into the old idiom—“they’d be scandalized. Why, I went to see a piece of Shakespeare at Sadler’s Wells myself last week, and I’m bound to say ’twas a bit thick—though splendidly acted, mind you.”

“You needn’t tell me that. Phelps!” He smacked his fleshy lips voluptuously. “Lord! What a job that man had to clear out the beer-sellers, babies, and filthy-mouthed roughs, and now it’s the quietest show in London. What was the piece?”

“Can’t remember the name—about a nigger.”

“Othello?”

“That’s it—sounded a rather Irish name for a nigger I thought.”

“Irish? Ah, yes—ha, ha, ha! You had me there! By Jove, that’s a new wheeze!” And he roared genially, while the innocent, and it is to be feared sadly illiterate, Will tried to look like a successful humorist. “Anyhow,” he said, “you won’t get ’em from Little Bradmarsh, no, nor Long Bradmarsh either. They think all actors are wicked.”

“And so they be!” burst forth the Deacon at last. “Hobs and jills ought to be kept apart!” He stuck his knife towards the poster. “The High Road to Marriage, indeed! High road to Hell!”

“Hear, hear,” agreed the Showman surprisingly, rattling his glass. “Well put, old cock. But these ain’t actors; only puppets. You can’t be wicked in wood.”

“I’m afraid I must be off,” said Will, rising.

“Then here’s luck to you.” He finished his glass. “And may you die before you’re buried!”

“Thanks, I hope I shan’t do either, Mr. Duke.” He took his hat and stick.

“Not Duke, old man. Flippance, Anthony Flippance, universally docked to Tony Flip. Duke only goes with the Marionettes. I bought ’em lock, stock, and barrel—-the oldest circuit in East Anglia, and the name going well with the crowned heads.”

“But there are no crowned heads in America,” said Will, smiling.

“Pardon me, sonny,” contradicted Mr. Flippance.

“But I’ve just come from there,” said Will crushingly.

“And how about the Emperor of Brazil?”

“Oh!” said Will blankly. He seemed really to have heard of this personage. Then recovering, he said: “But have you played before him?”

“That’s not my affair,” said Mr. Flippance. “It ain’t my responsibility what Duke’s done or left undone—if Duke was his name, which I take leave to question. ’Twixt you and I, I doubt if it would pay to work Brazil. But, as I said, I bought it as a going concern, lock, stock——”

“And lies,” snapped the Deacon.

Mr. Flippance turned his large red face benevolently towards the moleskins.

“Lies is a harsh word. Legends, old cock, legends.”

“Oi bain’t a bird,” rasped the Deacon. “Stick to the truth.”

“Lord love us, a Quaker!” Mr. Flippance winked at Will, who smiled—man of the world to man of the world. “As if anybody would take a thing that size and smell for a rooster!”

The Deacon reached for the rum-bottle in deadly silence. Will, with a fear—soon proved superfluous—that he meant it for a missile, hastened to remark that anyhow there were no crowned heads in Australia.

“Where were you educated, sonny?” retorted Mr. Flippance. And he began whistling the then favourite air: “The King of the Cannibal Islands.” He broke off to point out that kings and queens were as thick in the man-eating islands round Australia as old cocks in Essex, though they didn’t wear moleskins, or indeed anything but their own skins. Besides, he added as an afterthought, wasn’t Queen Victoria monarch of Australia too?

Will, taken aback again, had to admit it. “But you haven’t played before Victoria?” he murmured.

Mr. Flippance winked more widely as he explained that a study of the posters would show that the Marionettes themselves never claimed to have performed before crowned heads. It was the plays that had been performed. He turned suddenly upon the rum-soothed Deacon. “You’re not denying, my Quaker friend, that Queen Victoria’s seen Hamlet?”

“You leave me and the Queen out of it,” growled the Deacon.

“Ha! Then you admit she’s seen Hamlet?”

“Oi don’t know nawthen about it. Why should she see Hamlet?”

“Because he was the Prince of Denmark,” said Tony, winking again at his now bosom friend. “But you Methody Quaker dead-alive go-to-meeting sons of Sundayfied slugs crawl about thinking yourselves holier than Victoria, God bless her, even when it’s wood, never having seen society or ever had a drink outside Chipstone.”

The Deacon was roused at last. “Never had a drink outside Chipstone!” His breast heaved with a sinister movement—was it a wheeze of wrath or of laughter? “Oi’ll goo bail my round is bigger nor yourn. There ain’t scarce a barn in East Anglia what don’t know me.”

