Nicky Nan, Reservist by Arthur Thomas Quiller Couch (Q)

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NICKY-NAN, RESERVIST.

By Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch, ('Q')

Contents.

Chap.

I. HOW THE CHILDREN PLAYED.

II. CALL TO ARMS.

III. HOW THE MEN WENT.

IV. THE FIRST SERMON.

V. THE ANONYMOUS LETTER.

VI. TREASURE TROVE.

VII. "QUID NON MORTALIA PECTORIA . . ."

VIII. BUSINESS AS USUAL.

IX. THE BROKEN PANE.

X. THE VICAR'S MISGIVINGS.

XI. THE THREE PILCHARDS.

XII. FIRST ATTEMPT AT HIDING.

XIII. FIRST AID.

XIV. POLSUE _V_ PENHALIGON, NANJIVELL INTERVENING.

XV. THE 'TATY PATCH.

XVI. CORPORAL SANDERCOCK.

XVII. THE SECOND SERMON.

XVIII. FEATHERS.

XIX. I-SPY-HI!

XX. MISS OLIVER PROFFERS ASSISTANCE.

XXI. FAIRY GOLD.

XXII. SALVAGE.

XXIII. ENLIGHTENMENT, AND RECRUITING.

XXIV. THE FIRST THREE.

NICKY-NAN, RESERVIST.

CHAPTER I.

HOW THE CHILDREN PLAYED.

When news of the War first came to Polpier, Nicholas Nanjivell
(commonly known as Nicky-Nan) paid small attention to it, being
preoccupied with his own affairs.

Indeed, for some days the children knew more about it than he, being
tragically concerned in it--poor mites!--though they took it gaily
enough. For Polpier lives by the fishery, and of the fishermen a
large number--some scores--had passed through the Navy and now
belonged to the Reserve. These good fellows had the haziest notion
of what newspapers meant by the Balance of Power in Europe, nor
perhaps could any one of them have explained why, when Austria
declared war on Servia, Germany should be taking a hand. But they
had learnt enough on the lower deck to forebode that, when Germany
took a hand, the British Navy would pretty soon be clearing for
action. Consequently all through the last week of July, when the
word "Germany" began to be printed in large type in Press headlines,
the drifters putting out nightly on the watch for the pilchard
harvest carried each a copy of _The Western Morning News_ or _The
Western Daily Mercury_ to be read aloud, discussed, expounded under
the cuddy lamp in the long hours between shooting the nets and
hauling them.

"When the corn is in the shock,
Then the fish is on the rock."

A very little of the corn had been shocked as yet; but the fields,
right down to the cliffs' edge, stood ripe for abundant harvest.
I doubt, indeed, if in our time they have ever smiled a fairer
promise or reward for husbandry than during this last fortnight of
July 1914, when the crews, running back with the southerly breeze for
Polpier, would note how the crop stood yellower in to-day's than in
yesterday's sunrise, and speculate when Farmer Best or farmer Bate
meant to start reaping. As for the fish, the boats had made small
catches--dips among the straggling advance-guards of the great armies
of pilchards surely drawing in from the Atlantic. "'Tis early days
yet, hows'ever--time enough, my sons--plenty time!" promised Un'
Benny Rowett, patriarch of the fishing-fleet and local preacher on
Sundays. Some of the younger men grumbled that "there was no
tellin': the season had been tricky from the start." The
spider-crabs--that are the curse of inshore trammels--had
lingered for a good three weeks past the date when by all rights they
were due to sheer off. Then a host of spur-dogs had invaded the
whiting-grounds, preying so gluttonously on the hooked fish that,
haul in as you might, three times out of four the line brought up
nothing but a head--all the rest bitten off and swallowed.
"No salmon moving, over to Troy. The sean-boats there hadn't even
troubled to take out a licence." As for lobsters, "they were
becomin' a winter fish, somehow, and up the harbours you started
catchin' 'em at Christmas and lost 'em by Eastertide:" while the
ordinary crabbing-grounds appeared to be clean bewitched.

