Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  The wood where no God-fearing man would venture after dark, the circle within the twenty-four stones, inviolate all the year except on Midsummer Eve, when it was the dancing-floor of those who knew, these perhaps were the remnants of ancient sorceries, laughable and ridiculous to the educated, but firmly rooted in the instincts of the fisher-folk of St. Columb’s and the farm-folk round sixty years ago. And it was sixty years ago, on one Sunday afternoon, that this narrative opens.

  CHAPTER I. SUNDAY PRAYERS

  JOHN PENTREATH came out of the porch that had once been the main entrance to the farmhouse, and now only led into the garden. It was a warm languorous Sunday afternoon, late in February, and a breeze spiced with the scent of wallflowers and of magnolia blossom came strong to his nostrils. There was something carnal and seductive in these spring odours, which penetrated through the austere atmosphere with which he habitually encompassed himself of a Sunday. As usual he was dressed in thick black broadcloth, for that was his habit on the Lord’s Day; in his hand he held a well-thumbed Bible, and on his head was a silk hat dull with age. Round it ran a thick mourning band which had been sewn there for the funeral of his first wife, when the hat was newly purchased in Penzance for the occasion. A long tale of years had gone by since then, but this hat was for Sunday wear alone, and there was still a bit of nap left on it.

  He stepped on to the weedy gravel path, and paced up and down it for a minute or two with firm, heavy steps. In height he was close on six feet, lean in flesh, but broad in build, and for all his three and sixty years there was scarcely a grey hair to be found in his black-thatched head. But the signs of age and the conduct of his life could be traced in the loose pouches that hung beneath his blue eyes, and in the sodden sallowness that underlay the sun-tan of his clean-shaven face. His mouth was noticeably long, the upper lip thin and insensitive, while the lower one sagged loose and sensual in strange contradiction of the other. A grim face, hard and cruel and weak together.

  There was a wooden bench, with the discoloured paint blistered and peeling off it, in the angle where the garden wall ran out from the house, and presently he sat down there, opened his Bible at the Book of Revelation, and began reading to himself, forming the words with his lips, as if dumbly speaking them:

  “The same shall drink of the wine of the wrath of God which is poured out without mixture into the cup of his indignation... And the smoke of their torment ascendeth up forever and ever; and they have no rest day nor night, who worship the beast and his image, and whosoever receiveth the mark of his name.”

  Yes, that was grand stuff, he thought. Often and often he read these chapters on Sunday afternoon, for they never ceased to refresh him, and he rolled the words round on his tongue like a greedy man relishing a pleasant mouthful. It was good to remember, as often as Sunday came round, the inexorable Deity with His vials of wrath, who promised to punish the light and the careless who paid no heed to His ordinances, unmindful of the hell-fire that surely awaited them, in which they would burn conscious and unconsumed through eternity. He was the Master, and before Him John Pentreath furiously abased himself on one day of the week. Every Sunday, whatever the weather, he dressed himself in his hot black clothes, he attended morning and evening service in the church at St. Columb’s (for the Pentreaths had always been church-people, not chapel-people), and all afternoon; when dinner was done and he had had a smoke and a snooze, until the church bells began again, he spent with his open Bible in front of him; and woe be to any who, in his presence, indulged in laughter or light conversation. Not a drop of liquor did he touch that day at his dinner, but Sunday terminated at supper-time, and then he was free to make up for his abstinence. Plentiful were those retarded potations, but even they were by way of being part of his service to the Lord, for when, after supper, the table was cleared, and the family gathered round it for evening prayers, his eloquence and power in extemporary oration was determined by the quantity of whisky he had drunk. His bawled devotions were chiefly concerned with the iniquities of those who formed his household, and his fulminations were most fiery when he had drunk most. Occasionally he must be helped up to bed, still loudly praying as he lurched and stumbled up the stairs, and his orisons resounded through the house till he snored off into a drunken slumber.

