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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
- Sprache: Englisch
In 'Jinny the Carrier,' Israel Zangwill crafts a poignant narrative set in the bustling heart of London's East End, illuminating the struggles and resilience of a young Jewish woman named Jinny. Zangwill employs a naturalistic style imbued with vivid imagery and sharp social commentary, reflecting the realities of immigrant life in late 19th-century Britain. Through Jinny's experiences as a carrier, Zangwill explores themes of identity, class, and gender, embedding her story within the broader context of societal change and the search for belonging in a rapidly modernizing world. Israel Zangwill, a prominent figure in the early 20th-century literary scene, was deeply rooted in Jewish culture and advocacy. His own immigrant background and experiences with social injustices informed his writing, giving voice to those often marginalized. Known for his activism, Zangwill intricately weaves his empathy for the underprivileged into 'Jinny the Carrier,' demonstrating his commitment to social reform and cultural preservation. This book is highly recommended for those interested in the interplay of social issues and personal narratives. With its richly drawn characters and insightful critique of societal norms, 'Jinny the Carrier' offers readers a compelling glimpse into the complexities of immigrant life, making it an essential read for anyone seeking to understand the human spirit's resilience. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
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Jinny the Carrier
Table of Contents
Introduction
A woman who carries goods and messages between villages becomes the axle on which a whole countryside turns. Israel Zangwill’s Jinny the Carrier is a novel that centres daily motion and mutual dependence, following a working carrier whose route threads through fields, lanes, and hearths in rural England. Through her practical errands and constant encounters, the book explores how lives intersect when one person’s livelihood is everyone else’s link. Without relying on grand events, Zangwill builds a vivid fabric of place and people, presenting a world in which attention to ordinary transactions reveals complex ties, small frictions, and enduring bonds.
Situated as an early twentieth-century work of British fiction, the novel belongs to the tradition of the village or provincial novel, with an emphasis on social comedy and closely observed realism. Zangwill, widely recognized for his sharp social observation, here turns his gaze to the rhythms of country life. The setting is the English countryside, with market-days, chapel bells, and seasonal routines forming the ambient background. Readers can expect a narrative invested in manners and milieu: not a sweeping historical chronicle but a focused portrait of a community, its trades, and its textures, filtered through the travels of an itinerant professional.
The premise is elegantly simple and rich with possibility: the carrier’s cart or van brings parcels, letters, news, and occasionally passengers, and the novel accompanies those circuits. Each stop offers a new angle on local existence—farmyards, shopfronts, and kitchen tables—while the road between them allows reflection and anticipation. The carrier’s work is a practical service, but it also makes her an interpreter of needs and nuances, a witness to people’s best and worst days. Zangwill crafts an experience that is intimate, observant, and often wry, inviting readers to savor conversation, custom, and the quietly dramatic weight of everyday obligations.
At its core, the book examines interdependence: how a community relies on timely delivery, trustworthy exchange, and the informal traffic of information. It also considers gender and work, portraying a woman’s economic competence and social negotiation within a setting governed by habit and expectation. The carrier embodies mobility, yet she is anchored by duty and reputation, raising questions about autonomy, responsibility, and the price of belonging. Class and conscience surface in small gestures rather than speeches; fairness, barter, and favor create a moral economy that binds neighbors together. Zangwill treats these themes with tact, allowing implication and incident to carry their weight.
Zangwill’s style balances humor with sympathy. The prose pays close attention to the cadences of everyday speech and the concrete details of landscape and labor—the crack of a wheel, the heft of a parcel, the muddle of a lane after rain. Scenes unfold with an episodic rhythm that accumulates into substantial insight, and the comic touches never slide into caricature. The mood is humane and gently ironic, as the narrative lingers on misunderstandings, small triumphs, and the etiquette of local life. Readers encounter a world rendered through tactile specificity and social nuance rather than sensational turns or melodrama.
For contemporary readers, the book resonates as a study of connection in a dispersed world. The carrier’s work resembles a living network: logistics, communication, and care braided into a single path. In an era still grappling with service labor, community trust, and the invisible infrastructures that keep daily life moving, Zangwill’s portrait feels pertinent. It asks how work shapes identity, how reputation circulates, and what it means to be indispensable yet vulnerable. The rural setting underscores that modern questions—about access, reliability, and the ethics of exchange—are not solely metropolitan concerns but touch every threshold where needs meet means.
Jinny the Carrier offers a reading experience of steady pleasures and surprising depth: a social novel that rewards attentiveness, an intimate comedy of manners that treats labor with dignity. Without straying into spoiler territory, it is enough to say that the carrier’s rounds reveal as much about herself as about the people she serves, and that the book’s satisfactions arise from recognition rather than shock. Readers drawn to character-driven narratives, village chronicles, and finely grained observation will find an inviting companion here. Zangwill’s novel endures because it understands how small journeys hold large meanings, and how service can become a form of wisdom.
Synopsis
Israel Zangwill’s Jinny the Carrier opens in a remote English village whose life revolves around small trades, seasonal rhythms, and long-standing habits. Jinny, an independent young woman who runs the local carrier’s cart, serves as both lifeline and listener. She conveys packages, messages, and sometimes private hopes between scattered cottages and the market town. The novel establishes her practical competence, quick wit, and moral steadiness, presenting the carrier’s route as a moving stage on which village characters appear and vanish. Through this daily circuit, the book introduces a community defined by interdependence, gentle rivalries, and the quiet dramas of ordinary survival.
As Jinny travels her round, the narrative surveys the village’s social mosaic—shopkeepers guarding credit ledgers, farmers hedging against weather, parish figures balancing duty with gossip. Her cart becomes a hub of exchange: food and clothing, letters and rumors, apologies and demands. Zangwill maps customs and dialects without sentimentality, allowing small incidents to reveal larger truths about poverty, pride, and patience. Jinny’s work grants her unusual freedom for a woman in her setting, yet it also draws her into others’ concerns. Her familiarity with lanes and people makes her a trusted mediator, but this same closeness blurs the line between service and involvement.
A newcomer and a returning face complicate Jinny’s steady course, bringing feelings that test her independence. The novel develops a restrained courtship plot intertwined with economic realities and communal expectations, avoiding melodrama while showing how affection threads through barter, errands, and Sunday gatherings. Differences in creed, class, and ambition give the attachment its tension. Jinny weighs the comfort of companionship against the costs of surrendering control over her life and livelihood. Around her, friends and elders offer advice colored by experience and convention. The carrier’s timetable, once purely practical, begins to mark emotional distances as carefully as miles.
Tighter knots form from small misunderstandings, the stray word magnified by repetition, and the delayed parcel that becomes a grievance. Jinny’s role as go-between invites pressure to choose sides in disputes that predate her and may outlast their participants. At home, ordinary responsibilities deepen, stressing her energy and sharpening her judgment. The narrative tracks how unremarkable days accumulate into choices, each carried forward on the cart’s wheels. Through markets, fairs, and doorstep negotiations, Jinny learns where her influence helps and where neutrality must hold. Emotional crosscurrents intensify, yet Zangwill keeps the scale human, letting character rather than coincidence guide events.
