The Strand Magazine/Volume 2/Issue 12/A Day in the Country
A Day in the Country.
IS name was Brown-Smith—he wrote it with a hyphen, and was hurt when people in familiar converse neglected to mark that fact—J. Brown-Smith. He was a poet, not a very fine one perhaps, but certainly not a very bad one. Years of practice had given him the literary trick, which goes for more than an uninstructed person would be apt to fancy, and he had a good heart and an unaffected love for all things beautiful and gracious. He wore a slouched hat and a long paletot, and sported a big russet beard and moustache, so that he looked rather like a brigand out of business, until his mild and beneficent eye bewrayed him. He was generally to be seen with the amber stem of a big meerschaum between his lips, and he talked a good deal in a harmless way about Bohemia. When he had been younger Bohemia had had an actual existence, but Brown-Smith lived in the lights and shadows of a day which had for some time departed, and was faithful to traditions which were scorned by the majority of his compeers.
"He hailed a hansom."
He had been in love, probably more than once in his time, but once at least. He had been already middle-aged when he had made his final choice, and now his temples were grizzled and he was bald on top, and there were lines of silver in the russet beard. The lady on whom he had be owed his affections had been but half his age, and had elected to marry a much younger man. Brown-Smith proposed to her when she had been a month engaged, and, learning the truth, went away sorrowful, and made his verses his wife, and the cronies of his club his family circle.
It befell upon an autumn morning that the breath of the dying year put him in mind of the country as he sat in his London lodgings, and awoke a craving in his mind for the sight of yellowing trees and misty pastures. Everybody he knew lived in town, and of late years, though he wrote a great deal about rural things, he had hardly seen the country at all. He hated constitutional walks and journeys without a purpose, and for awhile he could think of nowhere to go to. But on a sudden he bethought him of his old sweetheart, who was settled fifteen or sixteen miles away from London, and he fancied that it would not be an unpleasant thing to go down and look at her abiding-place. He had no idea of calling upon her, or of intruding himself in any way. His clumsy and futile courtship was now a matter of ancient history, and the probabilities were that he was long ago forgotten. He had a notion that in one way the theme might be fruitful. His muse of late had been a little sterile, and perhaps the journey might prove to have a set of verses in it. That is the way of poets, and, indeed, of men of letters in general. Any little flower of emotion we may grow goes to market, and is more or less consciously nurtured and watered to that end. When we have been long at the business we are market gardeners pure and simple, and grow rose, lily, and forget-me-not side by side with mandragora and the deadly hellebore, culling them and arranging them into bouquets to suit the fashion or fancy of the moment. Brown-Smith arose, donned the sombrero and the long paletot, saw to it that his tobacco pouch and Britannia metal fusee box were well stocked, and, walking into the street, hailed a hansom. That was his constant habit. If ever he went further away from home than to his club, which was just round the corner, he went in a hansom. He hated railway carriages and omnibuses, and if he by rare chance tried to go any where on foot he succeeded only in losing himself, and had finally to call on a cabman to extricate him from the London maze. He had a handsome income of his own; indeed, if he had had a head for business, instead of rhyming, he might have been a wealthy man, and this was his sole extravagance. He was scarcely seated when the poetic spring began to show that it was wound up, and, whilst the cab clattered down Wellington-street and over Waterloo-bridge, the poet began to manufacture verses:—
Cabman, who pliest in the roaring Strand,
Sleepily pliest in the autumn weather,
Pause, at the signal of my waving hand,
And let's away together
There at least was a beginning, and it hit the feeling of the moment. The measure, as the practised in such matters will observe, lends itself to gravity or gaiety, and the bard might glide from either to either, and might rumble along in sleepy musing between whiles. He got a verse in embryo out of a crowd of little children who danced about an organ, on the top of which a misanthropic ape scratched the hind quarter of disdain with the hand of dejection. Then in due time the lines of houses broke and scattered, and the cab ran between green fields. The poet filled and lit his pipe, and straightway the poetic spring gave another whirl:—
Lord! how the flavour of that first fusee,
Blends with the grateful smell of trodden grasses,
And how I joy in every leafy tree
The hansom passes!
