Donkey Boy

by Henry Williamson

  Fortunately at this point the return of Miss MacIntosh, co-incident with the court being vacant, provided a change of thought in the Vicar, too, judging by the expression on his face. The white Amazon, whose confident stride revealed upon a splendid figure the absence of corsets, was approaching from the opposite side of the court. For Richard her return induced a stealthy excitement, concealed behind the austerity of his expression. As she came near he rose to his feet, preparatory to offering his chair; she anticipated his intention, and with a friendly smile inclined her head, and sat down between him and the Vicar.

  “I am preparing Maddison for induction into the Antiquarian Society, my dear,” he said. “Miss MacIntosh,” turning to Richard, “is a young woman of parts, being our good secretary and organiser. Yes, as I was saying, very soon the gravel pits, the ditches, the water-courses of the district will have disappeared. So we must to work to make our records for those who are to come after us, before all is covered by bricks and mortar. History lies in layers upon the surface of the earth. Recent history, of the last few thousand years, is very near the top. A fascinating subject. Why, we might even discover another mammoth!” He patted the hand of Miss MacIntosh.

  “Yes, do join us, we need some new blood, Mr. Maddison. Our expeditions are quite good fun.”

  Her glance met Richard’s across the profiled dark blue chin and red face of the Vicar; she lowered her eyes after a slight flicker of the lids had sent a wild excitement through him. Richard contained his breath, not wishing the Vicar to observe the quickening he felt. But he did not think to control the delicate movement of his nostrils, which the Vicar observed.

  “Yes, I think I would like to join the Antiquarian Society, sir.”

  “Good man. Well, Miranda,” placing his hand firmly on her knee as he prepared to rise, “I think we should be returning to the study to finish our Ruridecanal Report. No doubt the Club will be seeing you again on Saturday, Maddison? I shall not be here: Saturday is m’sermon. And when we are playing together again, you must forego all consideration for my grey hairs, and serve upon me your fastest service! We must match you in a single with Miranda here. She has a formidable top-spin drive upon occasion, as befits a past champion of Somerville.”

  The Vicar stood up. Richard stood up, too.

  Miss MacIntosh lifted her eyes to Richard’s, and modestly lowered her gaze a moment after. With a pang he watched them depart. After the next set was finished, it was time to be going home. The net was relaxed, and hung upon its wire. Goodnights were exchanged. He was left alone.

  He felt the evening, the world, suddenly to be empty. Shrilly whistled the swifts as they screamed around the church tower which arose grey, as though fossilized, into the pale and remote sky. The clock hands were at eight. It was nearly September; soon the linden leaves, dry and listless in the August heats, would change colour, and be falling from their parent trees. Well, there was nothing for it but to go home. And taking his bicycle, he wheeled it to the sidewalk of worn grey square stones, took a final regretful glance at the empty court, before pushing off in a direction opposite to that from which he had arrived.

  What had he done? He did not want to join the Antiquarian Society. He did not believe in any religion. He had merely wanted to play tennis, chiefly as a means of keeping fit; and now he was being treated for all the world as though he were a stalwart of St. Simon’s. It was a deliberate trick of that young woman to get him into the Church! Half-crowns were not so easily come by, that he could afford to dispense lightly with one of them. That was what came of permitting a woman to arrange a man’s affairs, or to interfere in a fellows’ doings, on his behalf. Hetty must have been drawing the long bow to Mr. Mundy about his interest in country matters, exaggerating some of his remarks to her about the geological formation of the Hill—which he had read to her in the first place out of St. Simon’s Parish Magazine, written by Mundy himself! That’s what women’s minds were, grasshoppers, jumping to any fortuitous conclusion. And ringing his bell, Richard turned the corner of Twistleton Road and pedalled down the slope towards Pit Vale.

  He did not want to go home. The thought of home was hollow, vacant, grey, meaningless, without life or soul.

  Ting-a-ling-a-ling! Racquet under one arm, straw boater on its safety-cord attached between brim and buttonhole, tilting uncertainly in the wind of descent, Richard, feet on rests fixed to the front forks, began to travel fast down the slope into Pit Vale. One hand was ready to grip the brake-lever which would press the plunger with its rubber pad upon the humming surface of the front tyre—and deposit him upon the tramlines and granite sett-stones if he applied it too suddenly! Ting-a-ling-a-ling!

