Innocent Birds (14 page)

T
HE
longing for motherhood has a cruel way sometimes of playing with a girl, as a cat plays with a mouse. It lets her run free for a moment and then pounces upon her. The longing has a way of saying, even though the mouse may have been frightened by the cat’s shining eyes, ‘You might have let him do all that he wished under those green bushes, for it didn’t matter very much what he did when you longed so!’

Maud’s fright had held her back for a while—in torment perhaps, but still it held her; and now that it was gone, the cat that had captured this little mouse allowed her, though wounded, to run in the fields.

Modesty, that careful sentiment, placed as a sun-dew in a maiden’s heart to catch brides—after their human blood is sucked dry—for heaven, now left Maud defenceless.

Maud even wanted to go to Dodderdown again to find the same place that Mr. Bugby had followed her to when he told her that a little child was crying there. Whenever Maud saw Mr. Bugby now, instead of running from him she begged him to go with her into the meadow again. ‘She wouldn’t struggle this time,’ she said, ‘but
would go first to the grassy chalk-pit and wait for him.’ She did go, and waited upon the grass until the night dews chilled her, and then she went home to Madder again, and peeped into the inn window, where Mr. Bugby was telling his friends about Maud.

‘Though I bain’t religious,’ she heard Mr. Bugby say, ‘I bain’t a-going to do what wicked mad Maud do ask.’

‘Where be Maud now?’ Wimple inquired.

‘In Dead Man’s Meadow waiting for I,’ laughed Mr. Bugby.

Sometimes Maud would meet Mr. Solly, but he would look so sadly at her that even Maud didn’t like to ask him to help her with her
longings
. Something, too, that Solly used to say—and he never passed Maud without speaking—used to give her back a little of her former modesty, as well as a new hope, though a far-away one. Whenever he met Maud, who would be out
looking
, or else waiting, for a man, Mr. Solly would stop in the road and look up at Madder hill, with a depth of longing expressed in his look that almost equalled Maud’s own.

‘Look, Maud,’ he would say, ‘look up there at Madder hill.’ And Maud, of course, did what Solly wished her to do, and watched the hill. And while she looked Solly would still be speaking.

‘He will come again,’ Solly said, with
conviction
, ‘and even if His gift is for Polly and
Fred this time, His mercy is infinite and His promises are sure; and one day He will remember us too.’

There was something in the tone of Mr. Solly’s voice that would make Maud forget herself, and indeed all Madder, yea, and all the world, for a few short moments. But when her mortal
longings
and her deferred hope brought her eyes to earth again, she would discover, very much to her disappointment, that Solly was gone.

But though Solly might have fled to Gift Cottage a little precipitately, as if he wished to get away from mad Maud and her longings, yet he spent a good deal of his time in considering what could best be done to help Maud in her trouble.

‘Now, if only those Americans,’ he thought one day, as he dug in his garden, ‘hadn’t
commenced
to manufacture iron, they might have helped to aid Maud Chick with a little advice.’

‘But of course there is Aunt Crocker!’ Mr. Solly thought of her as his clean shining spade cut the ground so nicely.

He remembered one evening in particular when his aunt described to him how Mr. Crocker had died. It was a stormy winter’s evening, when the wind and rain outside in the street did its best to make Mrs. Crocker’s parlour more than usually comfortable. Solly was sitting beside the fire, that he had replenished a moment before with a fine log of oak, sawed by his own
hands with much care so that it might exactly fit the parlour fire-place. Mrs. Crocker was knitting with large wooden needles, that gave a gentle grace to the home, as unlike as possible to the sharp biting clash of Miss Pettifer’s steel ones.

The storm outside rattled the windows in a merry fashion, and certain inquisitive drops of rain crept down the chimney, where they fell and hissed spitefully upon Solly’s log. Mrs. Crocker moved one of her feet from the rug, that had once kept a bear warm, and placed it next to her other upon the footstool. She then settled her ball of wool in her lap, with as much consideration as though it were a soft white kitten.

‘Crocker was never a proud man,’ she said, laying down the knitting beside the ball of wool, ‘and he never thought his name was a pretty one.

‘“But there was somewhere,” he used to say, “where it might show itself off with more justice than upon a rate receipt.”

‘It was a rough windy night, as this is, when Crocker died.’

Mr. Solly touched the poker.

‘No, the log is burning well,’ Mrs. Crocker said; ‘let it alone, Solly.

‘He hadn’t spoken for some time, you know, and the doctor had told me, and the wild winds were telling me too, that the end was near. “Deborah,” he said, suddenly raising himself
up in bed, and looking at me as happily as if he had just discovered a truth he had looked for all his life, “it’s the very name for a tombstone.’”

Mrs. Crocker looked at Solly’s log, that was burning finely then.

A fierce gust of wind shook the house.

‘And also his wife Deborah Crocker,’ she said gratefully.

