Works of Grant Allen

by Grant Allen

  ‘‘Ees, ‘ees, lad, times is changed,’ Sam murmured meditatively, half to himself; ‘times is changed turble bad since old Squire’s day. Wot a place ‘Ootton ‘ad used to be then, ‘adn’t ur, Geargey? Coach from Darchester an’ ‘bus from Tilbury station, bringin’ in gurt folks from London vor the sayson every day; dinner party up to vicarage with green paysen an’ peaches, an’ nectarines, —— —’’An’ a ‘ole turbat,’ Geargey put in parenthetically. ‘Ay, lad, an’ a ‘ole turbot every Saturday. Them was times, Geargey; them was times. I don’t s’pose they ther times ull never come again. Ther ain’t the gentry now as ther’d used to be in old Squire’s day. Pack o’ trumpery London volk, with one servant, comin’ down ’ere vor the sayson — short sayson — six week, or murt be seven — an’ then walkin’ off agin, without so much as spending ten poun’ or so in the’ole parish. I mind the times, Geargey, when volks used to say ‘Ootton were the safety valve o’ the Bath sayson. Soon as sayson were over up to Bath, gentlevolk and ladies a-comin’ down ’ere to enj’y thesselves, an’ spendin’ their money vree and aisy, same as if it were water. Us don’t see un comin’ now, Geargey: times is changed turble: us don’t see un now.’

  ‘It’s the dree terms as ‘as ruined ‘Ootton,’ Geargey said, philosophically — the research of the cause being the true note of philosophy.

  ‘It’s they dree terms as ‘as done it, vor sartin.’

  ‘Why, ‘ow’s that, Gearge?’

  ‘Well, don’t ‘ee see, Sam, it’s like o’ thik. W’en they used to ‘ave ‘arf-years at the schools, bless ‘ee, volks with families ‘ad used to bring down the children vrom school so soon as the ‘arf-year were over. Then the gurt people ud take the young gentlemen out vishin’, might be in June, or July may-be, and gee a bit o’ work to honest visher-people in the off-sayson. Then in August, London people ud come an’ take lodgin’s and gee us a bit more work nice and tidy. So the sayson ‘ad used to last off an’ on vrom June to October. Well, bime-by, they meddlesome school people, they goes an’ makes up these ’ere new-vangled things o’ dree terms, as they calls ’em, cuttin’ up the year unnat’ral-like into dree pieces, as ‘adn’t used to be w’en we was children. Wot’s the consequence? Everybody comes a-rushin’ and a-crushin’ permixuous, in August, the ‘ole boilin’ o’ ’em together, wantin’ rooms an’ boats and vishermen, so as the parish baint up to it. Us ‘as to work ‘ard vor six or seven week, and not give satisfaction nayther; and then rest o’ the year us ‘as to git along the best us can on the shart sayson. I can’t abare they new-vangled ways, upsettin’ all the constitooted order of things altogither, an’ settin’ poor vishermen at sixes and sevens for arf their lifetime.’

  ‘It’s the march of intellect, Geargey,’ Sam Churchill answered, deprecatingly (Sam understood himself to be a Liberal in politics, and used this convenient phrase as a general solvent for an immense number of social difficulties). ‘It’s the march of intellect, no doubt, Geargey: there’s a sight o’ progress about; board-schools an’ sich like: an’ if it cuts agin us, don’t ‘ee see, w’y us ‘as got to make the best of it, however.’

  ‘It murt be, an’ agin it murtn’t; and agin it murt,’ Geargey murmured dubiously.

  ‘But any way, wher’s Minna to, Sammy? — that’s wot I comed vor to ax ‘ee.’

  ‘Down to vield by lake, yander, most like,’ Sam answered with a nod of his head in the direction indicated.

  ‘I’ll go an’ vetch her,’ said Geargey; ‘dinner’s most ready.’

  ‘An I’ll come an’ zee wot Colin’s up to,’ added Sam, laying down his hoe, and pulling together his unbuttoned waistcoat.

  They walked down to the brook in the meadow, and saw the two children sitting in the corner so intent upon their artistic performances that they hardly noticed the approach of their respective fathers. Old Sam Churchill went close up and looked keenly at the clay figure of Minna that Colin was still moulding with the last finishing touches as the two elders approached them. ‘Thik ther vigger baint a bad un, Colin,’ he said, taking it carefully in his rough hand.

  ‘‘ee’aven’t done it none so ill, lad; but it don’t look so livin’ like as it ‘ad ought to. Wot do ‘ee think it is, Geargey, eh? tell us?’