One theorist loudly called for a massacre of sea-birds, especially
shags and gannets. Others (and these were the majority) demanded
protection from steam trawlers, whom they accused of scraping the
sea-bottom, to the wholesale sacrifice of immature fish--sole and
plaice, brill and turbot.

"Now look 'ee here, my sons," said Un' Benny Rowett: "if I was you,
I'd cry to the Lord a little more an' to County Council a little
less. What's the full size ye reckon a school o' pilchards, now--one
o the big uns? Scores an' scores o' square miles, all movin' in a
mass, an' solid a'most as sardines in a tin; and, as I've heard th'
Old Doctor used to tell, every female capable o' spawnin' up to two
million. . . . No; your mind can't seize it. But ye might be fitted
to grasp that if th' Almighty hadn' ordained other fish an' birds as
well as us men to prey upon 'em, in five years' time no boat'd be
able to sail th' Atlantic; in ten years ye could walk over from
Polpier to Newfoundland stankin' 'pon rotten pilchards all the way.
Don't reckon yourselves wiser than Natur', my billies. . . . As for
steam trawlin', simmee, I han't heard so much open grievin' over it
since Government started loans for motors. Come to think--hey?--
there ben't no such tearin' difference between motors an' steam--not
on principle. And as for reggilations, I've a doo respect for County
Council till it sets up to reggilate Providence, when I falls back on
th' Lord's text to Noey that, boy an' man, I've never known fail.
_While th' earth remaineth, seed-time and harvest shall not cease._
And again," continued Un' Benny Rowett, "Behold, I say unto you,
_Lift up your eyes and look on the fields, for they are white already
to harvest_."

If pressed in argument he would entrench himself behind the wonderful
plenty of john-doreys: "Which," he would say, "is the mysteriousest
fish in the sea and the holiest. Take a john-dorey or two, and the
pilchards be never far behind. 'Tis well beknown as the fish St
Peter took when Our Lord told 'en to cast a hook; an' be shot if he
didn' come to hook with a piece o' silver in his mouth! You can see
Peter's thumb-mark upon him to this day: and, if you ask _me_, he's
better eatin' than a sole, let alone you can carve en with a
spoon--though improved if stuffed, with a shreddin' o' mint.
Iss, baked o' course. . . . Afore August is out--mark my words--the
pilchards'll be here."

"But shall _we_ be here to take 'em?"

It was a dark, good-looking, serious youth who put the question: and
all the men at the end of the quay turned to stare at him. (For this
happened on the evening of Saturday, the 25th--St James's Day,--when
all the boats were laid up for the week-end.)

The men turned to young Seth Minards because, as a rule, he had a
wonderful gift of silence. He was known to be something of a
scholar, and religious too: but his religion did Dot declare itself
outwardly, save perhaps in a constant gentleness of manner.
The essence of it lay in spiritual withdrawal; the man retiring into
his own heart, so to speak, and finding there a Friend with whom to
hold sweet and habitual counsel. By consequence, young Seth Minards
spoke rarely, but with more than a double weight.

"What mean ye, my son?" demanded Un' Benny. "Tell us--you that don't
speak, as a rule, out of your turn."

"I think," answered Seth Minards slowly, "there is going to be War
for certain--a great War--and in a few days."

Three days later the postmistress, Mrs Pengelly (who kept a general
shop), put out two newspaper placards which set all the children at
the Council Schools, up the valley, playing at a game they called
"English and Germans"--an adaptation of the old "Prisoners' Base."
No one wanted to be a German: but, seeing that you cannot well
conduct warfare without an enemy, the weaker boys represented the
Teutonic cause under conscription, and afterwards joined in the
cheers when it was vanquished.

