A Maggot - John Fowles (2 page)

The man in the military coat comes with the
pack-horse - he has stopped above to piss beside it - and takes his
own horse from the man in the jerkin, and reties the leading-line.
The girl stands waiting beside the pillion horse's withers; and now,
in a seemingly familiar ritual, the military man comes round, faces
her, then bends and enlaces his fingers to make a mounting stirrup.
She sets her left foot in his hands, springs and is lightly lifted up
to her blanketed seat before the impassive man in the jerkin. She
looks down, the bunch of violets like an absurd moustache beneath her
nose. The man in the scarlet coat drily tips his forefinger to his
hat and winks. She looks away. Her companion, who has observed this,
abruptly kicks the pillion horse's sides. It breaks into an immediate
clumsy trot. He reins the beast sharply back, and she has to catch
against him. Fists on hips, the man in the military coat watches them
go for a moment or two, soon to settle to a walk, then mounts and
follows.

A faint sound comes to his ears, as they wind down
through the woodland. The young woman is singing, or rather humming a
tune to herself. It is that of the melancholy old folk-air, Daphne,
already ancient in this time; yet it seems, this intrusion of a human
voice in the previous silence, less melancholy than vaguely impudent.
The man at the rear rides closer, to hear the voice better. The sound
of hooves, an occasional creak of leather, a tiny jingle of harness
metal; tumbling water below, and the sound of a misselthrush also
singing, from far across the valley, barely audible, as fragmented as
the muffled girl's voice. Through the bare branches ahead, there is a
gleam of luminous gold, where the sinking western sun has found a
first direct interstice in the clouds.

Now the sound of rushing
water dominates. They ride for a little way close above a fast and
furious moorland stream and greener vegetation: more violets,
wood-sorrel, first ferns, nests of primroses, emerald young rushes
and grass. They come to a small clearing where the track descends to
stream-level,, then bends into the water, smoother here, at a ford.
On the other side, facing them, wait the two gentlemen on their
horses; and it is evident now, as masters wait for laggard servants.
The elder, behind, takes snuff. The girl stops her singing. The three
horses splash across, beside a line of stepping-stones, blundering
their way among the small rocks beneath the swift-running water. The
younger gentleman stares at the girl, at her floral moustache, as if
she is in some way to blame for this delay. She does not look at him,
but nestles close against her companion, whose arms surround her to
keep her balanced. Only when all three horses and their burdens are
safely across does the younger gentleman turn his horse and proceed,
in the same order as before, and the same silence.

* * *

Some few minutes later this sombre cavalcade of five
came out of the trees and once more upon an open prospect, for here
the valley bottom broadened considerably. The track ran slightly
downhill across a long open meadow. In those days a single animal
dominated the agricultural economy of the West of England: the sheep
- and the needs of its pasturing. The huge hundred-acre sheep-run was
a much more frequent feature of cultivated landscapes than today's
densely hedged and enclosed patchwork of small fields. In the
distance could be seen the small town whose church tower they had
made out from the moorland above. Three or four flocks studded the
long meadow before them; and as many shepherds, monolithic figures in
cloaks of brown frieze, like primitive bishops with their crooks. One
had two children beside him. Their sheep, Exmoor Horns, were smaller
and scraggier than modern sheep, and tight-coated. To the travellers'
left, where the hillside came down to the valley bottom, was a
massive stone pen, and yet another further along.

The younger gentleman reined in slightly and let the
older come beside him; and from then on they rode abreast, though
still without talking. The two shepherd children ran across the
closecropped turf to the side of the open track, ahead of the party,
and waited once they were there, with strangely intent eyes, watching
beings from fable, not reality, approach; and as if they imagined
themselves not seen in return. They made no greeting, this small
upstaring boy and his sister, both barefoot; and received none. The
younger gentleman ignored them completely, the elder gave them no
more than a casual glance. The manservant on the doubly laden horse
similarly ignored them, while the man in the scarlet coat seemed to
find himself, even before such a minute audience as this, put upon
dignity. He rode a little more erect, staring ahead, like a would-be
cavalry trooper. Only the young woman smiled, with her eyes, down at
the small girl.

