The Blue Field Page 11

  The last occasion when I went with William Hart to dine with the gypsies was in 1938, about the time of Munich; and I remember thinking how remote their lives were from ours, for they were quite oblivious of the coming catastrophe. The successive wars and crises of civilization scarcely touch them at all; for it is a task beyond the wit of bureaucrats to conscript them into our armies or direct them into our factories. They pay no income tax and belong to no trade union; and since for the most part they live on the countryside, when the gorgios are rationed the gypsies continue to feed as well as before. Life has always been hard for them, and now that our own high standard of living is dwindling fast, and the cold winds of the world are blowing one by one our precious amenities away, they might laugh at our discomfiture and our grumbling – if they ever troubled themselves enough about our affairs to be amused by them.

  The joke is certainly against us, and it is a good joke. We have built up an extremely elaborate and inter-dependent form of society while the gypsies have sat peacefully by their primitive camp-fires. But those camp-fires will still be burning if our great blast-furnaces should go out through lack of coal, and the oil-lamps in the caravans will still give light if the failure of the power-stations should plunge all our cities into darkness. These queer secret people whom for so long we have pitied, despised and deplored, are nevertheless completely unaffected by the ills and catastrophes which our complex civilization has brought upon itself; and I don’t mind betting that their hens will be scratching about under their caravans when our last dollar has bought the last packet of dried eggs from America!

  The Patriarch

  On that misty autumn evening ten years ago William was already beginning to hobble with the arthritis which was soon to cripple him; I doubt whether he ever managed to visit the Gormleys’ camp again. Perhaps they guessed that it was the last time, for they guessed so many things; and they waited upon him with special courtesies and even with a kind of awe, as if he were a prophet soon to be translated who had come among his people to take his farewell. When the meal was over there fell a long silence, and then one of the children piped up in a timid voice:

  ‘Father Hart! Father Hart!’ – for thus they addressed him, almost as if he were a priest – ‘Father Hart, tell us a tale!’

  ‘What tale do you want tonight?’ said William, by which I learned that he was in the habit of telling them tales.

  Another child said timidly:

  ‘Tell us, please, how you came to our camp at midnight and cut the tents down!’

  ‘Tell us, tell us!’ cried all the other children. There is magic here, I thought: a legend is being born. Five centuries hence the gypsies will tell the fabulous tale round their fires. William then will be a giant twelve cubits tall.

  ‘Tell us how you pushed over the caravan and burned it with fire!’

  ‘Listen, then, my children,’ said William. ‘In those days I was more powerful than I am today. I simply leaned upon the caravan and it toppled over . . .’

  I shut my eyes and listened in a sort of ecstasy, for it is not often that a man may be present at the very fountain-head of a fable where the crystal-clear source bubbles out of the ancient rock. Thus it begins, I thought: this is the eternal spring of stories which never fails, whence flowed the tale of Angoulaffre who leaned against the Tower of Pisa and made it crooked; of Roland who slew him; of Samson; of Ajax and Achilles; of Polyphemus and of Odysseus who laid him low; perhaps – who knows? – of Odin and great Jove.

  ‘And who came against you, Father Hart, when you had pushed over the caravan?’

  ‘Some dozen only. But leading them was your grandfather, little one, who was then in his prime, and he’d plucked a tent-pole out of the wreckage which he whirled round his head as if it were no bigger than a walking-stick . . .’

  ‘But you knocked him down, Father Hart?’

  ‘One blow; and then came three men together . . .’

  So it went on until at last William had reached the door of the yellow caravan and was smashing it down. But there the story ended; for though I saw a young girl with a brown elf’s face, eager and beautiful in the flickering firelight, part her lips to ask a question, and I guessed what the question was going to be, an old woman at that moment stretched out her hand and laid it on the girl’s arm so that the words were never spoken: ‘Tell us about Pheemy – was she beautiful?’ Even the Gormleys had their reticence; and as for William, he never spoke her name.

  Works of Darkness

  So now you will understand that the gypsies had a double cause to hate the Syndicate, whose members had turned them out of the Park where they’d camped for three or four generations and had also wronged old William. William’s quarrel was their quarrel, his wrong was theirs; and love of him added zest to their hatred when they set to work against the Syndicate in their age-old mysterious way.

  None of us really knew how they performed their dark mischief. Nobody actually saw them breaking down the Park palings to enlarge the Prize Bull, which terrified the neighbourhood for five days and ultimately had to be shot because it was a danger to the children. Nobody caught them stealing the little weaner pigs which disappeared mysteriously from the styes. Nobody could guess at what secret hour they opened the fowlhouse doors, making a present of their inhabitants to the keen-nosed hill-foxes with which perhaps they had a gypsyish fellowship. Nobody was quite sure what killed the five cows and the two horses which were found dead one morning in a field, for though the vet said they had been poisoned with yew the nearest yew tree stood in the churchyard two miles away.