Religious and cultural strains surface, not as doctrinal debates but as habits of worship and work that shape daily decisions. The parish church, dissenting chapels, and itinerant voices represent competing messages about sin, duty, and redemption. Village rituals—harvest celebrations, charity collections, and solemn rites—register a society negotiating change without declaring it. Jinny observes rather than judges, adapting to ceremonial demands while preserving her practical ethic. These scenes underscore the novel’s interest in how belief informs behavior, and how public morality intersects private longing. The carrier’s path keeps crossing thresholds that divide households and hearts, clarifying the costs of belonging and of standing apart.
A natural hazard and a sudden emergency bring a sharper turning point, testing the community’s cohesion and Jinny’s courage. The landscape that usually seems familiar becomes treacherous, and routine skills matter more than grand gestures. Jinny’s knowledge of roads, tides, or weather—learned through repetition—proves essential. The crisis compresses time, forcing decisions that reveal loyalties and vulnerabilities. Without detailing outcomes, the episode recalibrates relationships and reputations, shedding light on who can be relied upon when the world narrows to immediate needs. Afterward, relief mixes with the unease of altered balances, and the cart’s creak sounds different to those who hear it.
Consequences ripple outward in quieter chapters that examine money, health, and the subtle arithmetic of favors. The village adjusts expectations, while talk of new conveyances and changing trade routes hints at pressures beyond any individual’s will. Jinny measures risks to her livelihood against the draw of affection and the duty she feels to customers who are also neighbors. The novel weighs thrift and generosity, privacy and confession, without resolving them into simple lessons. As misunderstandings are corrected and new doubts arise, the moral terrain looks both kinder and more complicated. The carrier’s autonomy, once unquestioned, now appears as a choice continually remade.
Approaching its climax, the story gathers at communal settings—market days, a festive observance, a household celebration—where private intentions must stand up to public attention. A pivotal journey through challenging conditions serves as both practical errand and inward reckoning, bringing threads together without theatrical contrivance. Jinny faces a decision that cannot satisfy every claim upon her, yet must honor the work that defines her. The narrative maintains discretion about exact outcomes, emphasizing process over revelation. What matters is how she navigates competing goods: stability and change, self-reliance and shared life, the known road and the turning that may open another map.
The novel closes by affirming the dignity of ordinary labor and the intricate sympathy that binds a small place. Without trumpeting a thesis, Zangwill presents a portrait of a woman whose competence and conscience make her central to communal well-being. Jinny the Carrier argues, through story rather than argument, that independence need not exclude connection, and that tradition can shelter growth when carried with care. Its humor, local color, and measured observation produce a world that feels habitable beyond the last page. The overall message is one of resilient kindness, grounded in work well done and choices made in clear daylight.
Historical Context
Published in 1919, Jinny the Carrier is set in the rural English countryside in the late Victorian and Edwardian decades, roughly the 1890s to the 1910s. Its world is a web of lanes linking a village to a nearby market town, where weekly fairs, church calendars, and agricultural seasons govern life. The carriera horse-drawn transporter of people, parcels, and newsis a vital intermediary before motor buses become common. Parish institutions, chapels, inns, and the post office frame the public sphere, while hedgerows, commons, and farmsteads shape its economy. The narrative captures the twilight of pre-motor rural England just as railways, bicycles, and early cars begin to press upon traditional rhythms.
The Great Agricultural Depression (18731896) profoundly altered rural England. International grain competition from the United States and Russia, enhanced by cheap transatlantic shipping, drove British wheat prices from over 50s per quarter in the late 1860s to under 25s by the mid-1890s. Tenant farmers failed, landlords converted arable to pasture, and rural wages fell, prompting out-migration to towns. Counties like Essex, Suffolk, and Norfolk were hard hit, with smallholders clinging to mixed farming and cottage industries. The novelcentred on a carrier whose livelihood depends on scattered farms and small tradesmirrors this tightening economy; Jinny2s routes, bargaining scenes, and reliance on market day embody the frugality and improvisation demanded by prolonged agrarian contraction.
A transport revolution frames the book2s social texture. The railway network, extended by branch lines in the 1860s90s and encouraged by the Light Railways Act 1896, tied villages to regional markets. Meanwhile the bicycle boom of the 1890s, the Locomotives on Highways Act 1896 (ending the red flag and raising speed limits), and the Motor Car Act 1903 (number plates, licensing) ushered in motor traffic; by the 1910s motor vans and buses began serving rural routes. County councils created in 1888 improved and maintained macadamized roads, further enabling competition. Carriers traditionally kept fixed timetables to market towns and used inns as depots. Zangwill situates Jinny at this hinge of eras: her horse-and-cart enterprise mediates goods and gossip even as rail parcels and motors threaten to supersede her essential, personal service.
Women2s work and the suffrage movement supply a crucial backdrop. From 1869 some women gained municipal voting rights; national campaigns coalesced in the NUWSS (1897, Millicent Fawcett) and the WSPU (1903, Emmeline Pankhurst), with militant peaks in 19121914. The First World War broadened women2s paid roles; the Representation of the People Act 1918 enfranchised women over thirty meeting property qualifications. Edith Ayrton Zangwill, the author2s wife, was a noted suffragist, linking the household directly to this politics. Jinny2s independent, income-earning carriage work resonates with these developments, challenging rural gender conventions; her competence and mobility exemplify how late Victorian and Edwardian women negotiated economic agency amid a shifting legal and political landscape.
Reforms in rural governance reshaped village power. The Local Government Act 1888 created elected county councils, reducing the magisterial dominance of justices of the peace, while the Local Government (Parish Councils) Act 1894 established elected parish councils and meetings, transferring oversight of footpaths, allotments, and community assets to local voters. These reforms democratized everyday administration and gave laborers and smallholders a voice in parochial affairs. The world of Jinny the Carriermarket gossip, notices, petty disputes over rights of way, and collective decisions about fairs and amenitiesreflects this newly participatory order, where carriers convey not only parcels but also petitions, minutes, and the informal news that oils the machinery of local self-government.
Religious Nonconformity, temperance, and mutual aid movements structured rural sociability. Methodist and Baptist chapels expanded from mid-century; the Band of Hope (1847) and the United Kingdom Alliance (1853) promoted sobriety, while the Licensing Act 1872 tightened drinking regulations and the 1904 Act compensated closures of public houses. Friendly societies such as the Oddfellows and Foresters provided sickness and burial benefits to millions; the National Insurance Act 1911 added state-backed health and unemployment coverage. Carriers often used inns as pickup points yet moved between chapel teetotalers and pub-keeping networks. The novel2s itinerant rounds traverse these moral geographies, staging tensions between convivial drinking culture and reformist discipline, and revealing how mutual aid and restraint underpinned precarious rural livelihoods.
