Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  The sun rose above the hills across St. Columb’s bay as Dennis sponged face and neck, tugged with a comb at his thatch of hair, and got into his farm clothes, corduroy breeches and a dark-blue fisherman’s jersey. It was full early yet, and he leant out of his window looking at the brightness of the garden. Not till then had he thought again of that rather strange thing he had seen last night, when the brown owl circled without alarm so close to where his grandmother sat, and now he remembered that as he dropped off to sleep he thought he had heard talking out there, or was it only the dry patter of the magnolia leaves outside his window, stirring in the wind? Certainly the last sound he heard was the low fluting of the owl as it quested over the garden. A pack of rubbish had Nell talked last night when she said that women who in life had been witches took the form of owls when they were dead, and visited the like-minded. Not a word of that did he believe, any more than he believed the yarn of Jonah being three days and nights in the belly of a whale. A rare funny yarn was that, and he had burst out laughing when Parson Allingham had read it aloud at the Sunday school which he used to attend, and had got a clout over the head in consequence that made a singing in his ears for an hour afterwards. Jonah and witches, not a pin to choose between them, he thought.

  But below that breezy ridicule, there lurked some consciousness which dwelt in his very blood, that there were hidden powers best to be treated with respect and not provoked. He always had a salutation for that old hag Sally Austell, and he could not help knowing that the folk at St. Columb’s were very polite to his grandmother if they met her in the ways; women would stand off the pavement to let her pass without messing her foot in the gutter, while, if they saw her coming some distance off, it was likely that they would nip round the corner till she had passed. Old wives’ tales, however, was his general conclusion about Jonah and witches alike, and they concerned a lusty boy very little. Farm work all day, a great appetite for supper, and then perhaps on the long summer evenings a bathe with Willie Polhaven, and a lie-out With him on the beach, just they two alone, with talk or laughter or silence, or they would make a cock-shy of a bottle and see who could smash it first, or take off shoes and coats and wrestle together. The day’s work and the dreamless night that followed were enough for him before this new tangle about Nell had started.

  Till now the friendship with Willie had been far the strongest emotional tie in Der1nis’s life, and strange to say, it had sprung out of a quarrel and a fight: the two boys had been just good friends before, even then preferring each other’s company to the gatherings of the village on the pier or a shadowy Corner with a girl. Then, three years ago now, Dennis’s mother had had that affair with the young artist, and there had been a bit of a scandal over it. Dennis had been sitting on the pier one day when his mother passed, and two fellows near him had nudged each other and pointed at her. “There’s a whore and no mistake,” said one, and the other laughed. Dennis didn’t properly know, in the innocence of his sixteen years, just what that meant, but it was something queer, for one of the fellows turned and saw him and gave the other a warning touch. A hot summer evening it was, and presently Willie Polhaven came up, and the two went off for a bathe as appointed. Willie was in a foul temper: his father had beaten him, and he snapped off Dennis’s head whatever he said. Presently they sat half-stripped on the beach, with the low sun warm on their shoulders, and says Dennis:

  “What’s a whore?”

  “Well, you should know that,” said Willie. “It’s just a dirty Woman who makes bed with any man she picks up.”

  “One of those fellows said my mother was a whore,” said Dennis.

  “And who’s denying it?” said Willie. “Shouldn’t wonder if you’re a bastard.”

  That was a more familiar word, and up Dennis jumped. “Come on,” he said, “I’ll knock that down your throat for you, Willie Polhaven,” and he spat in his face.

  At that they set to, for there was no other way for it. They were fine strong boys, without an ounce of science between them, Willie more stocky and a bit the heavier, Dennis lighter of build but with longer reach. The sand made a good foothold for their naked feet, and it was grim earnest. Sometimes they came into a clinch with locked arms and panting chests pressed close, but one flung the other off him, and they were at it again, keen as two fighting cocks, seeing red, both of them, with blue eyes and black steadily glaring at each other and arms flying out like piston rods, and teeth clenched. They had some sort of guard for their heads, or were quick enough to duck, but soon Willie got home on Dennis’s cheekbone, staggering him for a moment, and his left eye began to swell. Dennis in turn landed a jab on Willie’s mouth; and he saw him spit out a broken tooth, and the blood streamed over his chin. Then the oddest thought came into Dennis’s mind. “God, how I love that chap,” he said to himself. “Let me get another smack in like that, and he won’t call me a bastard again.” And as if to answer him, Willie’s eye lit up with the friendliest gleam, as he gave Dennis a couple over the heart that shook him badly.