Tony’s great jaw fell. “A barnstormer! You! Rats! What do you play?”

“It ain’t play—it’s work.”

“Yes, I know—but what’s your repertory?”

“My what?”

“Your pieces.”

“Oi bain’t onny a piece-worker.”

“In what?”

“In what you said. It ain’t always per tail.”

“Retail, do you mean?” said the puzzled Tony.

Will, who had listened to the conversation with an ever-expanding grin, here burst into a guffaw. Tony turned on him.

“Is he kidding me?” he asked half angrily, half amicably.

The answer—like Will’s departure from this enthralling parlour—was staved off by the advent of yet another head popped into the doorway. This time it was a heavily greased head with scrupulously parted hair, and was attached to a spruce young man with a spring posy in his buttonhole. But his bear’s-grease out smelt his primroses.

“Hullo, Tony!” cried the aromatic apparition. “Up already!”

“I’ve got to work for my living,” Mr. Flippance retorted. “The dormouse season is over. You coming in, Charley, to see the show to-night?”

“Me! I’ve got better things to do, old boy.” The young landlord turned to the Deacon. “Can you let me have five or six live ’uns?”

The Deacon shook his head. “Oi don’t want to disoblige brother. Oi do my duty according to Peter—‘nat’ral brute beasts made to be taken and destroyed’—but they bain’t meant by the Almoighty to be taken for sport, and Oi don’t howd with fox-hunting neither.”

“So I see.” Mr. Charles Mott glanced glumly at the backs of the pictures.

“Ef you want to be riddy o’ warmints, shoot ’em, says Oi, or nip their brushes in traps.”

“Oh, oh!” came involuntarily from Will at this blasphemy. The Deacon transfixed him with his glittering eye, but went on without pausing: “And ef you want to be riddy o’ rats, come to me. Don’t set a-worshippin’ your prize-terriers, like Ephraim jined to his idols.”

“I did come to you to be rid o’ the warmints, and now I want half-a-dozen spunky ’uns. Make your own price, but if you won’t supply ’em I’ll get ’em from Bill Nutbone.”

“That’s doubly sinful—to goo to the heathen.” He turned to Will. “Ef you’re so fond o’ ferrets, young man, Oi could spare you this pair—cheaper than you’ll get ’em from Nutbone.” He let their pink eyes protrude from his pockets.

Will eagerly closed with the offer. If Frog Farm proved as dull as he was now beginning to fear—after this contrast of Anthony Flippance and Joshua Mawhood—ratting or rabbiting might be a providential diversion.

“But I can’t carry them in my pockets,” he said impressively. “Just made by Moses & Son, London. And I’ve got a long walk. Besides, I’d like them in cages.”

“Oi’ll send ’em by the carrier on Friday,” promised the ratcatcher. “Frog Farm, you said. Good day to you, Brother Mott.”

“Good day, Deacon. Sorry we can’t do business. Queer old cuss,” he said, winking at Will as the door closed. “Belongs to the Peculiars.”

“I—I’ve heard of them.” Will coloured a bit.

Tony, who had listened to the dialogue with enlightenment, here stalked out in half-genuine horror: “Holy Moses & Son! The publican and sinner prefers rats to Shakespeare!”

“Stow it, Tony!” called the landlord after him. “One preacher’s enough.” And, smiling, he changed the blanks into hunting pictures almost as deftly as his waiter would have done it.

He had scarcely effected the transformation, however, before the Deacon popped his head in again. Mr. Mott looked like a caught schoolboy, but though the beady eyes looked straight at the flamboyant hunters, Mr. Mawhood only said: “Oi forgot to lend a law-book.”

“What sort of a law-book d’ye want?”

“Miss Gentry’s got a counter-claim. Ef Oi won’t pay for my wife’s silk dress as Oi never ordered, she says my ferrets killed her chickens.”

“That’s not a counter-claim, Mr. Mawhood,” advised Will.

“It’s a lyin’ claim, anyways. What killed her chickens was her own black devil, Squibs. Her and her angels!”

“You go down to the bar and see if the missus can find you a book—but wouldn’t a lawyer be better?”

“The good Lord forbid! Oi’d sooner goo to a doctor. Well, thank you kindly, brother—one good turn desarves another. Foive, Oi think you said.”

“Or six. First thing in the morning. Spunky ’uns, remember.”

