Noughts and Crosses by Arthur Thomas Quiller Couch

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"It's the _dog_ she's got!"

So it was. The woman had hold of Meg all the time, and the game
little brute had held on to the badger. Also the badger had held
_her_, and when at last his hold slipped, she was a gruesome sight.
She looked round, reproachfully, shook the earth out of her eyes and
went in again without a sound. And Dick picked up a clod and threw
it in his wife's face, between the eyes. She cursed him, in a
perfunctory way, and walked off, down the wood, to look after her
stew.

But now, Meg having pinned her enemy again, we soon dug them out: and
I held the sack while Dick took the badger by the tail and dropped
him in. His teeth snapped, a bare two inches from my left hand, as
he fell. After a short rest, he was despatched. The method need not
be described. It was somewhat crude, and in fact turned me not a
little sick.

"One o'clock," Dick observed, glancing up at the sun, and resuming
his care of Meg. "What're ye trying to do, youngster?"

"Trying to put on paper what a badger's like when he's dead. If only
I had colours--"

"My son, there's a kind of man afflicted with an itch to put all he
sees on paper. What's the use? Fifty men might sit down and write
what the grey of a badger's like; and they can't, because there's no
words for it. All they can say is that 'tis badger's-grey--which
means nought to a man that hasn't seen one; and a man that _has_
don't want to be told. Same with your pencils and paints. Cast your
head back and look up--how deep can you see into the sky?"

"Miles."

"Ay, and every mile shining to the eye. I've seen pictures in my
time, but never one that made a dab of paint look a mile deep.
Besides, why draw a thing when you can lie on your back and look up
at it?"

I was about to answer when Dick raised his head, with a queer
alertness in his eyes. Then he vented a long, low whistle, and went
on binding up Meg's jaw.

Immediately after, there was a crackling of boughs to the left and my
father's head appeared above the slope, with the red face of the
pastor behind it. We were caught.

On the harangue that followed I have no wish to dwell. My father and
the pastor pitched it in by turns, while Dick went on with his
surgery, his mouth pursed up for a soundless whistle. The
prosecution had it all its own way, and I felt uncomfortably sure
about the sentence.

But at last, to our amazement, Dick, having finished the bandaging,
let Meg go and advanced. He picked up my sketch-book.

"Gentlemen both," said he, "I've been listening respectful to your
talk about God and his wrath, and as a poor heathen I'd like to know
your idea of him. Here's a pencil and paper. Will you be kind
enough to draw God? that I may see what he's like."

The pastor's jaw dropped. My father went grey with rage. Dick stood
a pace back, smiling; and the sun glanced on the gold rings in his
ears.

"No, sirs. It ain't blasphemy. But I know you can't give me a
notion that won't make him out to be a sort of man, pretty much like
yourselves--two eyes, a nose, mouth, and beard perhaps. Now my wife
says there's points about a woman that you don't reckon into your
notion; and my dog says there's more in a tail than most men
estimate--"

"You foul-tongued poacher--" broke out my father.

"Now you're mixing matters up," Dick interrupted, blandly; "I poach,
and that's a crime. I've shown your boy to-day how men kill badgers,
and maybe that's wrong. But look here, sir--I've taught him some
things besides; the ways of birds and beasts, and their calls; how to
tell the hour by sun and stars; how to know an ash from a beech, of a
pitch-dark night, by the sound of the wind in their tops; what herbs
will cure disease and where to seek them; why some birds hop and
others run. Sirs, I come of an old race that has outlived books and
pictures and meeting-houses: you belong to a new one and a cock-sure,
and maybe you're right. Anyhow, you know precious little of this
world, whatever you may of another."

He stopped, pushed a hand through his coarse black hair, and, as if
suddenly tired, resumed the old, sidelong gypsy look that he had been
straightening with an effort.

"Your boy'll believe what you tell him: he's got the strength in his
blood. Take him home and don't beat him too hard."

He glanced at me with a light nod, untied his dogs, shouldered his
tools, and slouched away down the path, to sleep under his accustomed
tree that night and be off again, next day, travelling amongst men
and watching them with his weary ironical smile.

THE CAROL.

