The Salamanca Corpus: Wandering Heath (1896)
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curlews, field-fares, and plovers, both green and golden; rooks, starlings, little white-rumped sandpipers; herons from the upper woods and gulls from seaward. Master Simon had fine sport in the short days, and the inn might take care of itself, which it was perfectly well able to do. Its foundations rested on sunken piles of magnificent girth—"as stout as myself," said Master Simon modestly—and on these it stood so high that even the great flood of 'fifty-nine had overlapped the kitchen threshold but once, at the top of a spring-tide with a northwesterly gale behind it; and then had retreated within the hour. "It didn't put the fire out," boasted Master Simon. He was proud of his inn, and for some very good reasons. To begin with, you would not find another such building if you searched England for a year. It consisted almost wholly of wood; but of such wood. The story went that on a blowing afternoon in the late autumn of 1588 two Spanish galleons from the Great Armada—they had been driven right around Cape Wrath— came trailing up the estuary and took ground just above Ponteglos. Their crews landed and marched inland, and never returned. [228] Some say the Cornishmen cut them off and slew them. For my part, I think it more likely that these foreigners found hospitality, and very wisely determined to settle in the country. Certain it is, you will find in the upland farms over Cuckoo Valley a race of folks with olive complexions, black curling hair and beards, and Southern names— Santo, Hugo, Jago, Bennett, Jose. At all events, the Spanyers (Spaniards) never came back to their galleons, which lay in the ooze by the marsh meadows until the very birds forgot to fear them, and built in their rigging. By the Rôles d'Oleron— which were, in effect, the maritime laws of that period—all wrecks or wreckage belonged to the Crown when neither an owner nor an heir of a late owner could be found for it. But in those days the king's law travelled lamely through Cornwall; so that when, in 1605, these galleons were put up to auction and sold by the Lord of the Manor—who happened to be High Sheriff—nobody inquired very closely where the money went. It is more to the point that the timber of them was bought by one Master Blaise—never mind the surname; he was an ancestor of Master Simon's, and a well-to-do wool- [229]
comber of Ponteglos. This Master Blaise already rented the ferry-rights by Flowing Source, and certain rights of fishery above and below; and having a younger son to provide for, he conceived the happy notion of this hostelry beside the river. For ground-rent he agreed to carry each Michaelmas to the Lord of the Manor one penny in a silk purse, and the lord's bailiff, on bringing the receipt, was to take annually of Master Blaise and his heirs one jack of ale of the October brewing and one smoke-cured salmon of not less than fifteen pounds' weight. These conditions having been duly signed, in the year 1606, Master Blaise laid the foundations of his inn upon the timbers of one galleon and set up the elm keelson of the other for his roof-tree. Its stout ribs, curving outwards and downwards from this magnificent balk, supported the carvel - built roof, so that the upper half of the building appeared —and indeed was a large inverted hull, decorated with dormer-windows, brick chimneys, and a round pigeon-house surmounted by a gilded vane. The windows he took ready-made from the Spaniard's bulging stern-works. And for signboard he hung out, between two bulging poop-lanterns, a [230]
large bituminous painting on panel, that had been found on board the larger galleon, and was supposed to represent the features of her patron, Saint Nicholas Prodaneli. But the site of the building had always been known as Flowing Source, and by this name and no other Master Blaise's inn was called for over two hundred years. By this time its timber roof had clothed itself with moss upon the north side, and on the west the whole framework inclined over the river, as though the timbers of the old galleon regretted their proper element and strained toward it tenderly, quietly, persistently. But careful patching and repairing had kept the building to all appearance as stout as ever; and any doubts of its stability were dispelled in a moment by a glance at Master Simon, the landlord. Master Simon's age by parish register