Mockery Gap (15 page)

M
R.
G
ULLIVER
had never seen any one casting a net, and so, when he released his cows from the narrow lane into the wide meadow that was next to the sea, he thought he would go down this summer afternoon and watch the fisherman, who was then casting out from his boat a net into the sea.

The Mockery children, who were oddly quiet now, were watching too, and Simon Cheney might have been there had he wished, but he had gone to Mr. Gulliver’s cottage
hoping
that Mary would let him in, now that her father was out of the way.

Mr. Gulliver stood a little apart from the waves, upon the edge of his own field, where a few rushes grew.

He was thoughtful, though he did not think at the moment about his monsters; but wondered, as many a simple-minded father has wondered before him, why the other Mary had lost her happy colour and was become so pensive and so sad.

‘She used to dance and run,’ he thought, ‘but now she do walk slow.’

A wise parent often shuts his eyes tight to what is happening, and thus, although Mr. Gulliver was always willing enough to listen, he never looked. But the other Mockery eyes
were open enough though his were shut, and, with the exception perhaps of Mrs. Pattimore, all knew what Mary’s trouble was, and why she looked so pale.

‘A pretty maid,’ Mr. Caddy had often told those wise ducks of his, who were the best of listeners, ‘don’t lie down upon they green bank beds for nothing, when Simon Peter be about.’

And often when Mary went by the pond, wearing an apron over her thin summer frock, she would look longingly at Mr. Caddy’s ducks as if to ask for their advice in her trouble.

Every one wonders, and very naturally too, what would happen if a boy let off a water pistol in the face of a dean—Dean Ashbourne, most likely, as he was standing—such a stern one!—in his cathedral pew. And this same sort of wonder was running in Mockery as to how Mr. Gulliver would take an event that must be very soon.

Mr. Gulliver, though very kind to rabbits and very interested in monsters, was, as we know, one of those who believed entirely in a very strict set of proper manners in a home, having never forgotten Mr. Pattimore’s
precepts
delivered to him after his wife was buried.

‘Never,’ he used to say to Mary, when she would tell him how naughty the sky looked and how naked the earth, while Simon always had
clothes about him, and she too—‘never has one of they babies come to our home before the maid be married.’

No one, and certainly not Mary, ‘she that be t’ other,’ as the rude children had called her, could bear to think for a moment of anything that came naked into the world. Such a
happening
must point from everlasting to a dire state of iniquity, for born nakedly showed
backwards
as well as forwards an awful wickedness.

And so Mary, with a secret fear in her heart that one day she might behold something as shameful as the sky when it is reddest, went her ways a little sadly, and sat at home sometimes while Mr. Gulliver drove out the cows to the meadows, wishing, no doubt, that God Simon might knock at her door with the wedding-ring.

Ever since the arrival of the Nellie-bird—for all the village called him that now—the Mockery sea had altered its complexion in the eyes of the Mockery folk.

For one thing, some who had never been near to it, such as Mrs. Moggs, and others too, now came to look, if not wholly to taste of the waters.

Before the arrival of the Nellie-bird, the people had regarded the sea as an odd sort of person, a little like Mr. Pring’s weather, though whether beast, man, or woman they could never determine. Certainly they were sure that the sea was silly, if not gone entirely
foolish in the head, having formed the
ridiculous
habit of foaming with its many mouths open and distorting its features into the most ugly grimaces.

‘They jumping waters bain’t got all their senses,’ Mrs. Pring had once informed Mr. Gulliver. And even poor unnoticed John Pottle, a character that the wise Wang might have written of, did notice as he carried Dinah’s faggot—not out of politeness, but only to hide himself the more—that the sea had departed, in a sulky fit of springtime
madness
, almost entirely out of sight.

Besides looking so foolish, Mockery was well aware that the sea also showed the uneasiness of its habits by casting up—‘sicking up,’ Mrs. Pottle would have said—all sorts of things in such a variety that a small basket of them would have provided Mr. James Tarr with all the matter he needed for a lecture of some hours.

There was the monkey, and the torpedo, and the dead nigger that the former fisherman, Mr. Dobbin, came upon and wished himself anywhere else but on the seashore when he made the last discovery.

Besides much else, there was the sealed bottle that Mr. Pink had found, that contained a little slip of paper, upon which was written in a classical hand, ‘Beware of the horned beast.’

If any one had ever seen the sea in a concrete manner it might have been Mrs. Pring, who thought one day, looking at the waves from her garden, that the sea was like an old bull with a white curly head, having the same
restless
habits and manners as Mr. Cheney’s when he played with the cows.

The tides were always a mystery. For honest John had reported to Mr. Caddy, who was very much frightened at the time for fear that his pond might behave in the same manner, that ‘there bain’t nor sea.’

