Why we should read Part 13

A man who can make his yokels talk like this has got little to learn.

In Father Mostyn Mr Booth has created one of the most glorious parsons in fiction.

"'Ha! The vicar's lobster if you please. Not out of the window there; I won't have lobster out of the window. The sunlight has a peculiar chemical action upon the tin, liberating certain const.i.tuents of the metal exceedingly perilous to the intercostal linings.'"

Nothing that goes on in the village is hidden from him, so we see him at once making friends with the Spawer, the stranger who comes to Cliff-End to compose his music in quiet. "The house stands endwise to the sea, set deep in a horse-shoe of trees; a big, hearty, whitewashed building under bronze-red tiles; two storeys high in front, that slope down backward over the dairy toward the stack-garth till they touch its high nettles.... The kitchen takes up the whole end of the house, facing two ways. The first window watches the lane across the red tile path and the little uncla.s.sified garden; the second comes on to the broadside front of the house, facing south, where the sun is a gorgeous nuisance after mid-morning in summer, ... dipping below the sunk stone wall and the dry nettle-grown ditch in which the ball buries itself instinctively whenever you hit it, is the big gra.s.s field for cricket, with the wickets always standing. And beyond this, sweeping away in every direction ... go the great lagoons of corn, br.i.m.m.i.n.g up to their green confines ... and the dim Garthstone windmill turning its listless sails over in dreamy soliloquy across three miles of fattening grain and green hedge and b.u.t.tercupped pasture ... and the celestial sound of the sea, two fields off, tipping the lonely sh.o.r.e ... and the stirring of lazy leaves, the chick of poultry, the soothing grunt of distant pigs ... the solaceful shutting of unseen gates...."

G.o.d forbid that we should hurry amid surroundings such as these. Readers of _The Cliff-End_, fully to enjoy it, must imitate our village youths who prop themselves up by the wall of the bridge every Sunday afternoon and watch the water flow underneath in complete content for six hours at a time.

We are content to dawdle with the Spawer in his little, faded, old-world, out-of-the-world room, with its choir of pink roses on the walls and his own books scattered indiscriminately about: Daudet, Tolstoi, Turgenev, Moliere, Swinburne and so on.

By the time we reach chapter eight we have forgotten to wish that anything should happen ... and immediately something does. A sudden human sob breaks in upon the Spawer as he plays Chopin at midnight.

"Outside, the world lay wrapped in a great breathing stillness. Night's ultramarine bosom was ablaze with starry chain of mail. From the far fields came faint immaterial sounds, commingled in the suspended fragrance of hay, in warm revelations of ripening corn, in the aromatic pungency of nettles, and all the humid suffocation of herbs that open their moist pores at even. Distant sheep, cropping in ghost-like procession across misty, dew-laden clover, contributed now and again their strange, cutting, human cough." The night calls him and he jumps out of the window: he hears garments in swift full stir, the rending of a frock ... and at last sees, "struck in fugitive stoop to stone, the dim, motionless figure of a girl." In a voice that had "the rare mellow sweetness of blown pipes about it" she explains that she couldn't resist coming to hear him play. "He noted the wide generous forehead, the big consuming eyes, burning deep in sorrowing self-reproach and giving him a moment's gaze over the uplifted tumbler; the dispa.s.sionate narrow nose, sprinkled about its bridge ... with a pepper-castor helping of freckled candour; the small lips, the long, sleek cheeks; the slender, pear-shaped chin; the soft, supple neck of russet tan, spliced on to a gleaming shaft of ivory; the quick-throbbing throat and the burning lobes of red, like live cinders, in her hair ... she wore a shabby pale blue tam-o'-shanter...." And this vision turns out next morning to be the post-girl. He learns her history from the Vicar. "'Pamela, you mean!

I knew we should come to that before long. She's not like the rest of us; comes of a different cla.s.s altogether.... Take note of her when she laughs ... she covers the whole diapason. Ullbrig doesn't laugh like that. Ullbrig laughs on one note, as though it were a plough furrow.'"

