Amaryllis at the Fair Part 4

Ripe apples could not be got all the year round in any variety; besides which, in winter and cold weather the crudity of the stomach needed to be a.s.sisted with a little warmth; therefore bake them.

People did not eat nearly enough fruit now-a-days; they had too much butcher's meat, and not enough fruit--that is, home-grown fruit, straight from orchard or garden, not the half-sour stuff sold in the shops, picked before it was ready.

The Americans were much wiser (he knew a good deal about America--he had been there in his early days, before thought superseded action)--the Americans had kept up many of the fine old English customs of two or three hundred years since, and among these was the eating of fruit. They were accused of being so modern, so very, very modern, but, in fact, the country Americans, with whom he had lived (and who had taught him how to chop) maintained much of the genuine antique life of old England.

They had first-rate apples, yet it was curious that the same trees produced an apple having a slightly different flavour to what it had in this country. You could always distinguish an American apple by its peculiar piquancy--a sub-acid piquancy, a wild strawberry piquancy, a sort of woodland, forest, backwoods delicacy of its own. And so on, and so on--"talk, talk, talk," as Mrs. Iden said.

After his baked apple he took another guilty look at the clock, it was close on four, and went into the pa.s.sage to get his hat. In farmhouses these places are called pa.s.sages; in the smallest of villas, wretched little villas not fit to be called houses, they are always "halls."

In the pa.s.sage Mrs. Iden was waiting for him, and began to thump his broad though bowed back with all her might.

"Sleep, sleep, sleep!" she cried, giving him a thump at each word.

"You've slept two hours. (Thump.) You sleep till you stupefy yourself (thump), and then you go and dig. What's the use of digging? (Thump.) Why don't you make some money? (Thump.) Talk and sleep! (Thump.) I hate it. (Thump.) You've rubbed the paint off the wainscot with your sleep, sleep, sleep (thump)--there's one of your hairs sticking to the paint where your head goes. (Thump.) Anything more hateful--sleep (thump), talk (thump), sleep (thump). Go on!"

She had thumped him down the pa.s.sage, and across the covered-in court to the door opening on the garden. There he paused to put on his hat--an aged, battered hat--some sort of nondescript bowler, broken, grey, weather-stained, very battered and very aged--a pitiful hat to put above that broad, Shakespearian forehead. While he fitted it on he was thumped severely: when he opened the door he paused, and involuntarily looked up at the sky to see about the weather--a habit all country people have--and so got more thumping, ending as he started out with a tremendous push. He did not seem to resent the knocks, nor did the push accelerate his pace; he took it very much as he took the March wind.

Mrs. Iden slammed the door, and went in to clear the dinner things, and make ready for tea. Amaryllis helped her.

"He'll want his tea in half an hour," said Mrs. Iden. "What's the use of his going out to work for half an hour?"

Amaryllis was silent. She was very fond of her father; he never did anything wrong in her eyes, and she could have pointed out that when he sat down to dinner at one he had already worked as many hours as Mrs.

Iden's model City gentleman in a whole day. His dinner at one was, in effect, equivalent to their dinner at seven or eight, over which they frequently lingered an hour or two. He would still go on labouring, almost another half day. But she held her peace, for, on the other hand, she could not contradict and argue with her mother, whom she knew had had a wearisome life and perpetual disappointments.

Mrs. Iden grumbled on to herself, working herself into a more fiery pa.s.sion, till at last she put down the tea-pot, and rushed into the garden. There as she came round the first thing she saw was the daffodil, the beautiful daffodil Amaryllis had discovered. Beside herself with indignation--what was the use of flowers or potatoes?--Mrs.

Iden stepped on the border and trampled the flower under foot till it was shapeless. After this she rushed indoors again and upstairs to her bedroom, where she locked herself in, and fumbled about in the old black oak chest of drawers till she found a faded lavender glove.

That glove had been worn at the old "Ship" at Brighton years and years ago in the honeymoon trip: in those days bridal parties went down by coach. Faded with years, it had also faded from the tears that had fallen upon it. She turned it over in her hands, and her tears spotted it once more.

Amaryllis went on with the tea-making; for her mother to rush away in that manner was nothing new. She toasted her father a piece of toast--he affected to despise toast, but he always ate it if it was there, and looked about for it if it was not, though he never said anything. The clock struck five, and out she went to tell him tea was ready. Coming round the house she found her daffodil crushed to pieces.