The Schools broke up on the last day of July; and the contest next
day became a naval one, among the row-boats lying inside the old
pier. This was ten times better fun; for a good half of the boys
meant to enter the Navy when they grew up. They knew what it meant,
too. The great battleships from Plymouth ran their speed-trials off
Polpier: the westward mile-mark stood on the Peak, right over the
little haven; and the smallest child has learnt to tell a Dreadnought
in the offing, or discern the difference between a first-class and a
second-class cruiser. The older boys knew most of the ships by name.

Throughout Saturday the children were--as their mother agreed--"fair
out of hand." But this may have been because the mothers themselves
were gossiping whilst their men slumbered. All Polpier women--even
the laziest--knit while they talk: and from nine o'clock onwards the
alley-ways that pass for streets were filled with women knitting hard
and talking at the top of their voices. The men and the cats dozed.

Down by the boats, up to noon the boys had things all their own way,
vying in feats of valour. But soon after the dinner-hour the girls
asserted themselves by starting an Ambulance Corps, and with details
so realistic that not a few of the male combatants hauled out of
battle on pretence of wounds and in search of better fun.

Nicholas Nanjivell, "mooning" by the bridge twelve paces from his
door, sharpening his jack-knife upon a soft parapet-stone that was
reported to bring cutlery to an incomparable edge and had paid for
its reputation, being half worn away--Nicholas Nanjivell, leaning his
weight on the parapet, to ease the pain in his leg--Nicholas
Nanjivell, gloomily contemplating his knife and wishing he could
plunge it into the heart of a man who stood behind a counter behind a
door which stood in view beyond the bridge-end--Nicholas Nanjivell,
nursing his own injury to the exclusion of any that might threaten
Europe--glanced up and beheld his neighbour Penhaligon's children,
Young 'Bert and 'Beida (Zobeida), approach by the street from the
Quay bearing between them a stretcher, composed of two broken paddles
and part of an old fishing-net, and on the stretcher, covered by a
tattered pilot-jack, a small form--their brother 'Biades
(Alcibiades), aged four. It gave him a scare.

"Lor sake!" said he, hastily shutting and pocketing his knife.
"What you got there?"

"'Biades," answered 'Beida, with a tragical face.

"Han't I heard your mother warn 'ee a score o' times, against lettin'
that cheeld play loose on the Quay! . . . What's happened to 'en?
Broke his tender neck, I shouldn' wonder. . . . Here, let me have a
look--"

"Broke his tender fiddle-stick!" 'Beida retorted. "He's bleedin' for
his country, is 'Biades, if you really want to know; and if you was
helpful you'd lend us that knife o' yours."

"What for, missy?"

"Why, to take off the injured limb. 'Bert's knife's no good since
the fore-part o' the week, when he broke the blade prizin' up limpets
an' never guessing how soon this War'd be upon us."

"I did," maintained 'Bert. "I was gettin' in food supplies."

"If I was you, my dears, I'd leave such unholy games alone,"
Nicky-Nan advised them. "No, and I'll not lend 'ee my knife,
neither. You don't know what War is, children: an' please God you
never will. War's not declared yet--not by England, anyway.
Don't 'ee go to seek it out until it seeks _you_."

"But 'tis comin'," 'Beida persisted. "Father was talkin' with Mother
last night--he didn' go out with the boats: and 'Bert and I both
heard him say--didn' we, 'Bert?--'twas safe as to-morrow's sun.
The way we heard was that Mother'd forgot to order us to bed; which
hasn't happened not since Coronation Night an' the bonfire. When she
came up to blow out the light she'd been cryin'. . . . That's because
Father'll have to fight, o' course."

"I wish they'd put it off till I was a man," said 'Bert stoutly.

At this point the wounded hero behaved as he always did on
discovering life duller than his hopes. He let out a piercing yell
and cried that he wanted his tea. 'Beida dropped her end of the
ambulance, seized him as he slid to the ground, shook him up, and
told him to behave.

"You can't have your tea for another hour: and what's more, if you're
not careful there won't be no amputation till afterwards, when
Mother's not lookin' an' we can get a knife off the table. You bad
boy!"

'Biades howled afresh.

