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

Elizabeth Sadgrove

Prattle Corner

At the kitchen door he was confronted by a tall gaunt woman of middle age with a teapot in her hands.

“Afternoon, ma’am. Have you anything to sell?” began Harvey Witlow, tilting his hat with a confident affable air. The tall woman was cleanly dressed, a superior person; her hair was grey. She gazed at him.

“It’s cold,” he continued. She looked at him as uncomprehendingly as a mouse might look at a gravestone.

“I’ll buy any mottal thing, ma’am. Except trouble; I’m full up wi’ that already. Eggs? Fowls?”

“I’ve not seen you before,” commented Mrs. Sadgrove a little bleakly, in a deep husky voice.

“No, ’tis the first time as ever I drove in this part. To tell you the truth, ma’am, I’m new to the business. Six months. I was in the war a year ago. Now I’m trying to knock up a connection. Difficult work. Things are very quiet.”

Mrs. Sadgrove silently removed the lid of the teapot, inspected the interior of the pot with an intense glance, and then replaced the lid as if she had seen a black-beetle there.

“Ah, well,” sighed the higgler. “You’ve a neat little farm here, ma’am.”

“It’s quiet enough,” said she.

“Sure it is, ma’am. Very lonely.”

“And it’s difficult work, too.” Mrs. Sadgrove almost smiled.

“Sure it is, ma’am; but you does it well, I can see. Oh, you’ve some nice little ricks of corn, ah! I does well enough at the dealing now and again, but it’s teasy work, and mostly I don’t earn enough to keep my horse in shoe leather.”

“I’ve a few eggs, perhaps,” said she.

“I could do with a score or two, ma’am, if you could let me have ’em.”

“You’ll have to come all my way if I do.”

“Name your own price, ma’am, if you don’t mind trading with me.”

“Mind! Your money’s as good as my own, isn’t it?”

“It must be, ma’am. That’s meaning no disrespects to you,” the young higgler assured her hastily, and was thereupon invited to enter the kitchen.

A stone floor with two or three mats; open hearth with burning logs; a big dresser painted brown, carrying a row of white cups on brass hooks, and shelves of plates overlapping each other like the scales of fish. A dark settle half hid a flight of stairs with a small gate at the top. Under the window a black sofa, deeply indented, invited you a little repellingly, and in the middle of the room stood a large table, exquisitely scrubbed, with one end of it laid for tea. Evidently a living-room as well as kitchen. A girl, making toast at the fire, turned as the higgler entered. Beautiful she was: red hair, a complexion like the inside of a nut, blue eyes, and the hands of a lady. He saw it all at once, jacket of bright green wool, black dress, grey stockings and shoes, and forgot his errand, her mother, his fifty pounds, Sophy—momentarily he forgot everything. The girl stared strangely at him. He was tall, clean-shaven, with a loop of black hair curling handsomely over one side of his brow.

“Good afternoon,” said Harvey Witlow, as softly as if he had entered a church.

“Some eggs, Mary,” Mrs. Sadgrove explained. The girl laid down her toasting-fork. She was less tall than her mother, whom she resembled only enough for the relationship to be noted. Silently she crossed the kitchen and opened a door that led into a dairy. Two pans of milk were creaming on a bench there, and on the flags were two great baskets filled with eggs.

“How many are there?” asked Mrs. Sadgrove, and the girl replied: “Fifteen score, I think.”

“Take the lot, higgler?”

“Yes, ma’am,” he cried eagerly, and ran out to his cart and fetched a number of trays. In them he packed the eggs as the girl handed them to him from the baskets. Mrs. Sadgrove left them together. For a time the higgler was silent.

“No,” at length he murmured, “I’ve never been this road before.”

There was no reply from Mary. Sometimes their fingers touched, and often, as they bent over the eggs, her bright hair almost brushed his face.

“It is a loneish spot,” he ventured again.

“Yes,” said Mary Sadgrove.

When the eggs were all transferred her mother came in again.

“Would you buy a few pullets, higgler?”

“Any number, ma’am,” he declared quickly. Any number; by crumps, the tide was turning. He followed the mother into the yard, and there again she left him, waiting. He mused about the girl and wondered about the trade. If they offered him ten thousand chickens, he’d buy them, somehow, he would. She had stopped in the kitchen. Just in there she was, just behind him, a few feet away. Over the low wall of the yard a fat black pony was strolling in a field of bright greensward. In the yard, watching him, was a young gander, and on a stone staddle beside it lay a dead thrush on its back, its legs stiff in the air. The girl stayed in the kitchen; she was moving about, though, he could hear her; perhaps she was spying at him through the window. Twenty million eggs he would buy if Mrs. Sadgrove had got them. She was gone a long time. It was very quiet. The gander began to comb its white breast with its beak. Its three-toed feet were a most tender pink, shaped like wide diamonds, and at each of the three forward points here was a toe like a small blanched nut. It lifted one foot, folding the webs, and hid it under its wing and sank into a resigned meditation on one leg. It had a blue eye that was meek—it had two, but you could only see one at a time—a meek blue eye, set in a pink rim that gave it a dissolute air, and its beak had raw red nostrils as though it suffered from the damp. Altogether a beautiful bird. And in some absurd way it resembled Mrs. Sadgrove.

“Would you sell that young gollan, ma’am?” Harvey inquired when the mother returned.

Yes, she would sell him, and she also sold him two dozen pullets. Harvey packed the fowls in a crate.

“Come on,” he cried cuddling the squalling gander in his arms, “you needn’t be afeared of me, I never kills anything afore Saturdays.”

He roped it by its leg to a hook inside his cart. Then he took out his bag of money, paid Mrs. Sadgrove her dues, said: “Good day, ma’am, good day,” and drove off without seeing another sign or stitch of that fine young girl.

“Get along, Dodger, get along wi’ you.” They went bowling along for nearly an hour, and then he could see the landmark on Dan’el Green’s Hill, a windmill that never turned though it looked a fine competent piece of architecture, just beyond Dinnop.

Soon he reached his cottage and was chaffing his mother, a hearty buxom dame, who stayed at home and higgled with any chance callers. At this business she was perhaps more enlightened than her son. It was almost a misfortune to get into her clutches.

“How much you give for this?” he cried, eyeing with humorous contempt an object in a coop that was neither flesh nor rude red herring.

“Oh crumps,” he declared when she told him, “I am damned and done!”

“Go on with you, that’s a good bird, I tell you, with a full heart, as will lay in a month.”

“I doubt it’s a hen at all,” he protested. “Oh what a ravenous beak! Damned and done I am.”

Mrs. Witlow’s voice began indignantly to rise.

“Oh well,” mused her son, “it’s thrifty perhaps. It ain’t quite right, but it’s not so wrong as to make a fuss about, especially as I be pretty sharp set. And if it’s hens you want,” he continued triumphantly, dropping the crate of huddled fowls before her, “there’s hens for you; and a gander! There’s a gander for you, if it’s a gander you want.”

Leaving them all in his cottage yard he went and stalled the horse and cart at the inn, for he had no stable of his own. After supper he told his mother about the Sadgroves of Prattle Corner. “Prettiest girl you ever seen, but the shyest mottal alive. Hair like a squirrel, lovely.”