  ‘Why, I’m blowed if that baint our Minna,’ Geargey answered, with a little gasp of open-mouthed astonishment. ‘It’s her vurry pictur, Colin: a blind man could see that, of course, so soon as ’e set eyes on it. ‘Ow do ‘ee do it, Colin, eh? ‘Ow do ‘ee do it?’ ‘Oh, that baint nothin’,’ Colin said, colouring up. ‘Only a little bit o’ clay, just made up vor to look like Minna.’

  ‘Look ‘ee ’ere,’ Colin,’ his father went on, glancing quickly from the clay to little Minna, and altering a touch or two with his big clumsy fingers, not undeftly. ‘Look ‘ee ’ere; ‘ee must putt the dress thik way, I should say, with a gurt dale more flusterin’ about it; it do zit too stiff and starchy, somehow, same as if it wur made o’ new buckram. ‘ee must put in a fold or two, ’ere, so as to make un sit more nat’ral. Don’t ‘ee see Minna’s dress do double itself up, I can’t rightly say ‘ow, but sununat o’ tkik there way?’ And he moulded the moist clay a bit with his hands, till the folds of the drapery began to look a little more real and possible.

  ‘I’d ought to ‘ave drawed it first, I think,’ Colin said, looking at the altered dress with a satisfied glance. ‘‘ave ‘ee got such a thing as a pencil about ‘ee, father?’

  Old Sam took a piece of pencil from his pocket, and handed it to Colin. The boy held it tightly in his fingers, with a true artistic grasp, like one who knows how to wield it, and with a few strokes on a scrap of paper hit off little Minna far better than he had done in the plastic material. Geargey looked over his shoulder with a delighted grin on his weatherbeaten features. ‘I tell ‘ee, Sam,’ he said to the old gardener, confidentially, ‘it’s my belief that thik ther boy’ull be able one o’ these vine days to paint rale picturs.’

  CHAPTER III. PERNICIOUS LITERATURE.

  When winter came, Hiram Winthrop had less to do and more time to follow the bidding of his own fancy. True, there was cordwood to split in abundance; and splitting cordwood is no child’s play along the frozen shores of Lake Ontario. You go out among the snow in the wood-shed, and take the big ice-covered logs down from the huge pile with numbed fingers: then you lay them on a sort of double St. Andrew’s cross, its two halves supported by a thwart-piece, and saw them up into fit lengths for the kitchen fireplace: and after that you split them in four with a solid-headed axe, taking care in the process not to let your deadened hands slip, so as to cut off the ends of your own toes with an ill-directed blow glancing off the log sideways. Yes, splitting cordwood is very serious work, with the thermometer at 40° below freezing; and drawing water from the well when the rope is frozen and your skin clings to the chill iron of the thirsty bucket-handle is hardly better: yet in spite of both these small drawbacks, Hiram Winthrop found much more to enjoy in his winters than in his summers. There was no corn to hoe, no peas to pick, no weeding to do, no daily toil on farm and garden. The snow had covered all with its great white sheet; and even the neighbourhood of Muddy Creek Dépôt looked desolately beautiful in its own dreary, cold, monotonous, Siberian fashion.

  The flowers and leaves were gone too, to be sure; but in the low brushwood by the blackberry bottom the hares had turned white to match the snow; and the nut-hatches were answering one another in their varying keys; and the skunks were still busy of nights beneath the spreading walnuts; and the chickadees were tinkling overhead among the snow-laden pine-needles of the far woodland. All the summer visitors had gone south to Georgia and the gulf: but the snow-buntings were ever with Hiram in the wintry fields: and the bald-headed eagles still prowled around at times on the stray chance of catching a frozen-out racoon. Above all there was ease and leisure, respite from the deacon’s rasping voice calling perpetually for Hiram here, and Hiram there, and Hiram yonder, to catch the horses, or tend the harrow, or mind the bir
ds, or weed the tomatoes, or set shingles against the sun over the drooping transplanted cabbages. A happy time indeed for Hiram, that long, weary, white-sheeted, unbroken northern New York winter.

