Amaryllis at the Fair Part 12

The other day a travelling piano was wheeled through Coombe and set up a tune in that lonesome spot. Though it was but a mechanical piece of music, with the cogs as it were of the mechanism well marked by the thump, thump, it seemed to cheer the place--till she went out to the gate to look at the Italian woman who danced about while the grinding was done, and saw that she had a sound pair of boots on. That very morning her mother in crossing the road had set the Flamma rheumatism shooting in her bones, for the dampness of the mud came through the crack in her boot.

This miserable old Iden Pacha thought to honour her while he let her mother walk about with her stocking on the wet ground!

The Flamma blood was up in her veins--what did she care for guineas!

As she was putting her hat on in the bedroom before the gla.s.s she looked round to see that no one was watching, and then stooped down and put the spade-guinea in the dust of the floor under the dressing-table. She would have none of his hateful money. The sovereign she took care of because it was for her father, and he might buy something useful with it; he wanted a few shillings badly enough.

So the spade-guinea remained in the dust of the floor for a week or two, till it pleased the housemaid to move the dressing-table to brush away the acc.u.mulation, when she found the shining one in the fluff.

Being over thirty, she held her tongue, the guinea henceforward travelled down the stream of Time fast enough though silently, but she took the first opportunity of examining the iron box under the Pacha's bed, thinking perhaps there might be a c.h.i.n.k in it. And it was curious how for some time afterwards a fit of extraordinary industry prevailed in the house; there was not a table, a chair, or any piece of furniture that was not chivvied about under pretence of polishing. She actually had a day's holiday and a cast-off gown given to her as a reward for her labours.

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[Ill.u.s.tration]

CHAPTER XIV.

AMARYLLIS did not look back as she walked beside her grandfather slowly up the street, or she would have seen the company of relations watching them from the bow-window.

Iden went straight through the crowd without any hesitation on account of his age--angry as she was, Amaryllis feared several times lest the clumsy people should over-turn him, and tried her best to shield him.

But he had a knack of keeping on his feet--the sort of knack you learn by skating--and did not totter much more than usual, despite the press.

The world gets on with very little amus.e.m.e.nt somehow. Here were two or three thousand people packed in the street, and all they had to enliven their festive gathering was the same old toys their fathers' fathers'

fathers had set before them.

Rows of booths for the display of "fairings," gingerbread, nuts, cakes, brandy-b.a.l.l.s, and sugar-plums stood in the gutter each side.

The "fairings" were sweet biscuits--they have been made every fair this hundred years.

The nuts were dry and hard, just as Spanish nuts always are. The gingerbread was moulded in the same old shapes of clumsy horses outlined with gilt.

There was the same old trumpeting and tootling, tom-tomming, and roaring of showmen's voices. The same old roundabouts, only now they were driven by steam, and short, quick whistles announced that the whirligig caravan was travelling round the world. The fat woman, the strong man, the smashers tapping the "claret," the "Pelican of the Wilderness," that mystic and melancholy bird, the rifle galleries, the popping for nuts--behold these are they our fathers have seen.

There is nothing new under the sun--not even at Epsom. The first time I saw the wonderful crowd of the Derby Day--perhaps the largest crowd in the world--I could scarcely believe my eyes, for I found on pa.s.sing through it that the hundreds of thousands of people there had nothing more to amuse them than they would have found at an ordinary country fair. Swings, roundabouts, c.o.c.kshies at cocoa-nuts, rootletum, tootletum, and beer. That was all. No new amus.e.m.e.nt whatsoever: a very humdrum sort of world, my masters!

The next finest crowd is the crowd on August bank-holiday all along the Brighton beach, and there it is just the same. Nothing for the folk but Punch, bra.s.s bands, and somersaulters--dull old stories in my grandmother's time.

Xerxes offered a reward to anyone who could invent him a fresh pleasure--the mult.i.tude of the Derby Day and Brighton beach should do the same. But indeed they do, for an immense fortune would certainly be the reward of such a discoverer. One gets tired of pitching sticks at cocoa-nuts all one's time.

However, at Woolhorton n.o.body but the very rawest and crudest folk cared for the shows, all they did care was to alternately stand stock still and then shove. First they shoved as far as the "Lion" and had some beer, then they shoved back to the "Lamb" and had some beer, then they stood stock still in the street and blocked those who were shoving.

Several thousand people were thus happily occupied, and the Lion and the Lamb laid down together peacefully that day.

Amaryllis and old Iden had in like manner to shove, for there was no other way to get through, no one thought of moving, or giving any pa.s.sage, if you wanted to progress you must shoulder them aside. As Grandfather Iden could not shove very hard they were frequently compelled to wait till the groups opened, and thus it happened that Amaryllis found herself once face to face with Jack Duck.

He kind of sn.i.g.g.e.red in a foolish way at Amaryllis, and touched his hat to Iden. "You ain't a been over to Coombe lately, Mr. Iden," he said.

"No," replied the old man sharply, and went on.

