Mockery Gap (4 page)

And so with Mary; for when she happened to stare into the thick hedge thinking that a rabbit was there, Mrs. Pottle, whose bony body and thin crabbed face expressed anger, crawled out from the ditch, wherein Mary supposed, having so recently been talking to Mr. Caddy, that Mrs. Pottle had been making her bed.

But though Mary was surprised, Dick the horse was more so, and in the excitement of his feeling at seeing Mrs. Pottle so suddenly he broke from Mary and trotted merrily up the lane in the direction of his well-known field.

Mrs. Pottle was not alone, but what at first Mary supposed to be a man was in reality a large knotted lump of wood. And with this awkward-shaped piece of wood, that had she been naked very much resembled the lady's own trunk, Mrs. Pottle began to beat the ground, explaining that the part of the lane that she struck was ‘Sarah Pring.'

‘She be always hurting I,' shouted Mrs. Pottle, and with every stroke she beat the road harder. When she grew a little tired with the giving of so many blows she threw the wood down and looked at Mary, who had very naturally stepped back a step or two.

‘Sarah Pring do say,' said Mrs. Pottle in a mysterious whisper, going nearer to Mary, ‘that our Esther bain't got no clothes, only on
top.' Mary looked up at the hill; the hill line was as naked as ever, and Mary thought that it ought to have an apron, even though a dirty one like Mrs. Pottle's.

Mary spoke soothingly to Mrs. Pottle; she wished to calm her.

‘Little Esther be a good maid, and that I do know,' she said feelingly; ‘and whatever badness she do give herself to, 'tain't no naked badness.'

‘Yes,' said Mrs. Pottle, somewhat quieted by Mary's praise of her niece, ‘I do dress she nice though the poor maid be born so wicked; but thik Caddy do say that all green fields be beds and bedding in war time.'

Mary followed the horse, that was now
feeding
a little way ahead of her; she was so shocked at Mrs. Pottle's tale of how the white virtue of Esther had been muddied by Mrs. Pring's scandalous words, that she walked slowly instead of hurrying up the hill to the mound where Simon was waiting for her.

Mary was well aware that nothing could sting sharper than country venom when it
suggested
nakedness. Had any one said about her clothes what was hinted at about Esther's, Mary would have spent many nights in bitter tears.

As it was, she dared not lift up her eyes for some moments, because she feared that the unclothed sky might take upon it the form and semblance of Esther's legs as Mrs. Pring
represented them to be. When she did look up it was to behold Miss Pink, standing a little way from the horse, and looking at it as if it were the huge beast come up out of the sea that she so feared.

Mary stood beside the horse and allowed Miss Pink to go by.

Miss Pink, the most demure and harmless little lady in the world, with the grey shawl that she always wore round her shoulders in winter or in summer, and with shoes that went as near to being pattens as any shoe could, stood for a moment when she was gone safely by the horse and looked timidly back at Mary.

Miss Pink's nose was the smallest of its kind ever invented; but however small her nose was, it could always show signs of fear as well as her eyes. It showed real terror now when Miss Pink said, ‘Oh, Mary Gulliver, when I first saw the horse I thought it had the face of a lion.' Miss Pink's tiny nose tried to hide in the folds of her shawl.

‘You haven't seen anything to-day, have you,' she asked even more timorously, ‘coming up out of the sea?'

‘Yes, there be something about,' replied Mary, ‘for fisherman's chimney do smoke where there bain't no one.'

Miss Pink looked towards the sea. A column of white smoke rose up into the still evening air from the deserted cottage.

O
FTEN
in the country a young farmer’s son, whose parents are rich, is so fattened and reddened by praise and good living that he becomes a sort of man-god, spruce and verdant, and worshipped by all.

Young Simon Cheney, though possessed of quite a large share of unpleasant maxims and manners, was certainly set up in Mockery—his red, youthful face puffed and plumed with gross conceit, his light-coloured hair brushed and curled by his hard-worked mother, who continued even when the boy was twenty to tend him at bedtime—as a fine Phallic symbol for the young ladies to admire and for Mr. Caddy to talk about.

Such a god, whose business was pleasure, and whose pleasure was a girl, had waited for Mary upon the hill; and now, when she had let the horse go and went mildly to Simon, he, who had waited a little impatiently for her, having watched her loitering in the lane, at once threw her down upon the grass near to the green mound all amongst the Roddites.