  Richard hurtled down the slope, his boater now waving on its cord behind him. A small boy shouted, “Whip be’ind, guv’nor!” Another chanted, “Old iron never rust, Solid tyres never bust!” A dog stood in the road as he whizzed on downwards; a dog with dingy white coat, tail between legs, a weary look about its face. Hi! hi! The damned thing cringed, and shifted only at the last moment from the horse-dung it was eating, recently dropped by a weary horse, one of three abreast hauling a tram up the Vale.

  The evening was fine; green lakes among red remote islets covered the western sky. He alighted across the road from the entrance to Mill Lane, at the junction of the Randisbourne with a tributary called the Quaggy. In the pool where the streams met were several chub, or used to be; and he peered over the parapet, hoping to see one. Not much hope nowadays, with more and more filth being poured into the little river!

  After looking in vain, he went on down the street, coming to where it met with the road coming down from the Heath.

  Here stood a new stone fountain with a circular drinking rim to which iron cups were chained; and below it a trough for horses. Richard always remembered it as the place where he and Hetty had seen the horseless carriage pelted with horse-dung during a Sunday walk soon after they had set up house together. There had been only a lamp-post then, he remembered; now it was a fountain, with lamps above it, built for the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, with the name of the Obelisk. Feeling thirsty, he went to drink; but not out of any one of the iron cups, for fear of disease. He sucked in water from the stream that fell as he pushed the iron button.

  “Nice day, guv’nor,” remarked a short man in brown and black striped costermonger’s clothes, with a flash of six pearl-buttons sewn on the outer hem of his bell-bottom trousers. He hopped up beside Richard and took a heavy iron mug and filled it for drinking. “I like a nice cool drop o’ wa’er, too, specially arter the beer. Best wa’er sarfer river comes ou’er this ’ere Obelisk.”

  “Well, it’s the same water everywhere, provided it comes from the main. And that comes from the river Lea, so I am told.”

  “Yus, but the marble cools it in this ’ere Obelisk, and that’s what makes the difference, see?”

  “Is it marble, or granite? In either case, the water comes out of the ground, through an inch pipe, probably, tapped from the main. It’s the ground that cools it, surely?”

  “Blime guv’nor, what’s the idea o’ argyfying over cold water, guv’nor? I likes it arter the beer, see? Beer dries me tongue and froat up like. This ’ere Obelisk water wets ’em again, see? That’s all, guv’nor! Good night!” And the little man in close-fitting flap-pocket coat and bell-bottom trousers, human cock-sparrow, climbed into his barrow and was drawn away on it by his donkey.

  “There’s ignorance for you,” said Richard amiably to himself. “And what, and why, is this fountain called an obelisk? Why not a catafalque, or a pyramid? The best water south of the river comes from a misnomer, by way of a pipe of one inch bore, possibly three quarters of an inch. Ha ha,” and he laughed to himself. He felt a new man after his drink. The odd thing was that the water did taste differently from that at home.

  It was a wonderful summer night, there was a magic quality in the approaching twilight. Far, far away in the west, remote beyond the outlines of roofs and chimneys, the sunset lingered
among green lakes studded with rosy islets. There in the glory of the heavens lay the Happy Isles, the Hesperides, an archipelago of the mysterious sky. It was as though the flower-girt coral isles of the Polynesians were reflected as in some camera obscura of the wondrous universe. As he stared at the sky, Richard’s mind came down to earth, to less heart-stealing thought, as he recalled the Harvest Homes of his boyhood. It was harvest weather down there in the West. He could see the fields of corn cut and stooked, lying in golden chequer upon golden chequer under the downs and upon the sun-hazed plain of Colham. He saw the white owl and the yews of the churchyard, and Mother and Father in the chalk, and Jenny his brother’s wife, so young, so lovely, dead in child-birth, Jenny who had surely been as near to being divine as it was possible to find in the world, lying beside them.

  With a whisper of “Ah well!” Richard turned away from the country of the lost, telling himself that he was now in Kent, or a part of it, as much a captive of London as he was. Then upon his being, Medusa-like, came the image of Miranda MacIntosh, her hair the colour of those far peaks and islands of the sunset, her eyes the hue of the sea; and as inhuman.