I was fourteen that Christmas:--all Veryan parish knows the date of
the famous "Black Winter," when the _Johann_ brig came ashore on
Kibberick beach, with a dozen foreigners frozen stiff and staring on
her fore-top, and Lawyer Job, up at Ruan, lost all his lambs but two.
There was neither rhyme nor wit in the season; and up to St. Thomas's
eve, when it first started to freeze, the folk were thinking that
summer meant to run straight into spring. I mind the ash being in
leaf on Advent Sunday, and a crowd of martins skimming round the
church windows during sermon-time. Each morning brought blue sky,
warm mists, and a dew that hung on the brambles till ten o'clock.
The frogs were spawning in the pools; primroses were out by scores,
and monthly roses blooming still; and Master shot a goat-sucker on
the last day in November. All this puzzled the sheep, I suppose, and
gave them a notion that their time, too, was at hand. At any rate
the lambs fell early; and when they fell, it had turned to perishing
cold.

That Christmas-eve, while the singers were up at the house and the
fiddles going like mad, it was a dismal time for two of us. Laban
Pascoe, the hind, spent his night in the upper field where the sheep
lay, while I spent mine in the chall[1] looking after Dinah, our
Alderney, that had slipped her calf in the afternoon--being promised
the castling's skin for a Sunday waistcoat, if I took care of the
mother. Bating the cold air that came under the door, I kept pretty
cosy, what with the straw-bands round my legs and the warm breath of
the cows: for we kept five. There was no wind outside, but moonlight
and a still, frozen sky, like a sounding board: so that every note of
the music reached me, with the bleat of Laban's sheep far up the
hill, and the waves' wash on the beaches below. Inside the chall the
only sounds were the slow chewing of the cows, the rattle of a
tethering-block, now and then, or a moan from Dinah. Twice the
uproar from the house coaxed me to the door to have a look at Laban's
scarlet lantern moving above, and make sure that he was worse off
than I. But mostly I lay still on my straw in the one empty stall
staring into the foggy face of my own lantern, thinking of the
waistcoat, and listening.

I was dozing, belike, when a light tap on the door made me start up,
rubbing my eyes.

"Merry Christmas, Dick!"

A little head, bright with tumbled curls, was thrust in, and a pair
of round eyes stared round the chall, then back to me, and rested on
my face.

"Merry Christmas, little mistress."

"Dick--if you tell, I'll never speak to you again. I only wanted to
see if 'twas true."

She stepped inside the chall, shutting the door behind her.
Under one arm she hugged a big boy-doll, dressed like a sailor--from
the Christmas-tree, I guessed--and a bright tinsel star was pinned on
the shoulder of her bodice. She had come across the cold town-place
in her muslin frock, with no covering for her shoulders; and the
manner in which that frock was hitched upon her made me stare.

"I got out of bed again and dressed myself," she explained. "Nurse
is in the kitchen, dancing with the young man from Penare, who can't
afford to marry her for _ever_ so long, father says. I saw them
twirling, as I slipped out--"

"You have done a wrong thing," said I: "you might catch your death."

Her lip fell:--she was but five. "Dick, I only wanted to see if
'twas true."

"What?" I asked, covering her shoulders with the empty sack that had
been my pillow.

"Why, that the cows pray on Christmas-eve. Nurse says that at twelve
o'clock to-night all the cows in their stalls will be on their knees,
if only somebody is there to see. So, as it's near twelve by the
tall clock indoors, I've come to see," she wound up.

"It's quig-nogs, I expect. I never heard of it."

"Nurse says they kneel and make a cruel moan, like any Christian
folk. It's because Christ was born in a stable, and so the cows know
all about it. Listen to Dinah! Dick, she's going to begin!"

But Dinah, having heaved her moan, merely shuddered and was still
again.

"Just fancy, Dick," the little one went on, "it happened in a chall
like ours!" She was quiet for a moment, her eyes fixed on the glossy
rumps of the cows. Then, turning quickly--"I know about it, and I'll
show you. Dick, you must be Saint Joseph, and I'll be the Virgin
Mary. Wait a bit--"

Her quick fingers began to undress the sailor-doll and fold his
clothes carefully. "I _meant_ to christen him Robinson Crusoe," she
explained, as she laid the small garments, one by one, on the straw;
"but he can't be Robinson Crusoe till I've dressed him up again."
The doll was stark naked now, with waxen face and shoulders, and
bulging bags of sawdust for body and legs.

"Dick," she said, folding the doll in her arms and kissing it--
"St. Joseph, I mean--the first thing we've got to do is to let people
know he's born. Sing that carol I heard you trying over last week--
the one that says 'Far and far I carry it.'"

So I sang, while she rocked the babe:--

'Naked boy, brown boy,
In the snow deep,
Piping, carolling
Folks out of sleep;
Little shoes, thin shoes,
Shoes so wet and worn'--
'But I bring the merry news
--Christ is born!

Rise, pretty mistress,
In your smock of silk;
Give me for my good news
Bread and new milk.
Joy, joy in Jewry,
This very morn!
Far and far I carry it
--Christ is born!'

