Collected works of j s f.., p.146
Collected Works of J S Fletcher, page 146
“That looks to be in a poorish state!” he thought. “And it’s rent-day next week. I wonder how Perris stands for that? It’s a pity for that wife of his — a fine woman!”
Rhoda and Tibby Graddige went back to the orchard to finish hanging out the clothes. Both were in meditative mood, brought about by the event of the afternoon.
“So that’s Mr. Taffendale, is it?” said Rhoda. “For all we’ve been here two years I never saw him before. Well off, isn’t he, Tibby?”
Tibby Graddige jerked her head.
“Well off!” she exclaimed. “I’ll warrant! What with his big farm, and his lime-kilns, I should think he were well off, yon! Why, his father, old Mestur Taffendale, left him thirty thousand pound. An’ isn’t it fair shameful? — he’s never yet shown sign o’ tekkin’ a wife to share it wi’ him!”
Rhoda made no answer. She was wondering what so wealthy a man had thought of the palpable poverty of Cherry-trees.
II
ABOUT THE TIME that Mark Taffendale and Tibby Graddige carried Pippany Webster into the house-place, Abel Perris got out of a train at the little railway station, Somerleigh, which stood four miles away along the high-road to the north of Martinsthorpe. A tallish, bony man, somewhat uncertain at his knees and rounded of shoulder, with a sharp, thin face, a weak chin, and a bit of sandy whisker cropping out in front of each over-large ear, he looked almost pathetically desolate as he stood on the platform, mechanically feeling in one pocket after another in the effort to find his ticket. His attire gave no force to his naturally colourless personality.’ Having been on a visit to his relations he had worn his best clothes — garments rarely brought out of the chest which had been their place of repose for several years. The sleeves of the black coat were too short, and exposed the prominent, fleshless bones of the wearer’s wrists; the legs of the grey trousers had been shortened by much creasing and bagging at the knees, and revealed the rough grey stockings which terminated in unpolished lace-up boots; the waistcoat, loose and baggy, was crossed by a steel watch-chain, bought in youth, a great bargain, at some forgotten statute-hiring fair. A much frayed collar, dirty and crumpled by its two days’ wearing, and at least a size too small for the neckband of the coarse shirt on which it had with difficulty been fastened, formed a striking contrast to the gaudy necktie of blue satin, which was wound about it and had worked itself out of place until its knot lay beneath the wearer’s left ear. The necktie, like the watch-chain, was the result of a visit to some fair or other; it expressed Perris almost as eloquently as the useless switch of ashplant which he carried aimlessly in his great raw hand — a switch that was of no use for anything in a pedestrian’s hand but to snick off the heads of the flowers and weeds by the wayside.
Perris was the only person who left the train; a solitary porter was the only person who emerged from the station buildings to greet and speed it. The train went on slowly, and Pen-is made for the exit at the end of the platform with equal leisureliness. He found and gave up his ticket, and went out on the high-road. Opposite the station stood a wayside inn, meagre and poor of aspect, but dignified with the title of Railway Hotel; Perris, having moved a few yards in the homeward direction, paused and looked at its open door uncertainly. His feet began to shuffle towards it; eventually he crossed the road with shambling gait and bent head.
“I may as well take an odd glass,” he muttered. “There’s nowt ‘twixt here and our house, and it’s a good four mile.”
The parlour into which he turned on entering the inn was close and heavy with the smell of rank tobacco and stale beer. Sawdust, strewn about three days before, and now littered and foul with the accumulations brought in from the road outside, covered the floor; the rough tables of unpolished wood were marked with the rings made by the setting down upon them of overflowing pots and mugs; the walls, originally washed in some indefinite tint of yellow or drab, and now stained and discoloured by damp and neglect, were relieved from sheer bleakness by framed advertisements of ales and spirits, and here and there by a grocer’s fly-blown almanack. One side of the room was filled up by a bar, covered over with zinc sheeting, out of which projected three beer-pulls standing up like ninepins; behind it, on shelves ranged against the walls, were displayed a few bottles of spirits, an ancient cigar-box or two, and some rows of cloudy glasses. The whole place was down at heel and disconsolate: Perris, however, noticed nothing of its shabbiness: his eyes were no more offended by the squalor and the untidiness than his nose was vexed by the unpleasant atmosphere. He sat down heavily at the table nearest to the bar, and tapped on its surface with his ash switch.
