Mockery Gap (8 page)

‘Simon won’t touch nothing that bain’t the best,’ she said, looking at the other Mary; whose turn it was, now that Mrs. Pattimore was gone, to blush.

Having said this, and feeling that she had said enough, Mrs. Cheney looked at Miss Pink, who had somewhat recovered from her fright and was knitting again.

Mrs. Pottle and Mrs. Pring were listening; each had forgotten the other. They were listening as folk will who want to catch—
though they know this to be impossible—a distant word.

All waited, and the Dean, at whom each looked in turn, seemed to wait too.

Something was going on at the back door, and even Dinah, though she felt that a wood was the better place for hidden doings, wished she was there to see.

Every one listened, as though it were a matter of life and death to them to know whether the fine mackerel, fresh caught as they really were, were three for sixpence or four for ninepence.

It was Mary Gulliver, and as a child she had played the game, ‘Who speaks first becomes the sow’—and she always was—who now broke the silence by saying with a gasp, ‘What do ’ee think Mrs. Pattimore be a-doing wi’ thik fisherman?’

To aid herself in giving a right answer to this question Miss Pink looked out of the window.

The vicarage gate, that had up to that moment been as silent as any gate that
behaves
properly should be, now showed an
unusual
liveliness, for seated upon it, in a way that wasn’t exactly modest, was Esther, the naughtiest child in Mockery. And as though to give all possible support to their leader, the rest of the wolfish pack, with hands through the bars, were demanding with shouts and
clamour that the Nellie-bird should be given up to them.

‘’E be a-gone thik way,’ cried Esther, pointing to the path that led round the house to the back door.

‘Send ’e out for we to throw mud at,’ called out the others. All the children now set up a loud howling and demanded with many threats that the Nellie-bird should be let out of the gate.

Even the Dean had few eyes now left to look at him, for the window demanded all, and before Mary Gulliver had time to gasp out, ‘’Tis ’e wi’ they fishes,’ the fisherman passed the window again, but not alone. Mrs. Pattimore was with him.

The fisherman walked beside her.

The children cried out the louder.

The cloud that had made all things so dim that afternoon now broke as if in two halves. And the sun poured down hot and loving.

The fisherman had taken off his cap, perhaps when the lady first opened the door to him, and hadn’t troubled to put it on again, and he now carried it in his hand. He was talking pleasantly to Mrs. Pattimore, who, though she hardly answered at all, looked up at him with a blissful devotion.

‘The Nellie-bird, the Nellie-bird!’ shouted the children.

Mrs. Pattimore stood uncertain while the
fisherman opened the gate; she felt that she ought to try to prevent the children from hurting this newcomer who was being made a mock of; and yet by the look of him he
appeared
to be well able to take care of himself.

He waved her back, and before little Esther could quite decide what he was doing to her he had filled her apron with fishes.

While Esther divided the spoil, which she did very fairly, the fisherman strode boldly across the fields and towards the sea.

Mrs. Pattimore entered the dining-room, but instead of looking in a dreary way at the Dean, as she would sometimes do, she looked with a happy smile at Miss Pink, and taking her almost into her arms she kissed her three times.

M
R.
J
AMES
P
RING
always spoke to the weather; he considered that the weather was a person that could be addressed as either ‘he’ or ‘she.’ ‘’E be bad-tempered to-day,’ James would say to his wife, if there chanced to be
rain-clouds
abroad. Or else when the wind blew, ‘She don’t care whose thatch she do blow off, she bain’t particular.’

When Mr. Pring named the weather as ‘she,’ Mrs. Pring often misunderstood him, and fancied that he referred to Mrs. Pottle.

‘She bain’t worth a cow’s tail, thik ’oman,’ said Mrs. Pring one fine hot morning when she observed her husband to stare hard at the sky.

Mr. Pring looked from the sky to the Mockery cliff, beyond which lay the villages of Dodder, Madder, Norbury, and all the rest of the world.