She heard me with a grave face to the end; then pulling a handful of
straw, spread it in the empty manger and laid the doll there. No, I
forget; one moment she held it close to her breast and looked down on
it. The God who fashions children can tell where she learnt that
look, and why I remembered it ten years later, when they let me look
into the room where she lay with another babe in her clay-cold arms.

"Count forty," she went on, using the very words of Pretty Tommy, our
parish clerk: "count forty, and let fly with 'Now draw around--'"

"Now draw around, good Christian men,
And rest you worship-ping--"

We sang the carol softly together, she resting one hand on the edge
of the manger.

"Dick, ain't you proud of him? I don't see the spiders beginning,
though."

"The spiders?"

"Dick, you're very ig-norant. _Everybody_ knows that, when Christ
was laid in a manger, the spiders came and spun their webs over Him
and hid Him. That's why King Herod couldn't find Him."

"There, now! We live and learn," said I.

"Well, now there's nothing to do but sit down and wait for the wise
men and the shepherds."

It was a little while that she watched, being long over-tired.
The warm air of the chall weighed on her eyelids; and, as they
closed, her head sank on my shoulder. For ten minutes I sat,
listening to her breathing. Dinah rose heavily from her bed and lay
down again, with a long sigh; another cow woke up and rattled her
rope a dozen times through its ring; up at the house the fiddling
grew more furious; but the little maid slept on. At last I wrapped
the sack closely round her, and lifting her in my arms, carried her
out into the night. She was my master's daughter, and I had not the
courage to kiss so much as her hair. Yet I had no envy for the
dancers, then.

As we passed into the cold air she stirred. "Did they come? And
where are you carrying me?" Then, when I told her, "Dick, I will
never speak to you again, if you don't carry me first to the gate of
the upper field."

So I carried her to the gate, and sitting up in my arms she called
twice:

"Laban--Laban!"

"What cheer--O?" the hind called back. His lantern was a spark on
the hill-side, and he could not tell the voice at that distance.

"Have you seen him?"

"Wha-a-a-t?"

"The angel of the Lo-o-ord!"

"Wha-a-a-t?"

"I'm afraid we can't make him understand," she whispered.
"Hush; don't shout!" For a moment, she seemed to consider; and then
her shrill treble quavered out on the frosty air, my own deeper voice
taking up the second line--

"The first' Nowell' the angel did say
Was to certain poor shepherds, in fields as they lay,
--In fields as they lay, a-tending their sheep,
On a cold winters night that was so deep--
Nowell! Nowell!
Christ is born in Israel!"

Our voices followed our shadows across the gate and far up the field,
where Laban's sheep lay dotted. What Laban thought of it I cannot
tell: but to me it seemed, for the moment, that the shepherd among
his ewes, the dancers within the house, the sea beneath us, and the
stars in their courses overhead moved all to one tune,--the carol of
two children on the hill-side.

[1] Cow-house.

THE PARADISE OF CHOICE.

It was not as in certain toy houses that foretell the weather by
means of a man-doll and a woman-doll--the man going in as the woman
comes out, and _vice versa_. In this case both man and woman stepped
out, the man half a minute behind; so that the woman was almost at
the street-corner while he hesitated just outside the door, blinking
up at the sky, and then dropping his gaze along the pavement.

The sky was flattened by a fog that shut down on the roofs and
chimneys like a tent-cloth, white and opaque. Now and then a
yellowish wave rolled across it from eastward, and the cloth would be
shaken. When this happened, the street was always filled with gloom,
and the receding figure of the woman lost in it for a while.

The man thrust a hand into his trousers pocket, pulled out a penny,
and after considering for a couple of seconds, spun it carelessly.
It fell in his palm, tail up; and he regarded it as a sailor might a
compass. The trident in Britannia's hand pointed westward, down the
street.

"West it is," he decided with a shrug, implying that all the four
quarters were equally to his mind. He was pocketing the coin, when
footsteps approached, and he lifted his head. It was the woman
returning. She halted close to him with an undecided manner, and the
pair eyed each other.

We may know them as Adam and Eve, for both were beginning a world
that contained neither friends nor kin. Both had very white hands
and very short hair. The man was tall and meagre, with a receding
forehead and a sandy complexion that should have been freckled, but
was not. He had a trick of half-closing his eyes when he looked at
anything, not screwing them up as seamen do, but appearing rather to
drop a film over them like the inner eyelid of a bird. The woman's
eyes resembled a hare's, being brown and big, and set far back, so
that she seemed at times to be looking right behind her. She wore a
faded look, from her dust-coloured hair to her boots, which wanted
blacking.