fell short of forty, but he looked at least ten years older: a slow man with a promising stomach and a very satisfactory balance at the bank; a notable breeder of pigeons and fisher of eels. He could also brew strong ale, and knew exactly how salmon should be broiled. He had heard that the world revolves, and decided to stand still and let it come round to him. [231] Certainly a considerable number of its inhabitants found their way to the "Flowing Source '' sooner or later. Marketers crossed the ferry and paused for a morning drink. In the cool of the day quiet citizens rambled up from Ponteglos with rod and line, or brought their families by boat on the high evening tide to eat cream and junket and sit afterward on the benches by the inn-door, watching the fish rise and listening to the song of the young people some way up stream. Painters came, too, and sketched the old inn, and sometimes stayed for a week, having tasted the salmon. Pigeon-breeders dropped in and smoked long pipes in the kitchen with Master Simon, and slowly matured bets and matches. And once or twice in the summer months a company of pilgrims would arrive—queer literary men in velveteen coats, who examined all the rooms and furniture as though they meant to make a bid for the inn complete; who talked with outlandish tongues and ordered expensive dinners, and usually paid for them next morning, rather to Master Simon's surprise. It appeared that there had been once, in the time of Master Simon's grandfather, a certain potboy at the "Flowing Source" who ran off [232] into the world and became a great poet; and these pilgrimages were made in his honor. Master Simon found this story somehow very creditable to himself, and came in time to take almost as much pride in it as in his pigeons and broiled salmon. Regularly after dinner on these occasions he would exhibit an old pewter pint-pot to the pilgrims, and draw their attention to the following verse, scratched upon it—as he asserted—by the poet's own hand: Who buys beef buys bones, Who buys land buys stones, Who buys eggs buys shels, But who buys ale buys nothing els. And the pilgrims feigned credulity according as they valued Master Simon's opinion of their intelligence. But most welcome of all were the merchant-captains from Ponteglos, among whom custom had made it a point of honor to report themselves at the "Flowing Source" within twenty-four hours after dropping anchor by Ponteglos Quay. When or why or how the custom arose nobody was old enough to remember, but a master mariner would as soon have thought of sailing without [233] log or leadline as of putting in and out of Ponteglos without tasting Master Simon's ale—"calling for orders," as they put it. Master Simon had never climbed a sea-going ship except to shake hands with a friend and wish him good voyage and return to shore with the pilot; but the teak walls of his parlor were lined with charts of such very remote parts of the world, and his shelves with such a quantity of foreign china and marine curiosities, and he spoke so familiarly of Gallapagos, Batavia, Cape Verde, the Horn, the Straits of Magellan, and so forth, and would bring his telescope so knowingly to bear on the gilt weathercock over Ponteglos church tower, that until you knew the truth you would have sworn half his life had been spent on the quarterdeck. And while —— the sea-captains—serious men, attired in blue cloth, wearing rings in their ears—sat and smoked canaster and other queer tobaccos in painted china pipes, and talked of countries whose very names conjured up visions of parrots, and carved idols, and sharks, and brown natives in flashing canoes, Master Simon would put a shrewd question or two and wag his head over the answers as a man who hears just what he expected. And [234] sometimes toward the close of the sitting, if he knew his company very well, he would. reward them with his favorite and only song, the Golden Vanitee: '' A ship I have got in the North Countree,