A man emerged lazily from an inner apartment — a gross-habited, bloated man, about whose thickly-jowled face coarse black hair grew in sparse tufts. The silence with which he advanced to the bar was due to the fact that although the afternoon was merging towards eventide, he still retained the slippers into which he had thrust his feet on rising; it needed no particular observation to see that so far he had performed no ablutions nor made his toilet. His trousers were kept in place by a single suspender; between them and his open waistcoat, almost destitute of buttons and greasy from much spilling of fat meats, large rolls of coarse linen forced themselves and suggested that he considered an allowance of one shirt a week ample for his requirements. He wore neither collar nor necktie: his unbuttoned shirt revealed a thick bull neck, and beneath it a chest covered as with the pelt of an animal.
“Day,” said Perris, nodding mechanically. “I’ll take a drop of Irish, if you please.”
He reached up to the counter and laid a sixpenny-piece on it, and the landlord turned to a bottle behind him and poured some of its muddy-looking contents into a glass.
“Happen you’ll take a drop o’ summat yourself, like?” suggested Perris generously.
“Well, I’ll just take a twopennorth o’ gin,” replied the landlord, helping himself from another bottle. “Here’s my best respects.”
“Best respects,” murmured Perris. He picked up the penny which the landlord pushed across the counter, and dropped it into his pocket. “Quietish about here, isn’t it?” he said.
The landlord leaned across the counter and stroked his sparse beard.
“Aye, there’s naught much doing,” he said. “This place is over far out o’ the village, and them as comes by train doesn’t turn in here very oft. It’s naught to me — I was only put in to manage it, like: it’s a tied house. Which way might you be going?”
“Nay, I come fro’ Martinsthorpe yonder,” answered Perris, nodding his head towards the south. “Least-ways, fro’ Cherry-trees Farm — I been farming there this last two year. I don’t oft come this way — it isn’t in my direction for anywhere.”
“How’s things out your way, like?” asked the landlord.
“Middlin’, middlin’,” answered Perris, tapping his switch on the floor. “There’s naught much to be made at it. It’s naught but scrattin’ a livin’ out o’ t’ land.”
“Why, it’s summat to do that,” observed the landlord. “There’s some as can’t scrat that much. And there’s some as can. I’ll lay yon neighbour o’ yours at Martinsthorpe Limepits scrats more nor a livin’.”
“Mestur Taffendale?” said Perris, looking up. “Ah, yes, but he were one o’ them ‘at’s born wi’ silver spoons i’ their mouths, accordin’ to what I understand. Yes, I understand that he’s part brass, has Mestur Taffendale.”
The landlord held out his hand for Perris’s glass and replenished it and his own.
“Aye, he has so!” he observed. “And them that has aught, always gets more to put to it. I’ll lay Taffendale could buy up all t’ farmers i’ Martinsthorpe.”
Perris sipped his whisky and laughed feebly and foolishly.
“I’ll lay he could buy me up!” he said. “It’s our rent-day next week, and I’m sure a body’s hard put to it to raise t’ rent nowadays. There’ll have to be some reductions or abatements, or summat, or else us little farmers ‘ll be sore tried.”
The landlord made no reply to these remarks. He glanced the caller up and down, and drew his own conclusions. And Perris presently drank off his whisky, and rising to his feet looked indefinitely about him.
“Well, I must be off,” he said. “It’s four mile to my place. I think I’ll take a sup o’ whisky in a bottle, like, as there’s no callin’ place on t’ way.”
“Shillingsworth?” asked the landlord.
“Aye, shillingsworth or eighteenpennorth, it makes no difference,” replied Perris, fumbling in his pocket and producing a florin. “Here, there’s two shilling — make it eighteenpennorth, and we’ll have another glass out o’ t’ change. And there’s another penny, and I’ll have a twopenny smoke.”
With a rank cigar between his teeth, and a small bottle of bad whisky in the tail of his coat, Perris set out homeward along the highway. He had pushed his last coin across the zinc-covered counter, and his purse and pockets were now empty, yet he laughed as he shambled on beneath the wayside trees and the high hedgerows, carelessly swishing at weed or flower with his ashplant. But when he had gone a mile he paused, and leaning over a gate he drew out and took a long pull at his bottle and shook his head.