‘Thik picture,’ remarked Mr. Pring,
looking
from the Mockery cliff and at his wife, ‘that did step out of ’is frame to kiss Miss Pink at party, do know of a letter.’

Mrs. Pring looked at her husband with pride; he was famed as a messenger. This fame had arisen in a very simple manner, because Mr. Pring had always taken the trouble to inform the good folk of Mockery,
whenever he met any of them, that he had never lost a letter.

In the ever-green valley of Mockery Gap only the stranger oddities of men and women outlive their lives. Riches pass there and are gone; goodness and charity, poverty—too common, perhaps, to be mentioned—go too; but a man who has once been credited with eating a dozen eggs for his dinner lives for ever. And so with Mr. Pring; for he with his fame—though only one person, and she a lady, had ever entrusted him with a letter—will most likely be handed down as the faithful deliverer of all the private and unposted
correspondence
through all time.

The letter from which Mr. Pring’s fame had arisen—for from its presence in his trousers pocket he had acclaimed himself to the world as ‘the one to carry a message’—the letter (and the time has come for us to discover it) had been handed to Mr. Pring by Miss Pink, then a girl, one autumn day when the mist hung low in the lane that led to the sea. Fifteen years have gone by since love had set Miss Pink’s heart a-dancing, a heart that must have been as large as her nose was small. Mr. Pink had only just been set up at his desk, with Mr. Roddy’s affairs all about him to attend to, and he had visited the shop but a few times, and Mrs. Moggs had hardly rung her bells to him, nor given him the exciting hopes
for her eternal salvation, when the letter was written.

It was February and leap year, and the last day of the month too, and Miss Pink had gone out, because the sun was pleasantly warm, to walk in the fields. Miss Pink had been
looking
for water-cress, a weed that her brother was extremely fond of; and after taking out of the ditch as much as she chose, she chanced to look up and saw Mr. Gulliver, who had been a widower for a year, playing with the rabbits. Mr. Gulliver wasn’t alone, for his daughter Mary was with him, and she was stroking a tiny rabbit that appeared to have entirely lost its natural timidity.

Near by upon the grass there were snares that were never set, a gun that was never fired, and nets that were never used.

Mr. Gulliver, being a rather oddly-made portion of Mockery clay, had discovered that rabbits were fine things for Mary to play with, though rather dull to eat.

And from that day Miss Pink loved Mr. Gulliver.

That same evening Mr. Pink said to his sister, ‘I cannot find, dear, any mention in my accounts of Mr. Gulliver’s rent-day.’

‘Perhaps it’s the 29th of February—that may be his day for payment,’ replied Miss Pink.

‘Oh, very likely,’ said Mr. Pink.

Miss Pink wrote her letter. 

Being such a timid person, one can easily imagine that Miss Pink hardly felt brave enough to deliver this letter with her own hands, and so she gave it to Mr. Pring, who promised to deliver it that very afternoon.

But Mr. Pring had only taken the letter out of his pocket some half-dozen times in half an hour when he began to feel that fame was come upon him.

‘Postman do think fine of ’eself,’ he said to the spade that he carried, walking to his home instead of to Mr. Gulliver’s; ‘but he bain’t nothing so careful as Pring.’

After many days of waiting for her answer, Miss Pink decided that Mr. Gulliver had dropped the letter in the field and that the
rabbits had eaten it. And she began to think that she couldn’t love rabbits as well as she used to. Sometimes, when she thought no one was listening, and she saw the rabbits in Mr. Gulliver’s field, she would say to them unhappily, ‘You shouldn’t have eaten my letter up—you naughty rabbits!’

But was it the rabbits? Miss Pink thought as she grew older that it might have been the horned beast from the sea. Perhaps he had pounced out upon poor Pring and torn the letter from him and then gone down to the sea again.

‘The sea is very dangerous,’ Miss Pink said to her brother, when she decided that the beast might have done it.

‘No, it’s very beautiful,’ said Mr. Pink….