The First World War (19141918) accelerated changes already underway. The British state, under the Defence of the Realm Acts (from 1914), regulated prices, labor, and transport. Hundreds of thousands of horses were requisitioned for military service, disrupting farm and carrier economies; labor shortages led to the Women2s Land Army (from 1917). Rationing arrived in 1918; Spanish influenza (19181919) compounded losses. Postwar measuresthe Representation of the People Act 1918, the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act 1919, and the Addison Act 1919 (housing)recast political and social expectations. Although pastoral in tone, a 1919 publication inevitably reads as an elegy for prewar village life. Jinny2s horse-drawn calling, buffeted by wartime requisitions and postwar motorization, symbolizes a rural order giving way to mechanized modernity and mass politics.
As social critique, the book illuminates the frailty and dignity of small trades within a transforming countryside. By centering a woman who sustains a community service without institutional protection, it exposes gendered inequities in access to capital, credit, and political voice. Its attention to rates, roads, parish decisions, and market dependency critiques a system that leaves villages vulnerable to distant price shocks and technological displacement. The friction between chapel temperance and pub conviviality reveals moral governance as a battleground over class respectability. Above all, the work scrutinizes how modernization proceeds unevenly, rewarding large actors while demanding resilience and self-sacrifice from those, like the carrier, who stitch rural society together.
Jinny the Carrier
PREAMBLE
I’ll tell you who Time ambles withal.
“As You Like It.”
Once upon a time—but then it was more than once, it was, in fact, every Tuesday and Friday—Jinny the Carrier, of Blackwater Hall, Little Bradmarsh, went the round with her tilt-cart from that torpid Essex village on the Brad, through Long Bradmarsh (over the brick bridge) to worldly, bustling Chipstone, and thence home again through the series of droughty hamlets with public pumps that curved back—if one did not take the wrong turning at the Four Wantz Way—to her too aqueous birthplace: baiting her horse, Methusalem, at “The Black Sheep[1]” in Chipstone like the other carters and wagoners, sporting a dog with a wicked eye and a smart collar, and even blowing a horn as if she had been the red-coated guard of the Chelmsford coach sweeping grandly to his goal down the High Street of Chipstone.
Do you question more precisely when this brazen female flourished? The answer may be given with the empty exactitude of science and scholarship. Her climacteric was to the globe at large the annus mirabilis[2] of the Great Exhibition, when the lion and the lamb lay down together in Hyde Park in a crystal cage. But though the advent of the world-trumpeted Millennium could not wholly fail to percolate even to Little Bradmarsh, a more veracious chronology, a history truer to local tradition, would date the climax of Jinny’s unmaidenly career as “before the Flood.”
Not, of course—as the mention of Methusalem might mislead you into thinking—the Flood which is still commemorated in toyshops and Babylonian tablets, and anent which German scholars miraculously contrive to be dry; but the more momentous local Deluge[3] when the Brad, perversely swollen, washed away cattle, mangold clamps, and the Holy Sabbath in one fell surge, leaving the odd wooden gable of Frog Farm looming above the waste of waters as nautically as Noah’s Ark.
In those antediluvian days, and in that sequestered hundred, farm-horses were the ruling fauna and set the pace; the average of which Methusalem, with his “jub” or cross between a lazy trot and a funeral procession, did little to elevate. It was not till the pride of life brought a giddier motion that the Flood—but we anticipate both moral and story. Let us go rather at the Arcadian amble of the days before the Deluge, when the bicycle—even of the early giant order—had not yet arisen to terrorize the countryside with its rotiferous mobility, still less the motor-mammoth swirling through the leafy lanes in a dust-fog and smelling like a super-skunk, or the air-monster out-soaring and out-Sataning the broomsticked witch. It is true that Bundock, Her Majesty’s postman, had once brought word of a big-bellied creature, like a bloated Easter-egg, hovering over the old maypole as if meditating to impale itself thereon, like a bladder on a stick. But normally not even the mail or a post-chaise divided the road with Master Bundock; while, as for the snorting steam-horse that bore off the young Bradmarshians, once they had ventured as far as roaring railhead, it touched the postman’s imagination no more than the thousand-ton sea-monsters with flapping membranes or cloud-spitting gullets that rapt them to the lands of barbarism and gold.
Blessèd Bundock, genial Mercury of those days before the Flood, if the rubbered wheel of the postdiluvian age might have better winged thy feet, yet thy susceptible eye—that rested all-embracingly on female gleaners—was never darkened by the sight of the soulless steel reaper, cropping close like a giant goose, and thou wast equally spared that mechanic flail-of-all-work that drones through the dog-days like a Brobdingnagian bumble-bee. For thine happier ear the cottages yet hummed with the last faint strains of the folk-song: unknown in thy sylvan perambulations that queer metallic parrot, hoarser even than the raucous reality, which now wakens and disenchants every sleepy hollow with echoes of the London music-hall.
Rural Essex was long the unchanging East, and there are still ploughmen who watch the airmen thunder by, then plunge into their prog again. The shepherds who pour their fleecy streams between its hedgerows are still as primitive as the herdsmen of Chaldea, and there are yokels who dangle sideways from their slow beasts as broodingly as the Bedouins of Palestine. Even to-day the spacious elm-bordered landscapes through which Jinny’s cart rolled and her dog circumambiently darted, lie ignored of the picture postcard, and on the red spinal chimney-shaft of Frog Farm the doves settle with no air of perching for their photographs. Little Bradmarsh is still Little, still the most reclusive village of all that delectable champaign; the Brad still glides between its willows unruffled by picnic parties and soothed rather than disturbed by rusty, ancient barges. But when Gran’fer Quarles first brought little Jinny to these plashy bottoms, the region it watered—not always with discretion—was unknown even to the gipsy caravans and strolling showmen, and quite outside the circuit of the patterers and chaunters who stumped the country singing or declaiming lampoons on the early Victoria; not a day’s hard tramp from Seven Dials where they bought their ribald broadsheets, yet as remote as Arabia Felix.
CHAPTER I
BUNDOCK ON HIS BEAT
He comes, the herald of a noisy world,
With spattered boots.
Cowper, “The Task.”