The Deacon sighed and disappeared again.

“Poor old chap!” Sure of his rats, Mr. Mott was now touched to sympathy. “His missus is a Tartar, no mistake. Still with them rounds of his, he dodges her a good deal.” And he sighed like the Deacon and followed him—bear’s-grease after aniseed—and Will, alone at last, followed too, though without a sigh, being still—as the waiter said—“one of the lucky ones.”

In the corridor he turned the wrong way, finding bedroom doors instead of the staircase. He paused a moment to gaze at a stuffed specimen of the sacred animal that stood with brush rampant against a scenic background under a glass case, and a stuffed trout that swam movelessly through a mimic stream. Then he became aware to his surprise that Tony Flip, still in his dressing-gown and still hugging the balance of his posters, was pacing the corridor restlessly, like a caged lion, though it turned out to be really like a tame creature denied his cage.

“They won’t let me in,” he said miserably. And he indicated an open bedroom door opposite the fox, with a view of housemaids at work, angry at the hour. One was making his bed, thumping it viciously; another raised swirls of dust with a broom. Slops stood blatantly around.

“They won’t even take free seats,” he groaned.

VII

“What did I tell you?” said Will.

“Oh, it ain’t because they think it wicked, the hussies. They turn up their noses at it, just because it’s under their noses. If they had to go to Greenwich Fair to see it, they’d fight to get in. Candidly, cocky, have you ever seen a better bill?”

“It seems only too much,” ventured Will.

“It don’t say all at the same performance. In practice it all comes down to The Mistletoe Bough, the silliest of the lot, a bride who shuts herself in a chest for fun, you know, and moulders into a spirit. But think of Richardson’s—what they cram into twenty-five minutes! You saw that at Greenwich, I suppose, Easter time.”

“No, I only got to London in time for the Great Exhibition.”

“You’ve been to that?” The Showman’s eyes sparkled.

“What I came back for.”

“That’s a Show!!” And a note of immeasurable envy mixed with the rapture of the rival impresario. “But what a chance missed!”

“How so?”

“No drinks.”

“I got lemonade.”

“That’s not a drink—that’s a gas. Lord, I thought, looking at that bumper house, with a proper Christian bar, they could pay off the National Debt.”

“You’ve seen it then?”

“Was there at the opening. Stood so near the Royal Party I patted the head of little Wales, and the Goldstick and Chamberlain walking backwards from the Presence nearly shoved me into the Chinese Ambassador just as he was salaaming on his stomach. Didn’t little Albert Edward look sweet in his Highland costume?”

“I wasn’t inside then,” confessed Will, “and I only had eyes for the Queen and her cream-coloured horses. You’ve got a season ticket, I suppose.”

“With the Prince Consort’s compliments. The fact is, I supplied the elephant for the Queen’s howdah.”

“Did you?”

“Yes, didn’t you see it in the Indian compartment? They wanted to show off the magnificent trappings she got from the Rajah, and they thought of getting a real live elephant, which would have been no end of trouble amid all those precious vases. But I happened to know of a stuffed elephant at a show down here in Essex, so I entered into correspondence with Buckingham Palace and loaned the beast for the season—buying him up first, of course—and sent him up in my caravan that had to be roused from its winter sleep and completely unpacked. Yes, trouble enough! But talk of the Koh-i-noor, that elephant’ll be worth his weight in gold when he comes back—Queen Victoria’s elephant as visited by the nobility and gentry of the world. I annex the Great Exhibition. See!”

“I wish I’d noticed him,” said Will wistfully. “I only saw her statue in zinc, seven yards high. But there’s so much to see—machinery and jewels and Mexican figures, it makes your head ache, and I couldn’t even get a look at that Koh-i-noor, such a crush round it. But did you see the Preserved Pig?”

The Showman’s eyes twinkled. “Mr. Woods, d’ye mean?”

“Mr. Woods?”

“The Chancellor of the Exchequer. Haven’t you noticed how they’ve left off abusing the income tax now they’ve got the show to talk about? By Jove,” he chuckled, “what a haul for the Exchequer if they bring the Crystal Palace under the window tax!”

“No, no! Best Berkshire breed. The real marvel of the Exhibition! None o’ your stuffed creatures, but a natural pig cured whole. Weighs three and a half hundredweight; five foot and a half from tail to snout. ’Twas done by a provision merchant in Dublin—Smith—I took note of the name.”