O
NE
has only to wink once or twice, and the summer is gone. Gone, with all its yellow
gladness
that it gave, and gone with all its yellow sadness too. But gone; and so quickly each summer’s going is, that we have only to wink the three times, and our lives are gone too, with their early morning sunshine and their long evening shadows.

If so be any happiness has been found by us during our three winks, we have found it—and we all know this to be true—in quiet places. We have met it—if at all—where the fir-cones lie about so kindly that we are almost inclined under those tall and sweet-scented trees to kneel down and worship the earth.

Perhaps upon the warm grassy side of a hill in March, with the cold wind banished behind it, the doors of our soul may have opened for a breath of joy to come in. Or when the bracken first breaks through the soil upon the heath; or when Madder hill, at midnight, makes a black line athwart the stars. If our joy enters not into us at those times, we may bid it farewell for ever….

Nearly all the leaves were fallen, and Madder sulked like a girl who is forced to wear sackcloth instead of bright colours. The fan-shaped trees had fancied—foolish trees—that when spring came and they sprouted greenly, they were going to live for ever as prettily. But an old worm who had lived in the hollow trunk of one of the largest elms knew better. The worm told the trees to wait a little until the autumn came, and then see what would happen to their pretty green covering.

When Madder sulks, as it did upon this autumn day that we have now reached in our story, even the church tower cannot cull the slightest spark of interest from the fact that it possesses a bell that is rung on Sundays, and a flagstaff where a flag is hung upon the king’s birthday.

But even the greyest of autumn days doesn’t always succeed in keeping the Devil away from Madder; and though no flag was flying and no bell rang, the church tower was awaked from its gloomy thoughts by the arrival of a bird.

This bird, one of a sea tribe that had visited Madder before, perhaps mistook the green fields of Madder for waves, and the church tower for a great rock set up in this green sea.

The bird flapped its wings, stretched them widely out, and appeared to be looking greedily at Madder rectory.

Certainly the cormorant needn’t have looked so greedily there, for even the Devil was likely
to get short commons at Miss Pettifer’s, although that very afternoon she intended to send Polly to meet Mr. Balliboy, the Norbury carrier, in the main road under the hill, to fetch the bones. For threepence, with an extra twopence for the carrier, Miss Pettifer was able to provide, with a few potatoes, a dinner for Polly, if only she took enough trouble about cooking it, for six days out of the seven.

Miss Pettifer held Polly so nailed to the kitchen table, as though it were a cross, that when Polly did find herself out of doors going for the bones, she could not avoid the pleasure of playing upon a bank near to the inn, with a tiny puppy that Susy’s nephew Tom led with a string.

Polly played with the puppy as though it were a summer’s day instead of an autumn one, and as if she were ten years old instead of near twenty.

Often it happens that a child is so happy
playing
that she doesn’t know when she is being watched. And if it so happens that a simple person, who thinks of himself but as a leaf in the wide tree—say a Mr. Solly—sees her, and notes the excitement of a girl’s pleasure as a bright shining star in a night’s blackness, and goes to his home comforted, though a man, then a girl’s joy has once more befriended a poor sinner. But, and if the watcher be of another kind, events may happen that show a game as a pretty chance for the Evil One.

Mr. Bugby liked Mrs. Chick. He was standing near to her now and watching Polly.

Nature had provided Mrs. Chick with a tongue as well as with a body that even now could please the men.

‘Chick be a fool,’ remarked the lady, ‘for ’e do want they strap leggings, same as thik Polly do hanker for Fred Pim, and same as silly Maud do want a baby.’

‘’Tis a world of wanting,’ replied
philosophical
Mr. Bugby, who remembered the brandy bottle that the Norbury carrier was to bring as far as the turning to Madder that very
afternoon
.

‘There bain’t no brandy in house now; ’tis finished,’ he said.

‘You be going to meet carrier, then?’

Mr. Bugby nodded.

The bird that had perched upon the church tower flew round the village and settled upon Madder hill.

‘Wants do come,’ said Mrs. Chick, ‘from what others do have, and I do tell silly Maud that if she wasn’t mad she’d be married.

‘There be thik merry maid too’—Mr. Bugby was watching Polly—‘that be so clean and tidy now, and ’twill all be extra washing for I wi’ she a-playing wi’ Tom’s puppy.

‘’Tis they Sunday ones,’ said Mrs. Chick crossly, who always showed a mother’s interest in underclothes when she was near a man, ‘’tain’t
they week-day’s, for they bain’t frilled same as they Sunday’s be.’

Mr. Bugby’s eyes followed Mrs. Chick’s looking.

‘She be going to fetch they bones and margarine,’ said Mrs. Chick.

Mrs. Chick spoke truly. Mr. Balliboy was bringing a pound of margarine as well as the bones to Miss Pettifer.