"It all seems so wide," she began; "so wide--"

"I'm going west," said the man, and started at a slow walk.
Eve followed, a pace behind his heels, treading almost in his tracks.
He went on, taking no notice of her.

"How long were you in there?" she asked, after a while.

"Ten year'." Adam spoke without looking back. "'Cumulated jobs, you
know."

"I was only two. Blankets it was with me. They recommended me to
mercy."

"You got it," Adam commented, with his eyes fastened ahead.

The fog followed them as they turned into a street full of traffic.
Its frayed edge rose and sank, was parted and joined again--now
descending to the first-storey windows and blotting out the cabmen
and passengers on omnibus tops, now rolling up and over the parapets
of the houses and the sky-signs. It was noticeable that in the crowd
that hustled along the pavement Adam moved like a puppy not yet
waywise, but with lifted face, while Eve followed with her head bent,
seeing nothing but his heels. She observed that his boots were
hardly worn at all.

Three or four times, as they went along, Adam would eye a shop window
and turn in at the door, while Eve waited. He returned from
different excursions with a twopenny loaf, a red sausage, a pipe, box
of lights and screw of tobacco, and a noggin or so of gin in an old
soda-water bottle. Once they turned aside into a public, and had a
drink of gin together. Adam paid.

Thus for two hours they plodded westward, and the fog and crowd were
with them all the way--strangers jostling them by the shoulder on the
greasy pavement, hansoms splashing the brown mud over them--the same
din for miles. Many shops were lighting up, and from these a yellow
flare streamed into the fog; or a white when it came from the
electric light; or separate beams of orange, green, and violet, when
the shop was a druggist's.

Then they came to the railings of Hyde Park, and trudged down the
hill alongside them to Kensington Gardens. It was yet early in the
afternoon. Adam pulled up.

"Come and look," he said. "It's autumn in there," and he went in at
the Victoria gate, with Eve at his heels.

"Mister, how old might you be?" she asked, encouraged by the sound of
his voice.

"Thirty."

"And you've passed ten years in--in there." She jerked her head back
and shivered a little.

He had stooped to pick up a leaf. It was a yellow leaf from a
chestnut that reached into the fog above them. He picked it slowly
to pieces, drawing full draughts of air into his lungs. "Fifteen,"
he jerked out, "one time and another. 'Cumulated, you know."
Pausing, he added, in a matter-of-fact voice, "What I've took would
come to less'n a pound's worth, altogether."

The Gardens were deserted, and the pair roamed towards the centre,
gazing curiously at so much of sodden vegetation as the fog allowed
them to see. Their eyes were not jaded; to them a blade of grass was
not a little thing.

They were down on the south side, amid the heterogeneous plants there
collected, examining each leaf, spelling the Latin labels and
comparing them, when the hour came for closing. In the dense
atmosphere the park-keeper missed them. The gates were shut; and the
fog settled down thicker with the darkness.

Then the man and the woman were aware, and grew afraid. They saw
only a limitless plain of grey about them, and heard a murmur as of
the sea rolling around it.

"This gaol is too big," whispered Eve, and they took hands. The man
trembled. Together they moved into the fog, seeking an outlet.

At the end of an hour or so they stumbled on a seat, and sat down for
awhile to share the bread and sausage, and drink the gin. Eve was
tired out and would have slept, but the man shook her by the
shoulder.

"For God's sake don't leave me to face this alone. Can you sing?"

She began "_When other lips_ . . ." in a whisper which gradually
developed into a reedy soprano. She had forgotten half the words,
but Adam lit a pipe and listened appreciatively.

"Tell you what," he said at the close; "you'll be able to pick up a
little on the road with your singing. We'll tramp west to-morrow,
and pass ourselves off for man and wife. Likely we'll get some farm
work, down in the country. Let's get out of this."

They joined hands and started off again, unable to see a foot before
them in the blackness. So it happened next morning that the
park-keeper, coming at his usual hour to unlock the gates, found a
man and a woman inside with their white faces pressed against the
railings, through which they glared like caged beasts. He set them
free, and they ran out, for his paradise was too big.

Now, facing west, they tramped for two days on the Bath road, leaving
the fog behind them, and drew near Reading. It was a clear night as
they approached it, and the sky studded with stars that twinkled
frostily. Eleven o'clock sounded from a tower ahead. On the
outskirts of the town they were passing an ugly modern villa with a
large garden before it, when an old gentleman came briskly up the
road and turned in at the gate.

Adam swung round on his heel and followed him up the path, begging.
Eve hung by the gate.

