It Was the Nightingale (16 page)

“I haven’t seen a paper for ages. What is it?”

Mules spoke very gently, “Have ’ee not, surenuff? Yes, ’tes on the Gaz-at-ee this week, my wife’s sister to Queensbridge sent it to my wife. ’Tes your li’l boy, you know, ’tes young maister, he won a prize for being the best babby at the Flower Show. ’Tes all on th’ paper! I’ll show ’ee if you come along home with me, zur.”

“Won a prize for being the best baby? Are you joking?”

“Oh no, zur, it be true—true like—’tes on th’ Gaz-at-ee.”

He managed to look Phillip in the face, a quick glance before looking away again. The gentle look returned, this time without falter. “You look a proper weary man, proper weary man you look, midear. But ’tes true what I be tellin’ ’ee. My wife saith her and Zillah would take care of the babby for ’ee, if you’m a mind to’t. Poor little maister, without a mother, poor li’l babby. That’s right.”

His mind seemed to dream, then to hover back. “Your li’l cat, too, I zeed her sittin’ on th’ wall, homely already her be, homely like. Your old dog, he followed me home. Just like pore ole Billjohn, Mr. Willie’s span’ll. ’Tes true. ’A knoweth, I fancy. Your dog—your span’ll—’a did, surenuff, just like ole Billjohn, your cousin Mr. William’s span’ll Billjohn, do ’ee mind he? ’A used to come down to our place, us was very plaized vor see th’ poor old dog, just as us be plaized vor see Rusty.”

Mules glanced around, then lowered his voice. “Us would be very plaized vor you to come too, if you’m a mind to. Only don’t ’ee come if you’m not in a mind to come, like. And don’t ’ee tell no-one what I zaid, wull ’ee? There be some what’d take the bread out of a man’s mouth!”

Phillip looked steadily at the slightly foxy face and said softly, “I used to look after mules in the army, they were lovely animals, very gentle and hard-working.”

“Aw, you’m a funny man, midear, a funny man, zur, beggin’ your pardon.” A hand came out to touch him, the hand hesitated, then rested on Phillip’s arm. “You come to our place,” said Mules quietly, without nervousness. “You look a proper tired man, midear. Zillah and my wife won’t zee ’ee wrong. Us’d like vor look after the li’l old babby, tew. Us would!”

A hand was put in the bag, a letter taken out. “Oh my, I was very nearly forgettin’ this yurr letter corned for ’ee, I hope ’tes good news, I do, surenuff.”

Phillip glanced at the unfamiliar writing, and put the envelope in his pocket. The postman said as he turned away, “You’ll come vor zee little maister’s photograph up on th’ Gaz-at-ee, won’t ’ee? Zillah and my wife would be disappointed if you don’t come vor see it. ’Tes a bootiful boy, smilin’ away like anything up on th’ paper.” He touched Phillip’s hand. “My dear zoul, you be hot, your hand be proper hot! Be’ee feelin’ a-right, zur? Many people be complainin’ of this yurr Roosian ’fluenza what be goin’ about. Plaize vor take care of yourself, midear. You’m so thin as a rasher of wind, a proper starved man you look. Us wouldn’t like vor zee ’ee go down through not takin’ proper care, you know that. Many people were sorry vor zee Mr. William go down. I mind the time when I zaid these very words to your cousin, I do. Us was standin’ in this very same place just like you and I be now. I mind zayin’ the selfsame words to ’n.” He patted Phillip’s hand once again. “Come you now to my wife’s place. My wife an’ Zillah wull look after ’ee praper, us wull.”

“I’ll come along very shortly, and thank you, thank you very much.”

*

Phillip in the Mules’ parlour, drinking cup after cup of weak hot tea with lemon and honey in it, felt blissful. The baby’s photograph in the
South
Hams
Gazette,
together with the enthusiasm of Mrs. Mules and her daughter in offering to have him as a lodger had been crowned by exaltation when, upon opening the letter Mules had brought, he saw the signature of
Mary
Ogilvie
and read that he was invited to Wildernesse.

He kept the full reading of the letter, as a reserve against the possible return of the blank of loneliness, until he was safe under blankets in his cottage bedroom, friendly candle shining in the night.