I
It had rained that April more continuously than capriciously, but this morning April showed at last her fairer face. The sunshine held as yet no sense of heat, only the bracingness of a glad salt wave. Across the spacious blue of the Essex sky clouds floated and met and parted in a restful restlessness. The great valley swam in a blue sea of vapour. Men trod as on buoyant sunshine that bore them along. The buds were peeping out from every hedge and tree, the blackthorn was bursting into white, the whole world seemed like a child tiptoeing towards some delightful future. Primroses nestled in every hollow: the gorse lay golden on the commons. The little leaves of the trees seemed shy, scarcely grown familiar with the fluttering of the birds. All the misery, pain, and sadness had faded from creation like a bad dream: the stains and pollutions were washed out, leaving only the young clean beauty of the first day. It was a virgin planet, fresh from the hands of its Maker, trembling with morning dew—an earth that had never seen its own blossoming. And the pæan of all this peace and innocence throbbed exultingly in bird-music through all the great landscape. Over the orchard of Frog Farm there were only two larks, but you would have thought a whole orchestra.
A blot against this background seemed the blood-red shirt of Caleb Flynt in that same orchard; a wild undulating piece of primeval woodland where plum-trees and pear-trees indeed flourished, but not more so than oaks and chestnuts, briars and brambles, or fairy mists of bluebells. The task of regenerating it had been annually postponed, but now that Caleb was no longer the Frog Farm “looker,” it formed, like his vegetable garden, his wheat patch, or his wife’s piggery, a pleasant pottering-ground. He worked without coat or smock, chastening the ranker grass while the dew was still on it—or in his own idiom, “while the dag was on the herb.” White-bearded and scythe-bearing, he suggested—although the beard was short and round and he wore a shapeless grey hat—a figure of Father Time, incarnadined from all his wars. But in sooth no creature breathed more at one with the earth’s mood that morning than this ancient “Peculiar[4],” whose parlour bore as its text of honour—in white letters on a lozenge of brown paper: “When He giveth quietness, who then can make trouble[1q]?”
Quietness was, indeed, all around him in this morning freshness: the swish of the scythe, the murmurous lapse of shorn grass, the drone of insects, the cooing of pigeons from the cote, the elusive cry of the new-come cuckoo, seemed forms of silence rather than of sound. And his inner peace matched his outer, for, as his arms automatically wielded the scythe, his soul was actually in heaven—or at least in the New Jerusalem which, according to his wife’s novel Christadelphian creed, was to be let down from heaven for the virtuous remnant of earth—and at no distant date! Not that he definitely believed in her descending city, though he felt a certain proprietary interest in it. “Oi don’t belong to Martha’s Church,” he reassured his brethren of the Peculiar faith, “but Oi belongs to she and she belongs to me.”
In this mutual belonging he felt himself the brake and Martha the spirited mare who could never stand still. No doubt her argument that we were here to learn and to move forward was plausible enough—how could he traverse it, he who had himself changed from Churchman to Peculiar? But her rider: “We don’t leave the doctrine, we carry it with us,” struck him as somewhat shifty. And her move from “Sprinkling” to “Total Immersion”—even if the submergence did in a sense include the sprinkling—was surely enough progression for one lifetime. He did not like “this gospel of gooin’ forrard”: an obstinate instinct warned him to hold back, though with an uneasy recognition that her ceaseless explorations of her capacious Bible—to him a sealed book—must naturally yield discoveries denied to his less saintly and altogether illiterate self. Discoveries indeed had not been spared him. Ever since she had joined those new-fangled Christadelphians—“Christy Dolphins” as he called them—she had abounded in texts as crushing as they were unfamiliar; and even the glib Biblical patter he had picked up from the Peculiars was shown to imply at bottom the new teaching. Curtain lectures are none the less tedious when they are theological, and after a course of many months—each with its twenty-eight to thirty-one nights—Caleb Flynt was grown wearisomely learned in the bold doctrine launched by the great John Thomas that “the Kingdom of God on earth” actually meant on earth and must be brought about there and nowhere else, and that Immortality enjoyed except in one’s terrestrial body—however spiritualized—was as absurd a notion as that it was lavished indiscriminately upon Tom, Giles, and Jerry.
The worst of it was he could never be sure Martha was not in the right—she had certainly modified his belief in “Sprinkling”—and he fluttered around her “New Jerusalem” like a moth around a lighthouse. Had anybody given a penny for his thoughts as he stooped now over his scythe, the fortunate investor would have come into possession of “the street of pure gold, as it were transparent glass,” not to mention the sapphires and emeralds, the beryls and chrysolites and all the other shining swarms of precious stones catalogued in Revelation. If he had kept from her the rumour that had reached his own ears of such a treasure-city of glass actually arising in London at this very moment, it was not because he believed this was veritably her celestial city, but because it might possibly excite her credulity to the pitch of wishing to see it. And the thought of a journey was torture. Already Martha had dropped hints about the difficulties of “upbuilding” in the lack of local Christadelphians to institute a “Lightstand”: the wild dream of some day breaking bread in an “Ecclesia” in London had been adumbrated: it was possible the restless female mind even contemplated London itself as a place to be seen before one died.
But surely the New Jerusalem, if it descended at all, would—he felt—descend here, at Little Bradmarsh. A heaven that meant girding up one’s loins and wrenching out one’s roots was a very problematic paradise, for all the splendour with which his inward eye was now, despite himself, dazzled.
II
From this jewelled Jerusalem Caleb was suddenly brought back to the breathing beauty of our imperfect earth, to pear-blossom and plum-blossom, to the sun-glinted shadows under his trees and the mellow tiles of his roof. The sound of his own name fell from on high—like the city of his daydream—accompanied by a great skirring of wings, and looking up dazedly, the pearly gates still shimmering, his eye followed the tarred side-wall of the farmhouse till, near the roof, it lit upon his wife’s night-capped head protruded from the tiny diamond-paned casement that alone broke the sheer black surface of the wood.
A sense of the unusual quickened his pulses. It stole upon him, not mainly from Martha’s face, which, despite its excited distension, wore—over wrinkles he never saw—the same russet complexion and was crowned by the same glory of unblanched brown hair that had gladdened his faithful eyes since the beginning of the century; but, more subtly and subconsciously, through the open lattice which framed this ever-enchanting vision. In the Flynt tradition, windows—restricted at best by the window tax still in force—were for light, not air. Had folks wanted air, they would have poked a hole in the wall; not built a section of it “of transparent glass.” People so much under the sky as Caleb and Martha Flynt had no need to invite colds by artificial draughts. They were getting a change of air all day long. But their rooms—their small, low-ceiled rooms—were not thus vivified, even in their absence; the ground-floor windows were indeed immovable, and an immemorial mustiness made a sort of slum atmosphere in this spacious, sun-washed solitude. Hence Caleb’s sense of a jar in his universe at the familiar, flat pattern of the wall dislocated into a third dimension by the out-flung casement: a prodigy which he was not surprised to find fluttering the dovecot, and which presaged, he felt, still vaster cataclysms. And to add to the auspices of change, he observed another piebald pigeon among his snowy flock.
“Yes, dear heart,” he called up, disguising his uneasiness and shearing on.
Martha pointed a fateful finger towards the high-hedged, oozy path meandering beyond the orchard gate, and dividing the sown land from the pastures sloping to the Brad. “There’s Bundock coming up the Green Lane!”
