Mockery Gap (13 page)

S
OMETHING
happened to Mr. Pattimore after eating the fish that he helped the fisherman to catch.

For at table, instead of looking up at the grand portrait, he would sometimes steal a hidden look at his wife’s shoe.

But not naughtily, and only in the manner of one who likes to think that there is anything both young and lovely in the world.

That peep carried Mr. Pattimore a little further perhaps from the Dean and all his chaste ideas than the good man intended to be carried. And when he uttered one afternoon in the presence of his wife, who was sewing a suspicious-looking garment—for she had now ceased to hide her work—the word ‘children,’ Mrs. Pattimore let fall her garment and blushed at the daisies. Alas! the blush soon faded, for Mr. Pattimore, speaking more to the green trees than to her—for they were sitting in the garden—remarked that ever since Mr. Pink had gone—and he feared the man might be dead—Miss Pink had asked him to try to do something to quiet the children.

‘They shout out such funny words in the lanes that they make me afraid,’ Miss Pink had told him.

‘I am afraid,’ said Miss Pink, ‘of something I don’t see.’

Mrs. Pattimore looked down at the daisies.

‘I want to do something for the children,’ her husband said. ‘Their names don’t carry them far to heaven, and I would like to help them.’

‘Give them your kite,’ said Mrs. Pattimore.

Mr. Pattimore didn’t answer her for a moment, but he looked at his wife — and blushed.

His kite, that he had brought with him when he first came to Mockery, had for all the years that he had been there hung in the great
wardrobe
in the best bedroom, that was his wife’s.

Mr. Pattimore didn’t look at the window of the dining-room in which was the portrait, but at the inland cliff.

‘Mrs. Moggs says,’ said Mr. Pattimore, wishing to bring more reasons to help the idea of his kite-flying than Miss Pink’s
nervousness
, ‘that the children rush into her shop in a crowd and demand sweets as though they were robbers; and when she shows them her pretty white mice they merely cry out that they ’re not Nellie-birds.’

‘Yes,’ said Mrs. Pattimore, looking up at him, ‘and Mr. Gulliver says that he believes they worship the devils that live in
Newfoundland
.’

‘Remember Dean Ashbourne,’ remarked Mr. Pattimore sternly, in order to stop his
wife from talking and himself from forgetting the desire of his life.

He still thought himself safe, and when he left her to go and fetch the kite—though she offered to go instead of him—he walked with the firm step of one who, though married, lives as if he were not.

On his way upstairs he wondered why he had not let her go instead of him. With each step he grew more and more nervous; he felt that to enter her room was to go into the very bowels of temptation. He stopped upon the landing and hesitated. He might even now go to the landing window and lean out and call meekly, ‘My dear, perhaps you had better after all fetch the kite, for I do not know where to find it.’

He stepped to the window, looking out with the intention of calling to her, but her chair under the window was empty, and she was standing beside the garden hedge talking to Miss Pink, who was in the lane, and asking her how her pain was.

Miss Pink’s pale face was looking up at hers, frightened.

‘I must find the kite myself,’ Mr. Pattimore decided.

He hadn’t visited his wife’s bedroom since the morning when he saw his sin in loving her so devotedly and—he knew it then—so naughtily.

To continue in that way was, he knew, the very thing that the Dean—godly man!—blamed the world for—this continuous married wantonness.

‘Fornication,’ the good man would remark to his friends at Oxford, ‘can never be so heinous, because it’s damned in the act, whereas this—even good men sometimes speak well of.’

Mr. Pattimore remembered how he had followed the Dean’s manners and wishes so soon after he took the girl, and he almost shouted out even now with shame when he remembered how he had once been naked in a field.

‘But I’m not even a rector yet,’ thought Mr. Pattimore, and moved excitedly to her bedroom door.

He opened the door hurriedly, making a great deal of noise, in order to frighten all temptation away, and, looking neither to the right hand nor to the left, he went direct to the wardrobe and opened it.

Mr. Pattimore stepped back.

The white frock hung there, the very one that had looked so transparent when she rested upon the dry grass that day upon the cliff.

He must touch it now as he touched it then. No, hardly like that!—because the place the kite was hidden in was behind the frock.

Mr. Pattimore had discovered by much practice a simple way of life, that Mr. Moody
the noted postman of Madder had always
followed
—that of putting an ugly thing in his eye, instead of a pretty one.

