Rewards and Fairies

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'"Better - for time that is," said Rene. He meant for the time
being, but I never could teach him some phrases.

'"I thought so too," said Jerry. "But how about time to come?"

Rene shook his head, and then he blew his nose. You don't
know how odd a man looks blowing his nose when you are
sitting directly above him.

I've thought that too," said Jerry. He rumbled so deep I
could scarcely catch. "It don't make much odds to me, because
I'm old. But you're young, Mosheur- you're young," and he put
his hand on Rene's knee, and Rene covered it with his hand. I
didn't know they were such friends.

'"Thank you, mon ami," said Rene. "I am much oblige. Let us
return to our trumpet-making. But I forget" - he stood up - "it
appears that you receive this afternoon!"

'You can't see into Gamm's Lane from the oak, but the gate
opened, and fat little Doctor Break stumped in, mopping his
head, and half-a-dozen of our people following him, very drunk.

'You ought to have seen Rene bow; he does it beautifully.

'"A word with you, Laennec," said Doctor Break. "Jerry has
been practising some devilry or other on these poor wretches, and
they've asked me to be arbiter."

'"Whatever that means, I reckon it's safer than asking you to
be doctor," said Jerry, and Tom Dunch, one of our carters, laughed.

'"That ain't right feeling of you, Tom," Jerry said, "seeing
how clever Doctor Break put away your thorn in the flesh last
winter." Tom's wife had died at Christmas, though Doctor
Break bled her twice a week. Doctor Break danced with rage.

'"This is all beside the mark," he said. "These good people are
willing to testify that you've been impudently prying into God's
secrets by means of some papistical contrivance which this
person" - he pointed to poor Rene - "has furnished you with.
Why, here are the things themselves!" Rene was holding a
trumpet in his hand.

'Then all the men talked at once. They said old Gaffer Macklin
was dying from stitches in his side where Jerry had put the
trumpet - they called it the devil's ear-piece; and they said it left
round red witch-marks on people's skins, and dried up their
lights, and made 'em spit blood, and threw 'em into sweats.
Terrible things they said. You never heard such a noise. I took
advantage of it to cough.

'Rene and Jerry were standing with their backs to the pigsty.
Jerry fumbled in his big flap pockets and fished up a pair of pistols.
You ought to have seen the men give back when he cocked his.
He passed one to Rene.

'"Wait! Wait!" said Rene. "I will explain to the doctor if he
permits." He waved a trumpet at him, and the men at the gate
shouted, "Don't touch it, Doctor! Don't lay a hand to the thing."

'"Come, come!" said Rene. "You are not so big fool as you
pretend. No?"

'Doctor Break backed toward the gate, watching Jerry's pistol,
and Rene followed him with his trumpet, like a nurse trying to
amuse a child, and put the ridiculous thing to his ear to show how
it was used, and talked of la Gloire, and l'Humanite, and la Science,
while Doctor Break watched jerry's pistol and swore. I nearly
laughed aloud.

'"Now listen! Now listen!" said Rene. "This will be moneys
in your pockets, my dear confrere. You will become rich."

'Then Doctor Break said something about adventurers who
could not earn an honest living in their own country creeping into
decent houses and taking advantage of gentlemen's confidence to
enrich themselves by base intrigues.

'Rene dropped his absurd trumpet and made one of his best
bows. I knew he was angry from the way he rolled his "r's."

'"Ver-r-ry good," said he. "For that I shall have much
pleasure to kill you now and here. Monsieur Gamm," - another
bow to Jerry - "you will please lend him your pistol, or he shall
have mine. I give you my word I know not which is best; and if he
will choose a second from his friends over there" - another bow
to our drunken yokels at the gate - "we will commence."

'"That's fair enough," said Jerry. "Tom Dunch, you owe it to
the Doctor to be his second. Place your man."
'"No," said Tom. "No mixin' in gentry's quarrels for me."
And he shook his head and went out, and the others followed him.

