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

“Phew, but that’s hot!” commented the man, “I’m as dry as a rattle.”

A few cherries had spilled from one basket and lay on the ground. The little furry mouse had found them and was industriously nibbling at one. The higgler nonchalantly stamped his foot upon it, and kept it so for a moment or two. Then he looked at the dead mouse. A tangle of entrails had gushed from its whiskered muzzle.

He resumed his work and the clapper rattled on throughout the afternoon, for there were other cherry trees that other buyers would come to strip in a day or two. At four o’clock he was finished. Never a word had he spoken with Mary, or she with him. When he went over to the house to pay Mrs. Sadgrove Mary stopped in the orchard scaring the birds.

“Take a cup of tea, Mr. Witlow,” said Mrs. Sadgrove; and then she surprisingly added: “Where’s Mary?”

“Still a-frightening the birds, and pretty well tired of that, I should think, ma’am.”

The mother had poured out three cups of tea.

“Shall I go and call her in?” he asked, rising.

“You might,” said she.

In the orchard the clappering had ceased. He walked all round, and in among the trees, but saw no sign of Mary; nor on the common, nor in the yard. But when he went back to the house Mary was there already, chatting at the table with her mother. She did not greet him, though she ceased talking to her mother as he sat down. After drinking his tea he went off briskly to load the baskets into the cart. As he climbed up to drive off, Mrs. Sadgrove came out and stood beside the horse.

“You’re off now?” said she.

“Yes, ma’am; all loaded, and thank you.”

She glanced vaguely along the road he had to travel. The afternoon was as clear as wine, the greensward itself dazzled him; lonely Shag Moor stretched away, humped with sweet yellow furze and pilastered with its telegraph poles. No life there, no life at all. Harvey sat on his driving board, musingly brushing the flank of his horse with the trailing whip.

“Ever round this way on Sundays?” inquired the woman, peering up at him.

“Well, not in a manner of speaking, I’m not, ma’am,” he answered her.

The widow laid her hand on the horse’s back, patting vaguely. The horse pricked up its ears, as if it were listening.

“If you are, at all, ever, you must look in and have a bit of dinner with us.”

“I will, ma’am, I will.”

“Next Sunday?” she went on.

“I will, ma’am, yes, I will,” he repeated, “and thank you.”

“One o’clock?” The widow smiled up at him.

“At one o’clock, ma’am; next Sunday; I will, and thank you,” he said.

She stood away from the horse and waved her hand. The first tangible thought that floated mutely out of the higgler’s mind as he drove away was: “I’m damned if I ain’t a-going it, Sophy!”

He told his mother of Mrs. Sadgrove’s invitation with an air of curbed triumph. “Come round—she says. Yes—I says—I ’ull. That’s right—she says—so do.”

III

On the Sunday morn he dressed himself gallantly. It was again a sweet unclouded day. The church bell at Dinnop had begun to ring. From his window, as he fastened his most ornate tie, Harvey could observe his neighbour’s two small children in the next garden, a boy and girl clad for church-going and each carrying a clerical book. The tiny boy placed his sister in front of a hen-roost and, opening his book, began to pace to and fro before her, shrilly intoning: “Jesus is the shepherd, ring the bell. Oh lord, ring the bell, am I a good boy? Amen. Oh lord, ring the bell.” The little girl bowed her head piously over her book. The lad then picked up from the ground a dish that had contained the dog’s food, and presented it momentarily before the lilac bush, the rabbit in a hutch, the axe fixed in a chopping block, and then before his sister. Without lifting her peering gaze from her book she meekly dropped two pebbles in the plate, and the boy passed on, lightly moaning, to the clothes-line post and a cock scooping in some dust.

“Ah, the little impets!” cried Harvey Witlow. “Here, Toby! Here, Margaret!” He took two pennies from his pocket and lobbed them from the window to the astonished children. As they stooped to pick up the coins Harvey heard the hoarse voice of neighbour Nathan, their father, bawl from his kitchen: “Come on in, and shut that bloody door, d’y’ear!”

Harnessing his moody horse to the gig Harvey was soon bowling away to Shag Moor, and as he drove along he sung loudly. He had a pink rose in his buttonhole. Mrs. Sadgrove received him almost affably, and though Mary was more shy than ever before, Harvey had determined to make an impression. During the dinner he fired off his bucolic jokes, and pleasant tattle of a more respectful and sober nature; but after dinner Mary sat like Patience, not upon a monument but as if upon a rocking-horse, shy and fearful, and her mother made no effort to inspire her as the higgler did, unsuccessful though he was. They went to the pens to look at the pigs, and as they leaned against the low walls and poked the maudlin inhabitants, Harvey began: “Reminds me, when I was in the war . . .”

“Were you in the war!” interrupted Mrs. Sadgrove.

“Oh yes, I was in that war, ah, and there was a pig . . . Danger? Oh lord bless me it was a bit dangerous, but you never knew where it was or wat it ’ud be at next; it was like the sword of Damockels. There was a bullet once come ’ithin a foot of my head, and it went through a board an inch thick, slap through that board.” Both women gazed at him apprehendingly. “Why, I might ’a’ been killed, you know,” said Harvey, cocking his eye musingly at the weather-vane on the barn. “We was in billets at St. Gratien, and one day a chasseur came up—a French yoossar, you know—and he began talking to our sergeant. That was Hubert Luxter, the butcher: died a month or two ago of measles. But this yoossar couldn’t speak English at all, and none of us chaps could make sense of him. I never could understand that lingo somehow, never; and though there was half a dozen of us chaps there, none of us were man enough for it neither. ‘Nil compree,’ we says, ‘non compos.’ I told him straight: ‘You ought to learn English,’ I said, ‘it’s much easier than your kind of bally chatter.’ So he kept shaping up as if he was holding a rifle, and then he’d say ‘Fusee—bang!’ and then he’d say ‘cushion’ kept on saying ‘cushion.’ Then he gets a bit of chalk and draws on the wall something that looks like a horrible dog, and says ‘cushion’ again.”

“Pig,” interjected Mary Sadgrove, softly.

“Yes, yes!” ejaculated Harvey, “so ’twas! Do you know any French lingo?”

“Oh yes,” declared her mother, “Mary knows it very well.”

“Ah,” sighed the higgler, “I don’t, although I been to France. And I couldn’t do it now, not for luck nor love. You learnt it, I suppose. Well, this yoossar wants to borrow my rifle, but of course I can’t lend him. So he taps on this horrible pig he’d drawn, and then he taps on his own head, and rolls his eyes about dreadful! ‘Mad?’ I says. And that was it, that was it. He’d got a pig on his little farm there what had gone mad, and he wanted us to come and shoot it; he was on leave and he hadn’t got any ammunition. So Hubert Luxter he says: ‘Come on, some of you,’ and we all goes with the yoossar and shot the pig for him. Ah, that was a pig! And when it died it jumped a somersault just like a rabbit. It had got the mange, and was mad as anything I ever see in my life; it was full of madness. Couldn’t hit him at all at first, and it kicked up bobs-a-dying. ‘Ready, present, fire!’ Hubert Luxter says, and bang goes the six of us, and every time we missed him he spotted us and we had to run for our lives.”