“Bundock?” gasped Caleb, the scythe stopping short. “You’re a-dreamin’.” That Brother Bundock, who had been prayed over for a decade by himself and every Peculiar in the vicinity, should at last have taken up his bed and walked, was too sudden a proof of their tenets, and the natural man blurted out his disbelief.
“But I see his red jacket,” Martha protested, “his bag on his shoulder.”
“Ow!” His tone was divided between relief and disappointment. “You mean Bundock’s buoy-oy!” He drew out the word even longer than usual, and it rose even beyond the high pitch his Essex twang habitually gave to his culminating phrases. “Whatever can Posty be doin’ in these pa-arts?” he went on, with a new wonder.
“And the chace that squashy,” said Martha, who from her coign of vantage could see the elderly figure labouring in the remoter windings, “he’s sinking into it at every step.”
“Ay, the mud’s only hazeled over. Whatever brings the silly youth when the roads be in that state?”
“It’ll be the Census again!” groaned Martha.
Caleb’s brow gloomed. He feared Martha was right, and anything official must have to do with that terrible paper-filling which had at last by the aid of Jinny been, they had hoped, finally accomplished some weeks before. Ever since the first English census had been taken in the first year of the century, Martha had been expecting a plague to fall upon the people as it had upon the Israelites when King David numbered them. But although she had been disappointed, there was no doubt of the plague of the Census itself.
“Haps it’s a letter for the shepherd,” hazarded Caleb to comfort her.
“Who’d be writing Master Peartree a letter? He can’t read.”
“Noa!” he answered complacently, for his wife’s learning seemed part of their mutual “belonging.” The drawbacks of this vicarious erudition were, however, revealed by his next remark; for on Martha crying out that poor Bundock had sunk up to his knees, Caleb bade her be easy. “He won’t be swallowed up like that minx Cora!”
But Martha’s motherly heart was too agitated to recognize the Korah of her Biblical allusions—she vaguely assumed it was some scarlet woman englutted in the slimy saltings of Caleb’s birthplace. “Run and lead him into the right path,” she exhorted.
But Caleb’s brain was not one for quick reactions. Inured for nigh seventy years to a world in which nothing happened too suddenly, even thunderbolts giving reasonable notice and bogs getting boggier by due degrees, he stood dazedly, his hands paralysed on the nibs of his arrested scythe. “Happen the logs Oi put have sunk down!” he soliloquized slowly.
“If I wasn’t in my nightgown I’d go myself,” said Martha impatiently. “ ’Tis a lesson from the Lord not to lay abed.”
“The Lord allows for rheumaties, dear heart,” said Caleb soothingly.
“He’ll be up to his neck, if you don’t stir your stumps.”
“Not he, Martha. Unless he stands on his head.” Caleb meant this as a literal contribution to the discussion. There was no wilful topsy-turveydom. He was as unconscious of his own humour as of other people’s.
“But he’ll spoil his breeches anyways,” retorted Martha with equal gravity. “And the Lord just sending his wife a new baby.”
“Bundock’s breeches be the Queen’s,” said Caleb reassuringly. But laying down his scythe, he began to move mazedly adown the orchard, and before the postman’s mud-cased leggings had floundered many more rods, the veteran was sitting astride his stile, dangling his top-boots over a rotten-planked brook, and waving in his hairy, mahogany hand his vast red handkerchief like a danger signal.
“Ahoy, Posty!”
Bundock responded with a cheerful blast on his bugle. “Ahoy, Uncle Flynt!”
“Turn back. Don’t, ye’ll strike a bog-hole.”
“I never go back!” cried the dauntless Bundock. And even as he spoke, his stature shrank till his bag rested on the ooze.
“The missus was afeared you’d spoil the Queen’s breeches,” said Caleb sympathetically. “Catch hold of yon crab-apple branch.”
“Better spoil her breeches than be unfaithful to her uniform,” said the slimy hero, struggling up as directed. “I’ve got a letter for you.”
Caleb’s flag fell into the brook and startled a water-rat. “A letter for us!”
He splashed into the water, still dazedly, to rescue his handkerchief, avoiding the plank as a superfluous preliminary to the wetting; and, standing statuesque in mid-stream, more like Father Neptune now than Father Time, he continued incredulously: “Who’d be sendin’ us a letter?”
“That’s not my business,” cried Bundock sternly. He came on heroically, disregarding a posterior consciousness of damp clay, and picking his way along the grassy, squashy strip that was starred treacherously with peaceful daisies and buttercups, over-hung by wild apple-trees, and hedged from the fields on either hand by a tall, prickly tangle and congestion—as of a vegetable slum—in which gorse, holly, speedwell, mustard, and lily of the valley (still in green sheaths), strove for breathing space. At the edge of a palpable mudhole he paused perforce. Caleb, who, when he recovered from his daze at the news of the letter, had advanced with dripping boots to meet him, was equally arrested at the opposite frontier, and the two men now faced each other across some fifteen feet of flowery ooze, two studies in red; Caleb, big-limbed and stolid, in his crimson shirt, and Bundock, dapper and peart, in his scarlet jacket.
The postman’s face was lightly pockmarked, but found by females fascinating, especially under the quasi-military cap. Hairlessness was part of its open charm: his sun-tanned cheek kept him juvenile despite his half-century, and preserved from rust his consciousness of a worshipping womanhood. Caleb, on the contrary, was all hair, little bushes growing even out of his ears, and whiskers and beard and the silver-grey mop at his crown running into one another without frontiers—the “Nonconformist fringe” in a ragged edition.
“Sow sorry to give ye sow much ill-convenience,” he called apologetically. “Oi count,” he added, having had time for reflection, “one of our buoy-oys has written from furrin parts. And he wouldn’t be knowing the weather here.”
“ ’Tain’t any of your boys,” said Bundock crossly, “because it comes from London.”
“That’s a pity. The missus’ll get ’sterical when she hears it’s for us, and it’s cruel hard to disappoint her. There ain’t nobody else as we want letters from. Can’t you send it back?”
“Not if I can deliver it,” said Bundock stiffly.
“But ye can’t—unless you chuck it over.”
The slave of duty shook his head. “I daren’t risk the Queen’s mail like that.”
“But it’s my letter.”
“Not yet, Uncle Flynt. When it reaches your hand it may be considered safely, legally, and constitutionally delivered. But, till then, ’tis the Queen’s letter, and don’t you forget it.”
Caleb scratched his head.
“If ’twas the Queen’s letter, she could read it,” he urged obstinately.
“And so she can,” rejoined Bundock. “She has the right to open any letter smelling of high treason, so to speak, and nobody can say her nay.”
“But my letter ain’t high treasony,” said Caleb indignantly. “And if Wictoria wants to read it, why God bless her, says Oi.”
Bundock sighed before the bovinity of the illiterate mind.
