The Post-Girl. Edward Charles Booth
over the contemplation down a long-drawn, eloquent "M-m-m-m," gazing out upon the infinite plains of melody with a brightened eye. "You are not relying on our aboriginal stone age pianos, of course," he said, recalling his eye to the actual, with a sudden recollective jerk.
The Spawer showed a sunny glint of teeth.
"Hardly," he replied. "As soon as the railway people remember where they saw it last, I hope to have one of my own."
"One of your own. Ha!" Father Mostyn's eye glistened to enthusiasm again. "I judged so. Beautiful! Beautiful!" The ebony staff shook to internal humor at a thought. "Fancy Mozart on an Ullbrig piano! ... or Bach! ... or Beethoven! ..." He wagged the unspeakable with his head. "I 'm afraid you won't find any music hereabouts."
"Thank Heaven!" the Spawer breathed devoutly. "I was afraid perhaps I might!"
"Ha!" Father Mostyn caught quickly at the inference and translated it. "I see; I see. A musical monastic! Coming into retreat at Cliff Wrangham to subject his soul to a course of artistic purification and strengthening!"
The Spawer accepted the illustration with a modest laugh.
"Well, yes," he said. "I suppose that 's it—only it 's rather more beautiful in idea than in actuality. I should have said myself, perhaps, that I 'd come into the country to be able to work in shirt-sleeves and loosened braces, and go about unshaved, in baggy-kneed trousers, without fear of friends. I 'm half a monastic and half refugee. In towns so many of us are making music that one never gets a chance to hear or think one's own; one's ears are full of other people's. So I 've run away with my own little musical bone to a quiet place, where I can tackle it all to myself and growl over the business to my heart's content without any temptation to drop it for unsubstantial shadows. Instead of having to work in a stuffy room, with all the doors and windows closed and somebody knocking at you on the next house wall, I have the sea, the cliff, the sands ... and the whole sky above me for my workshop. It will take me all my time to fill it. If a melody comes my way, I can hum it into shape without causing unpleasant remarks. Nobody ever hears me, for one thing; and for another, they would n't bother to listen if they did." Father Mostyn's glance flickered imperceptibly for a moment, and then burned with an exceeding steady light. "I can orchestrate aloud in the open air, singing flute, clarinet, oboe, bassoon, ophicleide ... tympani ... just whatever I please, without any risk of an official tap on the shoulder. In a word, I can be myself ... and it 's a treat to be oneself for a while. One gets tired of being somebody else so long, and having to go about in fear of the great Unwritten."
"We have our great Unwritten here too," Father Mostyn told him. "I doubt if any of us could write it if we tried. Ullbrig is weak in its caligraphy. We do most of our writing in chalk. It suits our style better. The pen has an awkward habit of impaling the paper, we find, and carrying it back to the ink-pot."
"Don't teach me anything of Ullbrig's great Unwritten," the Spawer put in quickly. "Let me violate it with an easy conscience."
"By all means," Father Mostyn invited him genially. "It will be a chastening mortification to our pride. We are swollen with local pride—distended with the flatulence of dissent. A little pricking will do us no harm. I should have thought, though," Father Mostyn went on, "that you would have sought to feed your muse on richer fare than turnip-fields. I imagined that mountains and valleys, with castles looking over lakes and waterfalls by moonlight, were more the sort of stuff for stimulating a musician's fancy. Is it possible there can be music lying latent in our Ullbrig soil?"
The Spawer smiled a sympathetic appreciation of his perplexity.
"I think there may be," he told him. "Anyhow, I have come to make the experiment, and I 'm very well satisfied with it so far."
"Heaven be with you," Father Mostyn prayed with fervor. "It passes the mind of man to imagine the conversion of friend Joseph Tankard into a symphony, or friend Sheppardman Stevens as a figure in a sonata. You have your labor."
"I am not dismayed," the Spawer laughed, with light-hearted confidence.
"And you are staying here for any length of time—a month, at least, to start with? ... I would suggest three, if you wish to study the district."