“I mun tell Rhoda how things is,” he muttered. “She’s a sharp un, is Rhoda; she’ll happen be able to make out a bit. She might be for sellin’ t’ cows, and very like she’s gotten a bit put away out o’ them cocks and hens — women contrives to save a shillin’ or two here and there where us men can’t. Aye, I mun hev’ a word or two wi’ Rhoda.”
Rhoda was alone when Perris came slowly in at the side gate and shambled along the cobble-paved path which lay between the fold and the house. He had drunk all his whisky and had thrown away the bottle, but the stump of his twopenny cigar still remained between his teeth, and he smiled weakly around it as he turned the door.
“I’ve corned, ye see, my lass,” he said, dropping into the nearest chair. “Aye, and I didn’t aim at gettin’ back till to-morrow, but there were naught no more to do over yonder, so I thought I might as well be steppin’, like. I could do wi’ a bit o’ supper, Rhoda, my lass.”
Rhoda, who had got rid of Pippany, and having just seen Tibby Graddige depart, was trying to reduce the untidy house-place to something like order, turned from the hearth, looking at her husband with anything but a friendly glance. She instinctively compared his careless and forlorn appearance, his weak and fatuous face, with the vastly different impression which Mark Taffendale had left upon her, and she was suddenly conscious of an intense dislike, a fierce loathing of something which was not exactly Abel Perris, but with which he was somehow inextricably mixed up. Her glance lighted on the bright blue satin necktie, and she felt an almost insane impulse to snatch it from Perris’s long, thin neck and stamp on it.
“How do you expect me to have any supper ready, or likely to be ready, when I didn’t know you were coming?” she exclaimed. “You should come home when you say you’re coming — there isn’t so much as even a bone in the larder — yon there Pippany finished up what there was for his supper.”
Perris, who was making vain attempts to relight the sucked and soddened stump of his cigar, looked up to where the shrunk shank of what had been a ham dangled from the rafters. There was little flesh left on it, but from the adjacent hooks hung a respectable piece of a flitch of bacon.
“Ye could fry a bit o’ that bacon, my lass,” he suggested. “And happen a egg or two wi’ it.”
“I can’t spare any eggs,” said Rhoda. “I want all the eggs I have for market. And if you must have some tea, you’d better go and fill that kettle. I wish you’d stopped away till to-morrow.”
Perris took the kettle out to the pump, filled it, came back and placed it on the fire, and having reseated himself again tried to induce the cigar to burn.
“I didn’t see no use i’ stoppin’ away when I’d done mi business,” he remarked suddenly. “When business is done, it is done, and so there’s an end on ‘t.”
“And I hope you did whatever it was you set off to do,” said Rhoda, who, mounted on a chair, was cutting slices off the flitch of bacon and tossing them into the frying-pan which she had placed on top of the oven. “And if it’s aught to do with money I hope you’ve brought some home, for if ever there was a place where it was wanted, this is it! There was Mr. Taffendale here this afternoon, and I’m sure I was fair ashamed that he should see such a starved looking hole!”
Perris looked up with a faint gleam in his pale grey eyes.
“What might Mestur Taffendale be wantin’ on my premises?” he asked.
“Your premises? Lord, you talk as if the place was a castle or a hall!” exclaimed Rhoda. “What did he want? Why, yon fool of a Pippany Webster pulled that old clover stack over on himself, and Mr. Taffendale happened to be passing, and helped Tibby Graddige to carry him in here — he’d have been suffocated if it hadn’t been for Mr. Taffendale.”
Perris slowly rose, and going to the door craned his long neck in the direction of the orchard.
“Ah, I see t’ clover stack’s down,” he said, coming back. “Did he bre’k any bones, Pippany?”
“No, he didn’t break any bones, nor his neck neither,” replied Rhoda. “A good job if he had — idle good-for-naught! He’d been down at the Dancing Bear all the afternoon. It’s worse nor a puzzle to me that you keep such a shiftless gawpy about the place. Why don’t you go and clean yourself?” she suddenly burst out, turning upon him from the fire, where she was endeavouring to accommodate both kettle and frying-pan. “You look as if you’d never been washed since you went out of that door. And for goodness’ sake take that necktie off — you look like one of those country joskins that’s used to naught decent.”
