Nicky-Nan, Reservist. Arthur Quiller-Couch
when Mother's not lookin' an' we can get a knife off the table. You bad boy!"
'Biades howled afresh.
"If you don't stop it,"—'Bert took a hand in threatening—"you won't get cut open till Monday; because 'tis Sunday to-morrow. And by that time you'll be festerin', I shouldn't wonder."
"—And mortification will have set in," promised his sister. "When that happens, you may turn up your toes. An' 'tis only a question between oak an' elum."
'Biades ceased yelling as abruptly as he had started. "What's 'fester'?" he demanded.
"You'll know fast enough, when you find yourself one solid scab," began 'Bert. But Nicky-Nan interrupted.
"There, there, children! Run along an' don't ee play at trouble. There's misery enough, the Lord knows—" He broke off on a twinge of pain, and stared down-stream at the congregated masts in the little harbour.
Polpier lies in a gorge so steep and deep that though it faces but a little east of south, all its western flank lay already in deep shadow. The sunlight slanting over the ridge touched the tops of the masts, half a dozen of which had trucks with a bravery of gilt, while a couple wore the additional glory of a vane. On these it flashed, and passed on to bathe the line of cottages along the eastern shore, with the coast-guard hut that stood separate beyond them on the round of the cliff-track—all in one quiet golden glow. War? Who could think of War? … Nicky-Nan at any rate let the thought of it slip into the sea of his private trouble. It was as though he had hauled up some other man's "sinker" and, discovering his mistake, let it drop back plumb.
While he stared, the children had stolen away.
Yet he loitered there staring, in the hush of the warm afternoon, lifting his eyes a little towards the familiar outline of the hills that almost overlapped, closing out sight of the sea. A verse ran in his head—"I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills from whence cometh my help. … "
The slamming of a door at the street-corner beyond the bridge recalled him to the world of action.
On the doorstep of the local Bank—turning key in lock as he left the premises—stood a man respectably dressed and large of build. It was Mr. Pamphlett, the Bank-Manager. Nicky-Nan thrust his hands in his trouser-pockets and limped towards him.
"If you please, sir—"
Mr. Pamphlett faced about, displaying a broad white waistcoat and a ponderous gold watch-chain.
"Ah! Nanjivell?"
"If you please, sir—" Nicky-Nan, now balanced on his sound leg, withdrew a hand from his pocket and touched his cap. "I've been waitin' your convenience."
"Busy times," said Mr. Pamphlett. "This Moratorium, you know. The
War makes itself felt, even in this little place."
If Nicky-Nan had known the meaning of the word Moratorium, it might have given him an opening. But he did not, and so he stood dumb. "You have come to say, I hope," hazarded Mr. Pamphlett after a pause, "that you don't intend to give me any more trouble? … You've given me enough, you know. An Ejectment Order. … Still—if, at the last, you've made up your mind to behave—"
"There's no other house, sir. If there was, and you'd let it to me—"
"That's likely, hey? In the present scandalous laxity of the law towards tenants, you've cost me a matter of pounds—not to mention six months' delay, which means money lost—to eject you. You, that owe me six pounds rent! It's likely I'd let you another house—even if I had one!"
"Even if you had the will, 'twouldn' be right. I understand that, sir. Six young men, as I know, waitin' to marry and unable, because the visitors snap up cottage after cottage for summer residences, an'll pay you fancy prices; whereas you won't build for the likes o' we."
"Your six young men—if six there be—" said Mr. Pamphlett, "will be best employed for some time to come in fighting for their country. It don't pay to build cottages, I tell you."
Nicky-Nan's right hand gripped the knife in his pocket. But he answered wearily—
"Well, anyways, sir, I don't ask to interfere with them: but only to bide under my own shelter."
"Owing me six pounds arrears, and piling up more? And after driving me to legal proceedings! Look here, Nanjivell. You are fumbling something in your pocket. Is it the six pounds you owe me?"
"No, sir."
"I thought not. And if it were, I should still demand the costs I've been put to. If you bring me the total on Monday—But you know very well you cannot."
"No, sir."
"Then," said Mr. Pamphlett, "we waste time. I have been worried enough, these last few days, with more serious business than yours. In the times now upon us a many folk are bound to go to the wall; and the improvident will go first, as is only right. Enough said, my man!"
Nicky-Nan fumbled with the knife in his pocket, but let Mr. Pamphlett pass.
Then he limped back to the house that would be his until Monday, and closed the door. Beyond the frail partition which boarded him off from the Penhaligon family he could hear the children merry at tea.
CHAPTER II.
CALL TO ARMS.
NESCIO QUA NATALE SOLUM DULCEDINE CUNCTOS DUCIT ET IMMEMORES NON SINIT ESSE SUI.
—The Old Doctor (to whom we have made allusion) had been moved to write an account of his native place, and had contrived to get it published by subscription in a thin octavo volume of 232 pages, measuring nine by five and a half inches. Copies are rare, but may yet be picked up on secondhand bookstalls for six or seven shillings.
From this 'History of Polpier' I must quote—being unable to better it—his description of the little town. (He ever insisted in calling it a town, not a village, although it contained less than fourteen hundred inhabitants.)
"If the map of the coast of Cornwall be examined, on the south-east, between the estuaries of the two rivers that divide the Hundred of West from the Hundred of East and the Hundred of Powder, will be noticed an indentation of the littoral line, in which cleft lies the little town of Polpier. Tall hills, abrupt and rugged, shut in a deep and tortuous valley, formed by the meeting of smaller coombs; houses, which seem dropped rather than built, crowd the valley and its rocky ledges; a rapid rivulet dances in and out among the dwellings, till its voice is lost in the waters of a tidal haven, thronged with fishing boats and guarded by its Peak of serried rock."
The Doctor after this first modest mention of "a rivulet" invariably writes of it as "the River," and by no other name does Polpier speak of it to this day. On the lower or seaward side of the bridge-end, where the channel measures some three yards across, the flank of his house leaned over the rushing water, to the sound of which he slept at night. Across the stream the house of Mr. Barrabell, clerk, leaned forward at a more pronounced angle, so that the two neighbours, had they been so minded, might have shaken hands between their bedroom windows before retiring to rest. Tradition reports this Mr. Barrabell (though an accountant for most of the privateering companies in Polpier) to have been a timorous man: and that once the Doctor, returning home in the small hours from a midwifery case, found his neighbour and his neighbour's wife hiding together under his bed-clothes. Upon an alarm that Bonaparte was in the town, they had bridged the stream with a ladder to the Doctor's open window and clambered across in their night-clothes. It is reported also that, on the transit, Mrs. Barrabell was heard to say, "Go forward, Theophilus! Th' Old Doctor knows all about me, if he don't about you. You can trust en to the ends of the world." "That's right enough, ma'am," said the Doctor in his great way; "but you appear to have gone a bit further." A variant of the story has it that Mrs. Barrabell was found beneath the bed, and her