“That name will be immortal,” said Mr. Flippance gravely.

“Yes, and there was a monster pigeon-pie!” said Will with the same unsuspicious enthusiasm.

The church clock, striking four at this point, made the Showman bound frantically to his doorway. “Not done yet, you snails and sluts! When am I to get these bills to the tent? Do you realize we open to-night? You’ll ruin the show.”

“I’ll take them,” volunteered Will. “My road lays by the field.”

“A friend in need is a friend indeed.” Tony thrust the heavy roll effusively into Will’s hands. “Ask for my daughter—she’ll help you to stick ’em up on the bill-boards.”

“Your daughter?” murmured Will. He would have resented his sudden reduction to a bill-poster but for the romantic vision of the Bohemian petticoat.

“I can’t pull the strings on both sides of the stage at once, can I? Not to mention the women’s and boys’ voices, and the piping Gaffers. Lord, she’s got a head on her, has Polly. And pops in and out to play the piano too.”

With pleasant flutterings of the springtide fancy, the young man lightly strode with his roll under his arm to the field where a long chocolate-coloured caravan—apparently the vehicle that had transported the elephant—stood horseless at an aperture in the mammoth mushroom described by Tony Flip. Labourers in shirt-sleeves were carrying in ropes and rough benches. Small boys and large dogs stood around, and there was a litter of straw, cardboard, shivered packing-cases, and dirty paper. Two trucks covered with tarpaulin, and a vast box with a high-pitched roof marked “Duke’s Marionettes,” completed the confusion. Will, peeping in, saw a stage already set, at the border of which a girl on her knees was tacking a row of tin footlight-holders. The rear was already roped off, and the benches seemed to rise like a gallery. Evidently the thing was done in style—crowned heads or no crowned heads. Not without a thrill he walked in, and across the grassy floor, but romance fled when the girl, raising her head, presented a face almost as massive as her father’s, and ravaged by smallpox to boot. Polly had indeed “a head on her,” he thought, though long pendent ear-rings preserved its femininity.

Politely concealing his chill, he murmured “Miss Flippance,” and explained he had been instructed to deliver the bills to her.

She received them and him with an indifference that would have been galling had she been prettier, and was not gratifying even from a massive brain.

“Silly nonsense!” she grumbled, unrolling them. “To open before you’ve done your posting and circularizing. There won’t be a soul!”

“Oh, surely—this weather!” he murmured.

Miss Flippance threw him an annihilating glance. “If dad once gets an idea into his head, you can’t get it out with a forceps.” Will stared at this vigorous young lady, who, with a poster unfurled in her hand, proceeded to yell directions and rebukes at the bench-arranging clodhoppers. It was an insult to his sex, he felt resentfully. No woman, however ugly, had the right to order men about, men who were not even married to her.

“Nincompoops! They’ll never be ready for to-night,” said Miss Flippance, acknowledging his existence again. “Would to heaven dad had gone up to London to see the Exhibition—and not hustled us like this.”

“But he was there at the opening.”

Miss Flippance stared at him. “Were you with him?”

“No such luck. I didn’t even see the stuffed elephant.”

“Has he stuffed you with that?” Miss Flippance emitted a mirthless laugh, and Will looked at once angry and sheepish. “Not that way, you hulking brutes! Turn ’em round. . . . And besides, it’s ridiculous to give Hamlet. High art don’t take south of Scarborough.”

“Well, I saw Othello in London last week,” he contradicted sharply—she should see he was no mere gull: “And the pit was packed.”

“Yes—in April. But try it in the dog-days.”

“Too warm, eh?” he sniggered. She turned away as from an idiot. That hurt him more than having swallowed her father’s royal rodomontade. Did she then think the plot of Othello glacial? Or had she no sense of humour? Yes, that was it—the sex had been denied the sense of humour. True, it shrieked with laughter if you tickled it, but the tickling must be physical. Ah, she was at it again, bustling and bullying the superior sex. Well, he wasn’t going to paste bills under her. Let that lazy liar of a Showman do his own dirty work.

“Good afternoon,” he called out huffily, and walked out of the great tent in a far less romantic mood than when he had entered it. And then, as he came through the opening in the canvas, his eyes nearly started out of their sockets: Daniel Quarles’s cart stood outside the tent, and there, perched on the driving-board, holding the reins, and calmly instructing the shirt-sleeved yokels to deliver the big drum to Miss Flippance, was the girl of the parcel-shed!