'"Hold on," said Jerry. "You've forgot what you set out to do
up at the alehouse just now. You was goin' to search me for
witch-marks; you was goin' to duck me in the pond; you was
goin' to drag all my bits o' sticks out o' my little cottage here.
What's the matter with you? Wouldn't you like to be with your
old woman tonight, Tom?"

'But they didn't even look back, much less come. They ran to
the village alehouse like hares.

'"No matter for these canaille," said Rene, buttoning up his
coat so as not to show any linen. All gentlemen do that before a
duel, Dad says - and he's been out five times. "You shall be his
second, Monsieur Gamm. Give him the pistol."

'Doctor Break took it as if it was red-hot, but he said that if
Rene resigned his pretensions in certain quarters he would pass
over the matter. Rene bowed deeper than ever.

'"As for that," he said, "if you were not the ignorant which
you are, you would have known long ago that the subject of your
remarks is not for any living man."

'I don't know what the subject of his remarks might have been,
but he spoke in a simply dreadful voice, my dear, and Doctor
Break turned quite white, and said Rene was a liar; and then Rene
caught him by the throat, and choked him black.

'Well, my dear, as if this wasn't deliciously exciting enough,
just exactly at that minute I heard a strange voice on the other side
of the hedge say, "What's this? What's this, Bucksteed?" and
there was my father and Sir Arthur Wesley on horseback in the
lane; and there was Rene kneeling on Doctor Break, and there was
I up in the oak, listening with all my ears.

'I must have leaned forward too much, and the voice gave me
such a start that I slipped. I had only time to make one jump on to
the pigsty roof - another, before the tiles broke, on to the pigsty
wall - and then I bounced down into the garden, just behind Jerry,
with my hair full of bark. Imagine the situation!'

'Oh, I can!' Una laughed till she nearly fell off the stool.

'Dad said, "Phil - a - del - phia!" and Sir Arthur Wesley said,
"Good Ged" and Jerry put his foot on the pistol Rene had
dropped. But Rene was splendid. He never even looked at me. He
began to untwist Doctor Break's neckcloth as fast as he'd twisted
it, and asked him if he felt better.

'"What's happened? What's happened?" said Dad.

'"A fit!" said Rene. "I fear my confrere has had a fit. Do not be
alarmed. He recovers himself. Shall I bleed you a little, my dear
Doctor?" Doctor Break was very good too. He said, "I am vastly
obliged, Monsieur Laennec, but I am restored now." And as he
went out of the gate he told Dad it was a syncope - I think. Then
Sir Arthur said, "Quite right, Bucksteed. Not another word!
They are both gentlemen." And he took off his cocked hat to
Doctor Break and Rene.

'But poor Dad wouldn't let well alone. He kept saying,
"Philadelphia, what does all this mean?"

'"Well, sir," I said, "I've only just come down. As far as I
could see, it looked as though Doctor Break had had a sudden
seizure." That was quite true - if you'd seen Rene seize him. Sir
Arthur laughed. "Not much change there, Bucksteed," he said.
"She's a lady - a thorough lady."

'"Heaven knows she doesn't look like one," said poor Dad.
"Go home, Philadelphia."

'So I went home, my dear - don't laugh so! - right under Sir
Arthur's nose - a most enormous nose - feeling as though I were
twelve years old, going to be whipped. Oh, I beg your pardon, child!'

'It's all right,' said Una. 'I'm getting on for thirteen. I've never
been whipped, but I know how you felt. All the same, it must
have been funny!'

'Funny! If you'd heard Sir Arthur jerking out, "Good Ged,
Bucksteed!" every minute as they rode behind me; and poor Dad
saying, '"'Pon my honour, Arthur, I can't account for it!" Oh,
how my cheeks tingled when I reached my room! But Cissie had
laid out my very best evening dress, the white satin one,
vandyked at the bottom with spots of morone foil, and the pearl
knots, you know, catching up the drapery from the left shoulder.
I had poor mother's lace tucker and her coronet comb.'