He weaves a fantastic story out of the little that he knows about her: a mother dying of a broken heart, having married beneath her, come to Ullbrig to escape the world, leaving Pamela, who "can do everything in the world except kill chickens." She can bake bread, paper-hang, paint, milliner and dress-make and plays the organ in church. She lives with John William Morland, who combines the office of postmaster with the trade of cobbler.

"'Stop a bit,'" the stern voice of the postmaster would tell you when you laid the penny and the boots on the counter together, and shot out your dual request for a "'stamp an' these 'ere solin'.'" "'Let's 'ave one thing at a time. Stamps 'as nowt to do wi' shoes, an' shoes 'as nowt to do wi' stamps. Tek yer boots off'n counter, or 'appen Ah s'll be slippin' 'em away by parcel post, an' then where sewd we be?... Noo; stamps fost; let's know what ye want.'"

Which point being settled and the penny rung into the till, he would suddenly cast his Governmental mask under the counter, throw the austerity out of his voice, and catch up the shoemaker's smile all at once in a quick-change act marvellous to behold.

The Vicar arranges a feast which Pamela prepares for and of course shares with him and the Spawer. And the collation is described as d.i.c.kens would describe it, to make your mouth water:

"There was a chicken-pie in a Mother Hubbard frill, with its crust as brown as a hazel-nut, and just nicely large enough to feed half-a-dozen, which is a capital size for three; and a n.o.ble sirloin of beef, fringed with a h.o.a.ry lock of horse-radish, and arching its back in lonely majesty on an oval arena of Spode, ... and there was a salad, heaped up high under the white and yellow chequer of sliced eggs, and a rosy tomato comb, in a glorious old oaken bowl as big as a kettle-drum, ...

and there were some savoury eggs, deliciously embowered in their greenery of mustard and cress ... and a tinned tongue ... and some beetroot ... and whipped creams, and a trifle pudding, all set out on snowy white damask amid an arctic glitter of gla.s.s and silver and cutlery. Except the cheese, which was a Camembert, and went by itself on the grained side-cupboard."

After the olives and the herrings Father Mostyn approaches the beef with a terrible "'Ha! I see you've not forgotten what I told you. The exterior alb.u.men's duly coagulated for the preservation of the nutritive juices, and there's a fine osmazonic smell that bodes well for the flavour.'"

Who wants to go on to the love episode when he can stay and refresh himself with a feast like this? Not I, for one. The longer I can stay with "the little tongues of crimson ham and grey-brown purple b.u.t.tons of mushrooms" the better so long as Pamela is there. I want as many helpings as possible of the stewed plums, the custard, the trifle pudding, the port-wine jellies, the whipped creams and the cheese. Time enough for love. There is the music to follow: the A flat Prelude twice, the Black Study, bits of Beethoven, the 111, s.n.a.t.c.hes of Brahms ... and to Pam as to us "there seemed not more happiness in Heaven."

All too quickly even that night the shadows fall: Pam goes home and encounters the village schoolmaster, a fellow-lodger at the Morlands', the veins in whose forehead stood out always, a thin, frail consumptive, who tortures himself with love of her. This night he waits up for her and makes her try to care for him, as so many others have in the past.

Out of pity for him she could not bring herself to deal the one smart blow that the moment required: the strength was lacking, and so she prepares for herself terrible consequences. The plot thickens. The Spawer sees more and more of Pam, he teaches her music, but he is already engaged to a girl in Switzerland of whom Pam knows nothing. He screws up his courage to tell her on one notable day when he goes with her to take dainties and administer comfort to an old dying man. The description of this one afternoon and evening takes up many chapters of the book, and the gradual leading up to the crisis where the Spawer has to tell Pam is wonderfully done.

Exactly at the moment when she acknowledges her sorrow at his departure the schoolmaster emerges out of the blackness and takes her away: she discovers now the Spawer is going that she is in love with him. "'He likes me,'" she says to the accusing consumptive, "'but he doesn't love me. I wish he did.... But I'm not good enough for him. There has never been any question of his loving me. He is engaged to marry somebody else ... and he may leave Ullbrig any day. When he told me he was going ... I was so unhappy that I began to cry. I couldn't help it. I didn't think he would notice ... but he did ... and tried to comfort me. And then--and then--you were there and saw. And I love him--I love him--I love him and I tell you....'"