  These hours of the afternoon, when on warm days like this he read his Bible in the garden, were the most irksome of all the week in spite of their spiritual uplift. On other days he would have had a couple of stiff drams at the midday dinner, and he went out to work on the farm till sunset and supper-time. But on Sunday there was no work doing, and he had to get through the hours uncheered except by the thought that his abstinence was his self-imposed penance, pleasing to the Most High and fully atoning for whatever had been his shortcomings in the previous week. His black and savage temper was made blacker yet by this sore business of saving his soul, and supper-time on Sunday was a long time coming.

  As usually happened, his attention presently wandered from the open book which he held, and though his eye continued to follow the lines of the print, and his mouth to form the words, his mind slid away from it, and those pictures of years past and of present days, which form the basis of a man’s consciousness, began to show themselves between the page and his eyes...

  The Pentreaths had come down in the world. and for two generations now their land had been slipping from them, sold slice by slice to thriftier and more prosperous folk, till now there remained but fifty acres of a property that a hundred years ago had been ten times more extensive, and even this remnant was sparsely stocked and badly cared for. Lately this ill-luck had been persistent: one year swine fever had invaded the sties, there had been a cruel bad lambing-season the next, a wet spring followed by a violent storm in June had ruined the hay crop another year, but whatever forms the ill-luck took, there was always the bottle to mitigate it. Then there had been the ill-luck of his two marriages. His first wife had been a comely lass, God-fearing like himself, and of family as good as his own, and while she was with him all had gone well; never since had there been such harvests, and such good fortune with the livestock. But then in the third year of their marriage she had died in child-bed, leaving him while only twenty-five years of age with one son.

  For fifteen years after that his mother had kept house for him and looked after young Richard, and not till her death did he take a second wife, satisfying his needs with chance adventures with a woman or two from the village. But it was an ill hour for him when Mollie Robson made a boiling in his blood: a lusty girl she was, black-eyed and big, and indeed she had thrown herself at him, making eyes at him, and waylaying him in the warm dusk till she had her way with him. He had really thought no more of her than of a blackberry picked by the wayside, a wild strawberry that offered itself for his casual eating, but before the summer was out her mother came up one day to the farm, telling him that he had got Mollie into trouble, and that his child was waxing within her. Such a scene there was: at first he had refused to marry her, but the old woman screamed and railed at him, and no prudent man would lightly cross Mother Robson when she was set on something. He had offered her money, but that was no good; nothing but his taking Mollie to wife would satisfy her. So married they were, and now he had been saddled with her for more than twenty years, while the baby which had been the cause of his taking her had been born dead, and never another had he got from her. Trollop she had been and a shrew she was, and she came of an evil stock, for none doubted but that Mother Robson had dealings with dark powers, and it soon seemed that her daughter was like her. John Pentreath had beaten her once, and sure enough next day the young bull he had just bought turned sick, and it was no good to put the cows to him. Once again he had locked her out of the house to teach her not to spend all the day down in St. Columb’s instead of doing her work at the farm in the kitchen and the poultry-run, returning at an hour when decent women were in bed, and what had been the result of that? She went to her mother with the tale of his treatment of her, an
d the very next Sunday while they were in church there came a hailstorm that shredded every blossom from the apple-trees in the orchard. It was many years now since Mollie had been to church at all or made any observance of the Lord’s Day, and sometimes John Pentreath wondered whether it was she who brought all the ill-luck on the house. Thank God, Mother Robson had been taken at last: only a week ago she had been found dead in her bed, and so now perhaps better days might come, for she had always hated him. But still he was mated with Mollie, and there was a wife for a God-fearing man. Unfortunately, he feared her but little less than he feared his Creator, and the fear of her lasted all the week, whereas God concerned him only on a Sunday.