  The Starley Rover rested, held by a rat-trap pedal, on the granite kerb of the fountain’s base. Richard stood on the steps, deprived for the moment of direction. His knees felt weak; an interior ache filled the hollow of his ribs. He ached for beauty to descend upon his being, a beauty wherein he would find peace, rest, and—Nirvana.

  He leaned against the fountain, the so-called Obelisk, while the torment of suppressed desires of his being gave him, as the light of the summer evening deepened above the Borough, and the trees darkened and the first stars were visible, and the first lamps were lit, a feeling of being in another world. He felt homeless, and heavy with lack of hope. The new house was not really the home of his spirit; he was pretending to himself all the time. Ah well, one must make the best of it; life was a tragedy.

  With this conclusion he pedalled away from the Obelisk, passing inns which recently had been rebuilt for the purpose of taking more profit from beer and porter, whiskey, rum and gin: buildings of brick and glass, of flaring gas and tables of mahogany with heavy cast-iron legs and frames, nearly indestructible. It was the age of the brewer becoming a gentleman, together with other big tradesmen. Songs, shouts and laughter came from The Plough, The Duke of Cambridge, The Roebuck, and The Joiner’s Arms.

  He came to the Clock Tower, also built to commemorate the Jubilee. It stood at the parting of two ways. The money raised by subscription for its erection had run out before it was finished, causing the omission of a series of panels bearing coats of arms. It was a case of either the clock or the arms; and the clock was more useful to those who, by necessity, cared nothing for the past. Away with the old century, let it die, and give place to the new, that was the modern spirit.

  The trees in the High Street were due to come down, he had heard; everywhere was building and expansion. The new advanced woman was part of it all. Miranda MacIntosh, she was a brazen huzzy, she was Scots, she was a disturbance. If only a fellow dared … no no, what was he thinking, it was unthinkable, confound her, he went to the club for tennis, not to be looked at by sea-green siren’s eyes. Jenny, Jenny! Was he like his own father, who had kicked over the traces, and gone to the dogs, because of drink and women. His own father—the disgrace of it—was that why he himself had such—such——. Father’s deathbed repentance; but nothing could ever undo the shame, the disgrace, the ruin he had brought upon the family. Miranda—what a name—in itself something beyond the pale, something luring, like the Lorelei in the Rhine, who drew men down to drown, with promises of inhuman delights. O damn Miranda! Was he some stripling boy, that such thoughts should find him their prey?

  He pedalled slowly by the White Hart. Should he call in for a glass of beer? There was no harm in that; and he was not likely to be recognized. No, for one glass might lead to another. A game of chess … what was the good of playing with Hetty, who would, or could, never really exert herself to try and win? It was a farce. His whole life was a farce. Making a garden out of a few square yards of London clay! O damn it, what was the matter with him? Miranda had got into him like an octopus. The white skin, the breasts showing movement beneath the white bodice, the show of leg to the knee, almost as she turned to take a back-hand volley, what a woman, what a mate. Alone with her on a South Sea Island, he would teach her to ogle a married man! Secretary of the Archæologists’ Association, more like the Harlots’! And by now feeling completely disgraced in his own eyes, and that he might as well go the whole hog, Richard stopped at The Castle, a hundred yards or so before the turn up to Randiswell; and wheeling his cycle into the passage leading to the various doors marked Jug and Bottle, Public Bar, Private Bar Saloon and Billiards, he set it up against the end wall, and without further ado pushed upon the ground-glass-panelled Private Bar and asked for some cider.

  “Don’t keep it, sir,” said a man with eyes almost concealed in a smile, a man in shirt-sleeves kept off his wrists by rubber bands, as he raised his boater, then set it on his head again at the original angle. “Porter, stout, bitter, mild in wood, Bass, Worthington, Guinness, Reid’s, Raggett’s, Truman’s, Allsopp’s, Courage’s in bottle. This is a free house.”

  Feeling the fellow’s eyes unbearably upon him, Richard said the first name that came to him. “Raggett’s, please.”

  “Nice evening, sir. Been playing tennis?”

  “Lawn tennis,” said Richard, not wanting to encourage conversation. The place smelled of stale beer and tobacco smoke.