In some hazy way he had persuaded himself that the Spanish galleon of the ballad was the very ship whose timbers overarched him and his audience; and for the moment, being himself inverted (so to speak) by the potency of his own singing, he blew out his chest and straddled out his thick calves and screwed up his eyes, quite as if his roof-tree were right-side-up once more in blue water, and he on deck beside the weather-rail. But the mood began to pass as soon as he bolted the front door behind his guests, and Ann the cook poured him out his last cup of mulled ale and withdrew with, the saucepan. And another noon would find him seated under his leaning house-front, his eyes half-closed, his attention divided between the whisper of the tide and the murmur in the pigeon-cotes overhead, his body at ease and his soul content. His was a happy life— [235] or had been, but for two crumpled rose-leaves. To begin with, there were those confounded pot-boys. It puzzled Master Simon almost as much as it annoyed him; he paid fair wages and passed for a good employer; but he could not keep a pot-boy for twelve months. As a matter of fact, I know the river to have been the bottom of the mischief—the river, and perhaps the talk of the ship-captains. It might satisfy Master Simon to sit and watch the salmon passing up in autumn toward their spawning beds, and rubbing, as they went, their scales against his landing-stage to clear them of the sea-lice; to watch them and their young passing seaward in the early spring; to watch and wait and spread his nets in the due season. But for the youngsters this running water was a constant lure—the song of it and the dimple on it. It coaxed them, as it coaxed the old galleon, to lean over and listen. And the moment that listening became intolerable, they were off. Only one of them—the poet before mentioned—had ever expressed any desire to return and revisit— 'The shining levels and the dazzled wave Emerging from his covert, errant long, [236]
In solitude descending by a vale Lost between, uplands where the harvesters Pause in the swathe, shading their eyes to watch Some barge or schooner stealing tip from sea; Themselves in sunset, she a twilit ghost Parting the twilit woods... Ah, loving God! Grant in the end this world may slip away With whisper of that water by the bows Of such a bark, bearing me home—thy stars Breaking the gloom like kingfishers, thy heights Golden with wheat, thy waiting angels there Wearing the dear rough faces of my kin! " I doubt if he meant it, any more than Virgil meant his "flumina amem silvasque inglorius." At any rate, the public knew what was due to itself, and when the time came, gave the man a handsome funeral in Westminster Abbey. Among his pall-bearers walked the Prime Minister, the Commander-in-Chief, the President of the Royal Academy of Arts, and (as representing rural life) the Chief Secretary of Foreign Affairs. What else disturbed the placid current of Master Simon's cogitations? Why, this: he was the last of his race, and unmarried. For himself, he had no inclination to marry. But sometimes, as he shaved his chin of a morning, the reflection in his [237] round mirror would suggest another. Was he not neglecting a public duty? Now there dwelt down at Ponteglos a Mistress Prudence Waddilove, a widow, who kept the Pandora's Box Inn on the quay— a very tidy business. Master Simon had known her long before she married the late Waddilove; had indeed sat on the same form with her in infants' school—she being by two years his junior, but always a trifle quicker of wit. He attended her husband's funeral in a neighborly way, and, a week later, put on his black suit again and went down—still in a neighbourly way—to offer his condolence. Mistress Prudence received him in the best parlor, which smelt damp and chilly in comparison with the little room behind the bar. Master Simon remarked that she must be finding it lonely. Whereupon she wept. Master Simon suggested that he, for his part, had tried pigeon-breeding, and found that it alleviated solitude in a wonderful manner. "There's my tumblers. If you like, I'll bring you down a pair. They're pretty to watch. Of course, a husband is different"------- “Of course," Mistress Prudence assented, [238]
her grief too recent to allow a smile even at the picture of the late Waddilove (a man of full habit) cleaving the air with frequent somersaults. She added, not quite inconsequently: “He is an angel." "Of course," said Master Simon, in his turn. “But I think," she went on quite inconsequently, "I would rather have a pair of carriers.'' "Now, why in the world?" wondered Master Simon. He kept carrier pigeons, to be sure. He kept pigeons of every sort— tumblers, pouters, carriers, Belgians, dragons. the subdivisions, when you came to them, were endless. But the carriers were by no means his show-birds. He kept them mainly for the convenience of Ann the cook. Ann had a cunning eye for a pigeon, and sometimes ventured a trifle of her savings on a match; and though in his masculine pride he never consulted her, Master Simon always felt more confident on hearing that Ann had put money on his bird. Now, when a match took place at some distant town or flying ground, Ann would naturally be anxious to learn the result as quickly as possible; [239]
