Innocent Birds

by T. F. Powys

  ‘Besides,’ thought Mr. Moody, whose ideas, when once led on to wantonness, were hard to lay, ‘it’s the custom in Madder for young women to walk sometimes in the fields, and when I do go across thik, wi’ Pim’s letter, I may meet one.’

  Mr. Moody did meet one. He met Maud. Although Maud’s hair was white, she still possessed the rounded firm figure and the graceful movements of a girl: the very attributes that Mr. Moody, with May’s body in his eye instead of Mrs. Billy’s, hoped to find waiting for him. ‘Why, then,’ and the Madder sparrows chirped excitedly as they asked the question from the nearest hedgerow, ‘did Mr. Moody, when Maud met him and spoke to him, as though she asked a favour, turn from her and hurry away with his hands to his ears, as if he were acting the part of Christian at Vanity Fair?’

  Later in the evening, when Mr. Moody sat at his tea-table and looked at the food upon his plate, Mrs. Moody, putting her head a little to one side, said gravely, ‘Yes, ’tis bread an’ butter on thee’s plate; ’tain’t worms nor spiders.’

  Mr. Moody placed one elbow upon the table, and his cheek into his hand, and stared still at his plate.

  ‘Bread and butter bain’t wrong side up?’ said Mrs. Moody.

  ‘World be,’ said Mr. Moody, finding his voice at last. ‘World be sadly twisted.’ Mr. Moody sighed deeply.

  ‘All my life long,’ said Mr. Moody, looking up at his wife, ‘leastways all my letter-carrying time, I’ve wanted to meet a maiden in they Madder fields who would say kindly, “There be they dark trees for we to go to, Mr. Moody.”’

  ‘Wouldn’t the kindly maid ’ave called ’ee William?’ Mrs. Moody inquired.

  ‘’Twere always “Mr. Moody” in me fancy,’ her husband replied. ‘’Twere “Mr. Moody” even on thik happy grass.’

  ‘We bain’t got no money to pay for they grassy doings,’ said Mrs. Moody a little sulkily.

  The postman stared at his plate again. Suddenly he beat his fist upon the table.

  ‘I won’t hanker for none of they maids no more,’ he cried out. ‘I’ll mind me letters and postcards.’

  ‘Thee bain’t been in no cold wind, ’ave ’ee?’ asked Mrs. Moody feelingly, ‘for thee’s eyes be blinking.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Mr. Moody, wiping his eyes. ‘Yes, they cold winds did drive into I cruel on they Madder hills.’

  Chapter xxiii

  MR. PIM KNOWS HIS GREATNESS

  WHEN Mr. Pim carried the letter that had come to him all the way from Derby to ‘The Silent Woman,’ he was fortunate enough to find Farmer Barfoot in the parlour.

  The farmer, with his mug near to him, was inquiring of Betty whether the corn in ‘fox holes field’ was ready to carry.

  ‘’Tis they knots in straw that do hold dampness, Betty be telling I,’ remarked the farmer, ‘so corn be best left on ground a day longer.’

  Pim handed his letter to Mr. Barfoot.

  ‘Now Betty ’ave a-spoken,’ he said, ‘maybe thee’d read thik to I.’

  The inn door darkened, for Chick and Wimple, each wishing to enter at the same moment, were finding some difficulty in doing so. Mr. Chick, however, soon gave place to Wimple, and didn’t venture for a moment to enter at all, for that gentleman said brightly, ‘’Tis funny how churchyard clay do stick to woon’s clothes.’

  When Chick did at last creep in, and took a place as far as possible from the sexton, Farmer Barfoot, with a friendly look at Betty, and moving her a little to an easier position, read the letter.

  ‘Dear Father, and all at home.’ Mr. Pim started, but looking at Betty, who seemed to reprove him, remained silent.

  ‘Dear Father, and all at home,—I do like Derby, I’m having such a fine time with my counting. I lodge in a house with sixty-seven windows, and in the same street where I live there are a thousand and one. I counted all these in one day.

  ‘I shall soon find some work to do besides my counting, but I’m not in want, you know, because I don’t have to pay anything for my lodgings. You and all may be sure that I shall soon come home very rich indeed. I have only one little trouble, which is that I have lost my cap. I threw it up one evening near to where I live, and it lodged upon some high railings, and that’s where it stayed.