  The second member of his household was his daughter-in-law Nancy, widow of his only son by his first wife, and there was a daughter for a God-fearing man, she with her tawdry finery, and her open-work stockings on Sunday; and the red muck she put on her cheeks and lips when she went to church, where there would be men to look at her, and, by God, hadn’t she got an eye for them! There had been from time to time rumours of her lightness with the artist-folk at St. Columb’s, and John Pentreath had seen her sitting on the pier with her legs a-swing, talking and laughing to four or five young fellows there, as no modest woman would have done. She was handsomer now perhaps, in the ripeness of her forty years, than she had ever been, and in face and figure alike she took a man’s eye. For nearly twenty years now she had lived at the farm, having come back there, still a mere girl, on the death of her husband. The kitchen was her main job, and she cooked plain savoury food: she and the servant-girl did the housework between them, for Mollie Pentreath took no hand in that. When Nancy’s work was done, she would stroll in the garden, singing and humming to herself, and picking posies to bedizen the house and particularly herself. Often she pinned some bright little nosegay in the hollow between her breasts, and then any man could see their firm and generous lines, as indeed he was meant to do, for Nancy would have shown off her points to anything that wore breeches, be he her own father-in-law or her own son. If there was marketing to be done in St. Columb’s, she would spend half an hour first in her bedroom, among her trinkets and ribands, and when supper Was cleared away of an evening, she sat in a rocking-chair and read some trashy story about dukes and duchesses and the ways of the light folk in London town.

  She had married young Richard Pentreath up there in England, where he had gone, while still a boy! to seek his fortune with a hundred pounds which his mother had left him. Six months later he had been killed in a street accident, and the young widow, heavy with child, had come back to her husband’s home. Well did John Pentreath remember her advent, with her Cockney speech, and her airs of a fine lady, and her elegant clothes of mourning. Richard, no doubt, had bragged of the estate to which he was heir, and apparently she thought that she was to be served and waited on, but she had soon found out that it was she who had to serve and wait in return for her keep. Three months after her arrival her boy Dennis had been born, and now he worked as a labourer on the farm that would one day be his. Dennis was a strapping young fellow, close on twenty years old, and as tall as his grandfather.

  The breeze that had fallen asleep as John Pentreath read his Bible stirred and woke again, sprinkling the hot scent of the wallflowers over him, and rustling in the thin leaves of the book that lay open on his knee, as if suggesting that these dark musings might as well be shut up there, for they consorted ill with the seduction of the spring. His three and sixty years and his habitual intemperance had as yet left his vigour unimpaired, and his memory of his middle years, between his first wife’s death and his second marriage, were not faded like photographs of old faces, but still stirred lively in the fibre of his blood as he thought of them. There had been that Bolitho woman, married to a withered ape of a man, and he had done the pair of them a good turn, for he had given that miserly old pawnbroker in Penzance an heir to his business, and, Lord, how the old man had strutted about when his wife gave birth to a boy. He was as potent a man now as he had been then, and here was he mated to this barren woman whom he hated and feared, and with whom he had had no commerce this many a year. But to-day was Sunday, it was the hour for sacred reading and penitential thought, and he shut eyes and ears to the lure of memory, and tried to range himself on the side of the wrathful God who had promised to make sinners burn eternally for the sins they had so gleefully committed. Yet the fruitful, fragrant penetration of the spring continued subtly to invade him, making the marrow in his bones to simmer in its warmth, and the Bible slipped from his knees and lay unregarded at his feet.

