Innocent Birds (2 page)

M
R
. P
IM
had not lived long in Madder before it became clear to those who saw him that he shone most of all by means of his cheeks, which were of a high colour even in winter, for in those dull days the wind took the part of the summer sun to keep their colour upon them.

When Pim spoke it would be in a low tone, and only when he sang his song, ‘In from Spain‚’ a song that Mr. Pim believed he himself belonged to, did the real man appear.

It was then that his whiskers lived.

But Mr. Pim’s difference from other people—and his fame arose from this difference—lay in the fact that he had his doubts about some quite ordinary happenings in nature, happenings that most simple-minded people take for granted.

He was catholic enough and modest enough, however, to approach any one whom he thought ought to know more than he knew for advice respecting these doubts, hoping one day to
dissipate
them. And so with his song, that one day might become true, and his doubt transformed into belief, we may hope as well as Pim that some day strange events may come.

Perhaps it was not all chance that Mr. Pim
should have been born in a small hamlet, about two miles from God’s Madder, where there were willow trees, and a little brook to be crossed by the children on their way to school. No doubt destiny arranged that. Destiny also arranged that John should walk to school with Minna Bond, who wore socks, and where they didn’t reach to there was white skin, a little silky. During these walks Minna would confide all her secrets to little John.

Coming home from school, as was natural, she was more talkative than in going, because she often had some new experience or other, met with in her play there, to tell of.

‘I’ve been playing wi’ Jackie and Bert, under they trees, at being married‚’ Minna remarked one afternoon, as they went together down the lane, under the great elm tree, where the
missel-thrush
built its nest. ‘An’ now I’ve ’ee to walk wi’, an’ at home there be grandfer waiting for a game.’ Minna laughed noisily, as though she saw no end to her enjoyments. She also looked scornfully and in a superior manner at three cows that were feeding in a meadow, and threw a stone at them just to show that she was a girl, while they were mere cows.

The next day Minna ran out from her cottage with a new idea in her head, her frock unfastened and her socks showing the wrong side.

The doctor had come in the night, and she had been awakened from a nice dream about being
married by frightful screams, and still more awful groans, that came very distinctly through the thin wooden partition into little Minna’s room. Minna had heard of the Day of Judgment: she supposed it was come, and stopped her ears and hid her head under the bedclothes. When she peeped out again she heard the doctor washing his hands, and the nurse, Mrs. Tory, say very despairingly, ‘Thee’s bed be worse ruined than when t’ other did come, for there bain’t a dry patch on en.’

And as though to confirm Mrs. Tory’s words about the bed, a tiny voice began to cry that Minna thought was a little pig’s.

In the field where the cows were, Minna taunted John Pim.

‘You can’t make a baby like my mammy,’ she said.

John wisely replied, as so many have done before him, ‘that he didn’t know what he could do until he tried.’

Minna laughed and ran on, lifting her heels higher than was necessary.

When school was over she walked home in a very thoughtful manner, and kept away from John.

‘No, don’t ’ee touch I,’ she said in a grand knowing way, when John tried to pull her off the stepping-stones into the brook. ‘Don’t ’ee touch I, for ’tis most like ’ee ’d do it.’

‘Do what?’ asked John, with one foot on a stone and the other held high above the water.

‘’Tis two that kiss same as black slugs in wet grass that do bring a baby; ’tain’t Mrs. Tory.’

She ran away laughing, partly because of what she had said, and partly because John’s foot had slipped and he had fallen backwards into the water.

John wanted to know more. But he did not ask Minna to explain the matter better, because ‘they maidens be so fun making’; and so
instead
he asked the school teacher. After
receiving
a pretty sharp caning for his inquiry, John decided in his child’s mind that it must be a very hard matter, and a very troublesome one, to make a baby. As he grew older, he very much doubted whether such a difficult task could ever be managed by him, even if Minna, and later Annie, would modestly help.

When John Pim was grown to man’s estate, and began to court Annie Brine, who was in service with Miss Pettifer at Weyminster, he very naturally looked forward to his wedding day with a more than common anxiety.

John hoped that his mind would be then relieved of the doubt that troubled it.

And even if his doubt wasn’t removed then, Annie had told him that Miss Pettifer was well able, both by breeding and education, to answer any question, however hard, that was put to her; and so Pim trusted that his Annie’s mistress wouldn’t allow such a state of sad ignorance to always clog the life of the husband of her late faithful handmaiden. The wedding day came,
as such days will, sooner than expected, and poor Pim was rendered more than usually nervous by the extreme wonder and whiteness of Annie’s wedding frock. He tried not to listen to his new boots, creaking as he walked up the church aisle with her, and he looked down at his black trousers—likewise new—hoping that they would comfort him, and explain why Annie looked so different. In the pocket of those very wedding trousers—and no doubt it is there still—there was, for Annie had asked him to keep it safe, a letter that Miss Pettifer had written a day or two before to Annie Brine.

Two months after his wedding, Mr. Pim, having gone to market with three of Farmer Barfoot’s fat hogs, met Miss Pettifer in the Weyminster High Street, and touching his hat with extreme reverence, thanked her for her letter.

Miss Pettifer, who had just threatened to put her new servant, Miss Parsons, and her tin box into the road, looked kindly at Pim, and asked if there was anything she could do to help his wife.

Pim, seeing so much friendliness in Miss Pettifer, and thinking her a very learned lady as well as a kind one, asked her a simple question that had troubled him during many a married night. ‘Be thik the notion?’ Mr. Pim had ended the conversation very simply by saying.