On the other hand, when the waves were right up to the wood one day, and Mother Pottle was helping Dinah with her sticks, that lady supposed that the earth had one night been cut through at that point by the devil, and that God, in order to hold the earth together again, had filled up the gap with salt water instead of glue.

In any country place, when two or three are gathered together, something of interest is always expected to happen. Boors and
stablemen
, cottage women and shadows, will often stand near to one another in the fond hope that something may come of it; and if only a rat run out from between the stones of Farmer Cheney’s barn, or a slut of a girl run by, raising her skirts naughtily at the men, the company return to their homes and feel that something has been done.

The Mockery children, tamer now and more silent, are watching the fisherman, hoping to get again the same sort of excitement that they had in the wood. Esther is with them, and they do not even stone her, though there are plenty of stones; and Dinah too, who has no trouble—though she certainly, as well as Rebecca, deserved to have—can cheerfully be with the children and watch the Nellie-bird.

Those who have never been near to the sea, except when by chance the sea has been near to them, are near to it now. Mrs. Pottle and Mrs. Pring, with their shadows lying together upon the sands, are at the very sea’s edge, and regard the waters with true human greed, hoping to have the first chance to steal a mackerel, supposing the fisherman do catch any.

Although the waters were not home, Mrs. Pottle looked at them exactly as though they were the fine clock upon her mantel that could tick so loudly.

The waves splashed, and the same thoughts were in her mind about them as when the clock ticked, for the sea was there to yield up its mackerel to her as the clock its minutes.

Mrs Pring looked not only into the water, but sometimes at the rough blackness of the Blind Cow Rock, in the pleased manner of one who has a better cow at home than her
neighbour
has.

‘Poor Mrs. Topple,’ remarked Mrs. Pottle, eyeing the movements of the fisherman, who was now getting his net in nearer to the shore; ‘she were so glad to find leaf, that Mr. Tarr did tell of, that she did fall down from high bank to strike they rough stones in lane.’

‘And policeman did say “natural causes” before ’e turned she over in road.’

‘And true ’twere a natural cause for teacher to want to heal they pains in she’s leg.’

‘We do all want to get well.’

‘So we do,’ said Mrs. Pottle.

‘Children do stay quiet,’ murmured Mrs. Pring.

‘But now they bain’t so noisy they be more hungry, and Esther, now that she don’t run out to be naughty in lane, be always asking for fish for dinner.’

‘’Tis to be hoped that fisherman do catch a mackerel; but see, they children be going to help fisherman.’

Besides the two women, who were watching with astonishment the children standing near the fisherman and pulling in the net, Mr. Pring and Mr. Gulliver were watching with wonder too, for neither of them had ever seen the Mockery children perform any act other than a naughty one.

The women moved nearer.

The holy peace of a summer’s afternoon, sweet as the scent of the lily-of-the-valley,
visited the scene. The green shade of the wood darkened the colour of the sea, while the sea, with its tiny waves warmed, happily danced. But the Blind Cow Rock cast a black shadow.

The women watched, holding out their hands. They expected at any moment to see the splash of the shining bodies of the fish.

But the fisherman, although the sun shone upon his hair and beard, his cap being cast to one side, didn’t look so free and gay as usual. He wasn’t singing, his happy manners were changed to his sad ones, so that Mrs. Pring fancied that she could recognise in him even a look of the unfortunate Mr. Dobbin.

The afternoon’s catch was certainly very near to the shore now; but whatever it was that the fisherman had in his net—and it appeared very heavy—he didn’t wish the children to stay close by. Perhaps he supposed that their former ways would return and that they would bite and scratch one another to get hold of the fishes.

He even told Esther and Dinah to go away too, though Esther considered herself now to be every bit as grown-up as her cousin, and as well able to love anything or to see anything as ever was Dinah when Simon followed her into the wood.

The children went, as the fisherman told them to do, into the wood to gather sticks, and Esther and Dinah walked slowly along the lane
to their cottage, chattering about different coloured ribbons, and much disappointed that they were not allowed to see the fish that the Nellie-bird had caught in his net.

But in the place of the children a new helper had arrived. This was Mr. Caddy, who had informed his ducks that he had two good reasons for going down to the sea this
afternoon
. One was that his wife was washing, an occupation to which he hated to be anywhere near, because once—and this happened the very day that Mr. Tarr descended upon the village—Mrs. Caddy had asked her husband to wring a blanket.

‘’Twas a suggestion,’ Mr. Caddy told the ducks, ‘that I don’t wish to hear never again.’

And so as a rule when the copper was
heating
Mr. Caddy would walk away.

The second reason was—and a simple one—that Mr. Caddy, since Pottle had told him it wasn’t anywhere, had a natural desire to note if the sea had come back again.

And now Mr. Caddy, finding that the sea was come, looked into it most uncomfortably, because the fisherman invited him to help with the net.

