Gentian Hill Read online

  "Is there anything that you would especially like to do, Zachary?" asked the doctor gently.

  Zachary relaxed a little. Apparently he had not shouted aloud. "Yes, Sir. I’d like to be a shepherd at Weekaborough Farm.”

  The doctor was startled. This intelligent boy a farm laborer? Well, perhaps he knew best what was good for him just at this juncture. Out there on the hill with the sheep he’d find quiet and healing; and that he must undoubtedly have before he could once more come to grips with his demon.

  "But I understand, Zachary, that your services have already been somewhat violently rejected by Farmer Sprigg?"

  Zachary grinned. His relief that the doctor made not the slightest suggestion of his returning to the navy was so overwhelming that he felt quite light-headed. "Yes, Sir. But I was dressed like a scarecrow then."

  “And now, in Tom Pearse’s shore slops, you look like a molting macaw."

  "Perhaps, Sir-" suggested Zachary tentatively.

  "Very well, lad. Tomorrow we’ll drive to town and lit you out in a manner likely to impress Father Sprigg, and then you can try your luck again. And now as your medical adviser I suggest bed-though as your father, I’d prefer to keep you here till midnight.’

  Zachary got up, looked at the doctor, tried to find words, failed to achieve anything except, "Good-night, Sir," bowed and left the room. Dr. Crane sat silently for a while, the boy’s eyes and his face still vividly before him. He smiled as he pulled at his pipe, profoundly contented. Capricious fortune took it into her head sometimes to lay upon a wound a salve of such value that a man became positively glad of the wound .... Had he been able to choose his son, he thought, he would have had him in no wise different; and not every father whose son was born of his bone and flesh of his flesh could say the same .... But no, he did not believe in capricious fortune, but in a carefully woven pattern where every tightly stretched warp thread of pain laid the foundation for

  a woof thread of joy.

  2

  For a little while now there had been a bit of disagreeableness going on at Weekaborough Farm, and a few days later it came to a climax. It concerned the musical obstinacy of jack Crocker, the ploughboy, one of whose duties it was to sing counter-tenor to Sol’s bass in the beautiful chant which animated the Weekaborough oxen when they pulled the plough. Jack could not sing the chant correctly, and what was worse, he would not try. It was not that he lacked music in his soul. He could wlgstle "Drops of Brandy" as true as a blackbird, and when he sang "Spanish Ladies" to the pigs, the noise in Pizzle Meadow was almost deafening. But that strange old musical ploughing chant was somehow inimical to him. He said it gave him the bellyache. Jack was of the

  earth, earthy, and the strange stirrings in his inner man that took place when old Sol laid his hands upon the plough, lifted his seamed old face to the sky, and began to sing, gave

  Jack no pleasure. He located them, incorrectly, as in his belly, and his spirit rising in revolt within him, he either refused to sing at all or out of deliberate malice sang flat. He was a tiresome boy altogether, urban as well as carnal-minded, and had frequently expressed a desire to go to Plymouth and work in his uncle’s butcher shop. Told by the perpetually exasperated Father Sprigg to blast his eyes and go there, he nevertheless stayed where he was. He liked the pigs, he said, and he was indeed very handy with the pigs, also carnalminded creatures, and partly for that reason he was kept on. But chiefly he was kept on because the Sprigg family, like all Devonians, were deeply enrutted folk. They liked to go on as they always had gone on. Any change, they felt, was bound to be for the worse.

  Sol, unlike Father Sprigg, bore with Jack’s delinquencies with infinite patience and good humor except just in this one manner of the chant; and in this one instance he beat even Father Sprigg in the power of his wrath and his profanity in expression of the same. Indeed, at ploughing times Father and Mother Sprigg, Madge, and Stella got very anxious, for it could not be good for such an old man to get so very angry.

  "It’ll settle itself one of these fine days," Mother Sprigg would say comfortably, and upon a beautiful morning in the middle of October, it settled itself once and for all.