“The Queen has got better things to do than read every scribble her head’s stuck on to.”
“Happen Oi could ha’ retched it with a rake,” Caleb mused. “What a pity you ain’t got spladges, like when Oi was a buoy-oy, and gatherin’ pin-patches on the sands. And fine and fat they was too when ye got ’em on the pin!” His tongue clucked.
Bundock looked his contempt. “A pretty sight, Her Majesty’s uniform lumbering along like a winkle-picker!”
“Bide a bit then,” said Caleb, “and Oi’ll thrash through the hedge and work through agen in your rear.”
It was a chivalrous offer, for a deep ditch barred the way to the freshly ploughed land, and a tough and prickly chaos to the pasture land; but Bundock declined churlishly, if not unheroically, declaring there was a letter for Frog Cottage too. And when Caleb, recovering from this vindication of his wife’s prophesyings, offered to transmit it to the shepherd, “What guarantee have I,” asked Bundock, “that it reaches him safely, legally, and constitutionally? Nay, nay, uncle, a man must do his own jobs.”
“Then work through the bushes yourself. Don’t, ye’ll be fit to grow crops on.”
“Lord, how I hate going round—circumbendibus!” groaned Bundock. “I might as well be driving a post-cart.”
“There’s a mort of worser things than gooin’ round,” said Caleb. “And Oi do be marvelling a young chap like you should mind a bit of extra leg-work, bein’ as how ye’ve got naught else to do but to put one leg afore the ’tother.”
“Indeed?” snapped Bundock, this ignorant summary of his duties aggravating the moist clayey consciousness that resided at the seat of Her Majesty’s trousers.
“Ef ye won’t keep to the high roads, you ought to git a hoss what can clear everything,” Caleb went on to advise.
“And break my neck?”
“Posty always had a hoss when I was a cad.”
“Or lay in the road with a broken back and Her Majesty’s mail at the mercy of every tramp?” pursued Bundock. “No, no, one cripple in a family is enough.”
Caleb looked pained. “You dedn’t ought to talk o’ your feyther like that. And him pinchin’ hisself and maybe injurin’ his spinal collar to keep you at school till you was a large buoy-oy!”
III
Bundock’s irritation at his Bœotian critic was suddenly diverted by the spectacle of a female figure bearing down upon him literally by leaps and bounds—it seemed as if the steeplechase method recommended by Caleb was already in action. The postman felt for his spectacles, discarded normally in the interests of manly fascination. “Lord!” he cried. “Has your missus joined the Jumpers?” Caleb turned his head, not unalarmed. With so skittish a theologian anything was possible. But his agitation subsided into a smile of admiration.
“She thinks of everything,” he said.
The practical Martha was in fact advancing with an improvised leaping-pole that had already carried her neatly over the brook and would obviously bring Bundock over the boglet. But why—Caleb wondered—was she risking her “bettermost” skirt? His own mother, he remembered, had not hesitated to tuck up her petticoats when winkles had to be gathered. And why was Martha’s hair massed in its black net cap with a Sunday stylishness?
“Morning, Mrs. Flynt,” cried Bundock, becoming as genial as the weather. Females, even sexagenarian, so long as not utterly uncomely, turned him from an official into a man.
“Morning, Mr. Bundock!” Martha called back across the mudhole. “I hope your father’s no worse!”
Bundock’s brow clouded. Still harping on his father.
“He’s not so active as you,” he replied a bit testily.
“Thank the Lord!” said Caleb fervently. Then, colouring under Bundock’s stare, “For the missus’s legs,” he explained.
And to cover his confusion he snatched the pole from her and hurled it towards Bundock, who had barely time to jump aside into a still squidgier patch. But in another instant the dauntless postman secured it, and with one brave bound—like Sir Walter Scott’s stag—had cleared the slimiest section, and his staggering, sliding form was safely locked in Caleb’s sanguineous shirt-sleeves. Safely but not contentedly, for at heart he was deeply piqued at this inglorious position of Her Majesty’s envoy; the dignified newsbearer, the beguiler of loneliness, the gossip welcomed alike in the kitchens of the great and the parlours of the humble. Morbidly conscious of his unpresentable rear, he kept carefully behind the couple, while Caleb explained the situation to Martha, breaking and blunting the news at one hammer-blow.
“There’s a letter for us! From Lunnon!”
Martha was wonderful. “What a piece! What a master!” he thought. One might live with a woman for half a century, yet never fathom her depths. Not a gasp, not a cry, not a sigh of vain yearning. Merely: “Then it’ll be from Cousin Caroline. When she went back to London at Michaelmas she promised to let us know if she reached home safe, and if your brother George was better.”
“Ay, ay!” he assented happily. “Oi’d disremembered Cousin Caroline.”
It was a merciful oblivion, for his Cockney cousin had come from Limehouse in August and stayed two months, protesting that it was impossible to bide a day in a place where there wasn’t a neighbour to speak to except a silly shepherd who was never at home; where water was scooped filthily from a green-scummy pond instead of flowing naturally from a tap; where on moonless nights you could break your leg at your own doorstep; where frogs croaked and cocks crowed and pigeons moaned and foxes barked at the unholiest hours; where disgusting vermin were nailed on the trees and where you broke out in itching blotches, which folks might ascribe to “harvesters,” but which were susceptible of a more domestic explanation. Moreover, Cousin Caroline had brought a profuse and uninvited progeny, whose unexpected appearance in Jinny’s cart, though vaguely comforting as recalling the days when the house resounded with child-life, was in truth at disturbing discord with the Quakerish calm into which Frog Farm had subsided after the flight of its teeming chicks. As Caleb came along now, convoying Bundock through the lush orchard grass, the echo of Cousin Caroline’s querulous voice rasped his brain and made him wish she had pretermitted her promise to write. As for his ailing brother George, information about whom she was probably sending, it was obvious that he was no worse, else one would assuredly have heard of his funeral. Had not George carefully let him know when he got married? Caroline was a Churchwoman—he remembered suddenly—she had compromised Frog Farm by eking out Parson Fallow’s miserable congregation. And now she had sent her letter just at a season to plague and muddy a worthy Dissenter.
“Sow sorry to give ye sow much ill-convenience, Mr. Bundock,” he repeated, as they reached the farmhouse.