Had Mr. Roddy been watching he would indeed have been sadly disturbed at such a shameless despising of his grand discovery. But Mary not being Mr. Roddy, had only one fear in her mind, and that was that she might
see the nakedness of the sky; otherwise she was pleasantly smiling and was never more happy. She shut her eyes, for this garment of darkness can at any moment—and Mary had used it before—become a shield safe against all the elemental nakedness of sea, sky, or man.

‘Oh,’ gasped Mary, when she was a little recovered from her excitement because of having been thrown down so rudely amongst the Roddites—‘Oh, ’tis well the sun be sunk down, for ’e do stare so in daytime.’

God Simon rose lazily from the grass and threw a white chalk stone at the horse who was feeding near by and taking, which was wise of him, no notice of the grassy happenings.

Mary sat up and looked down upon Mockery; she saw all nature—after a little shaking of herself and brushing that she hurriedly completed with fast, ready fingers—there below her now as completely clothed.

It wasn’t our pretty god’s habit to loiter beside a girl after having amused himself with her, as more ordinary folk would do, leading this aftermath of maidenhood with whispered promises home to her cottage. But Simon, when he had entertained himself for a few moments with stoning the horse, left Mary and strode home along the lane thinking of Dinah Pottle.

Mary didn’t mind his going, she was used
to that; and she hung up Dick’s halter upon the gate, and looked up at the sky with less timidity now because a decent small cloud in shape like a loin-cloth had crept over it.

Mary, who was blushing and happy,
followed
Simon Cheney down the lane and watched him enter the large gate and go towards his father’s house that stood up finely, beside the large trees that looked sombre and mighty under the darkening sky.

As the milk-cans behind her cottage were nicely garnished and set in a row, Mary Gulliver supposed that her father was resting in his
armchair
looking, as he always did now of an
evening
, at the map of the world that had been given to him by Mr. James Tarr.

Mr. Gulliver’s ideas of virtue, and the
awfulness
of any outbreak into nakedness or naked happenings, such as a child that is born to the unmarried, were certainly as strong as his daughter Mary’s.

‘If anything ever happened,’ he would tell her, ‘if thee ever did do any of they wicked things that parson did tell we of, ’tis best to drown thee self.’

But though he had such ideas, Mr. Gulliver was born of the softest kind of the Mockery mould. He was one whose feelings were friendly to mild wet days, to lowly cottages, and to mangel-wurzel when snugly housed in the dark end of an old barn.

Mr. Gulliver walked through the days of his life in a friendly manner, nodding at the
mealtime
hours as if they knew him and nodded back; and he would look at all living and dead things with an affectionate misunderstanding.

Mr. Gulliver had his own notions about great men and great matters. Mr. Cheney he thought too grasping; he honoured Mr. Pattimore; but Mr. Roddy’s agent, Mr. Pink, was the man that he really admired.

If Mr. Gulliver ever wondered about the sea, and he used to wonder sometimes, he would go to Mr. Caddy’s gate where Mr. Caddy always leaned and ask for information. There he would listen carefully to Mr. Caddy, who would inquire in his turn of the ducks, and the ducks would be sure to quack loud enough—being runners—for Mr. Caddy to explain what they meant.

The wisdom of the ducks would usually show the sea as a very large green beast with a voice, so Mr. Caddy would explain, that exactly
resembled
that of Farmer Cheney’s black bull.

‘’Tis best to keep out of ’is way, so thik drake do tell I,’ Mr. Caddy would remark; ‘though of course there be Mr. Pink to go to when the sea do break into the land.’

This allusion to Mr. Pink referred to the kindly habits of the agent, whose mediation in every matter between Mr. Roddy and his tenants was always successful.

Gulliver, though as mild as a Mockery worm, had once turned unexpectedly when Caddy, letting the sea alone for the moment, had spoken of Mary, hinting harmlessly enough that the newest kind of bed, ‘where blankets be all green and don’t need no making, could be found upon the cliff where wold horse be led to.’

Something then boiled up in Mr. Gulliver, whose daughter’s honour was his dearest
possession
, and who, though most anxious to hear all her merry tales from her own lips—for all tales were far separate from the real in his mind—could never bear the least discrediting hint to come from another.

Mr. Caddy noticed the changed look, and when he knew that Gulliver’s fist was waiting pleasantly about an inch from his nose he looked discreetly at the ducks.

‘If anything did happen to she, there ’d be a killing,’ shouted Mr. Gulliver, waving both his fists around Mr. Caddy as if they were wheels.