  Sam Churchill was with the deacon still, but had little enough to do, for there isn’t much going on upon an American farm from November to April, and the deacon would gladly have got rid of his hired help in the slack time if he could have shuffled him off; but Sam had been well advised on his first hiring, and had wisely covenanted to be kept on all the year round, with board and lodging and decent wages during the winter season. And Hiram initiated Sam into the mysteries of sliding on a bent piece of wood (a homemade toboggan) down the great snowdrifts, and skating on the frozen expansion of Muddy Creek, and building round huts, Esquimaux fashion, with big square blocks of solid dry snow, and tracking the white hare over the white fields by means of the marks he left behind him, whose termination, apparently lengthening itself out miraculously before one’s very eyes, marked the spot where the hare himself was hopping invisible to human vision. In return, Sam lent him a few dearly-treasured books: books that he had brought from England with him: the books that had first set the Dorsetshire peasant lad upon his scheme of going forth alone upon the wide world beyond the ocean.

  Hiram was equally delighted and astonished with these wonderful charmed volumes. He had seen a few books before, but they were all of two types: Cornell’s Geography, Quackenboss’s Grammar, and the other schoolbooks used at the common school; or else Barnes’s Commentary, Elder Coffin’s Ezekiel, the Hopkinsite Confession of Faith, and other like works of American exegetical and controversial theology. But Sam’s books, oh, gracious, what a difference! There was Peter Simple, a story about a real live boy, who wa’n’t good, pertickler, not to speak of, but had some real good old times on board a ship, somewhere, he did; and there was Tom Jones (Hiram no more understood the doubtful passages in that great romance than he understood the lucubrations of Philosopher Square, but he took it in, in the lump, as very good fun for all that), Tom Jones, the story of another real live boy, with, most delightful of all, a reg’lar mean sneak of a feller, called Blifil, to act as a foil to Tom’s straightforward pagan flesh-and-bloodfulness; the Buccaneers of the Caribbean Sea, a glorious work of fire and slaughter, whar some feller or other got killed right off on every page a’most, you bet; Jake the Pirate, another splendid book of the same description; and half a dozen more assorted novels, from the best to the worst, all chosen alike for their stirring incidents which went straight home to the minds of the two lads, in spite of all external differences of birth and geographical surroundings. Hiram pored over them surreptitiously, late at nights, in the room that he and Sam occupied in common — a mere loft at the top of the house and felt in his heart he had never in his life imagined such delightful reading could possibly have existed. And they were written by growed-up men, too! How strange to think that once upon a time, somewhile and somewhere, there were growed-up men capable of thus sympathising with, and reproducing the ideas and feelings of, the natural mind of boyhood!

  One evening, very late — eleven nearly — the deacon, prowling around after a bottle or something, spied an unwonted light gleaming down from the trap-door that led up to the loft where the lads ought at that moment to have been sleeping soundly. Lights in a well-conducted farmhouse at eleven o’clock was indeed incomprehensible: what on earth, the deacon asked himself wonderingly, could them thar lads be up to at this hour? He crept up the step-ladder cautiously, so as not to disturb them by premonitions, and opened the trap-door in sedulous silence. Sam was already fast asleep; but there was Hiram, sot up in bed, as quiet as a ‘possum, ‘pearin’ as if he was a-readin’ something. The deacon’s eyes opened with amazement! Hiram reading! Had his heart been touched, then, quite sudden-like? Could he have took up the Hopkinsite Confession in secret to his upper chamber? Was he meditatin’ makin’ a public profession afore the Assembly?

  The deacon glowered and marvelled. Creeping, still quite silently, up to the bedhead, he looked with an inquiring glance over poor Hiram’s unsuspecting shoulder. A sea of words swam vaguely before his bewildered vision; words, not running into long orthodox paragraphs, like the Elder’s Ezekiel, but cut up, oh horror, into distinct sentences, each indicating a separate part in a conversation. The deacon couldn’t clearly make it all out; for it was a dramatic dialogue, a form of composition which had not largely fallen in the good man’s way: but he picked up enough to understand that it was a low pothouse scene, where one Falstaff was bandying improper language with a person of the name of Prince (given name, Henry) — language that made even the deacon’s sallow cheek blush feebly with reflected and vicarious modesty. For a moment he endeavoured, like a Christian man, to retain his wrath; and then paternal feeling overcame him, and he caught Hiram such a oner on his ears as he flattered himself that boy wouldn’t be likely to forgit in any very partickler hurry.

  Hiram looked round, amazed and stunned, his ear tingling and burning, and saw the gaunt apparition of his father, standing silent and black-browed by the bare bed-head. For a moment those two glared at one another mutely and defiantly.

  At last Hiram spoke: ‘Wal!’ he said simply.

  ‘Wal!’ the deacon answered, with smothered wrath. ‘Hiram, I am angry and sin not. What do you go an’ take them bad books up to read for? Who give ’em you? Whar did you get ’em? Oh, you sinful, bad boy, whar did you get ’em?’ And he administered another sound cuff upon Hiram’s other ear.