She is fated to take the letter to her lover which she imagines will summon him away from her ... and she fails to deliver it. The schoolmaster discovers her crime, gets it from her and makes her promise to marry him before he will restore it (this is where the actual story becomes unbearably silly--people don't do these things). She decides to run away; the same night the Spawer walks along the cliffs late, and the schoolmaster, who has discovered Pam's flight, shadows him, so clumsily that the Spawer discovers him: they argue on the cliff edge and the Spawer falls over: Pamela hears his scream and goes to the rescue, and the two discover their love for each other at death's door. They are cut off from help by the rising tide.

"'I want to ask you ...'" he said. "'You know why I was going back. The other letter was--from Her. She asks me to set her free. If there hadn't been--been any other one in the case, and I'd asked you ... to marry me ... would you have married me?'"

In an instant the girl's arms were about the man's neck, and her lips upon his lips, as though they would have sucked the poor remaining life out of his body into her own ... yea--though Death stood by their side ... yet could he not arrest this moment.

"'Oh--my love, my love!' the girl wept through the wet lips that clung to him. 'What do I care about dying now? I would rather a thousand times die to learn that you had loved me--than live and never know it. Promise me--you will not--let go of me--when the time comes.... Don't let me go.

I want to die with you.'

"And there being nothing else to do, they stood and waited for death...."

But this is a love romance: it could not be allowed to end like that.

Drunken Barclay, having missed Tankard's Bus that night, hears Pam's calls for help and saves them both and gives us and Mr Booth a fuller chance to revel in a regular orgy of love. The Spawer was glad to be thus helpless on his back, for the glory of being cradled in such a love, and learning his love over again, from the lips and looks and actions, the dear, large-hearted A B C Primer of Pam. "Her very love of him, issuing towards him from every pore of her body, fertilised the girl's own beauty, like the sap in the lush hedgerows at spring. Her soft, velvet eyes ... darkened and deepened ... till they were beyond all plumb of mortal gaze. Her lips ... coloured now to a deeper, clearer carmine, with little pools of love visible lurking in the corners of them ... her lashes ... grew black as ebony ... her freckles ... more purely golden.

"And Pam stooped over him as she was always doing, and slipped her linked fingers under his neck, and looked into his face first, and kissed him ... and buried her face by his, and lifted it to look at him once more, and kissed him again.... Who should stop her now from telling him she loved him, loved him, loved him?"

Yes, there is no doubt about it: Mr Booth, whose gift for seeing things is so remarkably acute, can describe the pa.s.sion of love with the best of them. Not easily does one forget those dear, kissable, candid freckles, powdered in pure gold-dust about the bridge of the nose and the brows ... the great round eyes with the blacky-brown velvety softness of bulrushes ... the rapt red lips ... the big beneficence of hair ... the oaten-tinted cheeks ... the little pink lobes ... the tanned russet neck ... and the pale blue tam-o'-shanter of our beloved Pam. She is one of the most alive heroines in fiction, and the man who doesn't find himself a good deal more in love with her than the Spawer was is not to be envied.

_Fondie_ is a novel of quite another sort. It is the grim tragedy of a flirtatious daughter of an impoverished country parson who gets "let down" by an undergraduate and drowns herself.

It has the same excellent qualities that so distinguish _The Cliff-End_, in that it is leisurely, the dialect is wonderfully reproduced, the scenery painted with an exquisite sense of colour and exactness, the characters all live ... and there is Fondie the wheelwright, Fondie the foolish, who "never used bad language even when unprovoked," who was not a bit of good among the girls, who did his best work when he was not being paid for it, who was always respectfully in love with the girl, Blanche, and offered to marry her when she had already got into trouble with the other man. "'Lad's fond,'" said his father, who was as "laughterless as Jehovah and as summary. 'He'll do owt onnybody tells him.'"