  No: there was not a tittle of evidence against the Fitchers and Gormleys; but it was significant that for two years they were unusually quiet and well behaved, they drank together in the pubs and refrained from brawling even when they were full of beer, and so powerful was the loving-kindness between them that they actually intermarried for the first time since the ancestral Fitcher had plunged his fatal hatchet into the Gormley skull. This unheard-of event happened at Easter, when an extremely timid-looking Gormley girl, wearing the expression of one who is about to be thrown to a pack of wolves, was led to the altar by a young Fitcher who kept glancing nervously over his shoulder as if for his part he already heard the wolf-pack yelping at his heels. After the wedding the relations of the bride and the bridegroom, dressed in their best clothes but probably armed to the teeth, adjourned together to the Trumpet, where the respective heads of the families ordered drinks all round. When the drinks arrived the swarthy-looking chieftain of the Gormleys dramatically clasped the hand of the patriarch Fitcher and made a short speech. The phrase with which he ended could scarcely have been more ill-chosen. ‘Let us bury the hatchet,’ he said. At once a dozen Fitchers leapt to their feet and there were dangerous mutterings of ‘Rope!’ ‘Gallows!’ and even ‘Salmon-nets!’ The hands of the women were already flying to their hair-pins, which they employed with deadly effect in every brawl; but the stern glances of the two patriarchs quelled them just in time, and at last the whole company raised their glasses to the young couple and wished them health and happiness with murderous looks.

  The third member of the Triple Alliance played an obscure but possibly decisive part in the campaign. Jane Orris, who now lived in London, was married to a young man who had a financial interest in certain newspapers. It was not very difficult to persuade these newspapers to show a polite and kindly concern about the Syndicate’s successive misfortunes. They were extremely careful, of course, to print nothing scurrilous or in bad taste; they merely asked, in sizeable headlines, IS THERE A CURSE ON ORRIS MANOR? and then made quite sure that henceforth everything that happened there would be News. They duly reported, circumspectly, accurately, and indeed most sympathetically, the fire, the escape and pursuit of the Prize Bull, the disappearance of the pigs and poultry, the unexplained deaths of the cattle and horses; but as a matter of fact it was a rival newspaper, spurred on by the competitive spirit, which published a somewhat imaginative interview with a
hysterical maidservant who declared that she had seen the Devil, accompanied by a spectral goat, wreathed in blue flames at the entrance to the half-ruined chapel. On only one occasion did the papers owned by Jane’s husband overstep the boundaries of plain fact: they quoted ‘village gossip’ as their authority for stating that even in cold weather the milk at Orris Manor curdled within an hour, and speculated playfully whether this was the work of Robin Goodfellow. The wretched inhabitants of the Manor indignantly denied the story and the newspapers humbly apologized, giving undue prominence to the denial.

  Shortly after that the posters appeared announcing the forthcoming sale. The obstinacy of the villagers and the malice of the gypsies had made life unsupportable at Orris Manor; but worst of all, I suspect, was the sense of being watched – with however friendly and solicitous a stare – by a number of Argus-eyed newspapers. Nobody could have put up with that for very long; and the Syndicate, whose financial dealings were obscure and complicated, may have had more reason than most people for fearing the limelight.

  Three Swashers

  I forgot to mention, among the Syndicate’s persecutors, the three scoundrelly old soldiers whom I call Pistol, Bardolph and Nym. Nor do I know precisely by what mischief they added to the discomfiture of our foes. I can only tell you that they were frequently to be seen Hanging About, as the policeman darkly put it, in the vicinity of the Manor; and when one hears of these three Hanging About one is instantly reminded of vultures, which do the same thing for the same reason.

  They do not belong to Brensham, where most people regard them as an everlasting plague, but come from Elmbury where they are the petty lords of an alley-underworld. Since childhood they have lived by their wits, begging, borrowing, scrounging, pilfering, Hanging About and Hanging On; but those wits, though sharpened by continual adversity, have utterly failed to keep them out of trouble and they are familiar with the inside of many prisons, especially Gloucester jail, which they regard as their second home. From time to time, at the low ebb of their fortunes, they have enlisted under false names in the Army; and although they have invariably deserted or been dismissed before long, nevertheless it cannot be denied that their short periods of service have coincided with some notable battles. They therefore wear many medal-ribbons, though these are so dirty and faded as to be unrecognizable, and in the pub they often recall the long weariness on Mons, the heaving quagmire of the Somme, the tormenting flies of the Dardanelles, and the griping dysentery of Salonika with such verisimilitude that it is at least possible they were there. They also speak, but with less confidence, of Mafeking and Ladysmith and of the North-west Frontier of India; and thus they obtain many free drinks from strangers, who are sometimes profoundly moved by their chance encounter with three battered, tattered, down-at-heel Heroes in a bar.

