Part 13 (1/2)
A man who can make his yokels talk like this has got little to learn.
In Father Mostyn Mr Booth has created one of the most glorious parsons in fiction.
”'Ha! The vicar's lobster if you please. Not out of the window there; I won't have lobster out of the window. The sunlight has a peculiar chemical action upon the tin, liberating certain const.i.tuents of the metal exceedingly perilous to the intercostal linings.'”
Nothing that goes on in the village is hidden from him, so we see him at once making friends with the Spawer, the stranger who comes to Cliff-End to compose his music in quiet. ”The house stands endwise to the sea, set deep in a horse-shoe of trees; a big, hearty, whitewashed building under bronze-red tiles; two storeys high in front, that slope down backward over the dairy toward the stack-garth till they touch its high nettles.... The kitchen takes up the whole end of the house, facing two ways. The first window watches the lane across the red tile path and the little uncla.s.sified garden; the second comes on to the broadside front of the house, facing south, where the sun is a gorgeous nuisance after mid-morning in summer, ... dipping below the sunk stone wall and the dry nettle-grown ditch in which the ball buries itself instinctively whenever you hit it, is the big gra.s.s field for cricket, with the wickets always standing. And beyond this, sweeping away in every direction ... go the great lagoons of corn, br.i.m.m.i.n.g up to their green confines ... and the dim Garthstone windmill turning its listless sails over in dreamy soliloquy across three miles of fattening grain and green hedge and b.u.t.tercupped pasture ... and the celestial sound of the sea, two fields off, tipping the lonely sh.o.r.e ... and the stirring of lazy leaves, the chick of poultry, the soothing grunt of distant pigs ... the solaceful shutting of unseen gates....”
G.o.d forbid that we should hurry amid surroundings such as these. Readers of _The Cliff-End_, fully to enjoy it, must imitate our village youths who prop themselves up by the wall of the bridge every Sunday afternoon and watch the water flow underneath in complete content for six hours at a time.
We are content to dawdle with the Spawer in his little, faded, old-world, out-of-the-world room, with its choir of pink roses on the walls and his own books scattered indiscriminately about: Daudet, Tolstoi, Turgenev, Moliere, Swinburne and so on.
By the time we reach chapter eight we have forgotten to wish that anything should happen ... and immediately something does. A sudden human sob breaks in upon the Spawer as he plays Chopin at midnight.
”Outside, the world lay wrapped in a great breathing stillness. Night's ultramarine bosom was ablaze with starry chain of mail. From the far fields came faint immaterial sounds, commingled in the suspended fragrance of hay, in warm revelations of ripening corn, in the aromatic pungency of nettles, and all the humid suffocation of herbs that open their moist pores at even. Distant sheep, cropping in ghost-like procession across misty, dew-laden clover, contributed now and again their strange, cutting, human cough.” The night calls him and he jumps out of the window: he hears garments in swift full stir, the rending of a frock ... and at last sees, ”struck in fugitive stoop to stone, the dim, motionless figure of a girl.” In a voice that had ”the rare mellow sweetness of blown pipes about it” she explains that she couldn't resist coming to hear him play. ”He noted the wide generous forehead, the big consuming eyes, burning deep in sorrowing self-reproach and giving him a moment's gaze over the uplifted tumbler; the dispa.s.sionate narrow nose, sprinkled about its bridge ... with a pepper-castor helping of freckled candour; the small lips, the long, sleek cheeks; the slender, pear-shaped chin; the soft, supple neck of russet tan, spliced on to a gleaming shaft of ivory; the quick-throbbing throat and the burning lobes of red, like live cinders, in her hair ... she wore a shabby pale blue tam-o'-shanter....” And this vision turns out next morning to be the post-girl. He learns her history from the Vicar. ”'Pamela, you mean!
I knew we should come to that before long. She's not like the rest of us; comes of a different cla.s.s altogether.... Take note of her when she laughs ... she covers the whole diapason. Ullbrig doesn't laugh like that. Ullbrig laughs on one note, as though it were a plough furrow.'”
He weaves a fantastic story out of the little that he knows about her: a mother dying of a broken heart, having married beneath her, come to Ullbrig to escape the world, leaving Pamela, who ”can do everything in the world except kill chickens.” She can bake bread, paper-hang, paint, milliner and dress-make and plays the organ in church. She lives with John William Morland, who combines the office of postmaster with the trade of cobbler.
”'Stop a bit,'” the stern voice of the postmaster would tell you when you laid the penny and the boots on the counter together, and shot out your dual request for a ”'stamp an' these 'ere solin'.'” ”'Let's 'ave one thing at a time. Stamps 'as nowt to do wi' shoes, an' shoes 'as nowt to do wi' stamps. Tek yer boots off'n counter, or 'appen Ah s'll be slippin' 'em away by parcel post, an' then where sewd we be?... Noo; stamps fost; let's know what ye want.'”
Which point being settled and the penny rung into the till, he would suddenly cast his Governmental mask under the counter, throw the austerity out of his voice, and catch up the shoemaker's smile all at once in a quick-change act marvellous to behold.