"Oh!" The blood rushed to her forehead; then her beautiful lips pouted and quivered; tears filled her eyes, and her breast panted. She knew immediately who had done it; she ran to her bedroom to cry and to hide her grief and indignation.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

[Ill.u.s.tration]

CHAPTER VI.

LADY-DAY Fair came round by and by, and Amaryllis, about eleven o'clock in the morning, went down the garden to the end of the orchard, where she could overlook the highway without being seen, and watch the folk go past. Just there the road began to descend into a hollow, while the garden continued level, so that Amaryllis, leaning her arm on the top of the wall, was much higher up than those who went along. The wall dropped quite fourteen feet down to the road, a rare red brick wall--thick and closely-built, the bricks close together with thin seams of mortar, so that the fibres of the whole ma.s.s were worked and compressed and bound firm, like the fibres of a piece of iron. The deep red bricks had a colour--a certain richness of stability--and at the top this good piece of workmanship was protected from the weather by a kind of cap, and ornamented with a projecting ridge. Within the wall Amaryllis could stand on a slight bank, and easily look over it. Without there was a sheer red precipice of fourteen feet down to the dusty sward and nettles beside the road.

Some bare branches of a plum tree trained against the wall rose thin and tapering above it in a bunch, a sign of bad gardening, for they ought to have been pruned, and the tree, indeed, had an appearance of neglect.

One heavy bough had broken away from the nails and list, and drooped to the ground, and the shoots of last year, not having been trimmed, thrust themselves forward presumptuously.

Behind the bunch of thin and tapering branches rising above the wall Amaryllis was partly hidden, but she relied a great deal more for concealment upon a fact Iden had taught her, that people very seldom look up; and consequently if you are only a little higher they will not see you. This she proved that morning, for not one of all who pa.s.sed glanced up from the road. The shepherd kept his eye fixed on his sheep, and the drover on his bullocks; the boys were in a hurry to get to the fair and spend their pennies; the wenches had on a bit of blue ribbon or a new bonnet, and were perpetually looking at the traps that overtook them to see if the men admired their finery. No one looked up from the road they were pursuing.

The photographer fixes the head of the sitter by a sort of stand at the back, which holds it steady in one position while the camera takes the picture. In life most people have their heads fixed in the claws of some miserable pettiness, which interests them so greatly that they tramp on steadily forward, staring ahead, and there's not the slightest fear of their seeing anything outside the rut they are travelling.

Amaryllis did not care anything about the fair or the people either, knowing very well what sort they would be; but I suspect, if it had been possible to have got at the cause which brought her there, it would have been traced to the unconscious influence of s.e.x, a perfectly innocent prompting, quite unrecognised by the person who feels it, and who would indignantly deny it if rallied on the subject, but which leads girls of her age to seize opportunities of observing the men, even if of an uninteresting order. Still they are men, those curious beings, that unknown race, and little bits of knowledge about them may, perhaps, be picked up by a diligent observer.

The men who drifted along the road towards the Fair were no "mashers, by Jove!" Some of them, though young, were clad antiquely enough in breeches and gaiters--not sportsmen's breeches and gaiters, but old-fashioned "granfer" things; the most of them were stout and st.u.r.dy, in drab and brown suits of good cloth, cut awry. Hundreds of them on foot, in traps, gigs, fourwheels, and on horseback, went under Amaryllis: but, though they were all Christians, there was not one "worth a Jewess' eye."

She scorned them all.

This member of the unknown race was too thickly made, short set, and squat; this one too fair--quite white and moist-sugar looking; this one had a straight leg.

Another went by with a great thick and long black beard--what a horrid thing, now, when kissing!--and as he walked he wiped it with his sleeve, for he had just washed down the dust with a gla.s.s of ale. His neck, too, was red and thick; hideous, yet he was a "stout knave," and a man all over, as far as body makes a man.

But women are, like Shakespeare, better judges. "Care I for the thews and sinews of a man?" They look for something more than bulk.

A good many of these fellows were more or less lame, for it is astonishing if you watch people go by and keep account of them what a number have game legs, both young and old.