VIII

Before his eyes could return normally to their orbits or his breath to his windpipe, the incredible vision had vanished. Jinny had, in fact, had an overdose of commissions in the other purlieus of Chipstone, and having fetched the drum from its winter quarters as directed by Miss Polly Flippance that noon—it had, in fact, been pawned, and the piano was still irredeemable—she was hastening on her homeward circuit as fast as Methusalem could be induced to go.

“Who was that?” Will gasped.

The rustic who had received the drum looked at him with unconcealed contempt. A man who did not know that!

“That war Jinny!” he said.

It was as if he had given his drum a terrific bang. Jinny?—Jinny Quarles then! Who else? In the boom of that name reverberated a clamour of memories and of emotions, old and new. Images of a solemn-eyed mite, of a merry little maid, of a sedate Sunday scholar, and of the amazing creature of to-day, went all interflashing with one another. Yes, the little Jinny who had shared the wagon and his secret with him that fateful Sunday, and who if ever by a rare chance she had flitted across his thoughts, figured always as this same little girl in her grand pink Sunday pelisse, trimmed with pink velvet and fringes, was now grown up; bonneted, bewitching, incredible.

“But where—where was her grandfather?” he stammered. “Asleep inside?”

“Asleep?” The rustic grinned. “A long sleep, Oi should reckon. Whoy, we ain’t seen the Gaffer for years.”

“Don’t stand there gossiping.” It was the female martinet at her sternest.

“It’s not his fault,” said Will. “I was asking about old Daniel Quarles. Is he really dead?”

“Dead? Not to my knowledge. At least I have never noticed Jinny in black.”

“Then where is he? Why isn’t he looking after Jinny?”

“Eh? But he must be a hundred!”

“You don’t mean to say he lets Jinny go out and do his job?”

“The most natural person I should think,” said Miss Flippance. “Really I haven’t time to discuss village carriers, if the show is to open to-night. . . . Do be careful of that drum. No, not inside, blockhead. Come back!”

As the tambour-laden slave did not seem to hear, his affrighted fellow-serfs yelled to him to bring the drum outside again, and when he was come, the despot’s skirts rustled majestically back into the tent—they were long and hunched out quite fashionably, which accentuated the humiliation of the male element. But Will remained at the tent door, like Abraham after an angel’s visit, thunderstruck and dumbfounded, but with consternation, not reverence. It was, he thought, the grossest carelessness that had ever occurred in the history of the globe. A respectable girl like that—why, what was the world coming to? Sent gadding about the country like a trollop, perched up horsily behind a carter’s whip—this was what little Jinny had been allowed to grow up into! And that girl at “The Black Sheep”—she who had looked so innocent, whom he had mentally seen as a May Queen, crowned with garlands, dancing girlishly round a Maypole—this was what lay under her poetic semblance. And at the same time—pleasing and perturbing thought—both the unsexed Carrier and the maidenly May Queen were in reality little Jinny: no stand-offish stranger, needing deferential approach, but—in a way—his very own: the meek poppet whose cheek he had always pinched patronizingly, in whose eyes he had always seen himself as a grown-up god.

Miss Flippance, sweeping out again, and finding him still hanging about, immovable, had a new thought. “Pardon me—has my father engaged you?”

He coloured up in anger. “I brought his bills in passing—that’s all.”

“Oh, I thought you might be looking for a job. There’s this drum, you know.”

He could have knocked her down. But she was evidently quite in earnest, this outrageous, humourless female, only second in self-sufficiency to Jinny the Carrier. The world seemed suddenly emasculated.

“I’m no musician,” he said surlily.

“But you look a strong young man and it’s muscle we want, not music. You’d only have to stand here about half an hour a day. This afternoon, of course, you might join the Bellman round the town—I’ve ordered him for five.”

“Miss Flippance,” said Will, mastering himself and speaking with crushing dignity, “have you observed my clothes?”

“They don’t matter,” she assured him. “We provide the uniform.”

“Do I look,” he snorted, “like a drummer at a dime show?”

“If you’ve come as a walking gentleman,” replied Miss Flippance simply, “you’ve come to the wrong shop. We’re only wires.”

“Oh, I know all about that.” And he slashed savagely with his stick at the insulting tambour, which uttered a bass roar of agony.

“Splendid! But you might have smashed it!” cried Miss Flippance. “Where’s the drumstick?”