  ‘When I come home rich I’ll marry Polly, and give to all a great deal of money. I’ll soon be coming home.—Your loving Frederick.’

  Mr. Pim put the letter into his pocket. He turned to Chick.

  ‘What ’tis ’ee do want,’ he asked, ‘for a present when Fred do come in loaded?’

  Before replying to this kind question, Mr. Chick regarded his legs. Below the knees and over his well-worn trousers he had wound pieces of sacking. He regarded these now with a hopeful look, as if by means of Pim they would one day be changed into something better.

  ‘Strap leggings be a good warm wear,’ sai Mr. Chick.

  ‘You shall have they,’ called out Pim, ‘when Fred do come in from Spain.’ …

  After Fred’s letter was come, Mr. Pim began to look at the ordinary and natural things of life with marked contempt. He scarcely ever gave a thought now to what the weather was doing. Fred’s first coming had been wonderful; as coming from the body of dead Annie in a mysterious way, that all Minna’s earlier explanations of nature could never wholly account for. But now soon there would be happening a far more stirring event, an event that would give Chick his strap leggings—the second coming of Fred.

  Mr. Pim would stand uncertainly sometimes and watch the Madder rooks and starlings and even the swallows, as if to contrast his own fame with theirs, and would say, so that any one might tell where the true glory was to be found, ‘They be only poor birds that do lay eggs and hatch ’em.’

  Besides the poor birds, Mr. Pim would regard in the new light of Fred’s coming almost any other human being that he passed, on the way to or from his work, with a vast contempt. For if May and Eva Billy happened to be walking up the lane, in the happy hopes that some one might whistle after them, and met Pim, he would mutter as he went by, ‘They be only Madder maidens; they bain’t Queen Maries,’ as though to show to whose society he really belonged.

  All Madder had heard of Fred’s letter, and of another that Polly Wimple had received that was even more hopeful; because it told how he had bought a new cap, and therefore was no doubt beginning to walk quickly upon the high road to riches. No one, therefore, was very much surprised to hear, a week or two after these letters had arrived, that Mr. Pim had bethought him of the well-known fact, and acted upon it, that no gentleman with a rich son soon coming home would do any more work in the vulgar fields.

  This change in Mr. Pim’s behaviour toward this workaday world came in this way. He raised his hoe one morning in the turnip field and looked at it in a critical manner, as if it were the very oddest implement in the world for he, Mr. Pim, to be holding. Mr. Pim placed the hoe very gently down upon the ground.

  Though it was September the day was very warm. All Madder appeared to sleep under a silky haze that spread everywhere. Mr. Pim lay down and slept too….

  Though Madder slept, Betty was wakeful. She informed Farmer Barfoot, with the help of his own eyes, as he stood by his barton gate, that a figure that should be bent like a rather short gallows, to which Bewick would no doubt have hanged a cat or a little dog, didn’t show in the field at all. It wasn’t dinner-time yet, and Betty shrewdly observed ‘that no one in such a large field would leave his beer near a hedge four hundred yards away from his work, not even for the sake of taking his cool thin drink under a fresh tree’s shade.’

  When an hour later Farmer Barfoot woke Pim up, Mr. Barfoot remarked truthfully and harmlessly enough ‘that it wasn’t Sunday.’ And Pim, for the moment at least forgetting who he was, and who was soon to come home, lifted up the discarded hoe and made a motion as though he intended to begin to work at the weeds again. As soon as ever the hoe touched the ground Pim let it fall again. Farmer Barfoot looked from Pim to Betty, and then from Betty to Pim.

  Mr. Pim was fully awake now
and knew himself. He looked at the Madder valley. The great elms were crowned with gold, the red and white cows lay peacefully where the soft haze warmed the meadows, and Madder hill waited, with the grace of a lonely and lovely virgin, for God’s gift to come.

  ‘’Tain’t much that I do want,’ said Mr. Pim, regarding all the beauties of Madder with the eye of a land agent. ‘But me boy Fred, who did come funny—though thik bain’t no matter to I, now ’e be rich—could buy all that be over there an’ around—all they small trees and grounds—wi’ woon of they bank papers from ’s pocket that be all stuffed wi’ ’em.’