"If you don't stop it,"--'Bert took a hand in threatening,--
"you won't get cut open till Monday; because 'tis Sunday to-morrow.
And by that time you'll be festerin', I shouldn't wonder."

"--And mortification will have set in," promised his sister.
"When that happens, you may turn up your toes. An' 'tis only a
question between oak an' elum."

'Biades ceased yelling as abruptly as he had started. "What's
'fester'?" he demanded.

"You'll know fast enough, when you find yourself one solid scab,"
began 'Bert. But Nicky-Nan interrupted.

"There, there, children! Run along an' don't ee play at trouble.
There's misery enough, the Lord knows--" He broke off on a twinge of
pain, and stared down-stream at the congregated masts in the little
harbour.

Polpier lies in a gorge so steep and deep that though it faces but a
little east of south, all its western flank lay already in deep
shadow. The sunlight slanting over the ridge touched the tops of the
masts, half a dozen of which had trucks with a bravery of gilt, while
a couple wore the additional glory of a vane. On these it flashed,
and passed on to bathe the line of cottages along the eastern shore,
with the coast-guard hut that stood separate beyond them on the round
of the cliff-track--all in one quiet golden glow. War? Who could
think of War? . . . Nicky-Nan at any rate let the thought of it slip
into the sea of his private trouble. It was as though he had hauled
up some other man's "sinker" and, discovering his mistake, let it
drop back plumb.

While he stared, the children had stolen away.

Yet he loitered there staring, in the hush of the warm afternoon,
lifting his eyes a little towards the familiar outline of the hills
that almost overlapped, closing out sight of the sea. A verse ran in
his head--"_I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills from whence
cometh my help_. . . ."

The slamming of a door at the street-corner beyond the bridge
recalled him to the world of action.

On the doorstep of the local Bank--turning key in lock as he left the
premises--stood a man respectably dressed and large of build. It was
Mr Pamphlett, the Bank-Manager. Nicky-Nan thrust his hands in his
trouser-pockets and limped towards him.

"If you please, sir--"

Mr Pamphlett faced about, displaying a broad white waistcoat and a
ponderous gold watch-chain.

"Ah! Nanjivell?"

"If you please, sir--" Nicky-Nan, now balanced on his sound leg,
withdrew a hand from his pocket and touched his cap. "I've been
waitin' your convenience."

"Busy times," said Mr Pamphlett. "This Moratorium, you know. The
War makes itself felt, even in this little place."

If Nicky-Nan had known the meaning of the word Moratorium, it might
have given him an opening. But he did not, and so he stood dumb.
"You have come to say, I hope," hazarded Mr Pamphlett after a pause,
"that you don't intend to give me any more trouble? . . . You've
given me enough, you know. An Ejectment Order. . . . Still--if, at
the last, you've made up your mind to behave--"

"There's no other house, sir. If there was, and you'd let it to
me--"

"That's likely, hey? In the present scandalous laxity of the law
towards tenants, you've cost me a matter of pounds--not to mention
six months' delay, which means money lost--to eject you. You, that
owe me six pounds rent! It's likely I'd let you another house--even
if I had one!"

"Even if you had the will, 'twouldn' be right. I understand that,
sir. Six young men, as I know, waitin' to marry and unable, because
the visitors snap up cottage after cottage for summer residences,
an'll pay you fancy prices; whereas you won't build for the likes o'
we."

"Your six young men--if six there be--" said Mr Pamphlett, "will be
best employed for some time to come in fighting for their country.
It don't pay to build cottages, I tell you."

Nicky-Nan's right hand gripped the knife in his pocket. But he
answered wearily--

"Well, anyways, sir, I don't ask to interfere with them: but only to
bide under my own shelter."

"Owing me six pounds arrears, and piling up more? And after driving
me to legal proceedings! Look here, Nanjivell. You are fumbling
something in your pocket. Is it the six pounds you owe me?"

"No, sir."

"I thought not. And if it were, I should still demand the costs I've
been put to. If you bring me the total on Monday--But you know very
well you cannot."