  Hiram put his hand up to the stinging spot, and cried a minute silently: then he answered as well as he was able: ‘This aint a bad book: this is called “The Complete Dramattic Works of William Shakespeare.” Sam lent it to me, an’ it’s Sam’s book, an’ ther ain’t no harm in it, anyhow.’

  The deacon was plainly staggered for a moment, for even he had dimly heard the name of William Shakespeare; and though he had never made any personal acquaintance with that gentleman’s works, he had always understood in a vague, indefinite fashion that this here Shakespeare was a perfectly respectable and recognised writer, whose books were read and approved of even by Hopkinsite ministers edoocated at Bethabara Seminary. So he took the volume in his hand incredulously and looked it through casually for a few minutes. He glanced at a scene or two here or there with a critical eye, and then he flung the volume from him quickly, as a man might fling and crush some loathsome reptile. By this time Sam was half-awake, and sat up in bed to inquire sleepily, what all thik ther row could be about at thik time of evenin’?’ The deacon answered by going savagely to Sam’s box, and taking out, one by one, for separate inspection, the volumes he found there. He held up the candle (stuck in an empty blacking-bottle) to each volume in succession, and, as soon as he had finally condemned them each, he flung them down in an untidy pile on the bare floor of the little bedroom. Most of them he stood stoically enough; but the Vicar of Wakefield was at last quite too much for his stifled indignation. Sitting down blankly on the bed he fired off his volley at poor Hiram’s frightened head, with terrible significance.

  ‘Hiram Winthrop,’ he said solemnly, ‘you air a son of perdition. You air more a’most ‘n I kin manage with. Satan’s openin’ the door for you on-common wide, I kin tell you, sonny. It makes me downright scar’t to see you in company along of sech books. Your mother’ll be awful took back about it. I don’t mind this ’ere about the Pirates of the Caribbean Sea, so much; that’s kinder hist’ry, that is, and mayn’t do you much harm: but sech things as this Peter Simple, an’ Wakefield, and Pickwick’s Papers — why, I wonder the roof don’t fall in on ’em an’ crush us in the lot altogether. I’m durned ef I could have thought you’d bin wicked enough to read ’em, sech on-principled literatoor. I sha’n’t chastise you to-night, sonny; it’s late, now, and we’ve read chapter: but to-morrer, Hiram, to-morrer, you shall pay for them thar books, take my word for it. You shall be chastened in the manner that’s app’inted. Ef I was you, I should spend the rest of the evenin’
in wrestlin’ for forgiveness for the sin you’ve committed.’

  And yet in the chapter the deacon had read at family worship that evening there was one little clause which said: ‘Quench not the Spirit.’

  Hiram slept but little that night, with the vague terror of to-morrow’s whipping overshadowing him through the night watches. But he had at least one comfort: Sam Churchill had got out and gathered up his books, and locked them carefully in his box again.

  ‘If the boss tries to touch they books again, I tell ‘ee, Hiram,’ he said bi-lingually (for absorbent America was already beginning to assimilate him), ‘‘e’ll vind ‘isself a-lyin’ longways on the vloor, afore he do know it, I promise ‘ee.’ Hiram heard, and was partly comforted. At least he would still have the books to read, somehow, at some time. For in his own heart, unregenerate or otherwise, he couldn’t bring himself to believe that there could be really anything so very wicked in Henry the Fourth or Peter Simple.

  CHAPTER IV. PROFESSIONAL SOCIETY.

  The deacon’s cowhide cut deep; but the thrashing didn’t last long: and after it was all over, Hiram wandered out aimlessly by himself, down the snowclad valley of Muddy Creek, and along to the wooded wilds and cranberry marshes near the Ontario debouchure, to forget his troubles and the lasting smart of the weals in watching the beasts and birds among the frozen lowlands. He had never been so far from home before, but the weather and the ice were in his favour, enabling him to get over an amount of ground he wouldn’t have tried to cover in the dry summer time. He had his skates with him, and he skated where possible, taking them off to walk over the intervening land necks or drifted snow-sheets. The ice was glare in many places, so that one could skate on it gloriously; and before he had got half-way down to Nine-Mile Bottom he had almost forgotten all about the deacon, and the sermon, and the beating, and the threatened ten chapters of St. John (the Gospel of Love the deacon called it) to be learned by heart before next Lord’s day, in expiation of the heinous crime of having read that pernicious work the ‘Vicar of Wakefield.’ It was the loveliest spot he had ever seen in all his poor unlovely little existence.