Caddy bowed his head. ‘They ducks do know,’ he said meekly, ‘that I never meant no harm….’

When his tea was prepared, Mary went to her father’s chair, leaned over him, and looked at the map too. The map was an early picture of the world, drawn in the fine fancy of those ancient times, when the earth was excitingly
alive with monsters and devils, that were
outside
instead of inside folks’ minds as they are to-day.

Mr. Gulliver moved his finger over the map and pointed out to Mary a large monster flying over the northern lands.

Mary looked, and carried away by the
excitement
of the evening she said: ‘Something were a-flying over Mockery cliff, where horse were led to, and did flop down upon I, and ’tis most likely ’twere thik, for me eyes were shut.’

‘They things oughtn’t to be allowed about,’ said Mr. Gulliver decidedly.

‘Something did throw I down,’ continued Mary, who was grown a little paler, perhaps by thinking of such a monster—‘something did throw I down, and when I did open my eyes to see who ’twere, there weren’t no one, only Simon Cheney who were throwing chalk stones about.’

Mr. Gulliver looked upon his daughter with horror; he believed that something horrible, something depicted in his map, had visited Mary.

‘Miss Pink,’ he said, ‘that do keep lamp burning in she’s front room, do tell that a horrible beast out of the wide seas be expected each night-time.’

‘Oh,’ gasped Mary, ‘and that bain’t all, for the children do shout and call about the Nellie-bird.’

‘You haven’t seen nothing more, ’ave ’ee?’ asked Mr. Gulliver, looking first at Mary’s wide-open eyes and parted lips and then at the map, as if to search for another horror. ‘You never see’d nothing else, did ’ee?’

‘They wide skies did look at I,’ replied Mary, trembling.

‘’Tain’t likely thee did look out to sea, when cows were drove up?’

‘Something did rush along dried grass like rats a-running, and then’—and Mary shivered as if the cold horror of it all held her tight—‘I did see smoke that rose up out of fisherman’s chimney where no one do bide.’

‘’Tis best we do make hay of thik field,’ remarked Mr. Gulliver in a low tone, looking at the window. ‘For a field bain’t safe for cows where there be fire-drakes.’

Mr. Gulliver slowly moved his finger over his map and pointed out the monster he had named for Mary to see.

‘’Twouldn’t be proper for a poor cow to meet thik,’ said Mr. Gulliver.

N
O ONE
can walk down any pretty lane, that is hung perhaps with garlands of
old-man’s-beard
, without discovering himself after a mile or two in some village or other where fear, that hidden, creeping thing, has sucked out the heart’s blood of more than one simple and timid human creature.

Very few villages indeed have escaped Mr. Tarr, whose enterprise and courage even on rainy days would carry him, with or without Miss Ogle and the others, into the most secluded valley, where he would be sure to start many a meek being into looking for
impossible
wonders, or else trying to prepare themselves for some dread appearance.

Miss Martha Pink, whose brother, with his large wondering face bent over Mr. Roddy’s rent books, showed that he wished to do his duty, though his beliefs were elsewhere—Miss Pink, with her tiny nose and her lamp that always burned after sunset in the parlour though she never sat there, was exactly the very appearance for fear to annoy.

Martha Pink, being more timid than wise, had lived her life until Mr. Tarr came with but two thoughts in it, her brother’s dinner and her parlour lamp, that showed by its light that she needed a lover.

Mockery understood Miss Pink, for even before Mr. Tarr’s visit the extreme
restlessness
and excitement of the rude children had foretold by their dreadful shouting in the lanes that something was expected.

And now Miss Pink feared the worst. Besides fear, that dread horror, there was also in Mockery the love longing, a matter that when kept silent or buried deep always breaks out in midnight wakefulness, sighs, and aching tears, and which also—for waters must find their level—bubbles up sometimes under pillows and in hidden cupboards.

Perhaps it was partly because of the portrait of the Dean, her relative, the picture that she carried with her to Mockery, that Mr.
Pattimore
, aged then about fifty-five, married his wife Nellie—or Dorcas, as he re-named her after the honeymoon.

He had taken a holiday in Norfolk, at a rectory where, besides the picture of the Dean, and his old friend the rector and his wife, there was something else too. This was neither the windmill nor the goose green, but a young girl of twenty, the daughter of his friend.