'Oh, you lucky!' Una murmured. 'And gloves?'

'French kid, my dear'- Philadelphia patted her shoulder - 'and
morone satin shoes and a morone and gold crape fan. That
restored my calm. Nice things always do. I wore my hair banded
on my forehead with a little curl over the left ear. And when I
descended the stairs, en grande tenue, old Amoore curtsied to me
without my having to stop and look at her, which, alas! is too
often the case. Sir Arthur highly approved of the dinner, my dear:
the mackerel did come in time. We had all the Marklake silver out,
and he toasted my health, and he asked me where my little
bird's-nesting sister was. I know he did it to quiz me, so I looked
him straight in the face, my dear, and I said, "I always send her to
the nursery, Sir Arthur, when I receive guests at Marklake Hall."'

'Oh, how chee - clever of you. What did he say?' Una cried.
'He said, "Not much change there, Bucksteed. Ged, I deserved
it," and he toasted me again. They talked about the French and
what a shame it was that Sir Arthur only commanded a brigade at
Hastings, and he told Dad of a battle in India at a place called
Assaye. Dad said it was a terrible fight, but Sir Arthur described it
as though it had been a whist-party - I suppose because a lady was
present.'

'Of course you were the lady. I wish I'd seen you,'said Una.

'I wish you had, child. I had such a triumph after dinner. Rene
and Doctor Break came in. They had quite made up their quarrel,
and they told me they had the highest esteem for each other, and I
laughed and said, "I heard every word of it up in the tree." You
never saw two men so frightened in your life, and when I said,
"What was 'the subject of your remarks,' Rene?" neither of them
knew where to look. Oh, I quizzed them unmercifully. They'd
seen me jump off the pigsty roof, remember.'

'But what was the subject of their remarks?' said Una.

'Oh, Doctor Break said it was a professional matter, so the
laugh was turned on me. I was horribly afraid it might have been
something unladylike and indelicate. But that wasn't my
triumph. Dad asked me to play on the harp. Between just you and
me, child, I had been practising a new song from London - I don't
always live in trees - for weeks; and I gave it them for a surprise.'

'What was it?'said Una. 'Sing it.'

'"I have given my heart to a flower." Not very difficult
fingering, but r-r-ravishing sentiment.'

Philadelphia coughed and cleared her throat.

'I've a deep voice for my age and size,' she explained.
'Contralto, you know, but it ought to be stronger,' and she began, her
face all dark against the last of the soft pink sunset:

'I have given my heart to a flower,
Though I know it is fading away,
Though I know it will live but an hour
And leave me to mourn its decay!

'Isn't that touchingly sweet? Then the last verse - I wish I had
my harp, dear - goes as low as my register will reach.'She drew in
her chin, and took a deep breath:

'Ye desolate whirlwinds that rave,
I charge you be good to my dear!
She is all - she is all that I have,
And the time of our parting is near!'

'Beautiful!' said Una. 'And did they like it?'
'Like it? They were overwhelmed - accablEs, as Rene says. My
dear, if I hadn't seen it, I shouldn't have believed that I could have
drawn tears, genuine tears, to the eyes of four grown men. But I
did! Rene simply couldn't endure it! He's all French sensibility.
He hid his face and said, "Assez, Mademoiselle! C'est plus fort que
moi! Assez!" And Sir Arthur blew his nose and said, "Good Ged!
This is worse than Assaye!" While Dad sat with the tears simply
running down his cheeks.'

'And what did Doctor Break do?'

'He got up and pretended to look out of the window, but I saw
his little fat shoulders jerk as if he had the hiccoughs. That was a
triumph. I never suspected him of sensibility.'

'Oh, I wish I'd seen! I wish I'd been you,'said Una, clasping her
hands. Puck rustled and rose from the fern, just as a big blundering
cock-chafer flew smack against Una's cheek.