  They were fairly winded now, the drive of those random blows was losing steam, and Dennis felt his knees growing weak. They were both of them growing a bit wary also, looking for an opportunity to get in some punch that would finish the business. Willie was forcing the other back to where the sand at the edge of the sea was softer and Dennis was aware of that; his feet were slow in this slushy stuff, and he stepped sideways to get on to the firmer sand. Willie thought he saw his chance, and let out with his right, just missing, and before he could recover Dennis had landed him one full on the chin, and over he went with as clean a knockout as anyone could desire. “Got him, by God, with a beauty,” shouted Dennis, for there Willie lay, spread like a star¬-fish, with his bleeding mouth hanging wide, and slack as a bit of chewed string.

  As he looked at him, still with that crow of triumph on his lips, all the fight went out of Dennis. Right and proper it was that they should have fought, and Willie had paid for calling him a bastard; and now that was over, and there was Willie, whom he loved better than anyone in the world, laid out flat. But that did not last long: presently his eyes opened, and he stared vaguely about.

  “Hullo, Willie,” said Dennis. “You’ve come round?”

  “Reckon so. What’s happened?”

  “Just a knock-out,” said Dennis.

  “You don’t say! And I thought I’d got you.” He sat up, and half struggled to his feet. But his joints were slack as a kitten’s; and he would have fallen had not Dennis got hold of him round the waist.

  “Sling your arm round my neck!” he said, “and so we’ll get to the head of the beach. There’s a pool of fresh water there, and ‘twill be useful.”

  It was a limp process, for Dennis was not in much better case, and Willie was a dragging, shuffling weight on his shoulders, but soon they got to the shingle-bank above which lay a pool of fresh water from the spring in the cliff above. -Puffy of face were they both, Dennis’s cheek had swelled up so that his eye was but a slit between it and his eyebrow, and there was a bit of a lump coming on his forehead. and the bruise-flowers of Willie’s knuckles on his chest were beginning to open. Willie had an upper lip already as big as a thrush’s egg, and his teeth had cut it deep within, but the last punch of Dennis’s that knocked him out had not revealed itself, and he was the less marked of the two. Presently he sat up from his bathings of his mouth, and for the first time had a good view of Dennis’s bunged-up eye.

  “God, I got you fair there, Dennis,” he said.

  “That you did, but you was nearer finishing me here,” and he pointed to his chest.

  “Aye, I remember that, and then you had me clean and square.”

  Dennis’s only available eye sparkled.

  “And I liked you terrible, Willie, when I smashed you,” he said.

  “Same here. Lord, two bashings in one day, and I feel fine in my innards.”

  They had their postponed bathe, but that was no prosperous affair, for the salt water smarted sore o
n cuts and bruises, and then they layout on the sand till the sun dipped behind the hills; almost shy of each other, as if their fight had made lovers of them. Then it was time for Dennis to get home for supper, and more than time, for it was half over, and his grandfather in the quarrelsome stage of his evening’s tippling.

  “Late again,” he said as Dennis entered, “and I warned you, so you’ll go supperless. Why, your eye’s bunged up. What have you been up to?”

  “Fighting,” said Dennis.

  “Who with? And did you smash him?”

  “Yes, knocked him out,” said Dennis. “’Twas Willie Polhaven.”

  John Pentreath’s grim face relaxed.

  “Well done, by God,” he cried. “Get him a bit o’ raw meat for his eye, Nancy, and a good plateful for his stomach. That’ll show them the Pentreaths aren’t done for yet.”