and Master Simon, finding that the suspense affected her cookery, had fallen into the habit of taking a hamper of carriers to all distant meetings and speeding them back to "Flowing Source" with tidings of his fort-vine. Apart from this office — which they performed well enough—he took no special pride in them. The offer Of a pair of his pet tumblers, worth their weight in gold, had cost him an effort; and when Mistress Prudence, ordinarily a clear-headed woman, declared that she preferred carriers, she could hardly have astonished him more by asking for a pair of stock-doves. “Oh, certainly," he answered, and went home and thought it over. Women were a puzzle; but he had a dim notion that if he could lay hand on the reason why Mistress Prudence preferred ordinary carriers to prize tumblers, he would hold the key to some of the secrets of the sex. He thought it over for three days, during- which he, smoked more tobacco than was good for him. At about four o'clock in the afternoon of the third day, a smile enlarged his face. He set down his pipe, smacked his thigh, stood up, sat down again, and began to laugh. He laughed slowly and deliberately—not loudly [240] —for the greater part of that evening, and woke up twice in the night and shook the bedclothes into long waves with his mirth. Next morning he took two carriers from the cote, shut them in a hamper, and rowed down to Ponteglos with his gift. But Mrs. Waddilove was not at home. She had started early by van for Tregarrick (said the waitress at the Pandora's Box) on business connected with her husband's will. "No hurry at all,-'' said Master Simon. He slipped a handful of Indian corn under the lid, and left the hamper "with his respects." Then he rowed home, and spent the next two days after his wont; the only observable difference being the position of his garden chair. It stood as a rule under the shadow of the broad eaves, but now Master Simon ordered the tap-boy to carry it out and set it by a rustic table close to the river's brink, whence, as he smoked, he could keep comfortable watch upon the pigeon-cote. “You'll catch a sunstroke," said Ann the cook. "I hope you're not beginning to forget how to take care of yourself." “Well, I hope so too," Master Simon answered; but did not budge. On the morning of the third day, however, [241]
he saw that which made him step indoors and mount to the attic under the cote. Having opened with much caution a trap-door in the roof, he slipped an arm out and captured a carrier pigeon. The bird carried a note folded small and bound under its wing with a thread of silk. Master Simon opened the note and read: “If you loves me as I loves you,
He had prepared himself for a hearty chuckle; but he broke out with a profuse perspiration instead. "Oh, this is hustling a man!" he ingeminated, staring round the empty attic like a rabbit seeking a convenient hole. "Not three weeks buried!" he added, with another groan, and began to loosen his neck-cloth. While thus engaged, he heard a flutter above the trap-door, and a second pigeon alighted, with a second note, also bound with a silken thread. “Lor-a-mercy!" gasped Master Simon. But the second note was written in a different hand, and ran as follows: “I could die of shame. It was all that hussy of a girl. She did it for a joke. I'll [242]
Master Simon, rode nown to Ponteglos that very afternoon, and the two carriers went back with him. Happiness seemed to have shaken its wings and quite departed from Pandora's Box; but a twinkle of something not entirely unlike hope lurked in the corners of the waitress's eyes—albeit their lids were red and swollen—as she ushered Master Simon into the best parlor. "What can you be thinking of me?" began the widow. Her eyes were red and swollen, too. "I've brought back the pigeons." “I can never bear the sight of them again! '' “You might begin different, you know," suggested Master Simon, affably; "some little message about the weather, for instance. Have you given that girl warning to leave?'' “You see, I'm so lonely here...."