When she had finished rubbing the place, Mrs Vincey called to
her that Pansy had been fractious, or she would have come long
before to help her strain and pour off.
'It didn't matter,' said Una; 'I just waited. Is that old Pansy
barging about the lower pasture now?'

'No,' said Mrs Vincey, listening. 'It sounds more like a horse
being galloped middlin' quick through the woods; but there's no
road there. I reckon it's one of Gleason's colts loose. Shall I see
you up to the house, Miss Una?'

'Gracious, no! thank you. What's going to hurt me?' said Una,
and she put her stool away behind the oak, and strolled home
through the gaps that old Hobden kept open for her.

Brookland Road

I was very well pleased with what I knowed,
I reckoned myself no fool -
Till I met with a maid on the Brookland Road
That turned me back to school.

Low down - low down!
Where the liddle green lanterns shine -
Oh! maids, I've done with 'ee all but one,
And she can never be mine!
'Twas right in the middest of a hot June night,
With thunder duntin' round,
And I seed her face by the fairy light
That beats from off the ground.

She only smiled and she never spoke,
She smiled and went away;
But when she'd gone my heart was broke,
And my wits was clean astray.

Oh! Stop your ringing and let me be -
Let be, O Brookland bells!
You'll ring Old Goodman * out of the sea,
Before I wed one else!

Old Goodman's farm is rank sea sand,
And was this thousand year;
But it shall turn to rich plough land
Before I change my dear!

Oh! Fairfield Church is water-bound
From Autumn to the Spring;
But it shall turn to high hill ground
Before my bells do ring!

Oh! leave me walk on the Brookland Road,
In the thunder and warm rain -
Oh! leave me look where my love goed
And p'raps I'll see her again!
Low down - low down!
Where the liddle green lanterns shine -
Oh! maids, I've done with 'ee all but one,
And she can never be mine!

*Earl Godwin of the Goodwin Sands(?)

THE KNIFE AND THE NAKED CHALK

The Run of the Downs

The Weald is good, the Downs are best -
I'll give you the run of 'em, East to West.
Beachy Head and Winddoor Hill,
They were once and they are still.
Firle, Mount Caburn and Mount Harry
Go back as far as sums'll carry.
Ditchling Beacon and Chanctonbury Ring,
They have looked on many a thing;
And what those two have missed between 'em
I reckon Truleigh Hill has seen 'em.
Highden, Bignor and Duncton Down
Knew Old England before the Crown.
Linch Down, Treyford and Sunwood
Knew Old England before the Flood.
And when you end on the Hampshire side -
Butser's old as Time and Tide.
The Downs are sheep, the Weald is corn,
You be glad you are Sussex born!

The Knife and the Naked Chalk

The children went to the seaside for a month, and lived in a flint
village on the bare windy chalk Downs, quite thirty miles away
from home. They made friends with an old shepherd, called Mr
Dudeney, who had known their Father when their Father was
little. He did not talk like their own people in the Weald of Sussex,
and he used different names for farm things, but he understood
how they felt, and let them go with him. He had a tiny cottage
about half a mile from the village, where his wife made mead
from thyme honey, and nursed sick lambs in front of a coal fire,
while Old Jim, who was Mr Dudeney's sheep-dog's father, lay at
the door. They brought up beef bones for Old Jim (you must
never give a sheep-dog mutton bones), and if Mr Dudeney happened
to be far in the Downs, Mrs Dudeney would tell the dog to
take them to him, and he did.

One August afternoon when the village water-cart had made
the street smell specially townified, they went to look for their
shepherd as usual, and, as usual, Old Jim crawled over the doorstep
and took them in charge. The sun was hot, the dry grass was
very slippery, and the distances were very distant.

'It's Just like the sea,' said Una, when Old Jim halted in the
shade of a lonely flint barn on a bare rise. 'You see where you're
going, and - you go there, and there's nothing between.'

Dan slipped off his shoes. 'When we get home I shall sit in the
woods all day,' he said.

'Whuff!' said Old Jim, to show he was ready, and struck across
a long rolling stretch of turf. Presently he asked for his beefbone.