There are many inimitable anecdotes scattered irrelevantly through these pages, the best of which is perhaps that of the black bull which coughed gra.s.s and spittle all down the back of Bless Allcot's neck while he was engaged in fervent prayer in the chapel: "'Thoo's best not ti pray public of a Sunday or two, Bless Allcot, till thoo's had a chance ti pray private,'" shouts Fondie's father to the prayer ... and an altercation starts during divine service which nearly develops into a fight.

An example of Mr Booth's humour may be seen in his description of the installation of the harmonium in the chapel:

"There were two grand services ... and the cobbler from Sproutgreen walked all the way over to Whivvle in a parson's hat and a white tie, to tell folk what a sinful life he had led in his younger days and how, but for the Living Word, he might probably have been wearing a grey coat and coloured kerchief to this day, and been even as the other sinners whom he had met this morning bicycling along the road to h.e.l.l. And Bless Allcot's eyes were as wet as cut lemons ... and at both services he prayed in the key of G flat minor for absent Brethren."

Fondie's father, who in old days had sc.r.a.ped his fiddle-strings so frenziedly in that chapel that he had to give the fiddle a rest for one verse in three, "to cool her bearings and prevent her from firing,"

naturally hated the innovation, but went to the chapel to shame the others ... "he went, casting the chapel into such a hush as if he had been his own corpse, so that the praying went as dry as a duck-pond in August ... and Bless Allcot's daughter let the wind out of the harmonium time after time and lost all her faculty for counting how many verses there were in each hymn" ... and Fondie's father returns home triumphant:

"'Aye. It's been a judgment on 'em. Lord's visited 'em.'"

Fondie, like the Spawer in _The Cliff-End_, "could bide music as long as a sow could bide scratching," and Blanche made him play the organ for her in church, but because he wouldn't kiss her, altered the figures in the hymns, making threes into eights and ones into sevens so that he would play his worst, which he did.

"If he had been half a man--for there was n.o.body in the workshop at the time, except the two of them, amid the seductive warm scent of fresh pine-shavings--Fondie would have thrown both arms round Blanche's neck and held on. Blanche would only have whispered, 'Shut up, Fondie!

Fondie, you silly fool!' and Fondie would have whispered, 'Who's a silly fool?' between the kisses, and Blanche would have answered, 'You, you fool!' struggling with just sufficient discretion to give his kisses the requisite raptorial flavour ... and who knows how differently Whivvle history might have had to be written.... For that one kiss, or the lack of it, is altering lives the whole world over."

So Fondie is left to experience all the pitfalls of the double chant and odd verse as the village church organist and the awful feeling that accompanies the falling into it, as if one had slipped off the belfry ladder in the dark.

The family to which Blanche belonged was a big one, but most of them were abroad: there was, however, Harold, in an accountant's office in Hunmouth, who went to music halls twice a week and wore cuffs, and a younger brother, who went to the village school and wore corduroys, but Blanche was the only one that mattered--Blanche with her profligate golden hair and blue eyes, Blanche of the cheap Birmingham jewellery, Blanche, who inspired respect from no one except Fondie, who addressed her as "Miss," or "Miss Blanche" in all circ.u.mstances, "as naturally as he would take up his gravy on the knife-blade, without, for a moment, contemplating any other way."

We are shown Blanche in all her nakedness, from her earliest days, when "I wish I had a sovereign for every time that Blanche rode in the hat-rack in defiance of the notice that this was provided for light luggage only," until the day when the verdict on her body goes forth, "Found Drowned." She would have a.s.signations in the belfry while Harold folded cigarettes during the Litany and pared his nails for the coming week and read _The Confessions of a Lady's Maid_ and _Secrets of Matrimony_ with his head down, as if he had had a stroke, whilst his father preached from Samuel and Kings.

"The Creator that conceived and executed Blanche, and equipped her with that amphitheatre of teeth and those scintillating eyes, must have been a tyro at his trade if he really expected sobriety and worship of them; or else a jocund G.o.d of Mirth, who loved laughter and human happiness."