“Am I the drumstick’s keeper?” he answered, with an odd Biblical reminiscence.

“Nincompoops! Thickheads! Zanies! Where’s the drumstick?”

But nobody had seen the drumstick. Jinny hadn’t brought it, the slaves assured her. She assured them, still more emphatically, that they had dropped it off the drum in taking it out. And no inch of it being visible where the cart had stood, she drew the deduction that it was now speeding towards Long Bradmarsh.

She turned to Will. “Do run after her—the men are so busy—she can’t be far, and she has to stop every now and again.”

He glared at her. Then something inside him whispered that that was the obvious thing to do—impishly to pretend to obey her, and then to keep her waiting for the drumstick—eternally. Yes, he would be revenged on behalf of his sex.

“Yoicks! Tally-ho!” he cried with an advent of glee that he felt justifiably malicious. And, waving his own stick wildly, he bounded with mock frenzy towards the field gate by which the cart had gone off.

“You won’t catch her like that,” bawled Miss Flippance after him. “Across the fields! Head her off!” But he would not take orders from any woman, he told himself, so feigning deafness he ran doggedly into the Long Bradmarsh road, and turning a sharp elbow, felt his heart leap up to see the now familiar cart at a standstill before a wayside cottage. But even as he gazed it started afresh.

He tore on madly. The back of the tilt vanished round another bend. “Following a drumstick” passed grotesquely across his mind. What an odd home-coming! What a queer renewal of acquaintance with Jinny—after that solemn oath-taking in the wagon!

Presently he heard a wild scampering through the bushes on his right, and his canine friend of the inn was leaping and frisking and joyously barking beside him. They ran together—owing to the dog’s leisurely tangents and curvatures he could just keep up with it. But with the sweat now pouring from his forehead, the inner imp began asking what he was running for, since he had already deceived and chastised Miss Flippance, left her eternally expectant. Why not now drop into the pleasant saunter home he had planned?

But the poor dog was panting in this heat—he answered the imp—it must have run miles since its meal in the parlour. Apoplexy threatened perhaps, hydrophobia even. Look at its lolling tongue! He snatched it up: it must be restored to its inconsiderate mistress, to whom, at the same time, a still more important rebuke could be administered, if indeed any vestiges of decency yet remained in the minx. But the little terrier struggled spasmodically in his arms—the ungrateful brute! He must save it from itself, then, just as he must save its mistress from herself. Clamping it to his breast with iron muscles, he toiled frenziedly forwards. Then the far, faint sound of a horn came like elfin mocking laughter on the sultry air, and with a sudden convulsion the animal wrested itself free, and Will was left hopelessly pursuing, not the cart, but the dog. He had indeed the pleasure of seeing the former slacken to receive the latter, but the vehicle was wafted away again so smoothly that to the poor perspiring pedestrian Methusalem appeared in his original Mazeppa rôle.

The chase ran along wide horizons—great ploughed lands or meadows with grazing cattle—the level broken only by ricks, roofs, and trees, mainly witch-elms, with a few poplars. Sometimes these elms clustered in groves, sometimes a few helped to make the hedge-line; as often they rose solitary in arrogant individualism. To the right was a delicious sense of the saltings and of mewing sea-birds; and mysteriously, as in the heart of the fields, red-brown barge sails or the tall, bare poles of vessels could be seen upstanding. And once where the road mounted, Will caught a glimpse of the Blackwater, and ships floating, and the dim, blue shore beyond.

But at the top of this hill he was too breathed to continue. He sat down, wiped his forehead, and surveyed the view; far from soothed, however, by its simple restfulness. If only his father had come to meet him, as his letter had requested, he thought savagely, all this wouldn’t have happened!

IX

Anyhow there was no need to follow the glaring high road any longer. On the left he could see the clump of Steeples Wood, and he knew that once he had cut through that, he could find the swift field-path through Hoppits that would save miles of the high road and not bring him out on it till the Silverlane Pump. He strolled with a sense of relief towards the wood, but hardly had its green groves closed refreshingly upon him when, reminding himself he was a trespasser, he quickened his pace again, and hurried through the oak plantations and over the wonderful carpet of bluebells with but a slight eye to the sylvan beauty.