  ‘’Tis more than likely,’ said Farmer Barfoot after a look at Betty, ‘that Fred ’ave done well for ’imself up Derby way.’

  ‘Better than well,’ Mr. Pim replied; ‘for if Fred were to touch they turnips they would be gold woons.’ …

  Madder tries in many little ways, with its rain-clouds and lightnings, with its fan-shaped trees—bare shapes in winter—with its first primrose, that should be wept over rather than plucked, and the January scent of white violet leaves amongst the thorns, together with the little black spots of the plantain shadows upon the sun-warmed grass, to give all the happiness that is in it to those that have eyes to see and noses to smell. It succeeds, indeed, in giving a kind of joy—but alas! all creatures are so fanciful—to the weasels. And sometimes a stray hedgehog comes along, who finds a worm and is glad of it. And now it attempted, after so many trials with ungrateful man, to give Pim a chance.

  ‘All they be only plain fields,’ said Pim. ‘And thik bain’t nothing, only a small turnip.’

  In order to show how little and poor a thing, as beheld from his new and exalted position, a field root was, Mr. Pim kicked this one up and turned to look at Madder hill.

  ‘Hill bain’t woon of they paper notes,’ he said scornfully.

  Mr. Barfoot looked at the hill too. Certainly Pim had said rightly what the hill wasn’t.

  From the hill Mr. Pim turned to his master.

  ‘You be Farmer Barfoot, bain’t ’ee, who do ’ave Betty to bed wi’ ’ee?’

  Farmer Barfoot looked proudly down at Betty; he was glad that so grand a man, with so rich a son, should mention his lame foot.

  Chapter xxiv

  MR. SOLLY CONSIDERS

  THE longing for motherhood has a cruel way sometimes of playing with a girl, as a cat plays with a mouse. It lets her run free for a moment and then pounces upon her. The longing has a way of saying, even though the mouse may have been frightened by the cat’s shining eyes, ‘You might have let him do all that he wished under those green bushes, for it didn’t matter very much what he did when you longed so!’

  Maud’s fright had held her back for a while—in torment perhaps, but still it held her; and now that it was gone, the cat that had captured this little mouse allowed her, though wounded, to run in the fields.

  Modesty, that careful sentiment, placed as a sun-dew in a maiden’s heart to catch brides—after their human blood is sucked dry—for heaven, now left Maud defenceless.

  Maud even wanted to go to Dodderdown again to find the same place that Mr. Bugby had followed her to when he told her that a little child was crying there. Whenever Maud saw Mr. Bugby now, instead of running from him she begged him to go with her into the meadow again. ‘She wouldn’t struggle this time,’ she said, ‘but would go first to the grassy chalk-pit and wait for him.’ She did go, and waited upon the grass until the night dews chilled her, and then she went home to Madder again, and peeped into the inn window, where Mr. Bugby was telling his friends about Maud.

  ‘Though I bain’t religious,’ she heard Mr. Bugby say, ‘I bain’t a-going to do what wicked mad Maud do ask.’

  ‘Where be Maud now?’ Wimple inquired.

  ‘In Dead Man’s Meadow waiting for I,’ laughed Mr. Bugby.

  Sometimes Maud would meet Mr. Solly, but he would look so sadly at her that even Maud didn’t like to ask him to help her with her longings. Something, too, that Solly used to say—and he never passed Maud without speaking—used to give her back a little of her former modesty, as well as a new hope, though a far-away one. Whenever he met Maud, who would be out looking, or else waiting, for a man, Mr. Solly would stop in the road and look up at Madder hill, with a depth of longing expressed in his look that almost equalled Maud’s own.

  ‘Look, Maud,’ he would say, ‘look up there at Madder hill.’ And Maud, of course, did what Solly wished her to do, and watched the hill. And while she looked Solly would still be speaking.

  ‘He will come again,’ Solly said, with conviction, ‘and even if His gift is for Polly and Fred this time, His mercy is infinite and His promises are sure; and one day He will remember us too.’

  There was something in the tone of Mr. Solly’s voice that would make Maud forget herself, and indeed all Madder, yea, and all the world, for a few short moments. But when her mortal longings and her deferred hope brought her eyes to earth again, she would discover, very much to her disappointment, that Solly was gone.