IV
Frog Farm, before which Bundock stood fumbling in his bag, was—as its name implies—situated in a batrachian region, croakily cheerless under a sullen sky, a region revealed under the plough as ancient sedge-land, black with rotted flags and rushes. But the scene was redeemed at its worst by the misty magnificence of great spaces, whose gentle undulations could not counteract a sublime flatness; not to mention the beauty of the Brad gliding like the snake in the grass it sometimes proved. The pasture land behind the farmhouse and sloping softly down to the river—across which, protected by a dyke and drained by little black mills working turbine wheels, lay the still lower Long Bradmarsh—was the salvage of a swamp roughly provided with a few, far-parted drains by some pioneer squatter, content—on the higher ground where a farmhouse was possible—to fell and slice his own timber and bake his own tiles. At the topmost rim, on a road artificially raised to take its wagons to the higher ground or “Ridge” of the village, rose this farmhouse with its buildings, all dyked off from the converted marsh by a three-foot wall of trunk-fragments and uncouth stones, bordered by bushes. The house turned its back on the Brad, and had not even hind eyes to see it—another effect of the window tax—and had the rear of the house not been relieved by the quaint red chimney bisecting it, the blankness would have been unbearable. But if little of good could have been said of its architecture behind its back, and if even in front it ended abruptly at one extremity like a sheer cliff or a halved haystack, with one gable crying for another to make both ends meet, it was as a whole picturesque enough with all that charm of rough wood, which still seems to keep its life-sap, and beside which your marble hall is a mere petrifaction. Weather-boarded and tarred, it faced you with a black beauty of its own, amid which its diamond-paned little lattices gleamed like an Ethiopian’s eyes. In the foreground, haystacks, cornricks, and strawstacks gave grace and colour, fusing with the spacious landscape as naturally as the barns and byres and storehouses, the troughs and stables and cart-sheds and the mellow, immemorial dung.
But what surprised the stranger more than its lop-sidedness was the duplication of its front door, for there were two little doors, with twin sills and latches. It had, in fact, been partitioned to allow a couple of rooms to the shepherd-cowman, when that lone widower’s cottage was needed for an extra horseman. Master Peartree’s new home became known as Frog Cottage. The property was what was here called an “off-hand farm,” the owner being “in parts,” or engaged in other enterprises, and for more than a generation Caleb Flynt had lived there as “looker” to old Farmer Gale, the cute Cornish invader who had discovered the fatness of the oozy soil, and who had been glad to install a son of it as a reconciling link between Little Bradmarsh and “the furriner.” Caleb belonged to that almost extinct species of managers who can dispense with reading and writing, and his semi-absentee employer found his honesty as meticulous as his memory. While the Flynt nestlings were growing up, the parent birds had found the nest a tight fit, but with the gradual flight of the brood to every quarter of the compass, the old pair had receded into its snugger recesses—living mainly by the kitchen fire under the hanging hams. Thus when last year Farmer Gale’s son, succeeding to the property and foolishly desiring a more scientific and literate bailiff, delicately intimated that having bought all the adjoining land, he had been compelled to acquire therewith the rival looker, the old Flynts were glad enough to be allowed for a small rent the life-use of the farmhouse and the bits of waste land around it, subject to their providing living room for old Master Peartree, who was to pasture his flock of sheep and a few kine in the near meadows. Martha, indeed, always maintained that Caleb had made a bad bargain with the new master—did not the whole neighbourhood pronounce the young widower a skinflint?—but Caleb, who had magisterially negotiated with the new bailiff the swapping of his wood-ashes for straw for her pet pig, Maria, limited his discussions with her to theology. “When one talks law and high business,” he maintained, “we must goo back to the days afore Eve was dug out of Adam.”
V
Bundock, restored to his superiority by the deprecatory expectancy of the old couple, observed graciously that there was no need to apologize: anybody was liable to have a letter. Indeed, he added generously, with nine boys dotted about the world, Frog Farm might have been far more troublesome.
“Eleven, Mr. Bundock,” corrected Martha with a quiver in her voice.
“I don’t reckon the dead and buried, Mrs. Flynt. They don’t write—not even to the dead-letter office.” He cut short a chuckle, remembering this was no laughing matter.
“And the other nine might as well be dead for all the letters you bring me,” Martha retorted bitterly.
“No news is good news, dear heart,” Caleb put in, as though to shield the postman. He was not so sure now that this unfortunate letter had not disturbed her slowly won resignation. “We’ve always yeared of anything unpleasant—like when Daniel married the Kaffir lady.”
“That was Christopher,” said Martha.
“Ow, ay, Christopher. ’Tis a wonder he could take to a thick-lipped lady. Oi couldn’t fancy a black-skinned woman, even if she was the Queen of Sheba. Oi shook hands with one once, though, and it felt soft. They rub theirselves with oil to keep theirselves lithe.”
Martha replied only with a sigh. The Kaffir lady, for all her coloured and heathen horror, at least supplied a nucleus for visualization, whereas all her other stalwart sons, together with one married daughter, had vanished into the four corners of the Empire—building it up with an unconsciousness mightier than the sword—and only the children who had died young—two girls and a boy—remained securely hers, fixed against the flux of life and adventure. Occasionally indeed an indirect rumour of her live sons’ doings came to her, but correspondence was not the habit of those days when even amid the wealthier classes a boy might go out to India and his safe arrival remain unknown for a semestrium or more. The foreign postage, too, was no inconsiderable check to the literary impulse or encouragement to the lazy. Indeed postage stamps were still confined to half a dozen countries. It was but a decade since they had come in at all and letters with envelopes or an extra sheet had ceased to be “double”; postcards were still unknown, and in many parts postmen came as infrequently as carriers, people often hastening to scrawl replies which the same men might convey to the mail-bags.
“Kaffirs ain’t black,” corrected Bundock. “They’re coffee-coloured. That’s what the name means.”
Martha sighed again. So far had her brooding fantasy gone that she sometimes pictured baby grandchildren as innocently dusky as the hybrid young fantails which no solicitude could keep out of her dovecot, and which were a reminder that heaven knew no colour-boundaries.
“Don’t be nervous,” Bundock reassured her. “I’ll find it.”
“Oh, no hurry, no hurry!” said Caleb, beginning to perspire distressingly under the postman’s exertions and to mop his hairy brow with his brook-sopped handkerchief. How these youngsters grew up! he was thinking. Brats one had seen spanked waxed into mighty officers of State. “Shall I brush your breeches, Posty?” he inquired tactlessly.
“What’s the use till they’re dry?” snapped Bundock.
“Come in and dry them before the kitchen fire,” said Martha.
“This sun’ll dry them,” he said coldly.
“Not so slick as the fire,” Caleb blundered on. “ ’Tain’t like you was a serpent walking on your belly.”
Bundock flushed angrily and right-wheeled to hide the seat of his trousers. “Why you should go and catch your letter when the roads are in that state——!” he muttered.
“You could ha’ waited till they dried!” Caleb said deprecatingly.
“I did wait a post-day or so,” said Bundock with undiminished resentment. “But there’s such a thing, uncle, as duty to my Queen. Things might have got damper instead of drier, like the time the floods were out beyond Long Bradmarsh, and I might have had to swim out to you.”
Caleb was impressed. “But can you swim?” he inquired.
“That’s not the point,” growled Bundock. “I don’t say I’d ha’ faced the elements for you, but if somebody with real traffic and entanglement were living here, e.g. the Duke of Wellington, I should have come through fire and water.”