  The publican turned to say, as he drew a cork, “You’ll pardon me mentioning it, I hope, but I notice by the shape of your racquet it is a tennis racquet, and not the new lawn tennis shape.”

  “You are quite right,” exclaimed Richard. “It is a tennis racquet.”

  “Originally for use with soft leather balls stuffed with feathers, and sometimes horsehair, so I understand.”

  “Do you play, yourself?”

  “No sir,” replied the landlord, with a giggle, “I’ve got some old copies of ‘The London Illustrated News,’ and was reading about it only the other day.”

  The publican wiped the counter before putting down the glass of stout.

  “Threepence, if you please, sir. It’s up a ha’penny since the Budget.”

  Richard buttoned his jacket across his watch and chain as the door opened and two women in black bonnets and dresses came in. The landlord’s eyes grew to narrow slits as he smiled again, the straw hat being lifted and replaced while his face assumed the faint suggestion of being Chinese.

  “Two half quarterns of gin, Freddie,” said one of the women, in a voice familiar to Richard, who had turned his face to the mahogany partition. He had recognized Mrs. Cummings and Mrs. Birkett. What would the landlady of his bachelor days, and the midwife who had attended Hetty, think of him being there?

  He soon found out, when feeling himself discourteous, he turned round, simulated surprise, and raised his boater, slightly embarrassed by the thought of the landlord having just done the same thing.

  “Why Mr. Maddison, it is a pleasure to see you out and about, and in the Castle, of all places!” exclaimed Mrs. Cummings. “What a small world it is after all, I was only talking of you to Mrs. B. as we were walking past the Public Baths just now! ‘I never see Mr. or Mrs. Maddison nowadays,’ I said, ‘they never asked me to the christening of their little son, but then Mr. Maddison was always so reserved a gentleman, Mrs. B.,’ I said. How are you keeping, and how do you like your new house? I suppose all those years you lodged with me, and I always tell people you were the nicest gentleman I could wish to have under my roof, all those years with me seem nothing now you are happy and secure with your wife and family.”

  “You must come round and see us when you can manage it, Mrs. Cummings. We have another baby now, I expect you know, thanks to the skill and care of Mrs. Birkett.” He bowed slightly to Mrs. Birkett.

  Mrs. Cummings loo
ked significantly at the glass on the counter. “Do you see what I see, Mrs. B.? Father is keeping up his strength,” and both women laughed. “Raggett’s Stout! You must excuse us laughing, Mr. Maddison, but it is an old joke between Mrs. C. and me, how you brought your little wife home that evening, some months off her time, those bottles of Raggett’s all ready for the happy occasion! We’ve often had a quiet laugh over it, I hope you will not be offended, Mr. Maddison?”

  “Oh no, of course not. Well, how are you, Mrs. Birkett?”

  “Very well, thank you, Mr. Maddison. How is the little one progressing?”

  “Very well, thank you, Mrs. Birkett. The mother is able to feed the baby this time.”

  “Well, here’s a health to her, Father,” and Mrs. Birkett raised her glass of gin and hot water with a slice of lemon in it. Mrs. Cummings followed. They drank.

  The landlord appeared to be interested. So he was; but chiefly in the hope that the meeting would lead to more custom. It did; for Richard considered it the thing to do to offer them another drink. They accepted at once. He decided to have beer this time. He ordered himself a pint of strong Burton ale. Why not, indeed?

  It had an exhilarating effect on him. The evening became alive, in that he lived in the present. The tennis had been good fun; Mr. Mundy was doing his best to keep the true values of the country alive; Miss MacIntosh was a gay and natural lassie from the Highlands. He began to speak of his butterflies, while Mrs. Cummings exchanged a wink with Mrs. Birkett. They expected to be amused; they were enchanted. Freddie the landlord leaned nearer, the better to hear what the gentleman was saying, while marvelling at education. Richard told them how Painted Ladies and sometimes Large Coppers flew miles across the seas, with the rare Camberwell Beauty; how the herb fields in North Surrey were, in summer, acres of pure colour; and thither came Fritillary and Admiral, Marbled White and Blue Adonis. How one collected not for the sake of acquiring rare specimens, but as talismans of future happiness. Mrs. Cummings wondered at the change in him from the reserved young man she had known before, and declared that the alteration was due to his marriage.