Instead of answering Pim, as any decent lady who was well over forty would have done, by either saying that she didn’t know, or else that as far as her own learning went he had done as well as a man could, and should leave the rest to nature, Miss Pettifer threw her glove at him, and went to a policeman, who smilingly informed Pim ‘that questions of they sorts were best left for inn parlours.’

Mr. Pim ruefully entered the Unicorn.

S
UMMER
days are more pleasantly spent in Madder than elsewhere, because whichever way you may turn, provided you don't turn to the rectory, there are lambs skipping, larks
singing
, cows modestly feeding, now in the shadow and now in the sun, and horses that regard the meadows as their own.

Rabelais of Chinon in France had a simple modest word of praise to give to the little town where he lived—and if we do but borrow we harm no one. For if we look up in Madder, too, there is the hill, and if we look down there are the meadows. Though one isn't a happy cow, one can chew the green grass and buttercups as well as they, by merely looking, and so become nearly as modest and ruminatingly happy as a beast. If the days go by and we do nothing more than watch, as Mr. Solly did when he had planted his garden, we should be no less happy than the daisies that only grow, whiten the green for a little, and then sink into the earth again, as we must all do. Mr. Solly looked at the simple green things of Madder, that most people take so little thought of, because he was there for that very purpose—to see what would happen. And
as he knew that the moon daisies must know all about ‘that cloud' as well as Aunt Crocker, he watched and walked in the fields as well as regarding the men and women that he met. Solly had not been at Madder very long before the green fields as well as the lane that led him there took the form in his imagination, confirmed by Mrs. Crocker's vision, of holy ground. A long time had been spent by some one in making them exactly what they were, and in making them so suitable for a good gift. God's gift Solly knew would be a pretty one, a present worth the waiting for through a few dark winter days and summer sultry ones. Solly would see the new spring colour that made of Madder a patchwork quilt; and also note the time of the fall, when the dyed garment of Madder took a more natural and earthly colour that, besides a nice coolness of texture, remains the longest.

Mr. Solly's white pinks were so fine when July came in, that every one said that, though the late occupier of the cottage—Minnie Cuddy—had some very beautiful white hens, yet Mr. Solly's white pinks were even more lovely. The scent of these white pinks now came into Solly's open window, as well as a white butterfly, that flew in for no better reason than to settle for a moment upon the book that Mr. Solly had before him. Perhaps the butterfly had a mind to know from Mr. Solly what the book was about, for it
remained settled there until Solly took it up and put it gently out of the window.

Mr. Solly opened the book, now that the
butterfly
was gone to the pinks again. The book was
A
History
of
America,
by R. Mackenzie, and Aunt Crocker had given it to him. Though Mr. Solly had never been to America, he liked to read its history. He thought of this history in his own manner of thinking as inspired, believing every word of the particular account that the book gave him. ‘America stopped,' thought Mr. Solly, ‘where the history ended.' Solly could never have brought himself to see America, as so many do, as a wide chess-board sort of prairie, with Noah's ark trees, and cities like so many high hats, put about in the fields. Mr. Mackenzie certainly told him of a very different place to that. Although Solly believed that America was still inhabited by people, yet had he gone there he would have certainly expected to see the old order still in being.

‘There are texts there that will please you,' Aunt Crocker had said. Solly thought so too, and he liked the Americans for what they had been, and for what they had done. He saw them in the past as written large—as interesting people should be—by Mr. Mackenzie; not in the
mocking
learned way that modern historians tap old barrels of former days, drawing them dry, but with the modest reserve of a wise man who lets a character step into a page and go his ways.

Solly opened his book. The Madder honey that he had eaten for his dinner had tasted as lovely as the white pinks smelt. He thought of Deborah Crocker with befitting gratitude, and wished to see what some one in America had been doing. He opened upon a good man. His name was Roger Williams. He was a clergyman—‘godly and zealous.'

Solly was glad to have met him. He felt sure that Mr. Williams would have liked his aunt, and when he knelt down on the grass to smell the white pinks before going out, he told them softly that ‘Roger was a clergyman.'

Mr. Solly suited Madder well enough. He fell into its ways as soon as he came there. He liked Mr. Tucker, the Dodderdown clergyman who preached in Madder on Sunday afternoons, and who used to be, when she lived, a friend of Mrs. Crocker's. He also liked Farmer Barfoot's little brown and spotted pigs that ran grunting, in a high state of excitement, in the lanes.

At Madder, Solly was more often called ‘Mrs. Crocker's nephew' than Mr. Solly; because the man who brought the furniture to Gift Cottage had given that name to him, telling Mr. Billy, whom he stopped to speak to, ‘There do go Mrs. Crocker's nephew behind load, same as me lame dog do run.'

And so when Mr. Solly mentioned his aunt, he did no more than what the people expected. But when Pim and Chick heard him come out
with a text from his book, they put him down as being a better-informed person in the way of the world than a mere ‘Aunt Crocker's nephew' was likely to be.

No one in Madder is ever liked for what they are, but always for something that belongs to them; some oddity like the farmer's lame foot, that is nearer than a possession, and is easier to understand than the man himself, who is ever a mystery, not to Madder folk alone, but to wise Solomon in Jerusalem too. Mr. Solly had two strings to his bow: his aunt's words, that he so well remembered, and his texts. He either went with his aunt or with the Americans. And whichever of the two he spoke from, his words were always listened to with attention by Madder gossips, and a remark would follow at the end of them, such as, ‘They Americans bain't all b—— fools,' or else, ‘Thik Solly's wold aunt, she were a woman.' So carefully did Madder avoid committing itself.