  So out of that fight had come one of those strong boyish friendships, utterly void of sentimentality, but of the quality of passion. It was in vain that the girls made eyes at the two handsome young fellows, who had no more than a smile and a shrug for them, and they wandered off out of the lights and the jabberings for a contented solitude of their own. There were half a dozen Willies in the village, but Polhaven got to be known as Dennis’s Willie, and the folk looked with kindly eyes on this male attachment, for it was no rare thing that two boys or two young fishermen out at sea from dusk to dawn at the night-fishing should pair off together like this, independent for awhile of female attractions. For a year or two they would be allied, and then the natural call of sex would come to one or the other, and the idyll would be over. That had come to Dennis now, just like a change of wind, and soon, no doubt, Willie would get a girl, too.

  Dennis put on his thick farm-boots, which he had cleaned the evening before (the cleaning consisted of scraping off the heavier lumps of mud with an old dinner-knife) and clumped down the passage. He was up first this morning, for there was no one stirring in the house; and all the doors of the bedrooms were still shut. Nell should have been up by now, or his mother, to get the kettle boiling and give him a cup of tea and a hunk of bread and cold bacon to take out with him to last him till the one o’clock dinner, for he would have been six hours at work by then. But this morning he had to kindle the fire himself, stuffing it with paper and sticks and a sprinkle of small lumps of coal on the top, for he had no intention of going out till he had got something inside him. There were his grandfather’s big Bible and empty glass and nearly empty whisky-bottle still on the table! and on the ragged floor-rug below it, beside his arm-chair, lay his pipe. This rug was covered with numerous burnt holes; where he had knocked out the smouldering end of his tobacco. Some day, as Mrs. Pentrearh told him when the singeing smell was strong after supper, he would spill a drop of whisky there too and be burned to death as he slept and snored in his chair.

  The windows of the kitchen had been shut all night, and it reeked of stuffiness and stale smoke, and while the fire was taking hold, Dennis threw doors and windows wide to let the fresh air sweeten it. A grim and cruel old blackguard was his grandfather: how Dennis had feared and hated him when he was smaller, with his heavy hand and the dogwhip that hung by the kitchen-door. But physically he feared him no longer now, only the hate remained, and it would be a fine day when John Pentreath lay white and still in his coffin, and the lid was put on him: the sooner that day came the better, else surely more acres of the farm would go hissing down his throat. He himself would be marrying Nell before long, if she had a mind for him, whether the old folk dropped off or lingered like rotting pears on the tree, and when they were shovelled into the earth, there would be rare good times at the farm. His mother should live with them if she liked, for both Nell and he were fond of the foolish, good-natured woman, with her ribands and her tawdry finery, and her warm heart and her eye ever roaming round to see if a man wasn’t looking at her. It was not unlikely, he thought, that the fellow on the pier, one summer night three years ago, had been pretty right in what he said of her, and these last few weeks she had been down to St. Columb’s a sight of afternoons with her Sunday hat on bobbing with cherries, so maybe she had gotten another man. Though he despised her tor her gadding, chattering ways, and knew that she came of common stock compared to the Pentreaths, he had affectionate feelings for her, and he cared little for her way of life: it was her business, not his. But it was a different matter if another fellow called her so, and then there would be a couple of fists at his service, and a swinging kick on the bottom when he had had enough.

  Dennis scratched together a breakfast for himself, beating up one of the Sunday eggs into a cup of tea, as the milk had turned, and then he went across the farmyard to the stable. He had to put the heavy harrow over the field which he and another farm-hand had ploughed a couple of days before, where stood the circle of stones, to break up the big clods left by the plough, before putting in the grain. The harrow was already there, and he put the gear on the two horses and he called “Kep-kep” to them and they followed him across the farmyard to the gate that led through the pasture to the arable land. The kitchen windows which he had left open were closed again, and he saw his grandmother inside, who nodded and smiled to him, and he wondered what had put her in so cordial a temper. He grinned to himself as he thought it was her conversation, maybe, with the old brown owl last night. A rare pack of nonsense was that, and yet Nell had been as grave as a judge about it.