Then he was conscious of his old sweet heart's face. She looked in on him like an actual bodily presence, and surprised him. Another verse came quite naturally, and others flowed easily after it, though he gave them rather a disingenuous turn perhaps, considering the business which took him afield that morning:—
Why, Clare! Sweet Clare! No thought of your bright eyes
Has touched my memory for half a lustre;
And now how fast, with what a sweet surprise,
The fancies muster!
Lads play at love, and think it pleasant play,
And maidens find it, too, a pretty pastime,
Until the god himself descends some day
For first and last time.
He never came to you and me, sweet Clare—
You quite forget me, and I live without you;
And only at a time like this I care
To think about you.
It was not altogether true, but the bard was not going to be over-sentimental. He was getting perilously near the fifties for one thing, and he was going out, of motive aforethought, to look at his old sweetheart's house. Perhaps, if he had formed no such purpose, he might have chosen another measure, and another method of expression. But, in the circumstances, if he must touch his ghost at all, perhaps it was well not to lay a finger of too much stress upon it. It slept, and had slept for many years. It would hardly pay to do more than half awaken it. He went on with his verse-spinning, and in a dreary, half-regretful way was happy. He did not often say a humorous thing, but his whole turn of mind was humorous, and he had never dared to take himself too seriously. Once in a way he had given his whole soul to a woman, but she had never cared for him, and he had been sent out of her presence with a sore heartache, which had faded away little by little into a tranquil regret with a sense of romance around it. These melancholies of the middle-aged are not unpleasant.
The journey came to an end, and the cabman pulled up quite naturally at a publichouse of the better sort, and Brown-Smith was welcomed at the door. Could he have luncheon there by and by? Anything would serve. A little cold meat and a salad? That would do. Their home-brewed was greatly esteemed in the neighbourhood, the curtseying landlady assured him. He would essay a glass at once, and so would the cabman. The cabman being appealed to, touched the brim of his hat and expressed a husky preference for something short. "Two of gin, if you please, ma'am." The bard drank his beer meditatively and slowly, and filled his pipe anew. He had meant to inquire of his old sweetheart's whereabouts. That was a simple thing enough, but the presence of the cabman somehow made it difficult, and when the driver had withdrawn with instructions to stable and feed his horse, and get a snack for himself in the tap-room, it seemed too late to proffer the inquiry. Brown-Smith was shy, in fine, and had a fear which he himself confessed ridiculous, lest the sentimental character of his errand should be known.
He wandered out a little disconsolately into the lane. It was high noon, but there was an autumn mist abroad, and autumn gossamer, clogged thick with congested frost drops, showed everywhere in the hedges. The lane was carpeted thick with fallen leaves, and an earthy odour rose from them, remindful of a hundred memories, all more or less of a mildly sentimental kind. Except when the poetical watchspring set his internal works agoing, and the poetic musical-box sounded its pretty little inward tunes, Brown-Smith was, in the main, a mildly cheerful person. But to-day, what with the train in which his thoughts had started in the morning, and his propinquity to his old sweetheart, and the signs of lovely decay everywhere about, he grew to feel actually downcast and dejected. All the mistakes of his life rose up before him, all its failures and follies. He felt forlorn and old, and life in general seemed to be a very bitter business.
In this melancholy mood he wandered on, until it occurred to him that he had made half a dozen aimless turnings, and had no idea of his present whereabouts. He got lost in his favourite London once a week, but there he had always the ubiquitous cabman to appeal to. Here there was nobody. The lane in which he found himself was just wide enough for the passage of an ordinary vehicle, and was so walled in by thick-leaved hedges, and so arched over by embracing boughs, that the foggy gloom of the day was doubled, and only a damp and mournful twilight illuminated his surroundings. The silence and the solitude suited the mood into which he had allowed himself to fall, and, since he had made it a lifelong practice to surrender himself to his own fancies, he found it easy to give way to this. He arranged his long paletot so that he might take no damage from the moist grass, and, sitting down upon a bank by the roadside, took the russet beard in both hands, and sat staring at the bank opposite like a model for a statue of a poet in reverie. Somebody might come by to guide him in a while; if not, no matter.
"Brokers"
Just as he had arrived comfortably at the conclusion that there was nothing in the world in which it was worth while to be for a moment interested, he was recalled to his honest, natural self by the merest trifle of an incident, in the progress of which he immediately became absorbed.
"This way, gentlemen, if you please," said a voice at once suave and businesslike.