"No, sir."

"Then," said Mr Pamphlett, "we waste time. I have been worried
enough, these last few days, with more serious business than yours.
In the times now upon us a many folk are bound to go to the wall; and
the improvident will go first, as is only right. Enough said, my
man!"

Nicky-Nan fumbled with the knife in his pocket, but let Mr Pamphlett
pass.

Then he limped back to the house that would be his until Monday, and
closed the door. Beyond the frail partition which boarded him off
from the Penhaligon family he could hear the children merry at tea.

CHAPTER II.

CALL TO ARMS.

NESCIO QUA NATALE SOLUM DULCEDINE CUNCTOS
DUCIT ET IMMEMORES NON SINIT ESSE SUI.

--The Old Doctor (to whom we have made allusion) had been moved to
write an account of his native place, and had contrived to get it
published by subscription in a thin octavo volume of 232 pages,
measuring nine by five and a half inches. Copies are rare, but may
yet be picked up on secondhand bookstalls for six or seven shillings.

From this 'History of Polpier' I must quote--being unable to better
it--his description of the little town. (He ever insisted in calling
it a town, not a village, although it contained less than fourteen
hundred inhabitants.)

"If the map of the coast of Cornwall be examined, on the
south-east, between the estuaries of the two rivers that divide
the Hundred of West from the Hundred of East and the Hundred of
Powder, will be noticed an indentation of the littoral line, in
which cleft lies the little town of Polpier. Tall hills,
abrupt and rugged, shut in a deep and tortuous valley, formed
by the meeting of smaller coombs; houses, which seem dropped
rather than built, crowd the valley and its rocky ledges; a
rapid rivulet dances in and out among the dwellings, till its
voice is lost in the waters of a tidal haven, thronged with
fishing boats and guarded by its Peak of serried rock."

The Doctor after this first modest mention of "a rivulet" invariably
writes of it as "the River," and by no other name does Polpier speak
of it to this day. On the lower or seaward side of the bridge-end,
where the channel measures some three yards across, the flank of his
house leaned over the rushing water, to the sound of which he slept
at night. Across the stream the house of Mr Barrabell, clerk, leaned
forward at a more pronounced angle, so that the two neighbours, had
they been so minded, might have shaken hands between their bedroom
windows before retiring to rest. Tradition reports this Mr Barrabell
(though an accountant for most of the privateering companies in
Polpier) to have been a timorous man: and that once the Doctor,
returning home in the small hours from a midwifery case, found his
neighbour and his neighbour's wife hiding together under his
bed-clothes. Upon an alarm that Bonaparte was in the town, they had
bridged the stream with a ladder to the Doctor's open window and
clambered across in their night-clothes. It is reported also that,
on the transit, Mrs Barrabell was heard to say, "Go forward,
Theophilus! Th' Old Doctor knows all about _me_, if he don't about
you. You can trust en to the ends of the world." "That's right
enough, ma'am," said the Doctor in his great way; "but you appear to
have gone a bit further." A variant of the story has it that Mrs
Barrabell was found beneath the bed, and her spouse alone between the
bed-clothes, into which he had plunged with an exhortation, "Look
after yourself, darling!" "And what do you think Theophilus found
under that magnificent man's bed?" she asked her neighbours next day.
"Why, naught but a plumed hat in a japanned case; no trace of alarm,
and yet ready there against any emergency."

The Doctor (I should say) had held a commission--worn a Major's
uniform--in the local Artillery Volunteers during those days of the
Napoleonic peril. They passed, and he survived to die in times of
peace, leaving (as has been told) a local history for his memorial.
A tablet to his memory records that "_In all his life he never had a
lawsuit. Reader, take example and strive to be so good a man_."