  Somewhere in the house young Dennis was whistling a jiggety tune, and though whistling on Sunday afternoon before now had been rewarded by a sound whipping on Monday morning, that would be a hazardous experiment now for the sake of godliness, so big and strong had the boy grown. Moreover, John Pentreath felt some unregenerate spirit within him secretly dancing to the gaiety of the tune. Then a female voice joined in, singing the same refrain: no doubt Dennis and the servant-girl were sitting together at the open window of the kitchen, and perhaps their Bibles or those books of tales of Christian martyrs, which were the ordained reading for Sunday afternoon, had dropped from their knees, just as his had done, and they were looking at each other with the natural lasciviousness of a handsome boy and a pretty girl. Dennis as yet had taken little notice of girls; he was shy and awkward with them, and when, after supper of a summer evening, he went down to St. Columb’s for an hour or two, it was not to make up to the girls or sit and spoon with them on the pier, but to seek out his great friend, young Willie Polhaven, and the two would stroll out from the village, bathe in one of the sandy coves, and lie there smoking, or on winter evenings go to the clubroom and be content with each other. But of late his natural manhood had begun to stir in him, and it was but seldom that he left the farm after supper, preferring to help Nell to wash up in the scullery, talking low to her there, with an occasional gust of smothered laughter, and the two had bright secret glances for each other. Not to be wondered at, for, by God, Dennis was a handsome boy, and any girl who refused to do his will must be a prude only fit for a meeting of Quakers. And the girl, Nell Robson, a niece of his wife’s, was easily the prettiest lass in the place, dark in complexion, and with the black hair and black eyes of the southern strain. Dennis took after his mother: he was fair, with hair, thick as a rabbit’s, that shone like ripe wheat in the sunshine; he was tanned brown on face and neck and up to the shoulders of his lusty arms, but beneath his shirt and breeches there was the white skin of the Pentreaths. How the red weals had leaped out across his bare shoulders when his grandfather had flogged him...He imagined the two lying stretched on that bed of daffodils in front of him, or in the shadow of the trees among the wreaths of periwinkles. What a couple, black hair and gold, blue eyes and black setting each other on fire, and mouths a-thirst. There was a spring picture for you in spite of Sunday! A month of Sundays and a thousand Bibles would not take the colour out of that.

  The sharp click of the latch of the door leading from the farmyard into the garden diverted his attention from this imagined picture, and his wife came through, carrying the basket of eggs she had just gathered from the henhouse. The hens were her private property, bought with her own money, and well she looked after them. Two dozen eggs a week she allowed the house, in return for their food, and when they were not laying, or when eggs were scarce and fetched a high price down in St. Columb’s or Penzance, she would contribute instead a cockerel or two for dinner. Stringy and tough they were sometimes, for she kept the capons for the market, but the worst of them would make a hash or a tasty soup. She was his junior by fifteen years or more, and her face, handsome still in feature, wore the hard and soured look of thwarted fulfilment that often comes to childless women. But so vivid had been to John Pentreath his thoughts of youth, in this lure of the spell of spring, that now he saw, not the lined and ageing face which he had grown to fear and detest, but some wraith of that provocative wench
who had made his blood simmer with her enticements all those years ago. She was still upright in carriage and quick of movement, and the gleams of sun dappling down through the thick woven boughs of the big ash tree that stood by the gate lit a brightness in her hair and tinged her faded face with warm colour: just for a moment that illusion lasted, queerly vivid, and then was gone again. She took him in from head to foot in a quick furtive glance, not missing the Bible, which had slipped from his knees and now lay on the path between his feet, and with unusual sociability she came and sat down beside him on the blistered garden-bench.

  “A rare afternoon for to sit out and enjoy the sunshine,” she said. “’Tis a plum of a day picked out o’ June. And have pleasant thoughts been with ‘ee, John?”

  The spell of spring was still spread over him, like gossamer webs on a dewy morning.

  “Aye, indeed,” he said. “I was being like a cat blinking and purring in the warmth. And when you came through the gate then, Mollie, I seemed to see you standing on the pier again as on some spring day, before we came together. The children whistling and singing in there and the wallflower scent took hold on me, I’m thinking. Queer is it how a scent can bring back old days.”

  Something in this gave her high pleasure. She smiled at him, and her upper teeth dazzling and regular shifted in her mouth.

  “Well, and for Sunday afternoon that’ll be a nice change for you,” she said.

  The day had gone clean out of his mind. Sunday? He looked, as if for confirmation of that, at his own black broadcloth sleeve, and the grimness came flooding back to his face.