The poet turned, and looked across his shoulder in the direction of the voice. Just where he sat there was a slight gap in the hedge—a mere eyelet hole, large enough to afford him an unrestricted view, but so small that the hedge effectually concealed his presence. He saw before him a pretty little garden, a smooth-shaven lawn, and a small and unpretentious residence of the cottage-villa order. From its door emerged a bustling gentleman in a white hat, carrying a notebook in one hand and a pencil in the other. He was followed by some half-dozen men in various stages of dirty flashness, who had each and all beady eyes, and red lips, and thick hooked noses, and who each carried in one hand a pamphlet and in the other a pencil. The bard immediately recognised these gentlemen as brokers, and he knew, without need of explanation, that a sale of household effects was going on in the pretty retired little villa. The man in the white hat bustled forward into the middle of the lawn, and the thick-nosed contingent grouped about him at varying distances.
"You see the next lot before you, gentlemen," said the auctioneer. "Seven garden seats, various. One patent duplex-action lawn mower, an iron roller, three watering pots, spade, rake, and hoe. How much for this lot, gentlemen?"
The handful of brokers wandered unconcernedly about the lawn, inspecting the various articles offered for sale with depreciating aspect and gesture.
"Come, gentlemen," said the auctioneer, "we can't be here all day. How much? Give me a bid to start with."
"Ted bob," said one of the thick-nosed men.
"Oh, gentlemen, gentlemen!" cried the auctioneer, and became fluent, almost passionate, in laudatory criticism of the articles offered for sale. His voice took a tone of pathetically remonstrant indignation. "Ten shillings! Oh, really, really, gentlemen! Let us be reasonable!"
Another thick-nosed gentleman soared so high into the air of pure reason as to increase the bid by sixpence. The auctioneer expostulated. The goods were being thrown away. He was there to sell without reserve, but it was grievous and hardly to be borne that the things he had to offer should have to be knocked down at prices so far below their real value. The Hebraic crowd listened to his diatribes with a dreary patience; but, nobody offering a further bid for the garden seats, various, and the rest, the lot was knocked down, and the whole party, headed by the auctioneer, meandered back to the house again.
This little episode had inspired the unsuspected onlooker with a variety of emotions, and, after the manner of his tribe, he had profoundly pitied half a dozen imaginary persons before the scene was over. His bardic bosom had been fired with scorn for the handful of money-grubbers banded together to take advantage of the straits of the widow and the fatherless; but when the curtain had fallen on the trivial act he fell into a dejection more mournful than before, and gazed at the ivy-covered porch of the small villa as if he read in it a decree of mysterious and all-embracing doom.
As he looked, a small boy—a boy of five, or thereabouts—came out, nursing a puppy, a smooth-haired, pot-bellied, helpless canine infant of a month or two. The boy, a sturdy little fellow, was evidently labouring under a sense of injury, which he did his best to conquer. He walked resolutely towards the poet, as if he had him in view, and plumping down on the wet grass within two yards of him, hugged his burden to his breast with a gesture so emphatic that the puppy uttered a yowk of remonstrance. At this the child released him, and the pup, in infantile glee, began, with a tottering jocundity, to charge about the lawn, and to bark with a pretence of valour at imagined intruders. He was at the age at which dogs learn to bark, and was obviously proud of his newly found accomplishment. When he had sufficiently asserted his own importance, and had expressed with especial vehemence his opinion of the people then within doors, he returned to his childish companion, and tumbled over him in an ecstasy of fawning affection. The boy gathered him up again in a loose armful, and began to cry silently, but at this instant a jeering call broke in upon his solitude, and the poet, peering through the leafy screen, saw a mean boy, a repulsive boy, with a face freckled all over like a toad's back, who had thrown one leg over the garden wall something less than a score of yards away.
"Yah!" said the freckled boy, "who's being sold up?"
At this the eyes of the infant with the puppy glittered suddenly, and his tears ceased. He clinched his white milk teeth, and put both arms about the puppy.
"Who's being sold up?" the repulsive boy repeated. "Yah!"
He detached small pieces of mortar from the top of the wall, and threw them at the object of his derision. Then, emboldened by the absence of retort, for he was obviously, at the first glance, a boy who loved to deride in safety, he threw the other leg over the wall, and dropped stealthily into the garden. Then, having assured himself by observation that his way of retreat was clear, and that, if need were, he could scale the wall before the enemy reached him, he threw a stone, and finding that this elicited no retort, he grew still bolder, and ventured forward. He was an older boy than the rightful occupant of the lawn, and topped him by three ungainly inches.