He read it many times before blowing out the candle, and trying to settle to sleep, with many sighs.

Phillip put off a reply to Mary Ogilvie’s letter until he returned from a journey by train, accompanied by Mrs. Mules and Zillah, to fetch the baby.

Billy was immediately at home as, strapped in the tall chair that had been Phillip’s, he sat in the Mules’ kitchen, rattling an enamel mug on the tray before throwing it on the floor; whereupon Zillah picked it up and the game was repeated. The energetic and noisy Zillah never tired of playing the mug game with him, although Phillip once suggested that it might end in the baby learning to throw everything about when he grew up. At this Zillah became immediately possessive. “Whose baby be it? ’Tes I who looks after him, you know!”

She teased the baby, then reproved him when he cried out in a pet: but Phillip did not like to interfere. Soon he was having his meals alone, sitting at the circular table in the parlour, while repeated laughter came from the kitchen.

Having failed to compose a satisfactory reply to Mary Ogilvie’s letter, he decided to walk to the house on Sunday afternoon; but determination failed when he saw Mrs. Ogilvie and her uncle, Mr. Sufford Chychester, gardening beside the lawn. He tried to write a letter for Mules to deliver on his bicycle early the next morning, but failed again. What must Mary think of him? Finally he wrote a brief note saying that he was looking forward to seeing her and her cousin at the Duckponds. After more indecision on the day he walked there and arrived during the luncheon interval. Mary came to meet him with a smile of welcome.

“I am so very glad you could come! How are you? Do you know my cousin, Lucy Copleston?”

“How do you do.”

“How do you do.”

“Uncle Suff is over there. Would you like to talk to him?”

“Yes, Mary, I should.”

Hardly had the acquaintance been renewed with apparent heartiness on the old man’s part when a hound ran past gulping the remains of a pork pie. Mary laughed and touched the arm of her great-uncle to call attention to the sight. “Ha, you rogue!” exclaimed Mr. Chychester, genially, giving Phillip a comradely glance as the hound barged past his thin legs.

Thereafter Phillip began to feel easier as hounds, having drawn blank all the morning, left for the stream which fed the Duck-ponds. He found himself walking with Mary’s cousin beside a small mill-pond, round the edges of which dragonflies were darting and hovering.

“Do you know the various kinds, Miss Copleston?”

“Only that there is usually a blue one in our water-garden tub, that my father calls ‘Libellula’.”

“What a beautiful name—Libellula! Too good for the harsh, prehensile life of a dragonfly!”

When she said nothing more, he felt blank. They were now walking past brambles and alders which almost choked the small stream.

“Mary said you live in Dorset, Miss Copleston.”

“Yes, we are on the edge of Cranborne Chase.”

“I suppose you don’t know Colham? It’s a bit north of you, I fancy.”

“It’s not far from where we live.”

“My cousin, who knew Mary, used to live there.”

“Yes,” she said.

They crossed another meadow. “Did Mary tell you about Willie?”

“Yes,” she nodded.

“Are you staying long in Devon?”

“Until next Monday.”

Hounds were speaking in the undergrowth adjoining a rushy depression. There were cries and whip-cracks.
Gor’n
leave
it!
Leave
it!

With relief he heard that hounds, marking at a holt where a bitch and cubs were laid up, had been taken off the line.

“There’s a meet tomorrow at Meeth Bridge,” he said. “Will you be going?”

She blushed at his question. What a strangely sensitive girl she was, he thought, as he told her about his tame otter, which had been seen along the Taw. “Is Meeth Bridge on that river?”

“Oh no, the Torridge.”

“Thank heaven for that!”

It was a day without a kill, for which he was thankful; and afterwards a dozen or so men and women drove to Wildernesse for tea. He enjoyed himself, and as he was leaving Mary said, “Phillip, I shan’t be able to come out tomorrow, but Lucy is going, and there’ll be a lift from Bideford, if you don’t want to go all the way on your motor-bicycle.”

At the Meeth meet he found himself, by invitation, among the fortunate ones by the Master’s car at luncheon, drinking cyder drawn from the keg on the Trojan’s running board, and eating crab sandwiches and cherry cake offered him by the Master’s lady herself.

