Part 13 (2/2)
”And Pam stooped over him as she was always doing, and slipped her linked fingers under his neck, and looked into his face first, and kissed him ... and buried her face by his, and lifted it to look at him once more, and kissed him again.... Who should stop her now from telling him she loved him, loved him, loved him?”
Yes, there is no doubt about it: Mr Booth, whose gift for seeing things is so remarkably acute, can describe the pa.s.sion of love with the best of them. Not easily does one forget those dear, kissable, candid freckles, powdered in pure gold-dust about the bridge of the nose and the brows ... the great round eyes with the blacky-brown velvety softness of bulrushes ... the rapt red lips ... the big beneficence of hair ... the oaten-tinted cheeks ... the little pink lobes ... the tanned russet neck ... and the pale blue tam-o'-shanter of our beloved Pam. She is one of the most alive heroines in fiction, and the man who doesn't find himself a good deal more in love with her than the Spawer was is not to be envied.
_Fondie_ is a novel of quite another sort. It is the grim tragedy of a flirtatious daughter of an impoverished country parson who gets ”let down” by an undergraduate and drowns herself.
It has the same excellent qualities that so distinguish _The Cliff-End_, in that it is leisurely, the dialect is wonderfully reproduced, the scenery painted with an exquisite sense of colour and exactness, the characters all live ... and there is Fondie the wheelwright, Fondie the foolish, who ”never used bad language even when unprovoked,” who was not a bit of good among the girls, who did his best work when he was not being paid for it, who was always respectfully in love with the girl, Blanche, and offered to marry her when she had already got into trouble with the other man. ”'Lad's fond,'” said his father, who was as ”laughterless as Jehovah and as summary. 'He'll do owt onnybody tells him.'”
There are many inimitable anecdotes scattered irrelevantly through these pages, the best of which is perhaps that of the black bull which coughed gra.s.s and spittle all down the back of Bless Allcot's neck while he was engaged in fervent prayer in the chapel: ”'Thoo's best not ti pray public of a Sunday or two, Bless Allcot, till thoo's had a chance ti pray private,'” shouts Fondie's father to the prayer ... and an altercation starts during divine service which nearly develops into a fight.
An example of Mr Booth's humour may be seen in his description of the installation of the harmonium in the chapel:
”There were two grand services ... and the cobbler from Sproutgreen walked all the way over to Whivvle in a parson's hat and a white tie, to tell folk what a sinful life he had led in his younger days and how, but for the Living Word, he might probably have been wearing a grey coat and coloured kerchief to this day, and been even as the other sinners whom he had met this morning bicycling along the road to h.e.l.l. And Bless Allcot's eyes were as wet as cut lemons ... and at both services he prayed in the key of G flat minor for absent Brethren.”
Fondie's father, who in old days had sc.r.a.ped his fiddle-strings so frenziedly in that chapel that he had to give the fiddle a rest for one verse in three, ”to cool her bearings and prevent her from firing,”
naturally hated the innovation, but went to the chapel to shame the others ... ”he went, casting the chapel into such a hush as if he had been his own corpse, so that the praying went as dry as a duck-pond in August ... and Bless Allcot's daughter let the wind out of the harmonium time after time and lost all her faculty for counting how many verses there were in each hymn” ... and Fondie's father returns home triumphant:
”'Aye. It's been a judgment on 'em. Lord's visited 'em.'”
Fondie, like the Spawer in _The Cliff-End_, ”could bide music as long as a sow could bide scratching,” and Blanche made him play the organ for her in church, but because he wouldn't kiss her, altered the figures in the hymns, making threes into eights and ones into sevens so that he would play his worst, which he did.
”If he had been half a man--for there was n.o.body in the workshop at the time, except the two of them, amid the seductive warm scent of fresh pine-shavings--Fondie would have thrown both arms round Blanche's neck and held on. Blanche would only have whispered, 'Shut up, Fondie!
Fondie, you silly fool!' and Fondie would have whispered, 'Who's a silly fool?' between the kisses, and Blanche would have answered, 'You, you fool!' struggling with just sufficient discretion to give his kisses the requisite raptorial flavour ... and who knows how differently Whivvle history might have had to be written.... For that one kiss, or the lack of it, is altering lives the whole world over.”
So Fondie is left to experience all the pitfalls of the double chant and odd verse as the village church organist and the awful feeling that accompanies the falling into it, as if one had slipped off the belfry ladder in the dark.
The family to which Blanche belonged was a big one, but most of them were abroad: there was, however, Harold, in an accountant's office in Hunmouth, who went to music halls twice a week and wore cuffs, and a younger brother, who went to the village school and wore corduroys, but Blanche was the only one that mattered--Blanche with her profligate golden hair and blue eyes, Blanche of the cheap Birmingham jewellery, Blanche, who inspired respect from no one except Fondie, who addressed her as ”Miss,” or ”Miss Blanche” in all circ.u.mstances, ”as naturally as he would take up his gravy on the knife-blade, without, for a moment, contemplating any other way.”
