Martin Pippin in the Apple Orchard Part 15

Joscelyn: You are always supposing nonsense. Who ever heard of cuckoos flying in shoes?

Jane: Or of foxes running in gloves?

Joan: Or of b.u.t.terflies going in ones?

Martin: Or of boys--

Joscelyn: I have frequently seen b.u.t.terflies going in ones, foolish Joan. And the argument was not against b.u.t.terflies, but cuckoos.

Martin: And their shoes. Please, dear Mistress Joan, do not look so downcast, nor you, dear Mistress Joscelyn, so vexed. Let us see if we cannot turn a more sensible song upon this theme.

And he sang--

Cuckoo Shoes aren't cuckoos' shoes, They're shoes which cuckoos never don; And cuckoo nests aren't cuckoos' nests, But other birds' for a moment gone; And nothing that the cuckoo has But he does make a mock upon.

For even when the cuckoo sings He only says what isn't true-- When happy lovers first swore oaths An artful cuckoo called and flew, Yes! and when lovers weep like dew The teasing cuckoo laughs Cuckoo!

What need for tears? Cuckoo, cuckoo!

As Martin ended, Gillian raised herself upon an elbow, and looked no more into the green gra.s.s, but across the green duckpond.

"The second song seems to me as irrelevant as the first," said Joscelyn, "but I observe that you cuckooed so loudly as to startle our mistress out of her inattention. So if you mean to tell us another story, by all means tell it now. Not that I care, except for our extremity."

"It is my only object to ease it," said Martin, "so bear with me as well as you may during the recital of Young Gerard."

YOUNG GERARD

There was once, dear maidens, a shepherd who kept his master's sheep on Amberley Mount. His name was Gerard, and he was always called Young Gerard to distinguish him from the other shepherd who was known as Old Gerard, yet was not, as you might suppose, his father. Their master was the Lord of Combe Ivy that lay in the southern valleys of the hills toward the sea; he owned the grazing on the whole circle of the Downs between the two great roads--on Amberley and Perry and Wepham and Blackpatch and c.o.c.khill and Highdown and Barnsfarm and Sullington and Chantry. But the two Gerards lived together in the great shed behind the copse between Rackham Hill and Kithurst, and the way they came to do so was this.

One night in April when Old Gerard's gray beard was still brown, the door of the shed was pushed open, letting in not only the winds of Spring but a woman wrapped in a green cloak, with a lining of cherry-color and a border of silver flowers and golden cherries. In one hand she swung a crystal lantern set in a silver frame, but it had no light in it; and in the other she held a small slip of a cherry-tree, but it had no bloom on it. Her dress was white, or had been; for the skirts of it, and her mantle, were draggled and sodden, and her green shoes stained and torn, and her long fair hair lay limp and dank upon her mantle whose hood had fallen away, and the shadows round her blue eyes were as black as pools under hedgerows thawing after a frost, and her lovely face was as white as the s...o...b..nks they bed in. Behind her came another woman in a duffle cloak, a crone with eyes as black as sloes, and a skin as brown as beechnuts, and unkempt hair like the fireless smoke of Old Man's Beard straying where it will on the November woodsides. She too was wet and soiled, but full of life where the young one seemed full of death.

The Shepherd looked at this strange pair and said surlily, "What want ye?"

"Shelter," replied the crone.

She pushed the lady, who never spoke, into the shed, and took from her shoulders the wet mantle, and from her hands the lantern and the tree; and led her to the Shepherd's bed and laid her down. Then she spread the mantle over the Shepherd's bench and,

"Lie there," said she, "till love warms ye."

Next she hung the lantern up on a nail in the wall, and,

"Swing there," said she, "till love lights ye."

Last she took the Shepherd's trowel and went outside the shed, and set the cherry-slip beside the door. And she said:

"Grow there, till love blossoms ye."

After this she came inside and sat down at the bedhead.

Gerard the Shepherd, who had watched her proceedings without word or gesture, said to himself, "They've come through the floods."

He looked across at the women and raised his voice to ask, "Did ye come through the floods?"

The lady moaned a little, and the crone said, "Let her be and go to sleep. What does it matter where we came from by night? By daybreak we shall both of us be gone no matter whither."

The Shepherd said no more, for though he was both curious and ill-tempered he had not the courage to disturb the lady, knowing by the richness of her attire that she was of the quality; and the iron of serfdom was driven deep into his soul. So he went to sleep on his stool, as he had been bidden. But in the middle of the night he was awakened by a gusty wind and the banging of his door; and he started up rubbing his knuckles in his eyes, saying, "I've been dreaming of strange women, but was it a dream or no?" He peered about the shed, and the crone had vanished utterly, but the lady still lay on his bed. And when he went over to look at her, she was dead. But beside her lay a newborn child that opened its eyes and wailed at him.