It was on a day when the August sun, heavy with love, covered the green lands with its glory, that Mr. Pattimore pulled her, who was to be his wife, out from the laurel bush.

She had been about the house, as the young
lady must needs be because it was her home, but the portrait of the Dean had been there too, and that—a clear vision of the fine gaiters that his calling might lead him to—had taken all Mr. Pattimore’s indoor attention. But this August day, Mr. Pattimore in strolling by noticed something white in the laurel bush beside the drive.

Mr. Pattimore, who knew no more about birds than he did about women—for all his thoughts were with the Apostles—supposed that an owl might be resting there or a white rook, and so he moved the leaves a little aside and peeped in.

He saw no night bird, but a young girl in a white frock pleasantly seated amongst the boughs, and fully as tempting, with her red lips and firm roundness—for Mr. Pattimore’s eyes strayed—as any maid since the world cooled. Her hair, not dark but brown enough for darkness, was pleasantly tumbled, so that Mr. Pattimore couldn’t help wishing that his fingers were in it, and her blush when she saw his eyes looking at her made the good
gentleman
glad to remember that he wasn’t settled in a Church that forbade marriage.

As soon as Mr. Pattimore heard that the portrait of the Dean, towards which his high hopes lay as soon as he saw it, could go to Mockery as a wedding present with the young lady, he decided to marry her, and so he did.

But Mr. Pattimore had no idea what the laurel bush had done to his chosen. Nellie used to take her book there, and the laurel, a maiden too, would tell her, as soon as she was safely settled, to think about pretty men.

She may have had a fairy story in her mind, when she thought of her lover as a frog who hopped around her looking up with its large eyes asking a question, until it finally hopped into her lap. And after thinking of the man like that, she would think about the baby, and pull leaves from the laurel and pretend to make its clothes. ‘My baby‚’ she would whisper to herself every time now that she climbed into the bush, until Mr. Pattimore with the frog’s manners pulled her out, his hands a little more wantonly inclined than a clergyman’s should be.

The Dean—not the portrait this time, but the carnal man—wrote to Nellie, as soon as she was safely at Mockery and the picture hung up and the honeymoon over, and Mr. Pattimore read the letter as proudly as if he had written it himself.

The Dean said, ‘Remember St. Paul.’

‘He must have meant me,’ said Mr.
Pattimore
, ‘when he said that.’

Mr. Pattimore began to take cold baths.

But that wasn’t the worst.

He now saw all women, his young wife included, as wholesale temptations to wanton naughtiness…. Two nights after the return
from the honeymoon, Mr. Pattimore stared for a full half-hour about bedtime at the picture, and fled to the attic.

Mrs. Pattimore lay that night, in the pretty bedroom upon which so much money had been spent, alone and in tears.

Her husband appeared the next day in a black garment that reached to his toes. He talked only at breakfast about the proposed sewing meeting, and Mrs. Pattimore could think only about the frog.

When he asked her to pass the toast, he said: ‘The toast, please, Dorcas.’

And Mrs. Pattimore, her eyes still dim with her night’s crying, exclaimed, ‘But I’m Nellie, you know—darling Nellie.’

‘You’re Dorcas now,’ replied her husband sternly.

Mrs. Pattimore had been a little proud of the Dean too—he was her second cousin on her mother’s side—in bygone times, but now she could never look up at the picture without feeling what a great harm the Dean had done to her when he mentioned St. Paul in the wedding letter. ‘Cousin Ashbourne might have talked to him at the wedding instead of writing when that was over,’ she used to say sadly; ‘he wouldn’t have listened to him then.’

Nellie Pattimore, changed now to a Dorcas, was as meek as a dove and just as loving. She would sit up in her bed in all her night finery
and pout a little because he wasn’t there; and though there didn’t seem to be the least hope of a baby coming, she couldn’t help imagining there might be, and was beginning to sew some tiny garments. She began with a christening gown, and as soon as she was sure that she couldn’t have a baby she tried to pretend that she was making the gown for some other mother’s little one; though she could hardly bear to think, for she so longed herself, that there were other mothers in the world.

As each spring-time came—and Dorcas had only been married five years when Mr. Tarr and Miss Ogle invaded the village—she would comfort herself with the flowers, calling them all, when no one heard, ‘her pretty babies,’ because when she knelt down upon a soft mossy bank to smell a cowslip she felt sure that the scent of a real baby’s neck would be just like that.