And so now—and he did it manfully—he forced himself to think of the pretty frock as though it were a garment of Mrs Pottle’s—a woman Mr. Pattimore immensely disliked—that he had once seen hanging upon a hedge, and that even Mr. Caddy hadn’t the hardihood to stare at.

‘Mrs. Pottle’s,’ he said, ‘Mrs. Pottle’s petticoat. The kite must be here somewhere.’ Mr. Pattimore searched for it. He began to move other garments, though without troubling himself to think of them as Mrs. Pottle’s because they were such little ones. But in order to get to the kite he was forced to put them to one side.

As he did so, he saw what they were—all tiny things that infant children use, and sewn with stitches that any Arab would have envied.

Mr. Pattimore, looking at these pretty things, wondered what they had to do with her.

‘She is my wife,’ said Mr. Pattimore. His thoughts went out of him and crept queerly backwards.

But why in his thoughts did she wear her wedding frock?

And now here were these baby clothes.

Mr. Pattimore tore the kite from the bottom of the wardrobe, and fled.

I
T
was a simple fact, and only Mrs. Topple hadn’t noticed it, that the fisherman—and some there were who said he wasn’t as young as he looked—could be sad as well as careless.

Once he had been seen—by Esther, who felt the sight so that she couldn’t help telling Mrs. Moggs about it—sitting upon the Blind Cow Rock, during a low tide when the rock could be reached without wetting one’s feet at all, and weeping.

It was natural enough that this strange thing should be talked about in a village where the people were so settled in their foolishness as to believe in the real existence of fire-drakes and Nellie-birds.

This sadness of the fisherman could well have been attributed to the rude way the
children
treated him, for whenever a chance occurred they would rush out upon him and upset his basket of fish, that he was perhaps carrying to the vicarage, into the dust of the road.

Had the fisherman brought sorrow or
gladness
to Mockery? This was a point that the dwellers in the little Gap answered differently.

Mrs. Topple said nothing; but Mr. Cheney wasn’t sorry now that he had come, because the excitement prevented any one from noticing
that he had dug a tunnel into the centre of the tumulus upon the cliff, hoping to find the golden earrings.

. . .

Mr. Pattimore now stood—feeling the queer sensation of one who holds in his hand
something
that has been hidden for many a long year—beside his garden hedge, with his kite, that possessed a fine tail, ten yards in length.

He wanted the rude children; he wanted to get them back to better manners, as became their Bible names, by means of his kite.

But where were the rude children? Mr. Pattimore could see no one.

But no, he was wrong, for some one was passing.

This passer-by was Mrs. Pring, who walked a little and then waited and looked about her as though something queer had happened in the village and she wished to discover what it was.

Mrs. Pattimore, after speaking to Miss Pink, who was merely going to her cottage from the shop, had naturally followed her husband’s footsteps and was gone into the bedroom after he had left it in order to tidy the wardrobe, that she knew he would leave in confusion.

Mr. Pattimore looked about for the
children
, but only saw Mrs. Pring.

At the further corner of the vicarage garden there was a small gate, intended perhaps by
the designer of the garden to provide a poor clergyman a way of escape from the
tax-gatherer
, or the village beggar man. To this gate, that was but a few yards from Mrs. Pottle’s cottage, Mr. Pattimore betook
himself
, still carrying his great kite. And from there he watched an event that certainly
astonished
him in no small degree, considering how he as well as every one else in Mockery knew all about the quarrel between the Prings and the Pottles.

As a rule, Mrs. Pring would pass by Mrs. Pottle’s cottage with her eyes more than half closed and with the look of a woman who hates her neighbour most heartily. She would even stand for a moment and listen and then, hearing the tick of a clock, she would shake her head and mutter between her teeth, ‘’Tis only a very common clock that be going.’

Whether Mr. Pattimore fancied at that moment that the children had flown up into the sky, we do not know, but he looked up, perhaps to notice, in the interest of his kite flying, whether the winds were blowing.

Above him there happened to be settled a large black cloud like a great bird. Looking down from the cloud again, Mr. Pattimore beheld Mrs. Pring go near to Mrs. Pottle, who was standing in her garden, and speak to her.

‘What be the right time?’ inquired Mrs. Pring. Mr. Pattimore stared in astonishment.

Mrs. Pottle went into the house; she
returned
therefrom proudly, and replied that it was four o’clock.

‘Mary Gulliver, her that be called t’ other Mary in village’—Mrs. Pring was now talking as though to an intimate friend—‘she be got like it.’

Mr. Pattimore couldn’t run away. To make any movement would be to betray that he was there, and that he was listening, and so he
remained
very still.