Then the Shepherd ran to his open door and stared into the blowing night, but there were no more signs of the crone without than there were within. So he fastened the latch and came back to the bedside, and examined the child.--

(But at this point Martin Pippin interrupted himself, and seizing the rope of the swing set it rocking violently.

Joyce: I shall fall! I shall fall!

Martin: Then you will be no worse off than I, who have fallen already.

For I see you do not like my story.

Joyce: What makes you say so?

Martin: Till now you listened with all your ears, but a moment ago you turned away your head a moment too late to hide the disappointment in your eyes.

Joyce: It is true I am disappointed. Because the beautiful lady is dead, and how can a love-story be, if half the lovers are dead?

Martin: Dear Mistress Joyce, what has love to do with death? Love and death are strangers and speak in different tongues. Women may die and men may die, but lovers are ignorant of mortality.

Joyce (pouting): That may be, singer. But lovers are also a man and a woman, and the woman is dead, and the love-tale ended before we have even heard it. You should not have let the woman die. What sort of love-tale is this, now the woman is dead?

Martin: Are not more nests than one built in a spring-time?--Give me, I pray you, two hairs of your head.

She plucked two and gave them to him, turning her pouting to laughing.

One of them Martin coiled and held before his lips, and blew on it.

"There it flies," said he, and gave her back the second hair. "Hold fast by this and keep it from its fellow with all your might, for to part true mates baffles the forces of the universe. And when you give me this second hair again I swear I will send it where it will find its fellow. But I will never ask for it until, my story ended, you say to me, I am content.'")

Examining the child (repeated Martin) the Shepherd discovered it to be a l.u.s.ty boy-child, and this rejoiced him, so that while the baby wept he laughed aloud.

"It is better to weep for something than for nothing," said he, "and to laugh for something likewise. Tears are for serfs and laughter is for freedmen." For he had conceived the plan of selling the child to his master, the Lord of Combe Ivy, and buying his freedom with the purchase money. So in the morning he carried the body of the lady into the heart of the copse, and there he dug a grave and laid her in it in her white gown. And afterwards he went up hill and down dale to his master, and said he had a man for sale. The Lord of Combe Ivy, who was a jovial lord and a bachelor, laughed at the tale he had to tell; but being always of the humor for a jest he paid the Shepherd a gold piece for the child, and promised him another each midnight on the anniversary of its birth; but on the twenty-first anniversary, he said, the Shepherd was to bring back the twenty-one gold pieces he had received, and instead of adding another to them he would take them again, and make the serf a freedman, and the child his serf.

"For," said the Lord of Combe Ivy, "an infant is a poor deal for a man in his prime, as you are, but a youth come to manhood is a good exchange for a graybeard, as you will be. Therefore rear this babe as you please, and if he live to manhood so much the better for you, but if he die first it's all one to me."

The Shepherd had hoped for a better bargain, but he must needs be content with seeing liberty at a distance. So he returned to his shed on the hills and made a leather purse to keep his gold-piece in, and hung it round his neck, touching it fifty times a day under his shirt to be sure it was still there. And presently he sought among his ewes one who had borne her young, saying, "You shall mother two instead of one." And the baby sucked the ewe like her very lamb, and thrived upon the milk. And the shepherd called the child Gerard after himself, "since," he said, "it is as good a name for a shepherd as another"; and from that time they became the Young and Old Gerards to all who knew them.

So the Young Gerard grew up, and as he grew the cherry-tree grew likewise, but in the strangest fashion; for though it flourished past all expectation, it never put forth either leaf or blossom. This bitterly vexed Old Gerard, who had hoped in time for fruit, and the frustration of his hopes became to him a cause of grievance against the boy. A further grudge was that by no manner of means could he succeed in lighting any wick or candle in the silver lantern, of which he desired to make use.

"But if your tree and your lantern won't work," said he, "it's no reason why you shouldn't." So he put Young Gerard to work, first as sheepboy to his own flock, but later the boy had a flock of his own.

There was no love lost between these two, and kicks and curses were the young one's fare; for he was often idle and often a truant, and none was held responsible for him except the old shepherd who was selling him piece-meal, year by year, to their master. Because of what depended on him, Old Gerard was constrained to show him some sort of care when he would liever have wrung his neck. The boy's fits exasperated the man; whether he was cutting strange capers and laughing without reason, as he frequently did, or sitting a whole evening in a morose dream, staring at the fire or at the stars, and saying never a word. The boy's coloring was as mingled as his moods, a blend of light and dark--black hair, brown skin, blue eyes and golden lashes, a very odd anomaly.