Mr. Caddy decided that the sea had
betrayed
him, and that in future he would take the way to the churchyard, where the folk didn’t pull at nets or wash clothes, but lay always happy in wormy beds—Caddy’s own
favourite word—like logs of wood who
possessed
better manners than to become coal.

The catch was now brought in and laid upon the warmed sand.

‘’Tain’t no monster, be en, ’tain’t no tiger?’ inquired Mr. Gulliver, coming down slowly to the sands, to which Mr. Pring had descended before him.

‘No,’ replied Mr. Pring, ‘nor a bear neither….’

Mr. Caddy bent down pityingly over the two drowned women, who were holding one another. He covered their faces with Miss Pink’s shawl that had been caught in the net too and brought to shore.

‘They bells be silent now,’ said Mr. Caddy, ‘and Miss Pink’s nose be hid for ever.’

‘So it be,’ remarked Mr. Pring.

‘An’ Mother Moggs won’t be called a liar no more.’

As he followed Mr. Gulliver’s waggon, in which the sad burdens netted in the sea were placed tenderly, Mr. Caddy bethought him of his ducks and of the story he would have to tell them of his first and last visit to the Mockery sea.

I
T
was the first Sunday in September, and the first cool wind from the north blew over Mockery Gap, as if to remind any one who wished to play while the summer lingered to hurry to the meadows.

Mr. Pattimore now felt safer and more protected against that snare to the flesh, poor Dorcas, than he had been for some weeks.

He had been laid up, chastised by God—possibly by means of a prayer from Dean Ashbourne—with a sprained ankle, in the upper chamber.

Evidently this chastisement had come because he had said more than once, with the same kind of wanton thoughts that had met him in the wood, the name ‘Nellie.’

All the while he was in bed—and he was there until he knew each lump in his mattress as if it was his nearest relation—she was ‘Dorcas,’ and when he went out again she was ‘Dorcas’ still.

‘I mustn’t,’ he said, when he was
downstairs
once more, ‘ever look at the sea, for it was there too, when I caught those fish with the fisherman, that former things came into my mind.’

During his first walk, that he took with the help of a stick, he had boldly confronted the
fisherman, who was dancing with the children upon the green, while Mr. Pottle, noticed at last because he could play the flute, provided the music.

Mr. Pattimore spoke strongly; he told the fisherman that he ought to be catching cod-fish far out in the wide waters of the ocean, instead of playing with the children and allowing
himself
to be called the Nellie-bird, a name that could be found nowhere in the Bible.

‘You have only,’ said Mr. Pattimore, ‘shown the children a new way to be wicked; for now, instead of shouting out bad words and stoning the cats, they play games with singing and dance to damnation.’

This walk was upon a Saturday, and now that Sunday was come Mr. Pattimore preached from a favourite text—a little altered to taste—that a dean must be blameless.

His high hopes, however, of becoming one had, ever since the new fisherman had come to Mockery, been but futile.

During all this time Dean Ashbourne had written but one postcard to ‘Dorcas,’ to inform her that he was going to marry his third wife. (Let us say at once for the credit of the Church that the other two were really dead, and that the new one, a blooming young person of
five-and
-twenty, was very much alive.)

‘He’s getting quite a David,’ said Dorcas, helping her husband to a little bacon.

Mr. Pattimore didn’t answer.

Later, in church, Dorcas sat meek in her pew, and when she knelt down she pressed her red lips against her hand and thought of her husband, and how he was so merry and queer five years ago in the hollow of the cliff. She hid a blush in her Prayer-book, and wondered if any one had seen.

Beside Mrs. Pattimore, Mary Gulliver had also accepted one of the one hundred and eighty-two sittings. She had bought a new coat, a long one that hid her shape, telling her father, as an excuse for buying it, that the new woman at the shop, Mrs. Gentle, had said she found the church very draughty; ‘and I do too,’ said Mary.

Mr. Pattimore looked hard at Mary when he preached, and he stopped for a moment in order to put more force into his words when they came, and he told her to ‘beware of all nakedness.’

God Simon was standing beside the church gate, when Mary went out into the lane, with two girl companions, imported, with the promise of many presents, from Dodder.

They were standing under an elm, the
protruding
roots of which looked like large elephants’ heads.

Simon and the girls stared hard at Mary and laughed loudly.

As a general rule, Mary walked out with
Rebecca and Dinah upon Sunday afternoons. She would call at Dinah’s cottage, and together they would fetch Rebecca from the vicarage, and sometimes Esther would go with them. But this Sunday evening Mary walked alone in the lower meadows of Mockery.

Mary had very much admired, when she read it the day before, all that had been said in the
Western
Times
about the sad end of Miss Pink and Mrs. Moggs.

‘’Twould be a nice bit,’ thought Mary, feeling her trouble at that moment remind her of its presence, ‘that would be said about I; an’ London river be full up of poor girls.’

