THE SCARECROW RIDES

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This text prepared by Jordanna Morgan

  In Which the Visitor Puts back the Clock and Listens In Beneath
the Rookery

Anyone visiting that thriving holiday resort of Dymchurch Sands
to-day would be hard put to it to recognize the obscure village that it
was in the days of Doctor Syn. However, if you will take the trouble,
the mental trouble only, which will not disturb the peace, obliterate
the bungalows which spring up like mushrooms in the fertile Romney
Marsh, remove the obsolete wheel-less railway carriages which give
camping shelter to so many happy families during the season, and pack
up the enterprising little railroad whose express engines scream their
way with such import across the Marsh, although one of them bears the
name of Doctor Syn. Having done all this, you must then mentally
demolish telegraph posts, loud speakers, electric lights and
telephones, motor cars, aeroplanes, 'buses and the 'Bus Station. Then,
down in your imagination with the teashops innumerable, leaving only
those houses of call that are licensed to sell Beer, Wine, Spirits and
Tobacco. Ruthlessly use a spiritual pickaxe upon every building that is
not fashioned of mellow Queen Anne brick, Kentish rag and ship's
timber. Rip off the concertina lines of corrugated iron and laboriously
hang red tiles in its stead. Work your thoughts, and without asking
permission from the Ecclesiastical Commissioners, knock down the modern
rectory and restore the white-washed, rambling parsonage with its
red-tiled roof, and in order not to tread upon the corns of sainted
rectors dead and gone, re-christen it The Vicarage. Having done all
this, sit down and rest upon the mounting-block at the road entrance of
Sycamore Gardens, which you have now transformed into a rough meadow, a
farmstead and barn behind your back, and let your eyes survey the old
church and the Tudor building of New Hall, then as now, the Court House
of Dymchurch and headquarters of the Lords of the Level. One thing more
is left for this your thoughtful restoration. Since you have hypnotised
yourself back into a period with Trafalgar yet unfought, and Pitt's
Martello Towers not erected, you must replace the stately Memorial of
the War in our time with a grim symbol of Justice which preceded it
upon that very site—a gaunt and creaking gallows, and you may tell
yourself that the skeleton which swings there in the sea breeze was in
its living flesh a sheep-stealer; a crime unspeakable and unpardonable
in the summing-up of Dymchurch magistrates.

Now listen to the swaying rookery above your head, for these
black-feathered carrion have inherited their lofty homes from ancestors
who actually picked the flesh from the bones upon the gibbet, saw the
black-coated figure of Doctor Syn and heard his resonant voice
exhorting the congregation from the top deck of the great pulpit in the
little church beneath them. And you can hear his story also from the
gulls, for every day he would walk along the sea-wall, having discarded
his clasped Bible for a brass telescope, and as the salt tang filled
his lungs he would change his tune from hymns to capstan songs,
especially one old shanty that he was for ever singing when his mind
floated off across the ocean wastes:

“Oh, here's to the feet that have walked the plank—

Yo ho! For the dead man's throttle;

And here's to the corpses afloat in the tank,

And the dead man's teeth in the bottle.”

But never mind the screaming gulls as you sit beneath the rookery,
for those birds are going to re-tell the story as their ancestors have
cawed it down to them, repeating it caw for caw to their
adventure-loving children and recapturing, like you, the 'good old days
of smuggling'. They are beginning with the wreck of the good ship
City of London
that was driven ashore in Dymchurch Bay and, as you
will hear, heralded, with thunder, lightning and mountainous waves,
Doctor Syn's remarkable and uncanny return to Dymchurch-under-the-Wall.

“Caw, Caw, CAW”—which is, being interpreted—

Never in the history of Dymchurch Rookery that sways above the
church and court house had the black-robed inmates such cause to fear
the snapping of their fighting tops as during the soul-shaking tempest
that swept the English Channel on the night of November 13th, 1775. The
giant elms creaked and groaned as the racing wind shrieked in their
bent riggings. Far beneath on the flat grass of the low-lying
churchyard the headstones of the graves were torn from their sockets
and in some cases hurled and splintered against the church. The roof of
the old Manor Farm house opposite through the weakening of a beam
rained tiles upon the road, while all along the straggling village
street chimney tops crashed down. It was braving death to pass the
strongest buildings on that ghastly night. And yet two men were daring
enough to attempt it, and that when the storm was at its height.

With their scarves drawn tightly round their jaws, the collars of
their sea-coats up and their three-cornered hats pulled down to their
eyes, they leaned their bodies forward at such an angle that if it had
not been for the wind they must have fallen on their faces. Thus did
they endeavor to keep their footage against the pressure, fighting
their way step by step past the low churchyard wall towards the tall
black looming sea-wall over whose top the surf was driving in sheets of
foam water.