For three hundred yards the two children alternately
walked and trotted beside the travellers; but then the boy ran ahead,
for a first banked hedge and a gate now barred the road. He heaved it
off its latch, then pushed it wide back and open; and stood there,
staring at the ground, with a hand outstretched. The older gentleman
felt in his greatcoat pocket, and tossed a farthing down. The boy and
his sister both scrambled for it as it rolled on the ground, but the
boy had it first. Now once more they both stood, with outstretched
small arms, the palms upwards, heads bowed, as the rear of the
cavalcade passed. The young woman raised her left hand and took a
pinch of her spray of violets, then threw them at the small girl.
They fell across the child's arm, over her bent crown of no doubt
lice-ridden hair, then to the ground: where the child stared at them,
the arm dropped, nonplussed by this useless, incomprehensible gift.

A quarter of an hour later the five came to the
outskirts of the small town of C-. It was town more by virtue of
being a few hundred inhabitants larger than any surrounding village
in this thinly populated area than in any modern sense of the term;
town also by virtue of an ancient charter, granted in palmier or more
hopeful days four hundred years before; and which still absurdly
permitted its somnolent mayor and tiny corporation to elect two
members to parliament. It boasted also a few tradesmen and craftsmen,
a weekly market, an inn beside its two or three ale- and ciderhouses,
and even an ancient grammar-school, if one can call school one aged
master, also parish clerk, and seven boys; but in all else it was a
village.

Nothing, indeed, could have misled more than the
majestic high-pinnacled and battlemented tower of its medieval
church; it now dominated and surveyed a much less prosperous and
confident place than the one that had built it nearly three centuries
earlier, and stood far more relic than representative. No gentry
lived permanently there, though a manor house existed. The place was
too remote, and like all remote Britain then, without turnpike or
decent carriage-road. Above all it was without attraction to an age
whose notion of natural beauty - in those few capable of forming such
notions - was strictly confined to the French or Italianate formal
garden at home and the denuded but ordered (through art) classical
landscapes of southern Europe abroad.

To the educated English traveller then there was
nothing romantic or picturesque at all in domestic wild landscapes,
and less than nothing in the cramped vernacular buildings of such
townlets as C-. All this was so much desert, beneath the
consideration of anyone who pretended to taste. The period had no
sympathy with unregulated or primordial nature. It was aggressive
wilderness, an ugly and all-invasive reminder of the Fall, of man's
eternal exile from the Garden of Eden; and particularly aggressive,
to a nation of profit-haunted puritans, on the threshold of an age of
commerce, in its flagrant uselessness. The time had equally no sense
(except among a few bookworms and scholars) of the antique outside
the context of Greece and Rome; even its natural sciences, such as
botany, though by now long founded, remained essentially hostile to
wild nature, seeing it only as something to be tamed, classified,
utilized, exploited. The narrow streets and alleys, the Tudor houses
and crammed cottage closes of such towns conveyed nothing but an
antediluvian barbarism, such as we can experience today only in some
primitive foreign land ... in an African village, perhaps, or an Arab
souk.

A twentieth-century mind, could it have journeyed
back and taken on the sensibilities and eyes of those two
better-class travellers riding that day into the town, must have felt
itself landed, or becalmed, in some strange doldrum of time, place
and spirit; in one of those periods when Clio seems to stop and
scratch her tousled head, and wonder where the devil to go next from
here. This particular last day of April falls in a year very nearly
equidistant from 1689, the culmination of the English Revolution, and
1789, the start of the French; in a sort of dozing solstitial
standstill, a stasis of the kind predicted by those today who see all
evolution as a punctuated equilibrium, between those two zenith dates
and all they stand for; at a time of reaction from the intemperate
extremisms of the previous century, yet already hatching the seeds
(perhaps even in that farthing and careless strew of fallen violets)
of the world-changing upheaval to come. Certainly England as a whole
was indulging in its favourite and sempiternal national hobby:
retreating deep within itself, and united only in a constipated
hatred of change of any kind.