"Yah!" he said again, for he was a boy unfertile in resource, "who's being sold up?"
The little chap with the puppy was breathing hard, and to Brown-Smith's eye, looked likely to be dangerous. The poet had half a mind to steal silently along the lane until he found the gate, then to enter, and effect at least a momentary modification in the sentiment of the boy with the freckles. But he was a shy man, and contented himself with watching. The mean boy, quite secure by this time, stood over the object of his scorn, and goaded him still further.
"They've got the pup in the catalogue."
At this the smaller boy started to his feet, hugging his burden.
"No, they haven't," he said, defiantly, but yet with a tremor of doubt in his tone.
"Yes they have, though," said the freckled boy. "They're going to sell him. Not as he'll fetch much. Yah! You have got to be hard up before you'd sell a pup like that."
"The freckled boy was smitten."
Then the pup and the bard and the boy with the freckles were all simultaneously startled. The pup was whirled wildly in air, the freckled boy was smitten with extreme violence on the very tip of his jeering nose, and the poet exulted, as a poet has a right to exult whenever he sees the trampled soul arise, and the tyrant tremble. The freckled boy was not valiant in fight, but he was robust of lung. He yelled manfully, and his screams brought out an excited nurse-girl, in a whirl of flounces.
"Look what your Bob's done," said the chastised tormentor. His nose was bleeding, and from the spectacle he presented there was no knowing what injury he had received.
"Oh, you bad, wicked, naughty, abominable child!" cried the nurse-girl, and in one second the champion of the right was on her knee, and every adjective took emphasis from a sounding slap. The little fellow struggled away from her and stood on the defensive.
"He said they'd sell my puppy."
"So they will," said the nurse-girl, spitefully angry. "I'll see to that. Oh, master Gordon, don't be making that noise, you'll have everybody thinking you're killed. Come indoors and let me wash your face."
With that she marched the discomfited intruder away. The puppy, at whose age emotions, however violent, are short lived, had forgotten his astonishment, and returned frisking to his playmate.
"They shan't sell you!" said the boy. "I won't let them sell you. You haven't done anything to be sold, have you, Tiny? Look here, I'll go away and be a cabin boy. I'll take you with me, and then they can't sell you."
He kissed the puppy on the nose, and set out at once, hot with determination. Brown-Smith arose with intent to meet the child at the gate and soothe injured honour with the plaster of a new half-crown, bright from the mint, which he happened to carry in his purse. But before he had gained the gate the boy was in the lane, running as fast as his small legs would carry him.
"He won't go far," said the poet to himself, and refrained from quickening his own pace, lest he should frighten him.
After a burst of thirty or forty yards the adventurer fell into a jog trot, and from that into a walk. But the walk was dogged and full of purpose. The poet would not have been a poet if he had not remembered his own childhood. He, too, had risen, though many years ago, against abuse and tyranny with a soul which flamed with all the passionate valour which inspired Garibaldi or Kosciusko. If all good men, so Brown-Smith mused, wistfully watching the little figure before him, kept the childish courage and the childish hate of tyranny the world would have had smooth going for the weakest long and long ago.
"We degenerate," said Brown-Smith. "The Hampden of five is a trimmer at five and twenty. The infant Cromwell grows up to vote at the order of a Caucus."
The boy walked on, and Brown-Smith followed him, recalling a certain experience of his own, when he too had, at the premature age of five, rushed to face the world. He recalled the fact that that determination had endured for some ten minutes, and he looked for the same rapid cooling of heroic intent in this case. The boy in front, however, held steadily on for a mile. By this time he had set down the puppy, who frisked irresponsibly at his heels. The poet began to find his long paletot oppressive, and disembarrassing himself of it, threw it over his arm. What thoughts filled the child's mind beyond the rooted sense of injustice and resolve it would be difficult to tell, but he pegged away at his best pace, looking neither to left nor right, for a full hour. Brown-Smith admired his energy and determination, but began to hope that they would be of brief duration. On a sudden, the puppy, after a frantic burst of high spirits, lay down panting in the road, and refused to be allured or commanded further. In the end, the child took him up again; but, in spite of anger and resolve, he was already growing weary, and when he had covered another hundred yards, he sat down upon a bank by the roadside to rest. The poet smilingly approached him and sat down.