Sweet country hospitality, he thought, as he walked beside Lucy along the banks of the upper Torridge. He had discovered by now that she knew all about wild birds and flowers, and liked nothing so much as being out in the woods and fields by herself. Whenever she could, she told him, she slept out of doors beside a camp fire.

They met again the following day, and the next day. Soon she would be going home, and he would be seeing her no more. Meanwhile everything they saw together must be cherished, as he walked by her side for many miles in the hot sun above the valleys through which flowed the pale amber waters of Dartmoor in their descent to the sea. Yes, the wonderful time would soon be over, he thought as he sat in the midst of tobacco smoke and cheery talk outside an inn at midday, and again at tea when hounds had gone back in the van to kennels. For the hunting he did not care, but he wanted to learn the technique of hunting otters in the waters of brook and mill-leat, weir-pool and runner; for the idea of a book about Lutra’s life was growing in his mind.

*

On the penultimate day of the Joint Week he saw to his dismay that Lucy was accompanied by two older people, whom he imagined to be her uncle and aunt. They had not been out before. Should he go up to her, and say good-morning? Or wait for her uncle to invite him to join them? He shrank from the thought of
attaching himself to them, and kept away until, alarmed that they might consider him rude—after all, Lucy must have spoken to them about him—he went towards them, prepared to remove his cap and say good-morning. Before he reached them, her uncle began to talk to someone else, together with his wife: he hesitated whether or not to turn away: but it would be obvious if he did, so he kept on his course, and lifting cap, bent his head as he passed the group, and said, “Good-morning, Lucy!”

Immediately her cheeks flushed; he walked on past them, feeling that he had been presumptuous by addressing her by her Christian name on what must appear to be so short an acquaintance; and pretended that he was on his way to look at the hounds sitting by the road verge under the eye of huntsman and kennel boy.

Soon the field moved off to draw the banks of a weir-pool. He walked by himself, keeping well away from Lucy and her people, and staring at the water as though greatly interested in what he saw there: hounds clustering about the roots of a sycamore tree growing on the banks, obviously an otter holt. Then hounds were taken away, and a man with an iron bar began to thump the ground above the waterside roots.

The pool was long and deep. The otter holt apparently went back far under the roots, which resisted penetration by the bar, so a terrier was put in. From underground came the faint noises of barking. The terrier crept out, shivering. Another, with bigger head, was put in. Within a minute there was a cry from the bank of
Bubbles-a-vent
! and looking into the water Phillip saw the chain of small air-bubbles rising, section by section, upon the surface, as the otter swam underwater to the opposite bank.

The otter crossed again, re-entered the underwater entrance of the holt; was driven out once more, and went upstream, individual hounds swimming and giving tongue as they lapped the scent on the water. People were running, it was exciting; for Phillip, a cause of disquiet. Supposing the otter were Lutra? The chase went under a stone bridge, and to the throat of the pool, where it was shallow. There a massed clamour broke out; the pace of pursuit increased upon the stones by the edge of the river. Suddenly he saw the otter galloping across a bank of flat stones called shillets. The horn rang out with long notes and uniformed men jumped down into the shallows. to form a stickle across the shillets and
so bar the way back to deep water. But the otter went on upstream, and when last seen was swimming under a wide bridge that crossed the road.

*

Phillip listened to men saying that it was unusual for an otter to take a direct line like that for more than a mile upstream, away from the deep holding of a weir-pool. By its size and shape of head it was a dog, they said. Phillip recalled how Lutra had run before him over fields and by the sea, like a dog hunting before his master.

On the right bank above the bridge was a mill. The wheel was not working, it was the sawyers’ dinner hour. He heard the Master say that the otter might be lying in the water under one of the flood-piled heaps of branches lodged against the cut-waters of the bridge.

“We’ll give him a breather while we eat our sandwiches.”

Motor-cars, which had followed on the road rising through oakwoods above the meadows, had now returned to the bridge.

Sitting on the parapet, Phillip began to feel more and more depressed as he watched, from a distance, the group of friends about the Master’s Trojan. He had not been invited by the Master’s wife to help himself. Was it because of Lucy? Or had her uncle and aunt heard the rumours from South Devon? He sat a hundred yards from the Master’s car, while laughter and talk floated to him through vacant sunshine.

