Richard Blackmore - Cripps, the Carrier - A Woodland Tale

The little village of Beckley lies, or rather lay many years ago, in the quiet embrace of old Stow Wood, well known to every Oxford man who loves the horn or fusil. This wood or forest (now broken up into many straggling copses) spread in the olden time across the main breadth of the highland to the north of Headington, between the valley of the Cherwell and the bogs of Otmoor. Beckley itself, though once approached by the Roman road from Alchester, must for many a century have nursed its rural quietude, withdrawn as it was from the stage-waggon track from High Wycombe to Chipping Norton, through Wheatley, Islip, and Bletchingdon, and lying in a tangle of narrow lanes leading only to one another. So Beckley took that cheerful view of life which enabled the fox to disdain the blandishments of the vintage, and prided itself on its happy seclusion and untutored honesty.

But as all sons of Adam must have something or other to say to the rest, and especially to his daughters, this little village carried on some commerce with the outer world; and did it through a carrier.

The name of this excellent man was Cripps; and the Carrier's mantle, or woolsey coat, had descended on this particular Cripps from many generations. All the Cripps family had a habit of adding largely to their number in every generation. In this they resembled most other families which have to fight the world, and therefore recruit their forces zealously; but in one great point they were very distinct – they agreed among one another. And ever since roads were made, or rather lanes began trying to make themselves, one great tradition had confirmed the dynasty of Crippses.

This was that the eldest son should take the carrying business; the second son (upon first avoidance) should have the baker's shop in Oxford over against old Balliol College; the third should have the queer old swine-farm in the heart of Stow Forest; the fourth should be the butcher of Beckley, and the fifth its shoemaker. If ever it pleased the Lord to proceed with the masculine fork of the family (as had happened several times), the sixth boy and the rest were expected to start on their travels, when big enough. As for the girls, the Carrier, being the head of the family, and holding the house and the stable and cart, was bound to take the maids, one by one, to and fro under his tilt twice a week, till the public fell in love with them.

Now, so many things come cross and across in the countless ins and outs of life, that even the laws of the Crippses failed sometimes, in some jot or tittle. Still there they stuck, and strong cause was needed ere they could be departed from. Of course the side-shoots of the family (shoemakers' sons, and so on) were not to be bound by this great code, however ambitious to be so. To deal with such rovers is not our duty. Our privilege is to trace the strict succession of the Crippses, the deeds of the Carrier now on the throne and his second best brother, the baker, with a little side-peep at the man on the farm, and a shy desire to be very delicate to the last unmarried "female."

The present head of the family, Zacchary Cripps, the Beckley carrier, under the laws of time (which are even stricter than the Cripps' code), was crossing the ridge of manhood towards the western side of forty, without providing the due successor to the ancestral driving-board. Public opinion was already beginning to exclaim at him; and the man who kept the chandler's shop, with a large small family to maintain, was threatening to make the most of this, and set up his own eldest son on the road; though "dot and carry one" was all he knew about the business. Zacchary was not a likely man to be at all upset by this; but rather one of a tarrying order, as his name might indicate.

Truly intelligent families living round about the city of Oxford had, and even to this day have, a habit of naming their male babies after the books of the Bible, in their just canonical sequence; while infants of the better sex are baptized into the Apocrypha, or even the Epistles. So that Zacchary should have been "Genesis," only his father had suffered such pangs of mind at being cut down, by the ever-strengthening curtness of British diction, into "Jenny Cripps," that he laid his thumb to the New Testament when his first man-child was born to him, and finding a father in like case, quite relieved of responsibility, took it for a good sign, and applied his name triumphantly.

But though the eldest born was thus transferred into the New Testament, the second son reverted to the proper dispensation; and the one who went into the baker's shop was Exodus, as he ought to be. The children of the former Exodus were turned out testamentarily, save those who were needed to carry the bread out till their cousin's boys should be big enough.

All of these doings were right enough, and everybody approved of them. Leviticus Cripps was the lord of the swine, and Numbers bore the cleaver, while Deuteronomy stuck to his last, when the public-house could spare him. There was only one more brother of the dominant generation, whose name was "Pentachook," for thus they pronounced the collective eponym, and he had been compendiously kicked abroad, to seek his own fortune, right early.

But as for the daughters (who took their names from the best women of the Apocrypha, and sat up successively under the tilt until they were disposed of), for the moment it is enough to say that all except one were now forth and settled. Some married farmers, some married tradesmen, one took a miller's eldest son, one had a gentleman more or less, but all with expectations. Only the youngest was still in the tilt, a very pretty girl called Esther.

All Beckley declared that Esther's heart had been touched by a College lad, who came some five years since to lodge with Zacchary for the long vacation, and was waited on by this young girl, supposed to be then unripe for dreaming of the tender sentiment. That a girl of only fifteen summers should allow her thoughts to stray, contrary to all common sense and her duty to her betters, for no other reason (to anybody's knowledge) than that a young man ate and drank with less noise than the Crippses, and went on about the moonlight and the stars, and the rubbishy things in the hedges – that a child like that should know no better than to mix what a gentleman said with his inner meaning – put it right or left, it showed that something was amiss with her. However, the women would say no more until it was pulled out of them. To mix or meddle with the Crippses was like putting one's fingers into a steel trap.

With female opinion in this condition, and eager to catch at anything, Mrs. Exodus Cripps, in Oxford, was confined rather suddenly. She had kneaded a batch of two sacks of flour, to put it to rise for the morning, and her husband (who should not have let her do it) was smoking a pipe, and exciting her. Nevertheless, it would not have harmed her (as both the doctor and the midwife said) if only she had kept herself from arguing while about it. But, somehow or other, her husband said a thing she could not agree with, and the strength of her reason went the other way, and it served him right that he had to rush off in his slippers to the night-bell.

On the next day, although things were quite brought round, and the world was the richer by the addition of another rational animal, Mr. Exodus sent up the crumpet-boy all the way from Broad Street in Oxford to Beckley, to beg and implore Miss Esther Cripps to come down and attend to the caudle. And the crumpet-boy, being short of breath, became so full of power that the Carrier scarcely knew what to do in the teeth of so urgent a message. For he had made quite a pet of his youngest sister, and the twenty years of age betwixt them stopped the gap of rivalry. It was getting quite late in the afternoon when the crumpet-boy knocked at the Carrier's door, because he had met upon Magdalen Bridge a boy who owed him twopence; and eager as he was to fulfil his duty, a sense of justice to himself compelled him to do his best to get it. His knowledge of the world was increased by the failure of this Utopian vision, for the other boy offered to toss him "double or quits," and having no specie, borrowed poor Crumpy's last penny to do it; then, being defeated in the issue, he cast the young baker's cap over the bridge, and made off at fine speed with his coin of the realm. What other thing could Crumpy do than attempt to outvie his activity? In a word, he chased him as far as Carfax, with well-winged feet and sad labour of lungs, but Mercury laughed at Astræa, and Crumpy had a very distant view of fivepence. Recording a highly vindictive vow, he scratched his bare head, and set forth again, being further from Beckley than at his first start.