Mrs. Pattimore lived at Mockery
harmlessly
enough with her longing that hid itself in her feelings for the flowers and in the
bedroom
wardrobe where she kept her sewing. She would listen meekly enough when Mr. Pattimore, with eyes fixed upon the hard, stupid lines of the Dean’s—‘dear Cousin Ashbourne’—face, would speak more to the picture than to her, and tell him how Caddy—that lazy Caddy!—corrupted all the youth of Mockery with his nasty conversations that he
always addressed to the ducks—as Mr. Pattimore did his to the Dean.

‘He sets all their hearts and minds‚’ said Mr.
Pattimore
one April day at lunch, ‘agape for all naughtiness.’

Mrs. Pattimore blushed and looked down; she felt—and so many women have felt the same—that if all his outcry against
wantonness
could only be changed by the grand trump of love, what a lover he would become—and then the baby!

A few moments after lunch Mrs. Pattimore peeped into the dining-room, dressed to go out, just to see what he was doing.

Mr. Pattimore, with his hands clasped and his face a sad one, in which pride and hatred of sin were coupled, still stared at the Dean.

Mrs. Pattimore, with thoughts as hasty as a young girl’s who means to be naughty, hurried out of the house to ask a question of Mr. Caddy. She found Miss Pink, with her large scarf of grey wool that certainly any of Mrs. Gaskell’s Cranford ladies would have taken, as we have done, for a shawl, standing beside the churchyard gate waiting for Mr. Pink, who had for some reason or other entered the edifice of one hundred and eighty-two sittings.

‘Have you seen Mr. Caddy?’ inquired Mrs. Pattimore of Miss Pink. ‘I want to ask him something.’

‘Oh yes,’ replied Miss Pink, speaking out of the folds of her shawl; ‘he’s leaning over his cottage gate and talking to the ducks as usual.’

And so he was; but when Dorcas came near to him, wishing to learn the right path to naughtiness that she hoped would help her to her husband’s love, instead of going on telling the ducks and Mary Gulliver, who now modestly withdrew, about the leg of a
bedstead
, that astonished the late wedding guests taking their last cups by coming through the ceiling, he said to Mrs. Pattimore, ‘Mockery be a fine place for summer roses to grow in.’

‘But it isn’t time for the roses yet, Mr. Caddy,’ said the lady, her blush becoming an ordinary look of disappointment.

‘They little small flowers be so pretty,’ remarked Mr. Caddy, looking into the meadows. ‘They do always hear what God be a-saying when it do rain.’

‘But, Mr. Caddy’—Mrs. Pattimore looked after the departing form of Mary; she meant to make her plunge—‘a pretty girl likes to——’

‘To gather a flower for poor mother’s grave.’ Mr. Caddy looked sadly at the churchyard.

A loud clamour came near—the Mockery children; they were chasing a black cat up the lane with shouts and stones. They were led by Esther, who called out to Mr. Caddy
that the cat was soon to have kittens, and ran on shouting.

Mrs. Pattimore looked around Mockery. She wished to comment upon something that would set Mr. Caddy off talking to the ducks again.

In the middle of a wide field she saw Mrs. Topple going from one part of the field to another, stooping down and looking.

‘Poor ’oman‚’ said Mr. Caddy, seeing her too; ‘she do spend all her time in looking for good-luck clover.’

The tall, drooping figure of Mr. Pink came out of the little shop; he walked carefully down the stone path and then down the lane in the direction of his house.

‘’E do try to get Mrs. Moggs to go to the beautiful sea,’ explained Mr. Caddy when Mr. Pink had departed; ‘but she do only ring they bells and smile at ’e.’

Miss Pink now came near, hurrying from the churchyard as if frightened; she had missed Mr. Pink, who had left the church by another path. Miss Pink begged Mrs.
Pattimore
to take her home.

‘My brother only thinks of saving Mrs. Moggs’ soul now,’ she said. ‘And
something’s
been seen in the sea.’

‘They children do tell of a Nellie-bird,’ said Mr. Caddy.

Mrs. Pattimore turned sadly away with Miss
Pink; she had learned nothing from Mr. Caddy.

But when she was gone, though not quite out of hearing, Mr. Caddy said, turning to the duck-pond:

‘’Tis a pretty petticoat that do do it, so Mary do say, and a pair of white stockings.’

Mrs. Pattimore hardly listened to Miss Pink, who was telling her that she believed the beast of the Book of Revelation and the Nellie-bird the children told of were one and the same.