‘Mr. Gulliver,’ said Mrs. Pottle, taking from the hedge the very garment that Mr. Pattimore had tried to see instead of the muslin frock, ‘’e that do believe in monsters, be a strict father to ’is maid.’

‘If anything were to happen, ’e ’d as soon turn she into road as spit into fire.’

‘Yes, and though a man mid allow all the rabbits in Mockery to live rent-free in ’s meadow lands, same as ’e do live ’isself—’e may be funny.’

‘’E be funny,’ said Mrs. Pring. ‘If she’s baby do come, without she being a wife, ’twill be murder.’

Mrs. Pottle looked gloomily at the sky. ‘Where be all they children gone?’ she
inquired
.

Mrs. Pring opened the cottage gate and went nearer still to Mrs. Pottle.

‘’Tis thik fisherman,’ she said, ‘that all be
following, except they who bain’t willing to leave their homes.’

‘Ducks do swim upon Mr. Caddy’s pond, and ’e bain’t there.’

‘Wold Pring be gone.’

‘Mrs. Cheney do follow where her son Simon do go.’

‘Wold Cheney do bide home.’

‘Or else do dig on hill for gold.’

‘But Mrs. Topple don’t notice nothing, only they leaves.’

‘Mother Moggs don’t leave her shop where white mice do bide.’

‘All they maids be gone.’

‘Children be gone.’

The cloud hung silent.

‘Where be Mrs. Pattimore?’ asked Mrs. Pring.

‘She be gone after fisherman too,’ answered Mrs. Pottle.

A gust of wind that is named in Norfolk a Rogers blast came upon Mr. Pattimore with all the suddenness of an explosion, and carried—as if it were come for that very purpose—the kite away.

The women saw it go, and, taking the same fright that hens do when they see a hawk above, hurried both together into Mrs. Pottle’s
doorway
, exclaiming that the Nellie-bird was come to destroy them all.

The cloud, as soon as it had brought the
blast that carried off Mr. Pattimore’s kite,
immediately
disappeared, and the sun shone and a fresh summer wind blew that took the kite higher. The ball of string to which the kite was attached had unwound rapidly, though the end still remained in Mr. Pattimore’s hand.

Mr. Pattimore now felt that he was being strangely guided in a manner that Dean
Ashbourne
could never have expected and so had never advised him about. The string tugged at him, as the kite, borne aloft by a pretty strong breeze from the north, sailed over the Mockery meadows.

Mr. Pattimore clambered through the hedge and so followed the kite, but the string with an extra jerk slipped through his hand and was gone.

The kite as soon as ever it felt itself free went along in fine fashion, until the string managed to become entangled in one of the trees of Mockery wood, and the kite remained almost stationary in the sky.

Mr. Pattimore saw it there, and, bethinking himself of the star that led the wise men of the East, he followed to the wood.

In the centre of Mockery wood there used to be—at least when the writer of this tale first trespassed there—a ruined church. This church—and it was certainly still there when Mr. Pattimore lived in Mockery—was very much hidden. Those visitors, Mr. James
Tarr, Miss Ogle, and the rest, hadn’t found it; indeed, few people—even in this day when everything is discovered, except the peace of God (that none wish for)—know that if they trespass far into Mockery wood they will find a church.

When he crossed the meadow in order to reach the wood, above which the kite merrily floated in the summer airs, Mr. Pattimore came upon another person—he passed Mr. Pring returning to the village again—who was watching the kite too. This was Mrs. Topple, who while looking in the lanes for clover had seen the kite go by, and had followed it for nearly the same reason as Mr. Pattimore, only instead of a truant wife it was a fine stalk of clover that she hoped it would lead her to.

Mrs. Topple appeared to be careworn and haggard; her white face looked down, as if all the hope of finding what she wished for had long ago fled away, and now she had nothing to do but to look down at the ground for ever and until the end.

But Mrs. Topple wasn’t the only one who had wandered out that evening of strange happenings. For, going down into a little hollow in the field where a pit used to be, Mr. Pattimore came upon the smallholder Gulliver, who was staring up at the kite in a wild manner, and who at once, as soon as he saw the
clergyman
, began to declare that a flying fish must
have broken loose from India: ‘And ’tis most likely,’ said Mr. Gulliver, ‘that the Caribs will follow, who do eat men, and ’tain’t likely they will miss over me poor Mary, who be plump and tasty.’