The Master’s wife, a florid lady wearing a floppy, summery hat and a pink gown with a pattern of roses, was looking round. He stared up into the sky; then, feeling that he was perhaps conspicuous by remaining away, strolled back to the near end of the bridge, which had about thirty yards of parapet, and leaned over the northern end, watching the huntsman looking about him on the stones at the river-verge below.

He saw him stooping over what perhaps were the tracks of an otter’s feet on the mud beside the stones. The huntsman then looked up under an arch, below which lay the bed of the flume from the mill-wheel hidden in the darkness of the tunnel. The huntsman crept up the tunnel, and soon returned under the arch. Climbing up the bank, he went to the Master and touched his hat.

Phillip waited until Lucy and her party had moved away; then crossing the bridge, he slid down the track in the grass beyond the
end of the parapet and stood beside the river, seeing in the mud under the bank the track of the otter’s pads. One seal, beside the mark of dragging rudder, was imperfect. Peering low over the scour of mud, with beating heart, he saw what he had dreaded, but not believed he would see: every fourth seal held the print of three claws instead of five. He remained bending down, appalled, until he felt strong enough to climb up again.

The huntsman, waiting above, said cheerfully, “I fancy the otter is lying up on the water-wheel, sir. We’ll soon know when they start up again after lunch.”

Phillip waited: unable to tell his fears to the Master: unable to leave the scene.

*

Four hours later the otter was lying in a long shallow pool some miles below the bridge. When the hatch had been raised to allow the weights of water from the leat above to fill the wooden troughs of the wheel, the trundling had flung off the otter. It was seen going down into the river with the renewed gush of water. There it rested and looked up at the faces lining the bridge above. It stared at Phillip, who recognised Lutra as the hounds splashed baying into the water.

O why had he not spoken to the Master, he cried again and again within himself as he sat on the bank of the long shallow pool half a mile below the weir and watched hounds swimming, one occasionally baying, in the scarcely moving water. It was too late now.

The otter had shown what was called good sport after entering the river from the flume. Given two minutes law, it had gone down, down with the current, emerging at the stony shallows to gallop amidst its own splashings over thin, rapid streams running between banks of stones and gravel, to enter deeper, slower water beyond, there to swim submerged for fifty yards or so, as revealed by the bubbles-a-vent, from one bank to the other bank, finally to hide among the thick pointed leaves of flag-lilies until disturbed by hounds. Then down, down, down again—under oaks and alders and ash trees on the banks of the long weir-pool until it came to the sycamore holt above the weir.

It had been driven by a terrier from that underwater fastness and made straight for the weir, crawling out to shake itself, to look around on the concrete barrier as though seeking the face of its master; then over the weir in sunlight, in water just covering its
dark brown body sleek to shapelessness, to be tossed in the turmoil below and then down the rapid current, the beginning of one of the best salmon beats on the river.

Down, down, down in the fast water it went, hounds racing after it, following by scent which they appeared to lap as they ran. Men and women followed, Phillip ahead, just behind the huntsman. Constantly the horn sounded, huntsman running hard, scooping with his grey pot hat to urge on his hounds.

Three hundred yards above the tide-head, with its mud-stained rushes, the otter vanished. There followed searchings under the banks, patiently, for the afternoon was hot. Below, at the tail of the pool, across the breaking wavelets of a stony ridge stood a stickle—a line—of men and women with water over their boots and shoes, waiting to turn back the quarry with crossed poles should it try to get down to the tide-head.

Phillip saw, with some relief, that Lucy was not among them.

Then he saw her, sitting a couple of yards back from the bank, beside Mr. Sufford Chychester.

The Master walked down to the line of men and women standing on the flat stones which made the stickle of breaking fast water. Phillip followed. He heard the Master saying that the otter was probably lying up in the reeds somewhere. Tom the huntsman would find it, when it might make for the stickle in an attempt to get down to salt water.

The Master looked at his watch. “It’s high water at Bideford Bridge now,” he said. “If the otter gets through hounds won’t be able to follow him, for as you know tide-water carries no scent.”