  But though Solly might have fled to Gift Cottage a little precipitately, as if he wished to get away from mad Maud and her longings, yet he spent a good deal of his time in considering what could best be done to help Maud in her trouble.

  ‘Now, if only those Americans,’ he thought one day, as he dug in his garden, ‘hadn’t commenced to manufacture iron, they might have helped to aid Maud Chick with a little advice.’

  ‘But of course there is Aunt Crocker!’ Mr. Solly thought of her as his clean shining spade cut the ground so nicely.

  He remembered one evening in particular when his aunt described to him how Mr. Crocker had died. It was a stormy winter’s evening, when the wind and rain outside in the street did its best to make Mrs. Crocker’s parlour more than usually comfortable. Solly was sitting beside the fire, that he had replenished a moment before with a fine log of oak, sawed by his own hands with much care so that it might exactly fit the parlour fire-place. Mrs. Crocker was knitting with large wooden needles, that gave a gentle grace to the home, as unlike as possible to the sharp biting clash of Miss Pettifer’s steel ones.

  The storm outside rattled the windows in a merry fashion, and certain inquisitive drops of rain crept down the chimney, where they fell and hissed spitefully upon Solly’s log. Mrs. Crocker moved one of her feet from the rug, that had once kept a bear warm, and placed it next to her other upon the footstool. She then settled her ball of wool in her lap, with as much consideration as though it were a soft white kitten.

  ‘Crocker was never a proud man,’ she said, laying down the knitting beside the ball of wool, ‘and he never thought his name was a pretty one.

  ‘“But there was somewhere,” he used to say, “where it might show itself off with more justice than upon a rate receipt.”

  ‘It was a rough windy night, as this is, when Crocker died.’

  Mr. Solly touched the poker.

  ‘No, the log is burning well,’ Mrs. Crocker said; ‘let it alone, Solly.

  ‘He hadn’t spoken for some time, you know, and the doctor had told me, and the wild winds were telling me too, that the end was near. “Deborah,” he said, suddenly raising himself up in bed, and looking at me as happily as if he had just discovered a truth he had looked for all his life, “it’s the very name for a tombstone.’”

  Mrs. Crocker looked at Solly’s log, that was burning finely then.

  A fierce gust of wind shook the house.

  ‘And also his wife Deborah Crocker,’ she said gratefully.

  Chapter xxv

  ANOTHER BIRD FOR MR. BUGBY

  ONE has only to wink once or twice, and the summer is gone. Gone, with all its yellow gladness that it gave, and gone with all its yellow sadness too. But gone; and so quickly each summer’s going is, that we have only to wink the three times, and our lives are gone too, with their early morning sunshine and their long evening shadows.

  If so be any happiness has been found by us during our three winks, we
have found it—and we all know this to be true—in quiet places. We have met it—if at all—where the fir-cones lie about so kindly that we are almost inclined under those tall and sweet-scented trees to kneel down and worship the earth.

  Perhaps upon the warm grassy side of a hill in March, with the cold wind banished behind it, the doors of our soul may have opened for a breath of joy to come in. Or when the bracken first breaks through the soil upon the heath; or when Madder hill, at midnight, makes a black line athwart the stars. If our joy enters not into us at those times, we may bid it farewell for ever….

  Nearly all the leaves were fallen, and Madder sulked like a girl who is forced to wear sackcloth instead of bright colours. The fan-shaped trees had fancied—foolish trees—that when spring came and they sprouted greenly, they were going to live for ever as prettily. But an old worm who had lived in the hollow trunk of one of the largest elms knew better. The worm told the trees to wait a little until the autumn came, and then see what would happen to their pretty green covering.

  When Madder sulks, as it did upon this autumn day that we have now reached in our story, even the church tower cannot cull the slightest spark of interest from the fact that it possesses a bell that is rung on Sundays, and a flagstaff where a flag is hung upon the king’s birthday.

  But even the greyest of autumn days doesn’t always succeed in keeping the Devil away from Madder; and though no flag was flying and no bell rang, the church tower was awaked from its gloomy thoughts by the arrival of a bird.

  This bird, one of a sea tribe that had visited Madder before, perhaps mistook the green fields of Madder for waves, and the church tower for a great rock set up in this green sea.

  The bird flapped its wings, stretched them widely out, and appeared to be looking greedily at Madder rectory.