‘Where is the other Mary, then?’ asked Mr. Pattimore, catching, though most
unaccountably
, the fears of Gulliver.

‘She be gone down to the sea, where Caribs do come from,’ was the mournful reply. And Mr. Gulliver, evidently seeing all the other Mary as devoured beyond recall, walked sadly across the meadow in the direction of his home.

The evening, though fair on the whole, was behaving as if it wished to hasten the coming midsummer night by allowing dark clouds to hang in the sky and to remain still—for no wind blasts came now—above Mockery Gap.

As Mr. Pattimore entered the wood, the dimness caused by the clouds and the leafy trees so darkened his path that he feared it wouldn’t be easy to find the tree that flew his kite.

Mr. Pattimore was uncertain which way to go.

The scent of a wood, heavy-laden with all summer growings, carried Mr. Pattimore back to his childhood as the kite had done. In just such a wood had he and his little sister played at being the Babes, until his father, who
appeared
at the very moment when the children
were covering themselves with leaves,
discovered
them and sent them to bed.

The trees in Mockery wood—and Mr. Pink had never been able to do anything about them—had an uncomfortable habit of falling over each other that made wandering under their shadows a little tiresome. But this habit suited some people, for to Miss Dinah Pottle’s
satisfaction
there were always plenty of fallen boughs, and Mr. Caddy was always perfectly right when he said ‘that soft beds abounded everywhere in Mockery wood.’

Sometimes before we know it new
surroundings
will make us strange to ourselves and do odd things.

Near to the portrait of the Dean, Mr.
Pattimore
had been up to that moment, if we except the honeymoon, only mindful that he abode with a Dorcas in all humbleness and chastity. But now, in the silence of the wood and with no one near to him but a white owl that sat and winked above its hole in a hollow tree, Mr. Pattimore spoke softly the word ‘Nellie.’

Mr. Pattimore slowly made his way along deeper into the wood, where denser weeds grew and where the fallen trees more than ever encumbered the way.

He went by the place, a fair mossy bank, where Mr. Gulliver, having peeped into the wood—for no other or better reason than to see what a wood looked like—beheld the monster.

The scent of the wood weeds grew sweeter.

Mr. Pattimore forgot the kite, he almost forgot himself—he listened. A sound of merriment, the call of happy voices, and a song that went with a children’s dance came to him from somewhere in the wood. These sounds ceased soon, as sounds will that are so
doubtfully
heard as scarcely to be believed in. But soon again, and quite near to him this time, Mr. Pattimore heard sounds—voices.

He broke through a few low bushes and listened.

Some one was there, and quite near by. ‘Even though thee bain’t nor duck,’ a voice said, ‘thee mid be better to listen than wold owl in tree that I’ve been talking to.’

‘I came here to look for my husband, who’s lost his kite,’ a soft voice said.

‘’Twasn’t nor kite,’ said the other in an annoyed tone. ‘’Twas thik Nellie-bird.’

Mr. Pattimore clambered on. ‘Nellie,’ he said, ‘Nellie.’

He hardly knew what he said, but at the next step he made he slipped and fell, spraining his ankle. He tried to stand, but the pain was too much and he fell again. He crawled a little, hoping to hear the voices again. But he heard nothing. He was now near to a glade that continued, though Mr. Pattimore did not know it, all the length of the wood and at last reached the sea.

Mr. Pattimore had climbed a little grassy bank, and the glade was below him.

He groaned because of the pain that he was in, and waited; the evening was full of strange sounds.

The singing had begun again, the dance song. A little higher up the glade, where the ruined church was, the singing sounded more and more clearly.

At last, from an old archway that Mr.
Pattimore
could but dimly see, a group of merry children came dancing; each child carried a foxglove in its hand, and was singing.

They passed by Mr. Pattimore.

Behind the children came the new fisherman, and with him, holding his hand, was Esther. And soon Rebecca and Dinah and Mary passed silently behind them.

They were not gone out of sight before two more, a couple in close conversation, came by—Mrs. Pattimore and Mr. Caddy.

Mr. Pattimore shut his eyes.

When he opened them, he wondered what he had better do in order to get out of the wood.

He decided to crawl, and had proceeded, indeed, for a little way, until he encountered—for this summer evening was indeed an
exceptional
one—a god in distress.

For upon the mossy stump where the hermit of old was wont to pray, Mr.
Pattimore
found Simon Cheney.

This young gentleman was lying upon his face, and, after the usual custom of little gods when they don’t get exactly what they want, he was screaming and kicking with vexation and grief.