Mary had read something of this kind in the paper, referring to the pleasure that London girls took in ending their lives in the river. And as Mary had never seen a river, she thought the Thames at London to be
something
like Mr. Caddy’s pond, only larger, and containing pretty water-weeds to lie back upon when one is tired of one’s trouble.

As soon as ever the girls at the church gate had laughed, Mary decided to do as the other ones did so often. She knew her father, and she shared with him a proper abhorrence of the arrival of anything so like the red naked sky as a baby, unless one is conventionally clothed in the garment of marriage. She couldn’t bear to think how her father, after listening to her through all the summer telling
the amusing stories about Simon’s manners on the hill, should now have forced upon him the nakedness of reality; a natural order in life, perhaps, but one that the good farmer, and we think rightly, detested manfully.

When the other Mary reached the sands with intent to destroy herself in the sea, she couldn’t help bending down to reach a little shell that she admired, and wondering a little, as she looked at it, at the strong determination in her heart that had brought her down to the shore that day.

This determination took her along with a firm step until she stood opposite to the dark rock that is called the Blind Cow. The golden sun, yielding to the sea and land the last hot kiss of such a long spell of pleasant weather, caused the little waves to dance and to shine.

Under the Blind Cow the waters were dyed black by its heavy shadow, and to the blackness there Mary’s imagination went. The waves splashed there, but not with the light of
happiness
. They curled with delight to murder, and seemed to watch Mary and to wait, the black rock jutting out and hanging over them, for her to come.

Mary stepped into the sea, and the waters reached to her knees, when she looked up and saw, very much to her horror—for death
himself
would be wearing a shroud—a naked man, the Nellie-bird, standing upon the rock.

When one has decided to end it all, one certainly wouldn’t be expected to be over modest about any nakedness that may be met with in going down to those black waters.

But there is all the difference in the world between most of us who live in towns, and the other Mary who lived in Mockery Gap.

Although she had known rather more about Simon Cheney than is proper for any young lady who isn’t married, yet between him with his clothes on and the tall shining body of the naked fisherman there was a vast difference.

The sun, who appeared to be less astonished than Mary, set a burning and a shining match to the fisherman’s hair, that seemed at that moment to be on fire; while his limbs, white and still glistening with drops from the sea, appeared to belong, by reason of their perfect proportion, to some high spirit from above rather than to a plain, though unnamed,
fisherman
from those islands.

The man appeared by his gestures to be casting an invisible net over the girl.

It is possible to be awakened from the very saddest state of mind by a sudden burst of colour. A colour that burns can do more than make us merely happy: it can give us life.

The light that lightens the world can shine in a daisy; it can also shine in the human form when it is naked and fair.

But although Mary was saved, her ‘Oh!’ of astonishment wasn’t in the least an
exclamation
of admiration, but rather the cry of a child when she sees something that she doesn’t quite know the use of, a snake or a toad.

Seeing her there, and hearing her word of astonishment, the fisherman, who had only expected to see a barren shore when he climbed up the rock upon the other side, dived again and swam out to sea where his boat was anchored.

When Mary turned, she saw that her father’s cows, driven there by the flies, had come down to the sea too, as if they wished to know what their mistress was doing. While behind them at a little distance she found her father, who was studying his map, the present from Mr. James Tarr.

Mary helped her father to drive up the cows. ‘She was forced,’ she said, ‘to go into the sea after them.’

‘’Twould be nice,’ said Mr. Gulliver to Mary, as they walked slowly up the green lane behind the six cows—‘’twould be nice for I to see with me woon eyes one of they little mermaidens.’

‘But they bain’t all wi’ fishes’ tails,’ said Mary.

‘No,’ replied her father, ‘there be those that some do call sirens.’

‘Wi’ legs same as ours be, grow’d.’

‘You’ve been studying the world too,’ said Mr. Gulliver proudly.

‘’Twould be nice,’ said the farmer again, going back to his first thought. ‘If one of they sirens would come to we, ’twould be something for wold Caddy to tell ducks about, for ’e do say they won’t lay if they bain’t told nothing.’

Mr. Gulliver put his arm round Mary and kissed her cheek.

‘I begin to wonder,’ he said, ‘if it so
happened
that a siren did come to we, could ’e grow like a human and call I “grandfer”?’

‘’Tis all done wi’ learning,’ replied Mary decidedly. ‘You’ve only to call out “grandfer” loud enough and they’ll speak it.’

‘What do a siren eat?’ inquired Mr. Gulliver; ‘they bain’t like stoats, be they, that do eat rabbits?’

‘I’ll ask Mr. Caddy,’ said Mary, blushing.

The cows walked slowly; the evening gnats played about them in the still, sleepy air. And the fisherman, clothed now, sat beside his boat and mended his nets.