"It might very well be three before I leave; certainly not less than a month."
"Excellent! Your soul is my cure while you stay. It will be my duty as parish priest to pay you parochial visits. I hope, too, that it will be my privilege to receive your full musical confession. And as soon as ever you grow tired of the company of solitude up at the Cliff End, just drop down to Ullbrig and try me for an antidote, any time you happen to be passing. If you 're tired, or want something to drink, don't hesitate to make use of the parish priest. That 's what he 's for. Just call in at the Vicarage as you would at the Ullbrig Arms; you 'll find the attention as good, and the welcome greater. After eight o'clock you can be almost sure of catching me ... without there be sick calls. A pain in the umbilical vicinity is an excellent worker for the Church. Unfortunately, it passes off too soon, and then we are apt to forget that we called the vicar out of bed in a hurry one morning...." The first stroke of three fell across his words from the church tower round the corner, and on the instant his genial eye was wreathed in priestly mysticism as with the spirals of incense. The mantle of a mighty mission descended upon him, and he gathered its folds in dignity about his being. "Ha!" he said, grasping his staff for departure, and verifying the time from a handsome gold chronometer, "... I must leave you. They 're waiting.... Priestly duties...."
He did not specify who were waiting or what the priestly duties were, but exhaled the spirit of leave-taking in an ineffable smile without words, and vanished round Hesketh's corner—a vague, ecclesiastical vapor. A few moments later, by the time his Reverence could have comfortably reached the belfry, the creaking of a bell-rope overtook the Spawer on his way homeward, and the tongue of the stagnant hour-teller roused itself once more in public reproof of schism.
A mile and a half of roadway lies between Ullbrig and Cliff Wrangham. As near as may be it stretches straight to the halfway house, like a yard of yellow ribbon measured against the rod. From there the rest of it rolls away to the Cliff End in sweeping fold of disengaged material and the gateways set in. There are four of these, with a music all their own as they clash behind you, wagging their loose, worn, wooden tongues, that sometimes catch and are still with one short note, and sometimes reiterate themselves slowingly to sleep upon the gate-post behind you as you go. The first lets you by Stamway's long one-story farm-house, before Stamway's three front windows, hermetically sealed, each darkened with a fuchsia and backed with white curtains drawn as tight as a drumhead, and Stamway's front door, an arm's length behind the wooden palisading, that Stamway has never gone in or come out by since he happened through with some of the parlor furniture thirty years ago—our front door, as Father Mostyn himself tells us, being no better than the church door for all the use we make of it. Beyond Stamway's third window is Stamway's big semi-circular duck-pond, where Barclay of Far Wrangham suffered shipwreck one night in November, being found water-logged up to his knees, and crying aloud (as it is attested):
"Lord 'ev mercy on me an' gie me strength ti keep my legs while tide gans down." Adding when rescued: "Ah nivver knowed sea so 'igh i' all my days, nor rise so sudden. She mun 'a done a deal o' damage, Stamway. If ah 'ad n't been strongish o' my feet, like, ah sewd 'a been swep away, for sure."
"Nay," Stamway told him bluntly, who does not hold with dissipations in any shape or form, being a strict Good Templar himself, and never known the worse for liquor more than six times in the year. "It 's Red Sea i'side of ye, ah think, 'at 's most to blame. It 's drowned a deal o' Phaarahs in its time. Gan yer ways 'ome wi' ye, an' div n't say nowt about matter ti onnybody. They 'll know very well wi'oot."
The second gate gives you your first foot on Dixon's land. The house stands endwise to the sea, set deep in a horseshoe of trees; a big, hearty, whitewashed building under bronze red tiles, two stories high in front, that slope down backward over the dairy toward the stackgarth till they touch its high nettles. If you are approaching it with heelless boots and an apologetic tread, beware of the dog. The door opens under the low scullery roof, with the sink to your right hand as you go in, where the whole family takes turns at the papier-maché basin before tea. To the left of the