Mr. Pring held up his spade and pointed to the skies; he wished to show his wife that the skies and the weather were one and the same.

‘They wide skies,’ said Mr. Pring, ‘be against I; for whenever I be minded to climb to top of cliff and to pull loose stones out of road, for fear Mr. Hunt, who be worse than all they damned surveyors, mid come by, ’e do come.’

‘Who do come?’ asked Mrs. Pring.

‘Rain,’ replied her husband dolefully. ‘’E do come; and even when I do take an’ crack stones in lane, wi’ me back turned, she do blow upon me from behind.’

Mr. Pring began to move slowly; he had decided that, whatever the weather did, it was his duty to try to remove from the cliff road the stones that Mr. Hunt complained about. No one ever left his home, though for only a few hours and upon the smallest and most necessary occasion, with graver foreboding than did Mr. Pring. He always supposed that when he went off to the roads, Mrs. Pottle—and Mrs. Pring always said that she could do it—would change herself into a nasty dog, and bite his lame cow or else torment the little pigs.

Mr. Pring, as well as Mary Gulliver, felt the nakedness of the outside world, where one might walk in solitude for a mile and see no one.

The more ordinary and simple-minded a person is, the less able is he to enjoy solitude; and any word from man or woman, be that word ever so plain, is far more acceptable to such a one than the choicest gusts of wind from heaven.

Mr. Pring never approached anything that wasn’t a tree or a hill, but that had a more human look, without the greatest
inquisitiveness
.

He appeared now to be more than usually hopeful of meeting some one to talk to, because since the arrival of those fine visitors upon the cliff Mockery Gap had plenty to say for itself.

Pring was full of news, that bubbled as he walked and sometimes broke out of him in a groan of suppressed interest and sometimes in a chuckle.

As soon as he had entered the lane that led to the cliff, something had attracted his notice that wasn’t the mere dullness of empty nature, but rather belonged, and excitedly belonged, to the human.

To any one who knows a scene very well, the presence of something stationary, where nothing of the kind is likely to stand, at once arouses an interest and calls for further
investigation
.

The object that Mr. Pring saw looked black in the white cliff road, and was set half-way up the hill, looking in Mr. Pring’s eyes like one of the monsters that Mr. Gulliver talked so much about.

Mr. Pring hadn’t walked far before he decided that the monster in question was nothing more terrible than Mr. Hunt’s motor car, that had evidently broken down going up the steep place in the hill. Mr. Pring quickened his pace, for before him was no dead nature, or even a surprising monster, but a mere human accident, and so a kindly amusement for Mr. Pring.

When Mr. Pring reached the car, he
perceived
that there were two gentlemen in the road instead of one, as he had at first supposed,
one of whom was addressing the other, who heard his words a little impatiently.

‘You ought to be kinder to poor Mrs. Moggs,’ Mr. Pink, the second of the two gentlemen, was mildly saying. ‘You ought to be kinder, Mr. Hunt, for it’s not at all proper in a Christian country to shout and tell a soul that one day may be saved—and so may be above us all—that she’s only a stupid old woman.’

Mr. Hunt, although Squire Roddy and Mr. James Tarr always spoke well of him, and praised his strong-minded Conservatism, wasn’t the politest of men to all comers, and he
considered
that moment a suitable one for saying that he hadn’t stopped in the road to listen to any damned sermon.

‘I know my duties,’ he shouted, ‘and I don’t require to be taught by Roddy’s
dependants
.’

Mr. Pink bowed. ‘He hoped,’ he said, ‘he had done no harm in speaking a word for Mrs. Moggs, but he knew she felt unkind things, and perhaps might if she heard too many of them be prevented from viewing the loveliness of the blue sea.’

Mr. Hunt, being a fine imitator of great men, now shook his fist, because he had once seen Mr. Tarr shake his fist at his old gardener, Mr. Dobbin.