Yet like so many seemingly inert troughs in history,
it was not altogether a bad time for the six million or so there then
were of the English, however humble. The two begging children by the
road might wear ragged and patched clothes; but at least they were
visibly neither starved nor starving. There were higher real wages
than for centuries past - and for very nearly two centuries to come.
Indeed it was only just becoming anything but a distinctly prosperous
time for this county of Devon. Its ports, its ships, its towns and
villages lived, and largely thrived, as they had for the last
half-millennium, on one great staple: wool. In the abrupt course of
the next seventy years this trade was to be first slowly throttled,
then finally annihilated by a national change of taste, towards
lighter fabrics, and the more enterprising North of England; but
still at this time half Europe, even colonial America and imperial
Russia, bought and made clothes from the Devonshire dozen, its famous
length of serge and perpetuana.

There was evidence of the cloth trade in nearly every
thatched doorway and open cottage shutter of C ; women spinning, men
spinning, children spinning, their hands so accustomed that eyes and
tongues were entirely free; or if not doing that, then engaged in
cleaning, carding and combing the raw fleece-wool. Here and there in
a dark interior might be glimpsed or heard looms, but the spinning
predominated. The mechanical jenny was still several decades in the
future and the bottleneck in the ancient hand process always lay with
the production of the yarn, for which the great weaving, finishing
and market centres like Tiverton and Exeter and their rich clothiers
had an insatiable greed. In all this, too, the endless treadling,
blurred wheels, distaffs, the very scent of raw wool, our travellers
found nothing picturesque or of interest. Throughout the country,
industry still lay inside the cottage, in outwork, in the domestic
system.

This contempt, or blindness, was returned, in an
inverse way. The riders were forced to go at an even slower pace by a
lumbering ox-cart, which left no room to pass; and the doorway
spinners, the townspeople about in the street, or attracted to their
windows and thresholds by the horses' hooves, betrayed a similar
sense of alienation by staring, as the shepherd's children had, at
these strangers as if they were indeed foreigners, and not to be
trusted. There was also the beginning of a political and a class
feeling about this. It has been proved fifty years earlier, in the
neighbouring counties of Somerset and Dorset, when nearly half of
those who had flocked to join the Monmouth Rebellion had come from
the cloth trade; most of the rest had come from the agricultural
community, and virtually none at all from the local gentry. It would
be wrong to speak yet of a trade-union mindedness, or even of the mob
spirit by then recognized and feared in larger cities; but of an
inherent resentment of those who lived in a world not ruled by cloth,
here was evidence.

The two gentlemen studiously avoided the watching
eyes; and a sternness and gravity in their demeanour forbade greeting
or enquiry, if now chowring comment. The young woman passenger did
from time to time glance shily sideways; but something bizarre in her
muffled appearance puzzled the spectators. Only the man in the faded
scarlet coat at the rear seemed like a normal traveller. He gave
stare for stare; and even tipped his hat to two girls in a doorway.

Then a young man in a smock darted forward from the
niche of a cob buttress supporting a leaning cottage wall and
brandished an osier ring of dead birds up at the military-looking
man. He had the sly grin of a yokel, half joker, half village idiot.

'Buy 'un, maister? Penny a'oop, penny a'oop!'

He was waved aside, but walked backwards, still
thrusting the little ring of dead birds, each pierced through the
neck, crimson and brown breasts and coal-black heads, up towards the
rider. Hoops, or bullfinches, then had a price on their head, paid
against their bodies by parish vestries.

'Where be's 'ee to then, maister?'