'Not yet,' said Dan. 'Where's Mr Dudeney? Where's Master?'
Old Jim looked as if he thought they were mad, and asked
again.

'Don't you give it him,' Una cried. 'I'm not going to be left
howling in a desert.'

'Show, boy! Show!' said Dan, for the Downs seemed as bare as
the palm of your hand.

Old Jim sighed, and trotted forward. Soon they spied the blob
of Mr Dudeney's hat against the sky a long way off.

'Right! All right!' said Dan. Old Jim wheeled round, took his
bone carefully between his blunted teeth, and returned to the
shadow of the old barn, looking just like a wolf. The children
went on. Two kestrels hung bivvering and squealing above them.
A gull flapped lazily along the white edge of the cliffs. The curves
of the Downs shook a little in the heat, and so did Mr Dudeney's
distant head.

They walked toward it very slowly and found themselves
staring into a horseshoe-shaped hollow a hundred feet deep,
whose steep sides were laced with tangled sheep-tracks. The flock
grazed on the flat at the bottom, under charge of Young Jim. Mr
Dudeney sat comfortably knitting on the edge of the slope, his
crook between his knees. They told him what Old Jim had done.

'Ah, he thought you could see my head as soon as he did. The
closeter you be to the turf the more you see things. You look
warm-like,'said Mr Dudeney.

'We be,' said Una, flopping down. 'And tired.'

'Set beside o' me here. The shadow'll begin to stretch out in a
little while, and a heat-shake o' wind will come up with it that'll
overlay your eyes like so much wool.'

'We don't want to sleep,' said Una indignantly; but she settled
herself as she spoke, in the first strip of early afternoon shade.

'O' course not. You come to talk with me same as your father
used. He didn't need no dog to guide him to Norton Pit.'

'Well, he belonged here,' said Dan, and laid himself down at
length on the turf.

'He did. And what beats me is why he went off to live among
them messy trees in the Weald, when he might ha' stayed here and
looked all about him. There's no profit to trees. They draw the
lightning, and sheep shelter under 'em, and so, like as not, you'll
lose a half-score ewes struck dead in one storm. Tck! Your father
knew that.'

'Trees aren't messy.' Una rose on her elbow. 'And what about
firewood? I don't like coal.'

'Eh? You lie a piece more uphill and you'll lie more natural,'
said Mr Dudeney, with his provoking deaf smile. 'Now press
your face down and smell to the turf. That's Southdown thyme
which makes our Southdown mutton beyond compare, and, my
mother told me, 'twill cure anything except broken necks, or
hearts. I forget which.'

They sniffed, and somehow forgot to lift their cheeks from the
soft thymy cushions.

'You don't get nothing like that in the Weald. Watercress,
maybe?' said Mr Dudeney.

'But we've water - brooks full of it - where you paddle in hot
weather,' Una replied, watching a yellow-and-violet-banded
snail-shell close to her eye.

'Brooks flood. Then you must shift your sheep - let alone
foot-rot afterward. I put more dependence on a dew-pond any day.'

'How's a dew-pond made?' said Dan, and tilted his hat over his
eyes. Mr Dudeney explained.

The air trembled a little as though it could not make up its mind
whether to slide into the Pit or move across the open. But it
seemed easiest to go downhill, and the children felt one soft puff
after another slip and sidle down the slope in fragrant breaths that
baffed on their eyelids. The little whisper of the sea by the cliffs
joined with the whisper of the wind over the grass, the hum of
insects in the thyme, the ruffle and rustle of the flock below, and a
thickish mutter deep in the very chalk beneath them. Mr
Dudeney stopped explaining, and went on with his knitting.
They were roused by voices. The shadow had crept halfway
down the steep side of Norton Pit, and on the edge of it, his back
to them, Puck sat beside a half-naked man who seemed busy at
some work. The wind had dropped, and in that funnel of ground
every least noise and movement reached them like whispers up a
water-Pipe.