Even when he reached the field-path bounded by the ditch and the dog-rose hedge, he did not relax his speed, having bethought himself that the poor horse would surely be given drink at the trough of the Silverlane Pump, and that there would probably be a delay at “The Silverlane Arms,” even if he should not have succeeded in heading the Carrier off altogether. And from that point she would surely need his protection, so lonely was the road till you sighted Long Bradmarsh with the drainage windmills and the bridge. And the no less necessary sermon could be combined with the protection.

He found the wheel of the village pump chained up. Evidently the water was running scarce. It looked not unlike a gibbet, this tall pump, and he could imagine a criminal dangling from the spout. There was little water in the trough, and the water-butt of the inn was almost equally dry; a wayside mudhole haunted by geese represented a pool. He remembered these arid villages in such strange juxtaposition with his own oozy birthplace—was it here or at Kelcott that he had made a boyish fortune, bringing water at a halfpenny a pint? His mother, he recalled with a faint smile, had been against the business because Jesus had said to the woman of Samaria “Give me to drink,” though he had trumped her text with the injunction to the Israelites: “Ye shall also buy water of them for money.” It all made him super-conscious of thirst, and he went into the inn, and ordering a pint of ale, inquired if the Carrier had passed by.

“Which way be you a-gooin’?” said the tapster. It irritated him to be questioned, and he replied tartly that he was going home. He gulped down his liquor and put his question to a group of children playing around the pump. They scratched their heads and gaped at him, and the youngest put shy, chubby hands to its smeary face. “The white horse and the girl!” he explained, and the shy child started screaming, and a woman burst from a cottage door and dragged it within, glaring suspiciously at the “furriner.”

A labourer riding a plough-horse barebacked, and leading another, came from the Bradmarsh direction. “Has the Carrier passed you?” he asked.

“D’ye want a lift?” was the reply.

He lost his temper. “Haven’t you got enough business o’ your own?”

“Not much,” said the labourer naïvely. “Ground be as ’ard as the road. Curous, baint it, arter all that soakin’.”

He replied more civilly, glad his rudeness was misunderstood. “Yes, it’s always either too little or too much.”

“And ye can’t sow unless ’tis none-or-both,” added the philosophic ploughman, plodding on. “Gimme a followin’ toime!”

The rustic meant a season in which rain and sunshine came in rapid alternation, but Will ruefully reflected that the “followin’ toime,” in the sense he was having it, was far from satisfactory.

But at that moment there was a cheerful bark, and that inconsistent dog was curveting around him, its tall thumping wildly against his trousers in an ecstasy of recognition. So he was too late, he thought with a strange heart-sinking; knowing its rearguard habit. He pushed it away with his foot. If the beast thought he was going to carry it again, it was jolly well mistaken. No more cart-chasing for him. His “following time” was over. And as the creature persisted in gambolling round his legs, he made a swish in the air with his stick to drive it on its way, and it uttered a fearsome yell; it being part of Nip’s slyness to cry before he was hurt. But for once Nip was not a laggard, but an advance courier, and Fate brought Methusalem round the corner at the exact instant of his yell.

“How dare you strike my dog?” It was an inauspicious reunion. Jinny had checked Methusalem, and her grey eyes were blazing down from their dark lashes; her face framed in its bonnet glowed like a dark flower, and he was confusedly aware that that lonely hamlet’s high-street was suddenly pullulating with people—the tapster and gapers at the inn door, the ploughman looking backwards, excited at last, the little children mysteriously out again with their mother, and other mothers and infants (in arms or at skirt) surging agitatedly from nowhere, whether at Nip’s cry or Jinny’s. Even the pump seemed to have spouted an old man, while an old lady arose, like an ancient Venus, from the pond. And every eye, he felt, was stabbing at the maltreator of Jinny’s animal; the cackle seemed a sinister clamour as of vengeance mounting from that swarm of sympathizers.

“I didn’t strike him,” he answered sulkily. Clearly she had not recognized him—a position not without its advantages. Doubtless the raw youth of her childish memories was effectually buried beneath this manly form, set off by the elegant London suit, this well-barbered head, and the face that had exchanged freckles for the stamp of experience. “As a matter of fact,” he added, “I fed the brute at the inn.”

“Which brute?” retorted Jinny sharply. But at this moment Nip, who had been calmly lapping the dregs of the pool, intervened by leaping up to lick Will’s hand.

“I beg your pardon,” she murmured, coming to a standstill.

“Granted,” he said, not to be outdone in graciousness, and beginning to enjoy the advantage her ignorance of his identity gave him. “But that’s no proof I haven’t beaten him. You remember the saying: