Furze the Cruel. Trevena John

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ Us have lost our cloam and our rabbit-skins. Give I back my duppence, master. I'll work for ye to-morrow."

      Pendoggat hit his horse, and the animal cantered away, and the spectre troubled him no longer. He wiped his chin again and felt satisfied. He had made a poor creature suffer. There was a certain amount of crude pleasure in that thought. But why had that face and voice suggested death, the death of a man who has used his power to deprive a poor wretch of his vineyard? Pendoggat flung the rabbit-skins into the gaping pit of a mine-shaft and cantered on. He was a free man; he was a commoner; the rivers and the rocks were his.

      Brightly stumbled back to the hedge to reclaim his empty basket. He talked to Ju for a little, and tried to understand things, but couldn't. He would have to start all over again. He discovered a turnip, which had probably rolled out of a cart and was therefore any one's property, and he filled his stomach with that. Ju raked a bone bearing a few sinews out of a rubbish-heap. So they might have done worse.

      At the top of the village was an old cow-barn. Above was a loft containing a little dry fern. Brightly and Ju lodged there. It was quite away from other buildings, standing well out upon the moor, therefore nobody heard a queer piping voice, singing and feasting on the quaint doggerel far into the night—

      "Jerusalem the golden,

       Wi' milk and honey blest …

CHAPTER III

       Table of Contents

ABOUT PASTOR AND MASTER

       Table of Contents

      Unpleasant creatures are so plentiful in the world that they cannot be overlooked. Were there only a few they might be ignored; but they throng, they thrust themselves forward, they shout to attract attention, they push the decent-looking out of the way. The ugliest women make the most noise; the ugliest men shove to the front in a crowd; the ugliest insects make their way into bed-chambers. Why Nature made so much ugliness, side by side with so much that is beautiful, only Nature knows. Some countries are made detestable to live in by the presence of hideous creatures. There is the fire-ant of the Amazon valley, which will put human beings to flight. There is the Mygale spider, covered with poisonous red hair, its body the size of a duck's egg, the spread of its legs covering eight inches, which scuttles into a room by moonlight and casts a horrible shadow upon the bed. There is the wolf-spider which, if a man passes near its lair, will leap out and pursue him, and bite him if it can. There are so many of these repulsive things that they cannot be disregarded. Some things can be kept out of the way: abattoirs, operating-theatres, vivisection-hells. People ignore and forget these, because they are not seen; but the man wolf-spider cannot be forgotten, because he leaps out and pursues those that come near his lurking-place.

      Nothing in the entire system of creation can be more inexplicable than the persistent cruelty of Nature. Death there must be, but Nature resents a painless death. Animals not only kill but torture those which are inferior to them. Mason-wasps deliberately vivisect spiders, which are insects extremely tenacious of life. It is the same all the way along the scale up to and including man. Nature does her work with bloody hands; birth, life, death, become a miserable dabble of blood and passion. Some people shut their eyes to it all; others cannot; others add to it; churches with their tolling bells and black masses revel in the mystic side of it.

      There is not a person living who has not done an act of cruelty. It is impossible to refrain from it. However kindly the soul may be Nature will whisper bloody messages; and some day there is sure to be a temporary breakdown. In a town the wretched business is not much seen. It lurks in the dark corners, like the Mygale spider, and comes out perhaps at moonlight to cast its shadow upon the bed. On the sparsely inhabited moor it is visible, for it cannot hide away so easily, and it tries less because it is fiercer. It is like the wolf-spider which dashes out in a mad fury. Upon a wild upland passions are fiercer, just as physical strength is greater. Everything seems to suggest the dark end of the scale; the rain is more furious, the clouds are blacker, the wind is mightier, the rivers are colder; Nature is at full strength. She is wild and lawless, and men are often wild and lawless too. Tender lilies would not live upon the moor, and it is no use looking for them. They are down in the valleys. Upon the moor there is the granite, the spiny gorse, the rugged heather. It is no use looking for the qualities of the lily in those men who are made of the granite, and gorse, and heather.

      Pendoggat was the sort of man who might have melted into tears at hearing a violin played, and then have kicked the performer down a wheal if he asked for a copper. Nature turns out a lot of contradictory work like that. She never troubles to fit the joints together. Had any one told Pendoggat he was a cruel man, he would first of all have stunned the speaker into silence, and then have wondered whatever the man had been driving at. It is a peculiarity of cruelty that it does not comprehend cruelty. No argument will persuade a rabbit-trapper that the wretched animals suffer in the iron jaws of his traps. The man who skins an eel alive, and curses it because it won't keep still, cannot be brought to understand that he is doing anything inhuman. Perhaps he will admit he had never given the subject a thought; more probably he will regard the apostle of mercy as a madman. The only way to enlighten such men is to skin them alive, or compel them to tear themselves to death in an iron trap; and there are, unfortunately, laws to prevent that. The only just law ever made was the lex talionis, and Nature recognises that frequently. Pendoggat trapped rabbits in his fields, and if they were not dead when he found them he left them as a rule. The traps were supposed to kill them in time, and the longer they were in dying the longer their flesh would keep. That was the way he looked at it. Quite a practical way.

      Very likely Pendoggat was of Spanish extraction in spite of his Cornish name. The average Cornishman has a thoroughly good heart, and is, if he be of the true stock, invariably fair. The Cornish man or maid who is dark owes something to foreign blood. There are in Cornwall many men and women so strikingly dark as to attract attention at once; and if their ancestry could be traced back a couple of hundred years it might be found that a Spanish name occurred. While the stout men of Devon were chasing the Armada up channel and plucking the Admiral's feathers one by one, and the patriotic Manacles were doing Cornwall's share by giving the big galleons a hearty welcome, many a shipwrecked sailor found his way into the cottages of fishermen and wreckers, and with the aid of a pocketful of gold pieces made themselves at home. Some possibly were able to return to Spain; others probably seduced their protectors' young women; others were lawfully wedded; others settled down in their new land and took a Cornish name. It is a difficult piece of history to trace, and much must remain pure hypothesis; but it is fairly certain that had there been no Spanish Armada to invade England, and to send Queen Elizabeth to her writing-tablets to reel off a lot of badly-rhymed doggerel in imitation of Master Spenser, there would also have been no Farmer Pendoggat dwelling at Helmen Barton in the parish of Lydford and sub-parish of St. Mary Tavy, as a commoner of Dartmoor and a tenant in name of Elizabeth's descendant the Duke of Cornwall.

      There was nothing of a sinister nature about the Barton. Even its name meant simply in its original Celtic the place of the high stone; hel being a corruption of huhel, and men one of the various later forms of maen; just as huhel twr, the high tor, has now become Hel Tor. Wherever people have been given a chance of dragging in the devil and his dwelling-place they have taken it; actuated, perhaps, by the same motive which impelled the old dame to make a profound reverence whenever the name of the ghostly enemy was mentioned, as she didn't know what would be her fate in a future state, so thought it wise to try and propitiate both sides. The Barton was a long low house of granite, damp and ugly. No architect could make a house built of granite look pleasant; no art could prevent the tough stone from sweating. It was tiled, which made it look colder still. Creepers would not crawl up its walls on account of the winds. СКАЧАТЬ