"That's a nice little dog you have there," he said, by way of opening the conversation. The child looked shy, and returned no answer. "Do you think he would make friends with me? Let us see? He's tired, I fancy."
Brown-Smith's voice was naturally gentle, and his face was friendly and inviting. The child and the puppy, with the intuition natural to their several states and ages, trusted and believed in him at once.
"That's a nice little dog."
"And where are we going to, my little man?" The boy hung his head at this query, and answered nothing. "Aren't we rather a long way from home? Do you know, it strikes me that if we go much further we shall lose ourselves. Don't you think we'd better be going back again?" No answer still. The boy fondled the head of the pup as he lay in Brown-Smith's lap, and looked up once at his strange companion. "Don't you think," asked Brown-Smith, hazarding a guess, "that mamma will be likely to miss you?"
"She's gone away," said the child; "Betsy says she isn't coming back again."
"Now, do you know," said the poet, with an air of weight and gravity, "I don't believe in Betsy? I think it very likely that mamma's at home this minute. I don't know, mind you. I only say I think it very likely. Suppose we go and see."
"She went away this morning," the child answered. There was a catch in his voice, and the resolute corners of his mouth began to droop a little. "She went away before the sale, and Betsy says she's never coming back again."
"We won't trouble our heads about Betsy," said the bard, with an air of weightier decision than before. "Betsy's talking nonsense, evidently. Why, bless your soul,” he continued, in a voice altogether convinced and intimate, "I daresay I'm twice as old as you are—three times as old, perhaps—and I never heard of such a thing. The idea of mamma going away and never coming back again! Why, that is obviously preposterous. Perhaps you don't know what it is to be obviously preposterous? But when a thing is obviously preposterous, people always laugh at it. I know that, because I have been obviously preposterous myself, and people have laughed at me."
This mild joke tickled him a little, and his own kindly humour had opened his heart, and made laughter easy. He laughed gaily, and his infant charge laughed also. The pup sat up in the bard's lap, and barked for company.
"Why, the little dog laughs to see such fun," Brown-Smith continued. "He knows when a thing is obviously preposterous, don't you, doggie? What's your name, old fellow?"
"His name's Tiny," said the infant wanderer, who was quite certain of his man by this time. "Mine's Bob. He's two months old, and I'm five years."
"How's Tiny going to be rated on the ship's books?" asked the poet. "Is he going to be a cabin boy?" The child looked at him half ashamed, and wholly wonderstricken. "I know a lot," said Brown-Smith, solemnly. "I could tell you a lot of things. I don't wonder at your punching Master Gordon, but perhaps you needn't have hit him quite so hard."
From that moment Brown-Smith's reputation was established. It was evident that concealment was absolutely worthless with a man like that, and Bob was easily won to the relation of his own short and simple annals. Papa, it seems, had died ever so long ago, when Bob was little. "Less than I am now," he said, explanatorily. Mamma, of course, was mamma. They lived at the Fir Trees. He could give her a local habitation, but no name.
"Are you ever hungry?" Brown-Smith demanded. "I am."
He thought of the cold meat and salad ordered now two hours ago, and his inner man yearned at the fancy.
"We passed a nice place five minutes back. A place that looked to my mind as if it had milk and biscuits in it. Not at all an unlikely place for cake, I should fancy. There might even be plum cake there. I knew a place of that sort once, where they had plum cake with frosted sugar on the top—frosted sugar as thick as that, upon my word of honour." He held up his thumb in illustration. "That's not a thing to be looked for every day," he hastened to add, "but still it might be there. Suppose we go and see, eh?"
The immediate resolution to escape from the tyrannies of Betsy, and to become a cabin boy, made itself air when the poet conjured up this splendid vision. Bob, resuming charge of the puppy, was hoisted on to Brown-Smith's shoulder, and presently the two invaded a tidy roadside inn, where, as good fortune would have it, plum cake and milk were actually obtainable. The poet himself sat down to beef and ale, and rejoiced wholesomely above them.
"You know this little gentleman?" Brown-Smith asked of the landlord.