  The sun had not yet risen long enough to have dried up the heavy night dews, and when Dennis came to the field to be harrowed, the furrows lay richly red and shining with moisture under a net of gossamer webs: it was as if some pearly silk coverlet were spread over them. The morning was quite windless, and there hung in the air the odour of damp earth. This early hour was still chilly enough to condense the breath of the horses, and soon the steam rose from their backs and shining flanks, for this harrow was a ponderous machine with its curved iron tines biting deep into the heavy soil, and there was mingled with the smell of wet earth the sharp horse-odour. Dennis walked by the side of the beasts, with a rein in his hand and a backward eye to see that the harrow kept a straight course, for the cross-grained bitch liked to go askew if she wasn’t watched, and close behind it here hopped a robin, the bold thing, with beady eye alert for a breakfast from the broken clods. Primroses were a-bloom in the banks and wild violets, and at the far corner, where he must turn his harrow, was a gorse bush in full flower; and now the sun was warm enough to spread the honey-sweetness of it on the air. Somewhere behind it, in the crevices of the shaly wall, a pair of oxeyes were building; Dennis had seen the smart little birds popping in and out as he came up from St. Columb’s yesterday, and now, while he gave his horses a breathing-space, he looked about for the nest, and saw the head of the hen-bird as she sat on her eggs. Not an atom frightened was she, but just scolded at him to scare him away. That set Dennis smiling: there was a rare bowldacious bit!

  At this end of the field the ground began to decline sharply to the village, over the roofs of which, unseen below the hill, hung the smoke of early fires undispersed in the still air. Penzance lay sunning itself on the shore of the gleaming bay beyond, and a feather of steam shot up from the engine of a train that was crawling into the station: that would be the night train from London. Then the feather vanished, and soon there came to his ears the sound of the whistle that had caused it. Never yet, except when he came from London in his mother’s womb, had Dennis been in a train: they said that one of those puffing, snorting engines could pull a load of folk along at the rate of a mile in a minute. Old wives’ tales were such talk as that: ’twas a wonder that a man should not be ashamed to repeat them.

  As the harrow moved up and down the field it got nearer to the unploughed circle of stones that stood there and to the short grass path that led to it from the gate in the hedge. To plough close up to it was a tiresome business; and now there was continual turning of the harrow to be made on these curved lines, and he and the horses alike were in a muc
k of sweat before the angle was finished. He took a bit of a rest when this was done, munching his bread and bacon, wondering when the time would come for him and Nell to dance on Midsummer Eve in the circle. Anyhow, this year they would leap the bonfire that was lit that night in the field beyond, for those who leaped the fire together would surely be wed before the year was out, and it was only after marriage that they danced in the ring of stones...It would be a fine day when he and Nell danced together, for that caused a woman’s womb to be fruitful, even if she had long been childless. Often and often to Dennis’s knowledge had that spell proved its potency: it was no use, though you laughed at poor old Jonah spewed up by his whale and that owl-nonsense of Nell’s, to mock at the bonfire on St. John’s Eve and what it could work for a boy and girl who leapt it, and what the dancing in the circle could do for them afterwards.

  He finished his bacon, but there were still some crusts of bread, and these he gave to his horses, the soft-muzzled giants, and listened to the chumping rumble of their broad grinders. And then he saw something that made him stare, for perched on one of those tall erect stones at the eastern end of the circle he spied a magnolia blossom with a sprig of wallflower tied to it. Who should have put that nosegay there and for why, he wondered? He plucked it from its place and examined it. The dew was on the flowers, so they must have been placed here last evening or during the night. They were stuck in a twig of elder, out of which the pith had been scooped, and the whole was loosely bound together by a scarlet woollen thread. As he handled this odd contraption, the leather-like petals of the magnolia fell off, and the elder-twig slipped from his hand. The damaged remains of the nosegay he put back on the stone where he had found it, and thought no more of it.