The Post-Girl. Edward Charles Booth
The meteorological conditions point to prolonged set fair." He dismissed the weather with a sudden expulsion of glance, and put on his atmospheric courtesy of manner for personal approaches. "... A pilgrim to the old heathen centre of Ullbrig?" he inquired, diffusing the direct interrogation over the Spawer's holland trousers. "Brig, the Bridge, and Ull, or Uddle, the Idol—the Village of Idols on the Bridge. The bridge and the idols have departed ... the church is partly built of stones from infidel altars ... but the heathen remain. Large numbers of them. Do you come to study our aboriginal habits and superstitions? ... A student of Nature at all?"
The Spawer exchanged a happy negative.
"Hardly a student," he said, rejecting the title with pleasant demur. "I 'm afraid I can't lay claim to that. A lover, perhaps," he substituted. "That leaves ignorance free scope. Love is not among the learned professions."
"Ha!" Father Mostyn commented, considering the reflection, like the scent of a cigar, through critical nostrils. "A lover of Nature; with a leaning towards philosophy. You come far to do your love-making?"
"Fairly far—yes. I am fond of the country," the Spawer explained, with simple confession of fact, "and the sea."
"We have not much country to offer you hereabouts, I fear," Father Mostyn said, looking deprecatingly round it. "We have land." He leaned interrogatively on the proffered alternative. "If that 's any good to you. A fine, heavy, obstinate clay like the rest of us. We are sweaters of the brow in these parts. We find it an excellent substitute for soap. All our life is given over to the land. We are born on it, brought up on it, buried in it. We worship it. It is the only god we bow to. Notice the back of an Ullbrig man; it is bent with devotion to the soil. We don't bend like that in church. To bend like that in church is idolatry. So we go to chapel and unbend instead, and hold mighty tea-meetings in honor of Jehovah. Notice our eyes too; take stock of them when we give you 'Good day' in the road. There is a peculiar, foxy, narrow-grooved slant in them through incessant following of the furrow. You can't mistake it. You don't need any pretensions to metoposcopy to read our faces. We are of the earth, earthy. When we turn our eyes towards Heaven, we are merely looking for rain. If we turn them up again, we are merely looking for the rain to stop. Our lives are elemental and our pleasures few. To speak ill of one's neighbor, to slander the vicar, to deride the church, to perpetuate heresy, to pasture untruths—spargere voces in vulgum ambiguas—to fly off at a tangent on strong beer—these are among our catalogue of homely recreations.
"If you were staying here to study us for any length of time—but I suppose you are the mere sojourner of a day, gone from us again in the cool of the evening with the night-moths and other flitting things?"
The Spawer laughed lightly.
"Not quite so soon as that," he said. "And you make me glad of it. No; I am pitching my tent in this pleasant wilderness awhile."
Father Mostyn opened his roomy eye to the reception of surprise.
"Ha! Is it possible? Within measurable distance of us?"
"At Cliff Wrangham."
"Cliff Wrangham!" The ecclesiastical eyebrows elevated themselves up out of sight under Father Mostyn's cap-rim. "So near and yet so far! Friends?" he added, as the eyebrows came down, casting over the word a delicate interrogative haze.
The Spawer cleaved its meaning.
"I am making them," he said. "At present I am merely a lodger."
"Merely a lodger," Father Mostyn repeated, using the words to nod over, as was his wont. "And Mrs. Dixon, I suppose, is our landlady? Ha! I thought so. She has the monopoly hereabouts. A tower of nonconformity in a district pillared with dissent—but a skilled cook. A cook for an abbot's board. Only describe what a dish smells like and she will come within reasonable approach of its taste on the table. You won't have much fault to find with the meals—I 've tried 'em. Her chicken-pies are a specialty. There 's not a single crumb of vice in the whole crust, and the gravy glues your lips together with goodness. The pity is they are not even Protestant pies, and are impiously partaken of on Fridays and other holy fast days. You need never fear for a dinner. All you have to do is to go out into the yard and point your finger at it. We possess an agreeable knack of spiriting poultry under the crust hereabouts without unnecessary formula. It is inherited. Beef will give you trouble, and mutton; both in the buying and the masticating. We kill once a week. Killing day falls the day after you want steak in a hurry—or has fallen some days before. That is because we sell first and slaughter second. Our Ullbrig butchers leave nothing to chance. They keep a beast ready in the stall, and as soon as the last steak 's sold by allotment, they sign the execution warrant. Not before, unless the beast falls ill. In the matter of fish we are better off. We don't go down to the sea in ships for it—we should come back without it if we did. We get it at Fussitter's. Ready tinned."
"Ready tinned!" said the Spawer. "It sounds rather deadly, does n't it? It puts me in mind of inquests, somehow."
"Ha!" Father Mostyn made haste to explain. "You must n't buy it out of the window. That 's where the deadliness comes in. The sunlight has a peculiar chemical action upon the tin, liberating certain constituents of the metal exceedingly perilous to the intercostal linings. Insist on having it from under the counter. Ask for tinned lobster—as supplied to his reverence the vicar...." He wrote out the instructions with his right forefinger upon the left-hand palm. "To be kept in a Cool, Dark Place under the Counter. The crayfish brand. Nothing but the crayfish brand. Ask for the vicar's lobster—they 'll know what you mean—and see that you get it."
"Would n't one of Mrs. Dixon's pies come in rather handy there, even on Friday?" the Spawer suggested.
"Ha!" said Father Mostyn, with a luminous eye. "I see you realize the danger of them. The sin that comes in handy. That 's it! That we may have strength of grace to turn away from the sin that comes in handy! ... Your tent has been pitched in the wilderness before?"
"Many times."
Father Mostyn made expressive comment with his eyebrows.
"Ha! I thought so. A misanthrope?" he asked, in genial unbelief. "Shunning company for solitude!"
"On the contrary, I find solitude excellent company at times."
"A literary man?"
"No." The Spawer parted pleasantly with the word, unattached to any further token of enlightenment.
"A visitor at large, I suppose!" Father Mostyn substituted, holding the conclusion under his nose with the delicate non-insistence of a collecting plate in church. "Here for rest and quiet."
The Spawer shook his head.
"Again no," he answered. "Rest and quiet are for the wealthy." Then he laughed himself free of further dissimulation. "I will be frank with you," he said. "I am none of these things. I am a poor beggar in the musical line."
Father Mostyn's eyebrows arched.
"The musical line!" he exclaimed. "The musical line drawn through Ullbrig! Geography upheaved! Mercator confounded! One might just as well expect the equator. And yet ... I felt convinced ... a disciple of art. You can't mistake it. But in Ullbrig. Is it possible?"
He wagged the staff in his hands to appreciative wonder, waltzing back and forth over three paces as though he were performing the first steps of a minuet.
"A singer?" he said, with a beaming eye of discovery. "Surely.... You have the singer's eyes."
"Alas!" said the Spawer. "I have not the singer's voice."
The gaze of the Vicar went suddenly thin.
"But the eyes!" he said; and then, with a quick readjustment of vision: "At least ... there can be no doubt.... An executant? You play?"
The Spawer sighed.
"Yes," he admitted, with smiling resignation. "I suppose I play."
"The piano, of course?" Father Mostyn conjectured, taking assent for granted. "Ha! ..." His face melted in smiles, like golden butter, to rapt appreciation at the vista of glorious possibilities that the instrument conjured up before