Polly kissed the puppy, fondled it lovingly for a moment, and handed it to Tom with a sigh. Having been playing so long with the puppy, there was now need for her to hurry. She ran past the inn, as she had once ran in the meadow when Mr. Bugby was watching.

Mr. Bugby watched her now….

As Mr. Balliboy handed Polly Miss Pettifer’s parcel under the hill, he said, in a tone of concern, looking beyond Polly and up the Madder lane, ‘There be wold Bugby coming, but where the hell be brandy bottle?’

In order to fetch out the bottle, Mr. Balliboy climbed backwards into the car and felt amongst the legs of his customers.

‘Brandy bottle were under seat safe enough,’ he remarked to Polly, when his head and half his body appeared again, ‘but where be en now?’

Mr. Balliboy sniffed and looked suspiciously at an old lady from Norbury, a Mrs. Morsay, under whose legs he had placed Mr. Bugby’s
brandy an hour before. Mr. Balliboy put his head into the car and sniffed again. Inside the car there was an unmistakable vinous odour.

‘No one haven’t drank poor landlord’s bottle?’ he asked, bringing out his head again, and looking up at the dull sky as though he thought the thief lived there.

But as no answer came to Mr. Balliboy’s question, either from the sky or from the car, he sat down in his seat and said to Polly as the car moved away, ‘I best be a-going, for thik Bugby be the woon to frighten poor ’omen, an’ Mrs. Morsay be timid.’

When Mr. Bugby reached the road he saw Mr. Balliboy’s car turn the corner and go out of sight.

But though the brandy bottle was gone, Polly Wimple was still there. The reason why she wasn’t half-way up the Madder downs by this time was a simple one. The string that had tied Miss Pettifer’s parcel of bones together was loosened, and one bone—that perhaps wished for burial—had fallen by the roadside. Polly wasn’t the kind of girl to leave anything behind her, and so she found the bone and fastened the parcel again, tying to it as well the pound of margarine.

Owing to the escape of this bone, Mr. Bugby came up to Polly when the parcel was safely tied again. The two walked together, but without speaking to one another.

There are other ways of thinking about a young
girl who walks by one’s side in the country than the poet Wordsworth’s. Mr. Bugby thought by a law of custom. That is to say, he always pursued the same road of thought before he reached to the consummation of his desires. He regarded each new girl that he went with as a mysterious circle of wonders, to be unwrapped, frightened into docility, and at last utterly rent and discovered.

Above the great road that leads elsewhere, and near to the top of the long Madder down over which Mrs. Pim was carried, there is a pretty copse. The trees in this little copse are covered with ivy, that gives a dark pleasant shade or shelter to any wayfarer who wishes to rest there. This little copse is far enough away from Madder village to prevent any one who wishes to read
Wood
and
Stone
or
Marius
the
Epicurean
from being disturbed there. It is also a suitable spot for young lovers to retire to upon a happy Sunday.

Upon each side of the lane outside the copse there are steep banks; and these banks have often provided the Madder children, who wander sometimes quite a long distance in fine weather, with a chance to roll.

Darkness, and even twilight that is deepening into darkness, produces sometimes dim forms that appear human, and yet they may be but tree stumps or hedgerow shadows.

Near to these high banks, and in the growing
and shadowy darkness, the landlord of ‘The Silent Woman’ touched Polly. Polly screamed, ran up the bank, but was caught by the foot.

She struggled, escaped again, for she was young and strong. She ran a few yards up the road and then stopped. Polly stopped because there was a large black bird in the road—a bird whose proper situation in nature is the sea, where it is credited by certain writers with an abnormal will to devour.

Upon such a darkening evening the bird appeared to be larger than its usual size, as it is seen in its natural home; and its being there at that hour was not the sort of sight to cheer a girl’s feelings who is trying to escape a ravisher.

The bird stretched out its neck, spread its wings, as this species will often do upon a rock at sea, and Polly was caught from behind….

Near to the high banks, and in the copse by the roadside, a large spider lived in a hollow tree. This spider had by nature and inheritance an interest in another form of natural life—the flies. The place of his retreat being so well chosen, and this interest of his so often and so easily consummated, he—for happy spiders even can be troubled by idleness—was sometimes
dissatisfied
with life.

Ever since this spider had seen Farmer Mew carrying a lamed sheep upon his back down the Madder fields—for he used to live that side of the hill—the wise spider had decided that man
was but a larger creation of his own kind, though of course more greedy, for the spider considered himself, as is usual with well-fed people, as but a moderate eater.

The spider looked out of his web—his eyes were like tiny beads of fire—in order to see what Mr. Bugby did with the struggling fly he had carried into the copse….

The spider watched until Mr. Bugby left the girl, who lay as still now as any fly that he had laid out in his nest; and then he left the shelter of his web to see what had happened.

When the spider left his web, the footsteps of Mr. Bugby could be heard going jauntily down the Madder hill towards the village.

Mr. Bugby was whistling.