Jack could hardly have struck a note more discordant to Amaryllis. The father had not been to visit his son for more than a year--she did not want unpleasant memories stirred up.

Again in another group a st.u.r.dy labourer touched his hat and asked her if her father was at fair, as he was looking out for a job. Old Iden started and grunted like a snorting horse.

Amaryllis, though put out, stayed to speak kindly to him, for she knew he was always in difficulties. Bill Nye was that contradiction a strong man without work. He wanted to engage for mowing. Bill Nye was a mower at Coombe, and his father, Bill Nye, before him, many a long year before he was discovered in California.

When she overtook Iden he was struggling to pa.s.s the stream of the Orinoco, which set strongly at that moment out of the "Lamb" towards the "Lion." Strong men pushed out from the "Lamb" archway like a river into the sea, thrusting their way into the general crowd, and this mighty current cast back the tottering figure of old Iden as the swollen Orinoco swung the crank old Spanish caravels that tried to breast it.

It was as much as Amaryllis and he together could do to hold their ground at the edge of the current. While they were thus battling she chanced to look up.

A large window was open over the archway, and at this window a fellow was staring down at her. He stood in his shirt-sleeves with a billiard-cue in his hand waiting his turn to play. It was the same young fellow, gentleman if you like, whose pale face had so displeased her that morning as he rode under when she watched the folk go by to fair.

He was certainly the most advanced in civilization of all who had pa.s.sed Plum Corner, and yet there was something in that pale and rather delicate face which was not in the coa.r.s.e lineaments of the "varmers"

and "drauvers" and "pig-dealers" who had gone by under the wall.

Something that insulted her.

The face at the window was appraising her.

It was reckoning her up--so much for eyes, so much for hair, so much for figure, and as this went on the fingers were filling a pipe from an elastic tobacco-pouch. There was no romance, no poetry in that calculation--no rapture or pure admiration of beauty; there was a billiard-cue and a tobacco-pouch, and a gla.s.s of spirits and water, and an atmosphere of smoke, and a sound of clicking ivory b.a.l.l.s at the back of the thought. His thumb was white where he had chalked it to make a better bridge for the cue. His face was white; for he had chalked it with dissipation. His physical body was whitened--chalked--a whited sepulchre; his moral nature likewise chalked.

At the back of his thought lay not the high esteem of the poet-thinker for beauty, but the cynical blackguardism of the XIXth century.

The cynicism that deliberately reckons up things a Shakespeare would admire at their lowest possible sale value. A slow whiff of smoke from a corner of the sneering mouth, an air of intense knowingness, as much as to say, "You may depend upon me--I've been behind the scenes. All this is got up, you know; stage effect in front, pasteboard at the rear; nothing in it."

In the sensuality of Nero there may still be found some trace of a higher nature; "What an artist the world has lost!" he exclaimed, dying.

The empress Theodora craved for the applause of the theatre to which she exposed her beauty.

This low, cynical nineteenth century blackguardism thinks of nothing but lowness, and has no ideal. The milliner even has an ideal, she looks to colour, shape, effect; though but in dress, yet it is an ideal. There was no ideal in Ned Marks.

They called him from within to take his turn with the cue; he did not answer, he was so absorbed in his calculations. He was clever--in a way; he had quite sufficient penetration to see that this was no common girl.

She was not beautiful--yet, she was not even pretty, and so plainly dressed; still there was something marked in her features. And she was with old Iden.

Amaryllis did not understand the meaning of his glance, but she felt that it was an insult. She looked down quickly, seized her grandfather's arm, and drew him out from the pavement into the street, yielding a little to the current and so hoping to presently pa.s.s it.

By this time, as Ned Marks did not answer, his companions had come to the window to discover what he was staring at. "Oho!" they laughed.

"It's Miss Iden. Twenty thousand guineas in the iron box!"

Iden's great white hat, which always seemed to sit loosely on his head, was knocked aside by the elbow of a burly butcher struggling in the throng; Amaryllis replaced it upright, and leading him this way, and pushing him that, got at last to the opposite pavement, and so behind the row of booths, between them and the houses where there was less crush. Taking care of him, she forgot to look to her feet and stepped in the gutter where there was a puddle. The cold water came through the crack in her boot.

While these incidents were still further irritating her, the old Pacha kept mumbling and muttering to himself, nodding his head and smiling at each fresh mark of attention, for though he was so independent and fearless still he appreciated the trouble she took. The mumbling in his mouth was a sort of purring. Her dutiful spirit had stroked him up to a pleasant state of electric glow; she felt like a hound in a leash, ready to burst the bond that held her to his hand. Side by side, and arm in arm, neither of them understood the other; ninety and sixteen, a strange couple in the jostling fair.

Iden turned down a pa.s.sage near the end of the street, and in an instant the roar of the crowd which had boomed all round them was shut off by high walls up which it rose and hummed over their heads in the air. They walked on broad stone flags notched here and there at the edges, for the rest worn smooth by footsteps (the grave drives such a trade) like Iden's doorstep, they were in fact tombstones, and the walled pa.s.sage brought them to the porch of the Abbey church.