A. E. (Alfred Edgar) Coppard - The Collected Tales of A. E. Coppard

From that time forward Dan gave up his boozing and devoted himself to the boy, little Martin, who, a Thasper joker suggested, might have some kinship with the notorious Betty of that name. But Dan’s voice was now seldom heard singing upon the roads he travelled. They were icy wintry roads, but that was not the cause of his muteness. It was severance from the choir; not from its connoted spirit of religion—there was little enough of that in Dan Pavey—but from the solemn beauty of the chorale, which it was his unique gift to adorn, and in which he had shared with eagerness and pride since his boyhood. To be cast out from that was to be cast from something he held most dear, the opportunity of expression in an art which he had made triumphantly his own.

With the coming of spring he repaired one evening to a town some miles away and interviewed a choirmaster. Thereafter Dan Pavey journeyed to and fro twice every Sunday to sing in a church that lay seven or eight miles off, and he kept it all a profound secret from Thasper until his appearance at the county musical festival, where he won the treasured prize for tenor soloists. Then Dan was himself again. To his crude apprehension he had been vindicated, and he was heard once more carolling in the lanes of the vale as he had been heard any time for these twenty years.

The child began its schooling, but though he was free to go about the village little Martin did not wander far. The tidy cluster of hair about his poll was of deep chestnut colour. His skin—Meg said—was like “ollobarster”: it was soft and unfreckled, always pale. His eyes were two wet damsons—so Meg declared: they were dark and ever questioning. As for his nose, his lips, his cheeks, his chin, Meg could do no other than call it the face of a blessed saint; and, indeed, he had some of the bearing of a saint, so quiet, so gentle, so shy. The golden ring he no longer wore; it hung from a tintack on the bedroom wall.

Old John, who lived next door, became a friend of his. He was very aged—in the vale you got to be a hundred before you knew where you were—and he was very bent; he resembled a sickle standing upon its handle. Very bald, too, and so very sharp.

Martin was staring up at the roof of John’s cottage.

“What you looking at, my boy?”

“Chimbley,” whispered the child.

“Oh ah! that’s crooked, a’nt it?”

“Yes, crooked.”

“I know ’tis, but I can’t help it; my chimney’s crooked, and I can’t putt it straight, neither, I can’t putt it right. My chimney’s crooked, a’nt it, ah, and I’m crooked, too.”

“Yes,” said Martin.

“I know, but I can’t help it. It is crooked, a’nt it?” said the old man, also staring up at a red pot tilted at an angle suggestive of conviviality.

“Yes.”

“That chimney’s crooked. But you come along and look at my beautiful bird.”

A cock thrush inhabited a cage in the old gaffer’s kitchen. Martin stood before it.

“There’s a beautiful bird. Hoicks!” cried old John, tapping the bars of the cage with his terrible fingernail. “But he won’t sing.”

“Won’t he sing?”

“He donn make hisself at home. He donn make hisself at home at all, do ’ee, my beautiful bird? No, he donn’t. So I’m a-going to chop his head off,” said the laughing old man, “and then I shall bile him.”

Afterwards Martin went every day to see if the thrush was still there. And it was.

Martin grew. Almost before Dan was aware of it the child had grown into a boy. At school he excelled nobody in anything except, perhaps, behaviour, but he had a strange little gift for unobtrusively not doing the things he did not care for, and these were rather many unless his father was concerned in them. Even so, the affection between them was seldom tangibly expressed, their alliance was something far deeper than its expression. Dan talked with him as if he were a grown man, and perhaps he often regarded him as one; he was the only being to whom he ever opened his mind. As they sat together in the evening while Dan put in a spell at turning chair—at which he was astoundingly adept—the father would talk to his son, or rather he would heap upon him all the unuttered thoughts that had accumulated in his mind during his adult years. The dog would loll with its head on Martin’s knees; the boy would sit nodding gravely, though seldom speaking: he was an untiring listener. “Like sire, like son,” thought Dan, “he will always coop his thoughts up within himself.” It was the one characteristic of the boy that caused him anxiety.

“Never take pattern by me,” he would adjure him, “not by me. I’m a fool, a failure, just grass, and I’m trying to instruct you, but you’ve no call to follow in my fashion; I’m a weak man. There’s been thoughts in my mind that I daren’t let out. I wanted to do things that other men don’t seem to do and don’t want to do. They were not evil things—and what they were I’ve nigh forgotten now. I never had much ambition, I wasn’t clever, I wanted to live a simple life, in a simple way, the way I had a mind to—I can’t remember that either. But I did not do any of those things because I had a fear of what other people might think of me. I walked in the ruck with the rest of my mates and did the things I didn’t ever want to do—and now I can only wonder why I did them. I sung them the silly songs they liked, and not the ones I cherished. I agreed with most everybody, and all agreed with me. I’m a friendly man, too friendly, and I went back on my life, I made nought of my life, you see, I just sat over the job like a snob codgering an old boot.”

The boy would sit regarding him as if he already understood. Perhaps that curious little mind did glean some flavour of his father’s tragedy.

“You’ve no call to follow me, you’ll be a scholar. Of course I know some of those long words at school take a bit of licking together—like ‘elephant’ and ‘saucepan.’ You get about half-way through ’em and then you’re done, you’re mastered. I was just the same (like sire, like son), and I’m no better now. If you and me was to go to yon school together, and set on the same stool together, I warrant you would win the prize and I should wear the dunce’s cap—all except sums, and there I should beat ye. You’d have all the candy and I’d have all the cane, you’d be king and I’d be the dirty rascal, so you’ve no call to follow me. What you want is courage, and to do the things you’ve a mind to. I never had any and I didn’t.”

Dan seldom kissed his son, neither of them sought that tender expression, though Meg was for ever ruffling the boy for these pledges of affection, and he was always gracious to the old woman. There was a small mole in the centre of her chin, and in the centre of the mole grew one short stiff hair. It was a surprise to Martin when he first kissed her.

Twice a week father and son bathed in the shed devoted to chair. The tub was the half of a wooden barrel. Dan would roll up two or three buckets of water from the well, they would both strip to the skin, the boy would kneel in the tub and dash the water about his body for a few moments. While Martin towelled himself Dan stepped into the tub and after laving his face and hands and legs he would sit down in it. “Ready?” Martin would ask, and scooping up the water in an iron basin he would pour it over his father’s head.

“Name o’ God, that’s sharpish this morning,” Dan would say, “it would strip the bark off a crocodile. Broo-o-o-oh! But there: winter and summer I go up and down the land and there’s not—broo-o-o-oh!—a mighty difference between ’em, it’s mostly fancy. Come day, go day, frost or fair doings, all alike I go about the land, and there’s little in winter I haven’t the heart to rejoice in. (On with your breeches or I’ll be at the porridge pot afore you’re clad.) All their talk about winter and their dread of it shows poor spirit. Nothing’s prettier than a fall of snow, nothing more grand than the storms upending the woods. There’s no more rain in winter than in summer, you can be shod for it, and there’s a heart back of your ribs that’s proof against any blast. (Is this my shirt or yours? Dashed if they buttons a’nt the plague of my life.) Country is grand year’s end to year’s end, whether or no. I once lived in London—only a few weeks—and for noise, and for terror, and for filth—name o’ God, there was bugs in the butter there, once there was!”