Her father had even occasion to take for his text one day: "My daughter hath a devil" ... and she certainly was a thorn in his flesh. He made periodic attempts to put his house in order and his foot down, but within three days of new regulations he would have to give up his attempt at discipline and go back to his hens and tool-shed and the nutrition of the vicarage pig, while Blanche locked herself in her bedroom and learnt the mysteries of life from books that she stole from her brother and _Sunday Sacred Pennyworths_, where "the advertis.e.m.e.nts were even more absorbing than the literary matter and contributed liberally to her education."

This picture of the sordid, poverty-stricken vicarage life would make us weep were it not for the light relief afforded by the villagers, in such gorgeous scenes as that in which Fondie swarms the bees:

"'Thee wants ti gan up fierce-like, same as Bless says, an' sing a bit as thoo gans, an' swear when thoo gets ti top, an' mek bees think thoo's as good as them.'"

When he has finished collecting them he looks less like a victim of bees than of overstudy.

Meanwhile Blanche goes from conquest to conquest among her boys (always excepting Fondie) and makes with him a new friend in Lancelot Griffith D'Arcy Mersham. Fondie becomes more and more proficient in his trade of wheelwright and in his pa.s.sion for music: "Music stirred him, he knew not how or why; books, too, haunted him with the desire to read them--and beauty, whether of Blanche, or of a bird, of sunset or moonrise, of stars or blossoms, troubled him with a sweet sickness, a pining of the soul to be something other and something better than he was." Blanche fails to make much headway with the aristocratic Lancelot, who prefers the society of Fondie and helps him to throw off much of his vernacular so that he becomes more or less bilingual. In the church, or elsewhere, he spoke of "harmonium" and "home" and "Hunmouth," and said, "I am, sir," and "Were you, sir?": whereas in public he systematically dropped one "h" in every three out of consideration for his hearers'

feelings, and said, "I misdoot" and "I'se fit ti think" and "n.o.bbut" and "jealous" as before.

Blanche rises to the height of a bicycle, which gave her scope to extend the range of her acquaintances, but we don't hear much of these. Her fatal day is that of the Mersham Flower Show, to which she went "in a pale lavender print frock and a large straw hat trimmed with shasta daisies and blue cornflowers, spinning a creamy sunshade over her shoulder with a white-cotton-gloved hand." For it was here that she met for the first time Leonard D'Alroy, who was afterwards to prove her undoing. Mr Booth is lavish in his details of this show, and surely no flower show has ever been so admirably described: he misses nothing from the swing-boats to the sports with their inevitable clamour of unfairness on the part of the judges. "'Steeny would very like a' been first n.o.bbut he only went ti choch a bit reglarer, and sung i' choir.'"

We take leave of Blanche on this occasion by watching her fade away in the dusk with her arms about the neck of a boy on a bicycle, shouting "Oo-li-oo!" to all other defeated admirers. From that day the young squire was seen riding down the streets of Whivvle "with his hat at the back of his head" at very frequent intervals. In October he vanished to be "larned high books at Oxford," and by mid-November we see Blanche changed. This was not the Blanche of "Don't cares" and "Aren't frighteneds." This was another Blanche born of the fierce crucible of the cares and fears she had once so recklessly defied--Time had chosen this month to take a stern revenge at last. She goes to call on the carrier's wife and faints: her condition is discovered.

"Not that she had ever looked for marriage, or thought of it. No word of marriage had ever pa.s.sed between them: no word of love even. Their attachment had been but physical; their affection only make-believe--to colour fact, and suffuse reality with romance. Only that insatiable appet.i.te for life had really led her wrong; that pa.s.sion for physical vitality; the same fierce desire to do something with her body, to put it to some purpose, that Deacon Smeddy and others of the pious experienced in regard to the soul; not merely to possess it, but to be sensible of its possession and quicken it into an ardent instrument of life."

The carrier's wife takes her home and her father is acquainted with the truth about his daughter in these words: "'I'se jealous Blanche is like to be a mother, sir.'" The Vicar then calls on the opulent Rector of Mersham, who stoutly denies that his nephew could possibly be to blame.