Mr. Hunt shook his fist first at Mr. Pink
and then at the car. After which he applied himself to the latter with such anger, that with Pring pushing behind—and even Mr. Pink out of the kindness of his heart lent a willing hand—the machine started going and was in a moment gone, leaving Mr. Pring looking at the loose stones in the road that had caused the trouble, and Mr. Pink looking at nature and evidently wishing to forget man.

Mr. Pring was the first to break the silence of the hill, by addressing a remark to the stones in the road.

‘They grand gentlemen,’ remarked Mr. Pring, looking down, ‘do like to excite
themselves
.’

Mr. Pring looked up at his companion and winked; but seeing no response in Mr. Pink, who was leaning forward watching intently a moving figure in the fields of Dodder, Mr. Pring addressed himself to the stones again, that appeared to be the most interested listeners.

‘Mockery Gap,’ said Mr. Pring, sitting down by the roadside so as to be nearer to his listeners, ‘be the place for happenings. Simon Cheney do make things happen to maidens, that Parson Pattimore do name sinning in ’s sermons. ’Tis true,’ said Mr. Pring, kicking a stone to make it listen the better, ‘that Caddy do tell his ducks about what women do want, and that poor Mrs. Pattimore do lie in a wide
bed and cry at night-time. ’Tis nice to live in Mockery, where Mrs. Moggs do ring she’s happy bells, and schoolmistress do search all the fields over for a leaf to cure all afflictions. ’Tis nice to hear Mrs. Pottle cry out in lane, “Damn and blast all they Prings!” ’Tis nice to hear she talk. ’Tis nice to hear wold Gulliver tell t’ other Mary about savage demons and devils.’

Mr. Pring took up three stones out of the road and placed them upon the bank, so that they might be out of the way of Mr. Hunt’s car when he came another day to visit Mrs. Moggs.

Mr. Pink gave no heed to Mr. Pring’s talk; he overlooked Mockery sadly, as if he fancied the conversion of Mrs. Moggs to be an event very far off, and very much hindered too by the visits of Mr. Hunt. Above Mr. Pink the sky had grown darker, a circumstance that caused Pring to grow suspicious, and to wonder who it was that the agent was
watching
for. Mr. Pring always fancied that any changed behaviour of the weather was owing to the weather’s love or anger to him or else to another.

And so, seeing that Mr. Pink was watching some one, he fancied that it must be that some one who had caused the displeasure in the skies and brought up the dark cloud. Being familiar with the habits and manners of Mr. Pink, and regarding himself as almost one of
the family because Miss Pink had once entrusted him with a letter, Mr. Pring, raising himself, demanded a little pertly, ‘Who be thee out watching for, Agent?’

‘The fisherman,’ said Mr. Pink quietly.

Mr. Pring looked up at the cloud, as if he fancied the fisherman might come out from it.

‘’Ave ’ee spoken to thik Nellie-bird?’ he inquired.

‘The fisherman wished to meet me here,’ said Mr. Pink.

Sometimes when one has watched for some while upon a country hill for an expected comer, the object of our watch seems to appear as though by magic, and stands beside us—perhaps arriving from a direction that we least expect—in a moment, when we fancy that he or she may yet be far away.

The sudden arrival of the fisherman, who now stood in the road beside Mr. Pink, created such an unlooked-for disturbance in Mr. Pring’s mind, that had the cloud changed into the form of Mrs. Pottle—Mr. Pottle never counted as anything in the world—and begun beating him with lightning flashes, the road-mender wouldn’t have shown more surprise.

Mr. Pring looked fearfully at Mr. Pink, who, standing beside the fisherman, appeared to have become a different person.

The usual air of dejected humility that
Mr. Pink carried with him was changed to a strength of manner and look that made Mr. Pring stare and stare again. And the agent’s face, usually so sallow, shone now with a strange beauty, lit up by a sudden sunbeam.

It was only a moment before that Pring had noticed the cloud, and now here was the sun shining full upon Mr. Pink and the fisherman!