"No," said the old gentleman, fitting his latchkey into the door,
"I have no work to offer. Eh?--Is that your wife by the gate?
Hungry?"

Adam whispered a lie in his ear.

"Poor woman, and to be on the road, in such a state, at this hour!
Well, you shall share my supper before you search for a lodging.
Come inside," he called out to Eve, "and be careful of the step.
It's a high one."

He led them in, past the ground-floor rooms and up a flight of
stairs. After pausing on the landing and waiting a long time for Eve
to take breath, he began to ascend another flight.

"Are we going to have supper on the leads?" Adam wondered.

They followed the old gentleman up to the attics and into a kind of
tower, where was a small room with two tables spread, the one with a
supper, the other with papers, charts, and mathematical instruments.

"Here," said their guide, "is bread, a cold chicken, and a bottle of
whisky. I beg you to excuse me while you eat. The fact is, I dabble
in astronomy. My telescope is on the roof above, and to-night every
moment is precious."

There was a ladder fixed in the room, leading to a trap-door in the
ceiling. Up this ladder the old gentleman trotted, and in half a
minute had disappeared, shutting the trap behind him.

It was half an hour or more before Adam climbed after him, with Eve,
as usual, at his heels.

"My dear madam!" cried the astronomer, "and in your state!"

"I told you a lie," Adam said. "I've come to beg your pardon.
May we look at the stars before we go?"

In two minutes the old gentleman was pointing out the
constellations--the Great Bear hanging low in the north-east,
pointing to the Pole star, and across it to Cassiopeia's bright
zigzag high in the heavens; the barren square of Pegasus, with its
long tail stretching to the Milky Way, and the points that cluster
round Perseus; Arcturus, white Vega and yellow Capella; the Twins,
and beyond them the Little Dog twinkling through a coppice of naked
trees to eastward; yet further round the Pleiads climbing, with red
Aldebaran after them; below them Orion's belt, and last of all,
Sirius flashing like a diamond, white and red, and resting on the
horizon where the dark pasture lands met the sky.

Then, growing flushed with his subject, he began to descant on these
stars, their distances and velocities; how that each was a sun,
careering in measureless space, each trailing a company of worlds
that spun and hurtled round it; that the Dog-star's light shone into
their eyes across a hundred trillion miles; that the star itself
swept along a thousand miles in a minute. He hurled figures at them,
heaping millions on millions. "See here"--and, turning the telescope
on its pivot, he sighted it carefully. "Look at that small star in
the Great Bear: that's Groombridge Eighteen-thirty. _He's_ two
hundred billions of miles away. _He_ travels two hundred miles a
second, does Groombridge Eighteen-thirty. In one minute Groombridge
Eighteen-thirty could go from here to Hong-Kong."

"Then damn Groombridge Eighteen-thirty!"

It was uttered in the bated tone that night enforces: but it came
with a groan. The old gentleman faced round in amazement.

"He means, sir," explained the woman, who had grown to understand
Adam passing well, "my man means that it's all too big for us.
We've strayed out of prison, sir, and shall feel safer back again,
looking at all this behind bars."

She reached out a hand to Adam: and this time it was he that
followed, as one blinded and afraid. In three months they were back
again at the gates of the paradise they had wandered from.
There stood a warder before it, clad in blue: but he carried no
flaming sword, and the door opened and let them in.

BESIDE THE BEE-HIVES.

On the outskirts of the village of Gantick stand two small
semi-detached cottages, coloured with the same pale yellow wash,
their front gardens descending to the high-road in parallel lines,
their back gardens (which are somewhat longer) climbing to a little
wood of secular elms, traditionally asserted to be the remnant of a
mighty forest. The party hedge is heightened by a thick screen of
white-thorn on which the buds were just showing pink when I took up
my lodging in the left-hand cottage (the 10th of May by my diary);
and at the end of it are two small arbours, set back to back, their
dilapidated sides and roofs bound together by clematis.

The night of my arrival, my landlady asked me to make the least
possible noise in unpacking my portmanteau, because there was trouble
next door, and the partitions were thin. Our neighbour's wife was
down with inflammation, she explained--inflammation of the lungs, as
I learnt by a question or two. It was a bad case. She was a wisht,
ailing soul to begin with. Also the owls in the wood above had been
hooting loudly, for nights past: and yesterday a hedge-sparrow lit on
the sill of the sick-room window, two sure tokens of approaching
death. The sick woman was being nursed by her elder sister, who had
lived in the house for two years, and practically taken charge of it.
"Better the man had married _she_" my landlady added, somewhat
unfeelingly.

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