Two more opposite reasons for these two men thus braving the
stinging spray could hardly have been found. In one, it was a dogged
sense of duty—in the other a sordid greed.

They had been regaling their spirits in the company of Mr. And Mrs.
Waggetts, the proprietors of the 'Ship Inn' and consuming a vast
quantity of excellent French brandy which was cheap enough since no
duty had been charged upon it. Then they had heard the gun. It echoed
above the storm from the desolate pebble nose of Dungeness. A ship was
in distress. Simultaneously both men had risen and buttoned their
coats.

“You're never going out in this,” protested Mrs. Waggetts.

“There's no call for Merry to, but I must,” answered the shorter of
the two. “If a ship's coming ashore, it's my duty to see what manner o'
ship she be.”

He was the Preventive Officer. A dogged, bitter man, and most
unpopular in the village by reason of his trade. Unlike his companion
he possessed at least one virtue. His duty was his god, and it was his
dangerous boast that when he was called to discharge it, he had never
run away or shirked the worst consequences, although he knew that no
throat in Dymchurch was in such constant danger of being cut. He also
knew that no one was more likely to cut it than his drinking companion
who was, like him, buttoning up his coat.

This Merry belied his name. He was sullen, intractable and
cross-grained. So much so that he was known in the village as
'miserable Merry'. But he had his use in the community, for he was a
jack-of-all-trades. Tall and cadaverously thin, he was strong, and
could pick up a living at most things that came his way. But he didn't
say much, as the Preventive Officer found to his cost. He was never
talkative in his cups. The Preventive Officer had never got any
information out of him. An account of how he had been helping old
So-and-so to patch up a boat, or mend a net, uninteresting adventures
of fishing, or an opinion of the various harvests he had given a hand
at bringing in, but never so much as a hint of the many landings of
contraband that the Preventive man had found out about too late, and
knew by instinct that miserable Merry had received good hush money.

“Why was he leaving the snugness of the 'Ship' parlour to court
disaster outside?” the Preventive Officer asked himself.

A terrific crash near at hand.

“There goes our chimney stack,” whined Mr. Waggetts, who sat propped
up with pillows in a wheel-backed armchair by the fire. The blanket
round his knees corroborated the fact which his pasty, melancholy face,
sunken, the unnatural bright colour on his cheeks, and the large
weakened eyes with hanging pouches proclaimed that Waggetts was a sick
man.

His wife was the reverse. Large, ugly, vain, but capable. She it was
who steered the 'Ship Inn' and made it the profitable concern it was.
Her husband's terror lest the chimney would come toppling down upon him
resulted in his trying to get out of the chair, but Mrs. Waggetts
pushed him gently back as she thrust her head, regardless of the smoke,
under the mantle-beam and up the chimney. When it reappeared, she
nodded reassuringly to her husband. “Not ours, my love. Must have been
one at Sycamore Farm.”

There was another crash from the other side of the house.

“And that'll be something off of the old Manor,” she said
cheerfully.

“You won't be so happy when ours goes,” whined her husband.

“Well, I says, it's one of them nights when one must take the
crashes as they come and act according.”

Such philosophy was beyond her husband's grasp. His answer was a
violent fit of wheezing. Mrs. Waggetts pulled his head forward, pushed
it down onto his lap with one hand and gave him several clumps on the
back with the other.

Meanwhile the Preventive Officer continued to lash himself taut
against the driving wind and spray outside, and as he watched the
miserable Merry following his example he cudgelled his slow but sure
brain to discover a motive. 'Why should Merry want to come with him?'

“But you ain't never going out, not really?” again protested the
landlady.

“I've told Merry there's no reason he should, but if he will, he
will,” replied the officer.

“May as well go along and have a look as stay here,” said Merry. A
terrific gust of wind shook the old inn and blew the wood smoke into
the room. “If the old place is coming down, I'd as lief be crushed
under it outside as in here.”

“The inn ain't going to come down,” snapped Mrs. Waggetts. “Ain't it
stood all these years? Well then. For shame, trying to scare a sick
man.”

“It ain't stood many storms like this one,” argued the pessimist.
“You weren't up on the sea-wall p'raps this evening? No. Well, I were.
And I notices something that was queer. It's November, ain't it? And
there ain't a weather prophet on the Marsh wot hasn't said we're in for
a cold snap this winter. 'Severe', they all says. As I saw them
copper-coloured clouds piling up beyond Dungeness to-night, I found I
was sweatin' hot. And there was a hush all about one that by right you
only get about midsummer. It ain't natural, not this heat in November.
And there—”