We are shown Blanche in all her nakedness, from her earliest days, when ”I wish I had a sovereign for every time that Blanche rode in the hat-rack in defiance of the notice that this was provided for light luggage only,” until the day when the verdict on her body goes forth, ”Found Drowned.” She would have a.s.signations in the belfry while Harold folded cigarettes during the Litany and pared his nails for the coming week and read _The Confessions of a Lady's Maid_ and _Secrets of Matrimony_ with his head down, as if he had had a stroke, whilst his father preached from Samuel and Kings.
”The Creator that conceived and executed Blanche, and equipped her with that amphitheatre of teeth and those scintillating eyes, must have been a tyro at his trade if he really expected sobriety and wors.h.i.+p of them; or else a jocund G.o.d of Mirth, who loved laughter and human happiness.”
Her father had even occasion to take for his text one day: ”My daughter hath a devil” ... and she certainly was a thorn in his flesh. He made periodic attempts to put his house in order and his foot down, but within three days of new regulations he would have to give up his attempt at discipline and go back to his hens and tool-shed and the nutrition of the vicarage pig, while Blanche locked herself in her bedroom and learnt the mysteries of life from books that she stole from her brother and _Sunday Sacred Pennyworths_, where ”the advertis.e.m.e.nts were even more absorbing than the literary matter and contributed liberally to her education.”
This picture of the sordid, poverty-stricken vicarage life would make us weep were it not for the light relief afforded by the villagers, in such gorgeous scenes as that in which Fondie swarms the bees:
”'Thee wants ti gan up fierce-like, same as Bless says, an' sing a bit as thoo gans, an' swear when thoo gets ti top, an' mek bees think thoo's as good as them.'”
When he has finished collecting them he looks less like a victim of bees than of overstudy.
Meanwhile Blanche goes from conquest to conquest among her boys (always excepting Fondie) and makes with him a new friend in Lancelot Griffith D'Arcy Mersham. Fondie becomes more and more proficient in his trade of wheelwright and in his pa.s.sion for music: ”Music stirred him, he knew not how or why; books, too, haunted him with the desire to read them--and beauty, whether of Blanche, or of a bird, of sunset or moonrise, of stars or blossoms, troubled him with a sweet sickness, a pining of the soul to be something other and something better than he was.” Blanche fails to make much headway with the aristocratic Lancelot, who prefers the society of Fondie and helps him to throw off much of his vernacular so that he becomes more or less bilingual. In the church, or elsewhere, he spoke of ”harmonium” and ”home” and ”Hunmouth,” and said, ”I am, sir,” and ”Were you, sir?”: whereas in public he systematically dropped one ”h” in every three out of consideration for his hearers'
feelings, and said, ”I misdoot” and ”I'se fit ti think” and ”n.o.bbut” and ”jealous” as before.
Blanche rises to the height of a bicycle, which gave her scope to extend the range of her acquaintances, but we don't hear much of these. Her fatal day is that of the Mersham Flower Show, to which she went ”in a pale lavender print frock and a large straw hat trimmed with shasta daisies and blue cornflowers, spinning a creamy sunshade over her shoulder with a white-cotton-gloved hand.” For it was here that she met for the first time Leonard D'Alroy, who was afterwards to prove her undoing. Mr Booth is lavish in his details of this show, and surely no flower show has ever been so admirably described: he misses nothing from the swing-boats to the sports with their inevitable clamour of unfairness on the part of the judges. ”'Steeny would very like a' been first n.o.bbut he only went ti choch a bit reglarer, and sung i' choir.'”
We take leave of Blanche on this occasion by watching her fade away in the dusk with her arms about the neck of a boy on a bicycle, shouting ”Oo-li-oo!” to all other defeated admirers. From that day the young squire was seen riding down the streets of Whivvle ”with his hat at the back of his head” at very frequent intervals. In October he vanished to be ”larned high books at Oxford,” and by mid-November we see Blanche changed. This was not the Blanche of ”Don't cares” and ”Aren't frighteneds.” This was another Blanche born of the fierce crucible of the cares and fears she had once so recklessly defied--Time had chosen this month to take a stern revenge at last. She goes to call on the carrier's wife and faints: her condition is discovered.
”Not that she had ever looked for marriage, or thought of it. No word of marriage had ever pa.s.sed between them: no word of love even. Their attachment had been but physical; their affection only make-believe--to colour fact, and suffuse reality with romance. Only that insatiable appet.i.te for life had really led her wrong; that pa.s.sion for physical vitality; the same fierce desire to do something with her body, to put it to some purpose, that Deacon Smeddy and others of the pious experienced in regard to the soul; not merely to possess it, but to be sensible of its possession and quicken it into an ardent instrument of life.”
The carrier's wife takes her home and her father is acquainted with the truth about his daughter in these words: ”'I'se jealous Blanche is like to be a mother, sir.'” The Vicar then calls on the opulent Rector of Mersham, who stoutly denies that his nephew could possibly be to blame.
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