“Mi Aunt Maria, over yonder, thought it were a very fine tie,” said Perris, unconsciously fingering the adornment. “She remarked that it were, as soon as ever she set eyes on it.”
“Then your Aunt Maria’s a fool!” remarked Rhoda. “Go and wash yourself, do!”
Perris went into a scullery beyond the house-place; when he returned, the dirty, crumpled collar and the blue necktie had disappeared, and his face shone with brown soap, and his neutral-tinted, damp hair was smoothly plastered over his forehead. He hung up his coat on a peg that projected from the end of the tall dresser, and sat down in his shirt-sleeves. Rhoda had cleared a place for him at the deal table, and had set out a cup and saucer, a plate, and bread on the hare board. While the bacon frizzled in the pan she folded the damp clothes which lay piled about, sorting them into heaps against the morrow’s ironing.
“And what did you go away for?” she asked suddenly, glaring at Perris, who sat awaiting his supper, with his hands folded under his baggy waistcoat.
“I weern’t talk no business till I’ve had mi supper,” he answered. “I’ve had neither bite nor sup since I left yon place, and I’m none goin’ to talk business on an empty belly.”
Rhoda gave him another swift glance.
“You mayn’t have bitten, but you’ll none make me believe you haven’t supped,” she retorted. “You were stinking of spirits when you came in.”
“That’s neither here nor there,” said Perris. “I might have taken an odd glass or two on t’ way — all travellers does that. But I want summat to eat, and I’ll none talk till I’ve had it.”
Rhoda gave no further attention to him. When the bacon was cooked she set it before him, made him a pot of tea, and went on with her work. In the silence that ensued she was increasingly conscious of a growing dislike to her husband’s presence; it seemed to her that the mere fact of his being there was setting up in her some sort of nausea which she could not explain. And once more she thought of Mark Taffendale, of his good clothes, his fine linen, his suggestion of power and prosperity and money, and a certain uneasiness grew and stirred to increasing activity within her.
Perris ate up every scrap of the food which his wife had set before him, and finished his supper by cleaning the grease off his plate with a piece of bread, which he then swallowed with evident satisfaction. He turned his chair to the fire with a grunt of animal contentment, and proceeded to light his pipe. Rhoda whisked away the earthenware he had used into the scullery, and washed it up; having come back to the house-place she silently went on with her work amongst the clothes. For a time Perris sat and smoked, silent as she was, but at last, after some preliminary scraping of his feet and clearing of his throat, he addressed her.
“There’s a matter that I think we’d best have a bit o’ talk about, Rhoda, my lass,” he said diffidently. “It’s gotten to be talked about some time or other, and we may as well table it and have done wi’ it.”
“Well?” she said.
“Ye’re aware, my lass, ye’re aware that the rent-day’s close at hand,” continued Perris. “Early next week it is.”
“Well?” she said again.
“Aye, well, the fact is, my lass, that I’m not ready for it,” he said. “I’ve nowt i’ hand!”
Rhoda put down the garment which she was just then folding and looked round at her husband.
“You don’t mean to say that you can’t pay your rent?” she demanded in sharp tones.
“I’ve nowt i’ hand,” Perris repeated stolidly. “Nowt! Times has been that there bad that I haven’t been able to make no provision. It made a deal o’ difference to me losing that young horse last back-end, and ye know as well as I do, my lass, that I made nowt out o’ what bit o’ stuff I had to sell all winter. No, I’ve nowt i’ hand for no rent-days.”
Rhoda was still standing idle, still gazing at him as if she scarcely comprehended what he was telling her.
“What did you go away for?” she asked suddenly. Perris shook his head.
“I went to see if so be as I could raise t’ rent money among mi relations,” he answered. “I went to see mi brother John William, and mi Uncle George. I considered that they were t’ likeliest people to make application to, ye see, my lass. Howsomever, they could do nowt, for times is as bad wi’ them as what they are wi’ me. Mi Uncle George has had sad losses, and our John William’s suffered a deal o’ sickness in his family, and now his wife’s been thowtless enough to go an’ have twin bairns on t’ top on it. No! they couldn’t do nowt to help, howsoever willin’ they might ha’ been. An’ so, of course, that’s where I’m sittiwated, Rhoda.”