"I've seen him afore," the landlord answered. "His mother's a widow. She lives about three mile from here. I did hear as she was to be sold up to-day."
"Have you such a thing as a trap handy?" asked the poet. "I should like to drive him home again."
The landlord had a trap, and in ten minutes it was ready.
"Drive to Mrs. Barton's, Jim," cried the landlord, and Brown-Smith started at the name, and even paled a little. The old sweetheart, about whom he had been spinning verses all the morning, bore that name. It was hardly likely that there were two Mrs. Bartons in the same outlying village. It was by no means an impossible thing that there should be two, but to his mind it seemed improbable. Was his old love really a widow, and in distress? And could it be really her child in whom he had taken a passing and kindly interest? He scanned the boy's face with a new eye, and even thought he read some likeness to her features in it. That might be no more than fancy, but it was enough to set his heart fluttering. That organ had so long been quiet that its mild disturbance seemed almost volcanic to him. He had never dreamed that anything would touch it again in this world. If the old Clara of his dreams were really free.
He sat on thorns through the brief journey, and answered the boy's prattle at absent random. Suddenly the trap turned a corner of the lane, and the gate was in sight. Nursemaid Betsy was there with a slight figure in grey beside her. They both turned at the sound of wheels, and the boy sang out "Mamma!" in a rejoicing treble. The poet raised his hat, and blushed like any schoolboy.
"Mrs. Barton," he said, as the trap came to a standstill, "I found your little boy some distance away from here, and I was afraid he might be lost. I have brought him back to you."
He alighted, and lifted the child to the ground. The young widow was pale, and looked as if she had known trouble. She was embarrassed, too, and accepted the poet's proffered hand with a shyness which, as he thought, became her very prettily. The ten years which had elapsed since he had seen her last had left her girlish still, and he thought how wonderfully little she had altered. The old roses would come back with prosperity and happiness. He was amazed to find himself as much in love with her as ever.
"We have not met for a long time," he said.
"No," she answered. "It is a long time since we met. You are a little changed, I think."
"Am I?" he responded. "I don't feel changed at all."
"We have not met for a long time," he said.
Here he remembered the hostler, and dismissed him with a fare which sent off that simple fellow in astonishment. Nursemaid Betsy, milder under the maternal eye than when free of its controlling influence, had led the child away. The puppy alone remained as a witness to the interview, and he looked from one to the other with an inquiring sagacity, much as if he had expected things to take this turn so far, and were interested in the dénouement.
"I came down," said Brown-Smith, "on purpose to have a look at the place you lived in. I hope you don't think that a liberty."
She gave one brief glance at him, and lowered her eyes.
"I learn that you are lonely, Clara, and I am afraid from what I have seen and heard to-day that you are not too well to do. Excuse me, I am an old friend, you know, and I was always clumsy. If you could let me help you, Clara"
He stopped there, not daring to speak all his mind at once.
"I have a place to go to," she answered. "Some friends of mine have found me a situation."
"Don't take it, Clara!" said Brown-Smith, impulsively.
"What else is before me?" she asked.
"My dear!" said the poet, with a directness such as poets rarely use, "I am before you. Take me, and let the situation go. I am no younger than I was, and I thought, until I heard the truth to-day, that I had cured myself of my old fancy. I find I have not."
She murmured something about it being all so strange—so unexpected.
"Strange and unexpected to us both," he answered. "I have kept lonely for your sake all these years."
Five minutes later the wanderer, his desire for naval adventure clean forgotten, found mamma and the friendly stranger sitting side by side in a little arbour, and clambered without hesitation on the poet's knee.
"Mamma," he said, "this gentleman found me when I was going to sea to be a cabin-boy."
"A true bill," said the poet. He was so bright and smiling, and in spite of his grizzled temples looked so young again that, for the time at least, the last ten years of heartache and of loneliness might have been clean wiped away from him. The little widow was smiling too, gravely and tenderly, and the roses of her youth were back again.
"I say," said Master Bob, boldly, dividing the poet's beard and looking up at him. "I told you what my name was. What's yours?"
"Mine?" asked the poet. "I am papa."
"Is that true, mamma?"
"Yes," said the little widow, taking the boy from his protector’s knees and hiding her flushed face against his cheek. "It's quite true."
"Well," said Bob, with an accent of decision, "I call that jolly."
"I call that jolly."