'That is clever,' said Puck, leaning over. 'How truly you shape it!'

'Yes, but what does The Beast care for a brittle flint tip? Bah!'
The man flicked something contemptuously over his shoulder. It
fell between Dan and Una - a beautiful dark-blue flint arrow-head
still hot from the maker's hand.

The man reached for another stone, and worked away like a
thrush with a snail-shell.

'Flint work is fool's work,' he said at last. 'One does it because
one always did it; but when it comes to dealing with The Beast -
no good!' He shook his shaggy head.
'The Beast was dealt with long ago. He has gone,' said Puck.

'He'll be back at lambing time. I know him.' He chipped very
carefully, and the flints squeaked.

'Not he. Children can lie out on the Chalk now all day through
and go home safe.'

'Can they? Well, call The Beast by his True Name, and I'll
believe it,' the man replied.
'Surely!' Puck leaped to his feet, curved his hands round his
mouth and shouted: 'Wolf! Wolf!'

Norton Pit threw back the echo from its dry sides - 'Wuff!'
Wuff!' like Young jim's bark.

'You see? You hear?' said Puck. 'Nobody answers. Grey
Shepherd is gone. Feet-in-the-Night has run off. There are no
more wolves.'

'Wonderful!' The man wiped his forehead as though he were
hot. 'Who drove him away? You?'

'Many men through many years, each working in his own
country. Were you one of them?' Puck answered.

The man slid his sheepskin cloak to his waist, and without a
word pointed to his side, which was all seamed and blotched with
scars. His arms, too, were dimpled from shoulder to elbow with
horrible white dimples.

'I see,' said Puck. 'It is The Beast's mark. What did you use
against him?'
'Hand, hammer, and spear, as our fathers did before us.'

'So? Then how' - Puck twitched aside the man's dark-brown
cloak - 'how did a Flint-worker come by that? Show, man, show!'
He held out his little hand.

The man slipped a long dark iron knife, almost a short sword,
from his belt, and after breathing on it, handed it hilt-first to
Puck, who took it with his head on one side, as you should when
you look at the works of a watch, squinted down the dark blade,
and very delicately rubbed his forefinger from the point to the hilt.

'Good!' said he, in a surprised tone.

'It should be. The Children of the Night made it,' the man answered.

'So I see by the iron. What might it have cost you?'

'This!' The man raised his hand to his cheek. Puck whistled like
a Weald starling.

'By the Great Rings of the Chalk!' he cried. 'Was that your
price? Turn sunward that I may see better, and shut your eye.'
He slipped his hand beneath the man's chin and swung him till
he faced the children up the slope. They saw that his right eye was
gone, and the eyelid lay shrunk. Quickly Puck turned him round
again, and the two sat down.

'It was for the sheep. The sheep are the people,' said the man, in
an ashamed voice. 'What else could I have done? You know, Old
One.'

Puck sighed a little fluttering sigh. 'Take the knife. I listen.'
The man bowed his head, drove the knife into the turf, and
while it still quivered said: 'This is witness between us that I speak
the thing that has been. Before my Knife and the Naked Chalk I
speak. Touch!'

Puck laid a hand on the hilt. It stopped shaking. The children
wriggled a little nearer.

'I am of the People of the Worked Flint. I am the one son of the
Priestess who sells the Winds to the Men of the Sea. I am the
Buyer of the Knife - the Keeper of the People,' the man began, in
a sort of singing shout. 'These are my names in this country of the
Naked Chalk, between the Trees and the Sea.'

'Yours was a great country. Your names are great too,' said Puck.

'One cannot feed some things on names and songs.' The man
hit himself on the chest. 'It is better - always better - to count
one's children safe round the fire, their Mother among them.'

'Ahai!' said Puck. 'I think this will be a very old tale.'
'I warm myself and eat at any fire that I choose, but there is no
one to light me a fire or cook my meat. I sold all that when I
bought the Magic Knife for my people. it was not right that The
Beast should master man. What else could I have done?'

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