  There had been a week of wind and rain following the gray still day of the wrestling match, and then a good drying wind, and now the half-acre field on the slope of Taffety Hill was in exactly the right condition to be harrowed for the sowing of the autumn crop of winter oats. The beautiful oxen, Moses and Abraham, were harnessed to the equally beautiful plow, the zewl, made twenty years ago by the Gentian Hill carpenter, a man famed for miles ’round for the splendor of his craftsmanship; and the little party of two oxen, one old man, and one young boy set out for Taffety Hill, watched with some misgiving by Mother Sprigg and Madge, for there was that in Jack’s wickedly gleaming black eyes and Sol’s grimly set old mouth that seemed to presage trouble. But Stella, though she also noticed Jack’s eyes and Sol’s mouth, had a heart within her like a singing bird. She had been kept at home for more than a week by the wet weather and a streaming cold, and now it was a beautiful morning and her cold was gone. The behavior of her heart kept her perpetually a-jig upon her toes as she helped Mother Sprigg make the beds, her eyes were sparkling and her dimples peeping, and suddenly abandoning all attempt at decorum, she flung Father Sprigg’s goose-feather pillow into the center of the bedroom floor and turned a somersault upon it.

  "For gracious sakes!" ejaculated Mother Sprigg. Zachary, meanwhile, was coming up the hill from the village most suitably attired in breeches, leather gaiters, and rough freeze coat, with his hair cut short and one of Tom’s less spectacular shirts open at the neck. He whistled as he walked, but he did not feel quite as confident as he sounded. He had said to himself that he would go away from Weekaborough, and then come back, and he had done, was doing, just that, yet he knew in his heart that the small journey he had taken was not sufficient to have earned him any sort of permanent return. This was no more than that far glimpse of the Delectable Mountains that Christian had seen before he went down into the valley to fight with Apollyon.

  He reached the top of the hill and the great Danmonian fence that was the boundary of Father Sprigg’s land upon the north. He went through the gate and stood looking down upon the Weekaborougivalley, and away to the moors upon the west and the sea upo the east, as Stella and Sol had done. The season was more advanced now, and there was a cool nip in the west wind that was driving the white clouds like flocks across the sky, with their shadows racing beneath them over the fields. Yet the beauty was as great as before, and Zachary, taking great gulps of the life-giving wind, feeling it reach right through his clothes and caress his skin with its coolness, gave a sudden shout of triumph. Oh God, the freedom of it! To be able to shout when you wanted to, to feel health pouring back into a strengthening body and to climb the hills on feet that were healed and swift. And if this joy were only fleeting, what of it? He would live in the moment, as the gulls did, and shout as they did for joy of the sun and the wind. There was a flock of them wheeling just down the hill to his left, their wings flashing in the sun and the wind catching their strange voices so that their crying soared now loud, now soft, above the chanting that mingled with the faint bell-like jingling of harness. This music was so attuned to the spirit of the hour that Zachary was conscious of it at first only as part of the natural music of earth itself-of the music of the wind and the swaying branches, the stirring grasses and the rustling leaves. Then it swelled and drew nearer, and he was conscious of it as something supernatural, something that awed him to complete silence and stillness, even as the chanting of the mass had done, and the ringing of the Sanctus bell, in the days of his young boyhood that seemed now such centuries ago.

  He listened spellbound for a moment, until a sudden false note, sticking into his musician’s spirit like a stiletto, followed by a howl of fury upon the other side of the hedge, brought him suddenly to earth. He ran down the lane to a gate upon the left, leaped upon it, and found himself looking down upo
n such a comical scene that he swung his legs over the top of the gate and sat there laughing, unseen by the protagonists in the comedy down below.

  A field of red earth was being harrowed, but the team of beautiful dun-colored oxen had come to a standstill while the ploughman, an ancient with a bent old body like a brittle tree, and a brown seamed face with a stubble of gray beard upon it, like a lichen upon apple tree bark, belabored the hind quarters of a small boy whom he held wedged between his twisted old legs as in a vice. Fury had lent the ancient an almost youthful energy, for his blows flailed down with surprising strength, and he swore so loudly meanwhile that his voice rose easily above the howls of the youngster. Zachary made no attempt to go to the rescue of the victim; the horrible false falsetto note had been quite deliberately inserted. The young wretch deserved all he was getting, and he was even sorry when with a twist the scoundrel wrenched himself free, dived between the old man’s legs, and raced off down the hill. The old man staggered, recovered himself, wiped his forehead on his forearm, then turned and laid his hands once more upon the plough. The oxen moved forward again, turning downhill, the white cloud of gulls rose and followed, and the old man’s voice, very frail, yet so sure and sensitive in pitch and tone, rose lonely and serene in the immemorial chant that his fathers had sung before him century after century over these same green hills.