  In the Magistrate’s Court at Elmbury they have been convicted severally and together, goodness knows how often, of the trivial inglorious crimes of their kind: Begging, Petty Larceny, Trespassing in Pursuit of Coneys, Stealing Mushrooms, Doing Wilful Damage, Insulting Behaviour, Assaulting the Police, Wandering without Visible Means, Drunk and Disorderly, Drunk and Incapable, Sleeping Out. Often enough they have found little profit in it: Bardolph once stole a bicycle, rode it twenty miles on two flat tyres, sold it for half a crown, and went to prison for a week; thus emulating the achievement of his illustrious namesake who stole a lute-case, bore it twelve leagues, and sold it for three-halfpence. And I dare say it is true of Nym, though he has five convictions for assault, that ‘ ’a never broke any man’s head but his own, and that was against a post when he was drunk’. Theirs, in fact, are small, sordid and rather ineffectual sins, which make a dreary catalogue when the Inspector reads them out in court. Worthless good-for-nothings, you would say; and you would be surprised therefore to see the shadow of a smile upon the Chairman’s face as he passed the usual sentence. The truth of the matter is that they are not entirely graceless; they possess a scaramouch humour, and even a sort of mountebank dignity, which we are bound to acknowledge even while we deplore them. Pistol, as he slopes along with his curious stride (as if he were perpetually stalking somebody or something) wears his mouldy old hat with the jay’s feather in it at a jaunty angle of devil-may-care. Bardolph’s unlovely features, when he grins, are illuminated by that sheer basic unalloyed mischief which I have only seen elsewhere on the faces of the gargoyles on Elmbury Abbey; and Nym sometimes succeeds in making the stern Magistrate laugh when he pleads with mock gravity: ‘Don’t send me down for long, your Worship, or I shan’t be able to vote for you at the Council election!’ Even when they are drunk their waggish self-possession does not entirely desert them; I have seen Pistol, as he was borne away to the police-station, conduct himself with such a lordly air that one might almost imagine he had arrested the constable.

  I once encountered all three swashers walking, as bold as brass and in broad daylight, upon my small rough shoot halfway between Elmbury and Brensham. They had already, I was well aware, ferreted out most of the rabbits during a series of Sunday morning forays, and now they were obviously in search of other game, for they had a sly sneaking lurcher-dog at heel and Pistol carried an old hammer-gun with a long single barrel covered in red rust. I had surprised them by crawling down a hedge, and I came upon them suddenly face to face, so that they had no chance of sloping away. I was very angry indeed. ‘I’ve caught you at last,’ I began. ‘This has gone on long enough. You know, I suppose, that I pay for this bit of shooting?’

  Bardolph grinned his gargoyle’s grin. Nym shrugged his shoulders. (‘That’s the humour of it,’ I could almost hear him say!) And Pistol politely tugged at the brim of his hat and observed coolly:

  ‘We knowed it was yourn, sir; that’s why we come; we knowed thee wouldn’t say nothing.’

  And after that, what could I say?

  ‘Booze and the Wenches Take the Lot’

  A very respectable Councillor of Elmbury, who owned half the back-alleys in the town, once took me to task for, as he put it, romanticizing Pistol, Bardolph and Nym. ‘You writin’ fellers are all alike,’ he said ‘Sentimental. You don’t want to waste your sympathy on that sort, nor your ink neither. Folks don’t want to read about that sort. You can take it from me, they’re just plain rotten. I know what I’m talking about. Plain scum.’

  He certainly ought to have known what he was talking about; for he was the landlord of the particular stinking rabbit-warren called Double Alley in which Pistol, Bardolph and Nym as children had run about stark-naked, as most of the slum brats did in those days. There they learned the light-fingered tricks before they were ten; pinching a few pence, I dare say, out of a drunken father’s pocket as he snored. There they learned to drink before they were fifteen, and the rest of what they needed to know they were taught by the shrieking sluts in the common lodging-house which was half a brothel. Mr Councillor owned that too, and exacted for it a weekly rental of three shillings and sixpence. He didn’t collect the money himself, however. There were too many unpleasant smells and too many germs in Double Alley for his liking. The ragamuffins might have picked his pockets, or the drunken old women might have emptied the contents of their chamber-pots upon his respectable grey hairs. So he hired a cheap bully to collect his rents for him, on the strict commission basis of a shilling in the pound.

  Thirty or forty years ago he sent young Pistol to prison for stealing bull’s-eyes from a sweetshop. (‘Honest tradesmen must be protected.’) Bardolph and Nym incurred his displeasure soon afterwards and completed their education in Gloucester jail. Oh yes, he certainly knew what he was talking about! ‘Just plain scum,’ he said again.’ It’s the way they were bred, see. You can’t do anything for people like that. Society has got to defend itself against them.’

  He paused, and then with an odd sort of resentment he went on:

  ‘And what have they got out of it? I ask you? Thirty years of drinking, stealing, poaching, setting ‘emselves against the world – and look at ’em now? What h
ave they got out of it?’

  Then I realized suddenly that to this respectable man the crimes of Pistol, Bardolph and Nym seemed all the more shameful because of their pointlessness and futility. If they had made any profit out of the business he wouldn’t have thought so badly of them. Their continued poverty was an added crime, and perhaps the worst of the lot. That they would pick his pockets of half a crown was bad enough; but that they set no value on the half-crown and would spend it within half an hour on sluts or cider – that was the real anarchy. For, you see, the truth about Pistol, Bardolph and Nym is that they not only lack the respect for other people’s property, they lack respect for any property at all.