In his childhood Nicky-Nan had listened to many a legend of the Old
Doctor, whose memory haunted every street and by-lane and even
attained to something like apotheosis in the talk of the older
inhabitants. They told what an eye he had, as a naturalist, for
anything uncommon in the maunds; how he taught them to be observant,
alert for any strange fish, and to bring it home alive, if possible;
and how he was never so happy as when seated on a bollard near the
Quay-head with a drawing-board on his knee, busy--for he was a wonder
with pencil and brush--transferring to paper the outline and markings
of a specimen and its perishable exquisite colours; working rapidly
while he listened to the account of its capture, and maybe pausing
now and again to pencil a note on the margin of the portrait.
They told, too, of his ways--how for a whole month he came forth from
his front door in a crouching posture, almost on all fours, so as not
to disturb the work of a diadem spider that had chosen to build its
web across the porch; of his professional skill, that "trust yourself
to th' Old Doctor, and he'd see you came to a natral end of some
sort, and in no haste, neither;" of his habit of dress, that (when
not in martial uniform) he wore a black suit with knee-breeches, silk
stockings, and silver shoe-buckles; of his kindness of heart, that in
the _Notes of Periodic Phenomena_, which he regularly kept, he always
recorded a midnight gale towards the close of August, to account for
the mysterious depletion of his apple-crop.

But the Old Doctor had gone to his fathers long ago, and the old
house, divided into two tenements--with access by one porch and front
passage--had been occupied for twenty years past by Nicky-Nan and
(for eight or nine) by the Penhaligon family. Nicky-Nan's cantle
overhung the river, and comprised a kitchen and scullery on the
ground-floor, with a fairly large bedroom above it. The old Doctor's
own bedroom it had been, and was remarkable for an open fireplace
with two large recessed cupboards let into a wall, which measured a
good four feet in depth beyond the chimney-breast. Once, in cleaning
out the cupboards, Nicky-Nan had discovered in the right-hand one
that one or two boards of the flooring were loose. Lifting them
cautiously he had peered into a sort of lazarette deep down in the
wall, and had lowered a candle, the flame of which, catching hold of
a mass of dried cobweb, had shot up and singed his eyebrows, for a
moment threatening to set the house on fire. It had given him a
scare, and he never ventured to carry his exploration further.

His curiosity was the less provoked because at least a score of the
old houses in Polpier have similar recesses, constructed (it is said)
as hiding-places from the press-gang or for smugglers hotly pursued
by the dragoons.

The Penhaligon family inhabited the side of the house that faced the
street, and their large living-room was chiefly remarkable for the
beams supporting the floor above it. They had all been sawn
lengthwise out of a single oak-tree, and the outer edges of some had
been left untrimmed. From a nail in the midmost beam hung a small
rusty key, around which the spiders wove webs and the children many
speculations: for the story went that a brother of the old Doctor's--
the scapegrace of the family--had hung it (the key of his quadrant)
there, with strong injunctions that no one should take it down until
he returned--which he never did. So Mrs Penhaligon's feather-brush
always spared this one spot in the room, every other inch of which
she kept scrupulously dusted. She would not for worlds have
exchanged lodgings with Nicky-Nan, though his was by far the best
bedroom (and far too good for a bachelor man); because from her
windows she could watch whatever crossed the bridge--folks going to
church, and funerals. But the children envied Nicky-Nan, because
from his bedroom window you could--when he was good-natured and
allowed you--drop a line into the brawling river. Of course there
were no real fish to be caught, but with a cunning cast and some luck
you might hook up a tin can or an old boot.

Now Nicky-Nan was naturally fond of children, as by nature he had
been designed for a family man; and children gave him their
confidence without knowing why. But in his early manhood a girl had
jilted him, which turned him against women: later, in the Navy, the
death of a friend and messmate, to whom he had transferred all the
loyalty of his heart, set him questioning many things in a silent
way. He had never been able to dissipate affection or friendship:
and his feelings when hurt, being sensitive as the horns of a snail,
withdrew themselves as swiftly into a shell and hid there as
obstinately: by consequence of which he earned (without deserving) a
name not often entered upon the discharge-sheets of the Royal Navy.
But there it stood on his, in black upon white--"A capable seaman.
_Morose_."

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