[243]
for Illogan, in the mining district, where the matches for the championship cup were to be flown that year. Now Ann the cook had ventured no less than five pounds upon Harmony. Five pounds represented a half of her annual wage, and a trifle less than half of her annual savings. Therefore she spent the greater part of the following afternoon at her window, gazing westward in no small perturbation of spirit. It wanted a few minutes to five when a carrier pigeon came travelling across the zenith, shot downwards suddenly, and alighted on the roof. Ann climbed to the trapdoor and put out a hand. The bird was preening his feathers, and allowed himself to be taken easily. In circumstances less agitating Ann had not failed to observe that the thread about the messenger's wing was not of the kind that Master Simon used. But her eyes opened wide as they fell on the handwriting, and still wider as she read: '' It is all for the best, perhaps. If only people have not begun to talk.—Prudence." A second messenger arrived toward evening with word of Harmony's- success. But [244] the news hardly relaxed Ann's brow, which kept a pensive, contraction even when her master arrived next evening, and poured out her winnings on the table from the silver challenge cup. She wore this frown at intervals for a fortnight, and all the while maintained an unusual silence which puzzled Master Simon. Then one morning he heard her in the kitchen scolding the tap-boy with all her pristine heartiness. That night, after mulling her master's ale, she turned at the door, saucepan in hand, and coughed to attract attention. “Well, Ann; what is it? " “You've been philanderin'." “Hey! Upon my word, Ann-------" Ann produced the Widow Waddilove's note and flattened it out under Master Simon's eyes. And Master Simon blushed painfully. “Are you goin' to marry the woman?" Ann demanded. "I think not." “I reckon you will." "Well, you see, there has been a hitch. She won't leave the 'Pandora's Box,' and I'm not going to budge from 'Flowing [245]
Source.' If a woman won't put herself out to that extent—besides, she cooks no better than you." “Not so well. You wasn't thinking, by any chance, o' marryin' me? " "Ann, you're perfectly brazen! Well, no; to tell you the plain truth, I wasn't." “That's all right; because I've gone, and promised myself to a young farmer up the valley." “What's his name? " "I shan't tell you; for the reason that I've a second to fall back on, if I find on acquaintance that the first won't do. But first or second, I'll marry one or t'other at the month-end, and so I give you notice." Master Simon sighed. "Well! well! I must get on as best I can with Tom for a while." Tom was the tap-boy. “Tom's going, too. I bullied him so this morning that he means to give notice tomorrow; that is, if he don't save himself the trouble by running off to sea.'' "The twelfth in five years!" ejaculated Master Simon, stopping his pipe viciously. "And small blame to them. Married man or mariner—that's what a boy is born [246] for. Better dare wreck or wedlock than sit here and talk about both. Take my advice, master, and marry the widow.'' Ann carried out her own matrimonial programme, at any rate, with spirit and determination. Finding the first young farmer satisfactory, she espoused him at the end of the month, and turned her back on '' Flowing Source.'' And Tom the tap-boy fulfilled her prophecy and ran away to sea. And the old inn leaned after him until its timbers creaked. And the autumn floods rose and covered the meadows. Master Simon sat and smoked, and made his own bed, and accomplished some execrable cookery in the intervals of oiling his duck-gun. Even duck-shooting becomes a weariness when a man has to manage gun and punt single-handed. One afternoon he abandoned the sport in an exceedingly bad temper, and pulled up to jaws of Cuckoo Valley. Here he landed, and after an hour's trudge in the marshy bottoms had the luck to knock over two brace of woodcock. He rowed back with his spoil, and was making fast to the ferry steps, when a thought struck him. He shipped the pad- [247]
dies again, and pulled down to Ponteglos. The short day was closing, and already a young moon glimmered on the floods. The woodcock were cooked to a turn; juicier birds never reclined on toast. The waitress removed the cloth and returned with a kettle; retired and returned again with a short-necked bottle, a glass and spoon, sugar, a nutmeg, and a lemon; retired with a twinkle in her eye. “To fortify you," said Mistress Prudence, rubbing a lump of sugar gently on the lemon-rind. "The night air," Master Simon murmured. "Against the damp house you're going back to," the lady corrected. “You talk without giving it a trial." “As you talk, in your parlor, of deep-sea voyages." "As a ship's captain you would respect me, perhaps? '' “No, for you haven't the head. But I should like your pluck. If I saw you setting off for sea in earnest, I would run out and give you a chance to steer a woman instead of a ship. You would find her safer.'' |