“The Dook at a farm!” Caleb smiled incredulously.
“In the Battle of Waterloo,” said Bundock icily, “the whole fight was whether he or Boney should hold a farm.”
“You don’t say!” cried Caleb excitedly. “And who got it?”
“Well, it wasn’t Froggy’s Farm.” And Bundock roared with glee and renewed self-respect. Caleb guffawed too, but merely for elation at the Frenchy’s defeat.
The calm and piping voice of Martha broke in upon this robustious duet, pointing out that there was no Duke in residence and no need for natation, but that since Jinny called for orders every Friday he might have given her the letter.
“Give the Queen’s mail to a girl!” Bundock looked apoplectic.
“Jinny never loses anything,” said Martha, unimpressed.
“She’ll lose her character if she ain’t careful,” he said viciously; “driving of a Sunday with Farmer Gale.”
“That’s onny to chapel,” said Caleb.
“A man that rich’ll never take her there!” sneered Bundock.
“Why, Jinny’s only a child,” said Martha, roused at last. “And the best girl breathing. Look how she slaves for her grandfather!”
“Jinny! Jinny!” Bundock muttered. “Nothing but Jinny all the day and all the way.” How often indeed had she snatched the gossip from his mouth, staled his earth-shaking tidings, even as the Bellman anticipated his jokes! “Let me catch her carrying letters, that’s all. I’ll have the law on her, child or no child. I expect she blows that horn to make the old folks think she’s got postal rights!” He did not mention that in his vendetta against the girl it was he who never hesitated to poach on the rival preserves, and that he was even now carrying a certain packet of tracts which he had found at “The Black Sheep” awaiting Jinny’s day, and which he had bagged on the ground that he had a letter for the same address.
“Jinny would have saved your legs,” said Martha dryly.
Caleb turned on her. “Ay, and his leggings too!” he burst forth with savage sarcasm. But at great moments deep calls to deep. “Women don’t understand a man’s duty. And Posty’s every inch a man.”
Bundock tried to look his full manhood: fortunately the discovery of the letter at this instant enabled him to gain an inch or two by throwing back his shoulders, so long bent under the royal yoke.
“Mrs. Flynt,” he announced majestically.
“For me?” gasped Martha.
“For you,” said Bundock implacably. “Mrs. Flynt, Frog Farm, Swash End, Little Bradmarsh, near Chipstone, Essex. Not that I hold it’s proper to write to a man’s wife while he’s alive—but my feelings don’t count.” And he tendered her the letter.
“It does seem more becoming for Flynt to have his Cousin Caroline’s letter,” admitted Martha, shrinking back meekly.
Bundock relaxed in beams. “I’m wonderfully pleased with you, Mrs. Flynt,” he said, handing Caleb the letter. “You’re a shining example, for all you stand up for that chit. When I think of Deacon Mawhood’s wife and how she defies him with that bonnet of hers——!”
“What sort of bonnet?” said Martha, pricking up her ears.
“You haven’t heard?” Bundock’s satisfaction increased. “It’s like the Queen’s—drat her! I mean, drat Mrs. Mawhood—made with that new plait—‘Brilliant’s’ the name. They turn the border of one edge of the straw inwards and that makes it all splendiferous.”
“Pomps and wanities,” groaned Caleb. “And she a deacon’s wife!”
Bundock sniggered. His sympathy with the husband was deeper and older than theology.
“I told you,” Martha reminded Caleb, “what would come of electing a ratcatcher a deacon.”
“A righteous ratcatcher,” maintained Caleb sturdily, “be higher than a hungodly emperor.”
“You haven’t got any emperors,” said the practical Martha.
“And how many kings have joined your Ecclesia?” put in Bundock.
“All the kings of righteousness!” answered Martha in trumpet-tones.
Bundock was quelled. “Well, I can’t stop gammicking,” he said, shouldering his bag.
“Won’t you have a glass of pagles wine?” said Martha, relapsing to earth.
“No, thank you. I’ve got a letter for Frog Cottage too!”
“For Master Peartree!” cried Martha. “And all in one morning. Well, if that’s not a miracle!”
“You and your miracles!” he said with a Tom Paine brutality. “Why I saved up yours till another came for Swash End. And so I’ve managed to kill——” His face suddenly changed. The brutal look turned beatific. But his sentence was frozen. The good couple regarded him dubiously.
“What’s amiss?” cried Martha.
Bundock gasped for expression like a salmon on a slab. “To kill” burst from his lips again, but the rest was choked in a spasm of cachinnation.
“You’ll kill yourself laughin’,” said Caleb.
Bundock mastered himself with a mighty effort. “So as to kill—ha, ha, ha!—to kill—ha, ha, ha!—two frogs—ha, ha, ha!—with one stone!”
Martha corrected him coldly: “Two birds, you mean.”
“Ay,” corroborated Caleb, “the proverb be two birds.”
“But here,” Bundock explained between two convulsions, “it’s two frogs.”
Caleb shook his head. “Oi’ve lived here or by the saltings afore you was born, and brought up a mort o’ childer here. Two birds, sonny, two birds.”
Bundock’s closing chuckles died into ineffable contempt.
“Good morning,” he said firmly.
“You’re sure you won’t have a sip o’ pagles wine?” repeated Martha.
He shook his head sternly. “If I had time for drinking I’d have time to tell you all the news.” He turned on his heel, presenting the post-bag at them like a symbol of duty.
“Anything fresh?” murmured Martha.
Bundock veered round viciously. “D’you suppose all Bradmarsh is as sleepy as the Froggeries? Fresh? Why, there’s things as fresh as the thatch on Farmer Gale’s barn or the paint on Elijah Skindle’s new dog-hospital or the black band on the chimney-sweep’s Sunday hat.”
“Is Mrs. Whitefoot dead?” inquired Martha anxiously.
“No, ’twas only his mother-in-law in London, and when he went up to the funeral he had his pocket picked. Quite spoilt his day, I reckon—ha, ha, ha!”
“Buryin’ ain’t a laughin’ matter,” rebuked Caleb stolidly.
“It depends who’s buried,” said Bundock. “I shouldn’t cry over Mrs. Mawhood. Which reminds me that the Deacon sent out the Bellman to say he couldn’t be responsible for her debts.”
“Good!” cried Caleb. Martha paled, but was silent.
“Only the Bellman spoilt it as usual with his silly old jokes. Proclaimed that the Deacon had put his foot down on his wife’s bonnet.”
“He, he, he!” laughed the old couple.
Bundock turned a hopeless hump. “Good morning!”
“And thank you kindly for the letter,” called Martha.
“Don’t mention it,” said Bundock. “And besides I killed—ho, ho, ho!—two frogs!”
They heard his explosions on the quiet air long after he and his royal hump had vanished along the Bradmarsh road.