The Vicar arranges a feast which Pamela prepares for and of course shares with him and the Spawer. And the collation is described as d.i.c.kens would describe it, to make your mouth water:
”There was a chicken-pie in a Mother Hubbard frill, with its crust as brown as a hazel-nut, and just nicely large enough to feed half-a-dozen, which is a capital size for three; and a n.o.ble sirloin of beef, fringed with a h.o.a.ry lock of horse-radish, and arching its back in lonely majesty on an oval arena of Spode, ... and there was a salad, heaped up high under the white and yellow chequer of sliced eggs, and a rosy tomato comb, in a glorious old oaken bowl as big as a kettle-drum, ...
and there were some savoury eggs, deliciously embowered in their greenery of mustard and cress ... and a tinned tongue ... and some beetroot ... and whipped creams, and a trifle pudding, all set out on snowy white damask amid an arctic glitter of gla.s.s and silver and cutlery. Except the cheese, which was a Camembert, and went by itself on the grained side-cupboard.”
After the olives and the herrings Father Mostyn approaches the beef with a terrible ”'Ha! I see you've not forgotten what I told you. The exterior alb.u.men's duly coagulated for the preservation of the nutritive juices, and there's a fine osmazonic smell that bodes well for the flavour.'”
Who wants to go on to the love episode when he can stay and refresh himself with a feast like this? Not I, for one. The longer I can stay with ”the little tongues of crimson ham and grey-brown purple b.u.t.tons of mushrooms” the better so long as Pamela is there. I want as many helpings as possible of the stewed plums, the custard, the trifle pudding, the port-wine jellies, the whipped creams and the cheese. Time enough for love. There is the music to follow: the A flat Prelude twice, the Black Study, bits of Beethoven, the 111, s.n.a.t.c.hes of Brahms ... and to Pam as to us ”there seemed not more happiness in Heaven.”
All too quickly even that night the shadows fall: Pam goes home and encounters the village schoolmaster, a fellow-lodger at the Morlands', the veins in whose forehead stood out always, a thin, frail consumptive, who tortures himself with love of her. This night he waits up for her and makes her try to care for him, as so many others have in the past.
Out of pity for him she could not bring herself to deal the one smart blow that the moment required: the strength was lacking, and so she prepares for herself terrible consequences. The plot thickens. The Spawer sees more and more of Pam, he teaches her music, but he is already engaged to a girl in Switzerland of whom Pam knows nothing. He screws up his courage to tell her on one notable day when he goes with her to take dainties and administer comfort to an old dying man. The description of this one afternoon and evening takes up many chapters of the book, and the gradual leading up to the crisis where the Spawer has to tell Pam is wonderfully done.
Exactly at the moment when she acknowledges her sorrow at his departure the schoolmaster emerges out of the blackness and takes her away: she discovers now the Spawer is going that she is in love with him. ”'He likes me,'” she says to the accusing consumptive, ”'but he doesn't love me. I wish he did.... But I'm not good enough for him. There has never been any question of his loving me. He is engaged to marry somebody else ... and he may leave Ullbrig any day. When he told me he was going ... I was so unhappy that I began to cry. I couldn't help it. I didn't think he would notice ... but he did ... and tried to comfort me. And then--and then--you were there and saw. And I love him--I love him--I love him and I tell you....'”
She is fated to take the letter to her lover which she imagines will summon him away from her ... and she fails to deliver it. The schoolmaster discovers her crime, gets it from her and makes her promise to marry him before he will restore it (this is where the actual story becomes unbearably silly--people don't do these things). She decides to run away; the same night the Spawer walks along the cliffs late, and the schoolmaster, who has discovered Pam's flight, shadows him, so clumsily that the Spawer discovers him: they argue on the cliff edge and the Spawer falls over: Pamela hears his scream and goes to the rescue, and the two discover their love for each other at death's door. They are cut off from help by the rising tide.
”'I want to ask you ...'” he said. ”'You know why I was going back. The other letter was--from Her. She asks me to set her free. If there hadn't been--been any other one in the case, and I'd asked you ... to marry me ... would you have married me?'”
In an instant the girl's arms were about the man's neck, and her lips upon his lips, as though they would have sucked the poor remaining life out of his body into her own ... yea--though Death stood by their side ... yet could he not arrest this moment.
”'Oh--my love, my love!' the girl wept through the wet lips that clung to him. 'What do I care about dying now? I would rather a thousand times die to learn that you had loved me--than live and never know it. Promise me--you will not--let go of me--when the time comes.... Don't let me go.
I want to die with you.'
”And there being nothing else to do, they stood and waited for death....”
But this is a love romance: it could not be allowed to end like that.
Drunken Barclay, having missed Tankard's Bus that night, hears Pam's calls for help and saves them both and gives us and Mr Booth a fuller chance to revel in a regular orgy of love. The Spawer was glad to be thus helpless on his back, for the glory of being cradled in such a love, and learning his love over again, from the lips and looks and actions, the dear, large-hearted A B C Primer of Pam. ”Her very love of him, issuing towards him from every pore of her body, fertilised the girl's own beauty, like the sap in the lush hedgerows at spring. Her soft, velvet eyes ... darkened and deepened ... till they were beyond all plumb of mortal gaze. Her lips ... coloured now to a deeper, clearer carmine, with little pools of love visible lurking in the corners of them ... her lashes ... grew black as ebony ... her freckles ... more purely golden.