  Zachary listened, awed and silent again; it was still lovely but it lacked the tenor notes. He tried them softly under his breath, at first tentatively, then more surely, remembering the rhythm of the chanting of the mass. The plough with its wheeling gulls reached the bottom of the hill, turned, and came up again, and as it neared the steepest part of the slope Zachary was sure of himself and the music. Singing, he pulled off his coat, jumped off the gate and walked to meet the team. Still singing, he swung in beside Sol and bent his weight to the plough; still singing, they moved together up the hill, swung, and turned, the gulls turning with them. Sol, after one glance at the boy beside him, accepted him as he accepted everything, calmly and without astonishment, and rested himself in this blessed comradeship of a tuneful kindred spirit. As for Zachary, wave after wave of exultation beat through him as he gave himself for the first time to this blessed action of following the plough.

  Sol fitted no words to his music; if there had ever been words he had never known them, and neither had his father; his chanting was a succession of vowel sounds flowing so smoothly and effortlessly that, though there were no words, they nevertheless gave the impression of ordered language. But Zachary quite unconsciously found himself singing actual words. Et introibo ad altare Dei; ad Deum, qui laetificat juventutem meam. (And I will go unto the altar of God; to God who giveth joy to my youth.) He was unaware that he was singing words from the mass, unaware that this chant of the plough had centuries ago found its way from the chanting of the monks in the great Abbey at Torre to the fields of the countryside about it. The Holy Bread upon the altar of the Abbey, the Holy Bread springing from the furrowed sod of the fields, had both seemed equally a sacrament to the men of these days. Spera in Deo, Quoniam adhuc confitebor illi; salutare bultus mei, et Deus meus. (Hope in God: for I will still give praise to him; the salvation of my countenance, my God.) The plough swung around again. Zachary had lost all sense of place or time. The stars in the sky were dimmed by the bright sunlight, yet they were singing. His muddy vesture of decay seemed no longer to enclose him, and the harmony within his soul soared up to meet their music like a lurk.

  Gloria Patri, et Filio et Spiritui Sancto. Sicut erat in prinoipio, et nuuc, et Semper, et in saecula saeculorum. Amen.

  The plough had stopped. The patient oxen stood with heads drooping wearily. Old Sol was chuckling delightedly, rubbing his hands up and down his thighs, enjoying the dumbfounded astonishment of a tall stout man leaning over the gate.

  Zachary, utterly stunned by the sudden descent to earth, rubbed his hand across his eyes, then blinked confusedly at en picture he had seen before, and memorized with loving care a little figure in a red cloak standing behind a gate, a pointed chin propped on top of it, a row of small fingertips to either side; and down below a furry countenance thrust engagingly through the lower bars-Stella and Hodge. So he had seen them when he said good-by in the moonlight, so he saw them again now in the bright sun, and so he would see them in memory when he was parted from them, until the end of his life.

  He gave a cry of delight and strode towards them, and like a flash Stella had scrambled to the top of the gate, fallen down upon the other side, jumped up again, and Hung herself into his outstretched arms, He picked her up, not kissing her, not even wanting to, loving the feel of her in his arms, warm and thin and palpitating like a bird, loving her laughter, laughing with her, with no desire to do anything any more except to stand in the sun and laugh with Stella. Sol was still chuckling, and Hodge, who by some extraordinary deflating process had flattened himself sufficiently to get through the bars, was leaping about them and laughing too. Only Father Sprigg, still upon the wrong side of the gate, exploded abruptly into one of the most impressive rages that even Sol, in all the long years of their acquaintance, had ever seen.

  "What the devil!" demanded Father Sprigg, becoming at last coherent after most desperate and heroic efforts to control his language in front of Stella, and wrenching the gate open so violently that he nearly tore it off its hinges. "And who may you be-you-you-ugh!-you-twily young scoundrel! You dare touch my girl-you-foreigner! Hodge, come here! Stella. I’ll take a stick to you, laughing in that brazen fashion! Hodge! Sol, you maundering old dotard, I’ll give you the sack for this-letting a foreigner get his dirty hands on my plough!" He advanced upon Zachary, his big nobbly stick raised, once more roaring like a bull.