A young buck on a capital horse was at the first glance more interesting--paler, rakish, a cigar in his mouth, an air of viciousness and dash combined, fairly well dressed, pale whiskers and beard; in short, he knew as much of the billiard-table as he did of sheep and corn. When nearer Amaryllis disliked him more than all the rest put together; she shrank back a little from the wall lest he should chance to look up; she would have feared to have been alone with such a character, and yet she could not have said why. She would not have feared to walk side by side with the great black beard--hideous as he was--nor with any of the rest, not even with the roughest of the labourers who tramped along. This gentleman alone alarmed her.

There were two wenches, out for their Fair Day holiday, coming by at the same time; they had on their best dresses and hats, and looked fresh and nice. They turned round to watch him coming, and half waited for him; when he came up he checked his horse, and began to "cheek" them. Nothing loth, the village girls "cheeked" him, and so they pa.s.sed on.

One or two very long men appeared, unusually clumsy, even in walking they did not know exactly what to do with their legs. Amaryllis had no objection to their being tall--indeed, to be tall is often a pa.s.sport to a "Jewess' eye"--but they were so clumsy.

Of the scores who went by in traps and vehicles she could not see much but their clothes and their faces, and both the clothes and the faces were very much alike. Rough, good cloth, ill-fitting (the shoulders were too broad for the tailor, who wanted to force Bond Street measurements on the British farmer's back); reddish, speckled faces, and yellowish hair and whiskers; big speckled hands, and that was all. Scores of men, precisely similar, were driven down the road. If those broad speckled hands had been shown to Jacob's ewes he need not have peeled rods to make them bring forth speckled lambs.

Against the stile a long way up the road there was a group of five or six men, who were there when she first peered over the wall, and made no further progress to the Fair. They were waiting till some acquaintance came by and offered a lift; lazy dogs, they could not walk.

They had already been there long enough to have walked to the Fair and back, still they preferred to fold their hands and cross their legs, and stay on. So many people being anxious to get to the town, most of those who drove had picked up friends long before they got here.

The worst walker of all was a constable, whose huge boots seemed to take possession of the width of the road, for he turned them out at right angles, working his legs sideways to do it, an extraordinary exhibition of stupidity and ugliness, for which the authorities who drilled him in that way were responsible, and not the poor fellow.

Among the lowing cattle and the baaing sheep there drifted by a variety of human animals, tramps and vagrants, not nearly of so much value as the wool and beef.

It is curious that these "characters"--as they are so kindly called--have a way of a.s.sociating themselves with things that promise vast enjoyment to others. The number of unhappy, shirtless wretches who thread their path in and out the coaches at the Derby is wonderful.

While the champagne fizzes above on the roof, and the footman between the shafts sits on an upturned hamper and helps himself out of another to pie with truffles, the hungry, lean kine of human life wander round about sniffing and smelling, like Adam and Eve after the fall at the edge of Paradise.

There are such incredible swarms of vagrants at the Derby that you might think the race was got up entirely for their sakes. There would be thousands at Sandown, but the gate is locked with a half-crown bolt, and they cannot get a stare at the fashionables on the lawn. For all that, the true tramp, male or female, is so inveterate an attendant at races and all kinds of accessible entertainments and public events that the features of the fashionable are better known to him than to hundreds of well-to-do people unable to enter society.

So they paddled along to the fair, slip-slop, in the dust, among the cattle and sheep, hands in pockets, head hanging down, most of them followed at a short distance by a Thing.

This Thing is upright, and therefore, according to the old definition, ought to come within the genus h.o.m.o. It wears garments rudely resembling those of a woman, and there it ends. Perhaps it was a woman once; perhaps it never was, for many of them have never had a chance to enter the ranks of their own s.e.x.

Amaryllis was too young, and, as a consequence, too full of her own strength and youth and joy in life to think for long or seriously about these curious Things drifting by like cattle and sheep. Yet her brow contracted, and she drew herself together as they pa.s.sed--a sort of shiver, to think that there should be such degradation in the world.

Twice when they came along her side of the road she dropped pennies in front of them, which they picked up in a listless way, just glancing over the ear in the direction the money fell, and went on without so much as recognizing where it came from.

If sheep were treated as unfortunate human beings are, they would take a bitter revenge; though they are the mildest of creatures, they would soon turn round in a venomous manner. If they did not receive sufficient to eat and drink, and were not well sheltered, they would take a bitter revenge: _they would die_. Loss of s. d.!

But human beings have not even got the courage or energy to do that; they put up with anything, and drag on--miserables that they are.