  "Stand up to ’im, lad!" whispered Sol.

  Zachary pushed aside Stella and Hodge, who had planted themselves protectively in front of him, came up courageously to Father Sprigg and bowed to him. The nobbly stick dropped, and so did the farmer’s jaw. In this presentable and courteous young stranger he did not recognize the ragged boy whom he had once already got rid of from his farm.

  "I ask your pardon, Sir," said Zachary humbly. "I am staying in the village with Dr. Crane. I am his-sort of-relative. I passed this way and your ploughman was having trouble with his boy, who ran away. I stayed and helped him."

  "Sings counter-tenor like he’d been born to the plough, Sir," exulted Sol. "Abraham an’ Moses, ee got un goin’ at sich a pace that if ee ’hadn’t appened along, geowering an’ maundering, we’d ’ave ’ad the work ’alf done by this time. Let un bide, Sir, an’ ’im an’ me, we’ll ’ave the ’ole field ploughed by nummet time."

  "Let him bide, Father!" pleaded Stella. "It wasn’t his fault about me. I just jumped on him, like I do on you. He’s my friend, you see. Hodge’s too."

  Father Sprigg looked at Hodge. That worthy was standing beside Zachary with slowly rotating tail, his tawny eyes very bright, his head cocked slightly to the left with his right ear slightly raised and the left, torn ear drooping. A drooping left ear was always a sign of serene relaxation in Hodge; a sort of “all’s well" signal.

  "An’ for why are you so set on ploughing my field?" demanded Father Sprigg of Zachary.

  I want to work at Weekaborough Farm, Sir," said Zachary, still humbly but looking Father Sprigg straight in the eye. "Dr. Crane thought you might be so good as to give me employment. I think, Sir, you could teach me to be a good shepherd as well as a good ploughman."

  "I’m already suited. I’ve the boy Jack Crocker," snapped Father Sprigg.

  "Bolted to Plymouth, by the look of ’im," growled old Sol. "An’ bolted or no I’ll not endure the screechin’ o’ that boy no longer, Master. Two notes flat the ’ole while. A cat on the thatch is sweet 'armony compared to it. If ’e stays, I go, Master, an’ so I tell ee straight."

  Father Sprigg was still looking hard at Zachary. An amused smile flickered in the boy’s eyes and touched his lips with an (extraordinary sweetness. All unknown t
o himself, an answering smile came into the farmer’s eyes. They both knew Sol was lying. He’d not remove his old feet from the beloved soil of Weekaborough while he had the strength to drag them one after the other. "He needs a bit of help, Sir," murmured Zachary.

  "I’ve never had no foreigner working on my farm," growled Father Sprigg obstinately. By foreigner he meant a man who was not a West Country man; and by his speech he knew Zachary hailed from Sussex, or `Wiltshire, or the Hebrides, or some such outlandish place that he’d never set eyes on and that seemed to him as remote as Russia or the West Indies. "There ain’t no foreigner ever worked at Weekaborough."

  Zachary took a deep breath. "When a homeless man sees a bit of earth that seems to him lovelier than any bit of earth he ever saw, do you blame him if he tries to stay there?" he asked. "You can become a native by love as well as by birth. Give me a trial, Sir. I’ll serve the land well."

  Stella, who all this time had stood scarcely daring to breathe, saw the obstinacy of Father Sprigg’s mouth relax a little. Zachary had unconsciously touched the right note. Had he promised to serve the farmer well, it would have meant less to Father Sprigg than his offer of service to the land. For a moment or two Father Sprigg looked out over the valley at his feet, this great valley held between Bowerly Hill and Taffety Hill, between the moors and the sea. Then he looked.back at Zachary.

  "I’ll speak to the doctor about ye," he said gruilly.

  CHAPTER X

  1

  Zachary went to work with a will, delighted to find himself not totally unequal to the labor of a full grown man about a farm. It gave him courage and confidence again, as the doctor had hoped it would. He broadened and strengthened and put on weight, and after only a short time of trial and error, Father Sprigg and Sol really found him uncommonly useful, and that quite apart from his gift of music, which made new creatures of old Sol and the oxen. He was amazingly good with animals, especially sheep, and Father Sprigg suspected that when the summer came he would find that the bees liked him. He had all the makings of a good bee man, with his patience and reverent love for all small creatures.