The gentleman was on his feet. ‘That was a shame, friend, so it was. We’re vastly obliged to you, pon my soul we are. And now shew us our beds and we’ll wish you good night. Ha ha, took a stern view, did he? As good a tale as I’ve heard these three months. It shall go the round of the coffee-houses, I promise you.’
Returning to the public parlour after shewing his guests to their rooms, Mr Bailey, sobered and a little sorry for himself, found Coachy Timms sitting where he had left him.
‘Rouse up, old gentleman.’
‘Eh?’ Coachy was awake.
‘Time to go, friend. Come, you’re in a sad way if you need telling that. Tis time to go, I say.’
Coachy nodded. ‘Tis a winter-proud night, my coney. I’d as lief stay where I be.’
‘And so you could and welcome, friend. But I’ve not a bed left spare in the house. And the wife would take it amiss if she found you here in the morning. Come, rouse up.’
Without a word Coachy got out of his chair and began moving towards the street door. He opened it and the sky entered to meet him. He stared out at the scintillation. ‘Ay, tis a rare brimmer tonight. Frost and stars a-plenty, and print-moonlight. Could a man light his innards with that glory, he’d have owdacious fine dreams to his bed.’
His foot was across the threshold when Mr Bailey called him back with a loud whisper.
‘Eh?’ said Coachy. ‘What’s afoot now?’
‘If you had a sister, Coachy Timms,’ said Mr Bailey, ‘would you call her your dear love?’
‘Eh?’ said Coachy. ‘Say ut once more, my coney.’
Mr Bailey said it again. ‘And yet,’ he added, half to himself, ‘they act like sister and brother, whatever their speech. For they have each a room to sleep in, as proper and nice as you please.’
Coachy shook his head sadly. ‘That daun’t make sense. If I’d a sister, would I call her my dear love? No, that I woon’t. And if I’d a dear love I woon’t call her sister, nuther.’ His moonlit face creased in an elfish smile. ‘I’d call her my jolly, I’d call her my dimple, I’d call her my primy lass. Doxy and deary I’d call her, and heartsease, and gillyvor, and marnen glory. I’d see her eat hearty and step pretty, and I’d see Goodman Time run past and never mark her. Where be Coachy’s fine fillikin, he’d say; for I’ll have my due of her, be she never so brisky. She be gone that way, I’d tell him, and this way, and that way. And I’d send him down one road after t’other, the sorry geck, and see him lose his labour . . . God-a-mercy, neighbour, and give you good night, what little be left of it. There baint above an admiral’s pint, by the moon’s look.’
CHAPTER 4
MR BAILEY’S MOON: HOW HE CRIED FOR IT AND GOT IT, AND HINTS OF WHAT IT WAS MADE OF
Erasmus Bailey, left alone in the sleeping house, became sharply aware of the quietness, and of the voice of his thought speaking in it. He was aware of that voice as of something hardly his own, something that came from a great distance. To be alone was luxury: he was so seldom alone. And to be alone on such a night as this, with Coachy Timms just gone, and with his mind curiously stirred by wine and talk and the flattering attentions of a real lady and a real gentleman, was an experience of rare quality. The talk had taken him back to a time when he had been a smart young usher, with golden prospects, a sparkling eye, and no little aptitude for learning. Perhaps his eye sparkled more in memory than it had ever done in fact; perhaps those vanished prospects seemed more golden now than they had seemed to the young man himself; perhaps his learning had not amounted to much. For that is the way of us: we must needs sharpen the knife of past felicity before leaning our sentimental breast upon its point. Had he not been busy at this moment in disparaging his present state at the expense of his past, he must have recognized—for alone with himself he was not witless—that the young man he contemplated neither had within reach, nor truly desired, a brilliant worldly career. At best he would have been a country schoolmaster lording it timidly among the humble villagers and paying in his turn obsequious deference to the gentry. If it pleased the young man to dress up that modest ambition in fine raiment, if he made some little parade of his knowledge and liked to fancy himself a gallant among the ladies, it was all, though he knew it not, a kind of make-believe designed to conceal the romantic excess of his heart’s true desire. At the core of him, to himself unknown, or known only in wild intuitive flashes, was a fantastic dream of some ultimate and all-sufficing self-fulfilment. Of whence comes this ache that drives, this star that seduces us; or whether, drifting each in his lonely night, we are sparks of one fire and vainly seeking a return to our source; or made in pairs, Jack and Jill, as romantic persons tell us, and sundered by birth and sent each in quest of our twin; or dupes of a blind power that has no thought beyond that of multiplication; whether we are moved, not by love as we conceive it, but by the dynamics of the blood, the chemistry of attraction, the course of the stars, a word uttered before ever the atoms began dancing; whether (in fine) the soul is a self-flattering conceit or (which is no less probable) the body a creation of mad fancy; whether sex is the beginning of desire, or its end, or its imperfect instrument, and desire the sum of human loves or only their lowest common factor; whether all meaning is not of our own idle making, and thought a disease, and speculation a vanity; whether the Eternal is the true goal of all our striving, and whether the Eternal is not Death himself in his church-going guise; whether it is, or not, a laughing matter for the gods, this riot of sublimities, and whether, if gods there be, they have, as we have, imperative need of such laughter to distract them from the heartache and beauty and busy emptiness of the universe they have created—of these questions young Erasmus Bailey took no account, for he was never called upon to entertain them. Nor did he now, a much older man, pause to conceive or to consider such unprofitable matters, though he did, as he had too often done since the event itself, pause to ask himself by what trick of the brain or the blood that young usher had been led to suppose, even for one adventurous instant, that he might find his dream, his fair remote fancy warmly embodied, in the bed of a plump placid amiable and acquiescent maidservant. That one escapade, he being what he was, had been the cause of what he now chose to regard, somewhat melodramatically (but there is comfort in that), as his downfall. He could not find it in his heart to blame the girl (of whom a leaner and more masterful version was at this moment snoring in the room overhead) unless she was to blame for having submitted too readily to his first stolen kiss and for having smiled thereafter with a certain sentimental emphasis. She had done no more than that: for the rest she had offered neither resistance nor very positive encouragement. There was no vice in her; she was quiet, simple, mildly maternal; and if you asked love of her, well why not? Nor did she prove to be a passionate woman. It was her pleasure to be kind, and Mr Bailey was a pretty enough gentleman, and clever too, they said. Fancy his liking her!—she dimpled at the thought. And that was that. But it was not all. For young Bailey had not been the first to discover Sarah’s complaisant nature, nor even the first in that household; and when the girl became big with his child, and the whole story must come out, his master resolved that the shameless pair should be made an example of. In this resolution he had the hearty support of his wife, who had never liked the hussy’s looks, and as for Bailey, said she, he was as full of his own importance as she didn’t know what. Before many hours had passed the hounds were in full cry, the Squire who loved law, the Parson who loved virtue, and the Mob who loved wholesome fun. The sinners were haled to the pillory, there to be taught good manners with such taunts and missiles as came to hand; thence they were conducted to church, where, in mid-service, and clad in penitential white, they made public confession of their sin; and finally, with every inducement to love one another, they were joined together in holy matrimony and driven out of the village. Their reception by Bailey senior, to whom after many adventures and misadventures they naively presented themselves, would perhaps have been kindlier had not rumour of their public humiliations preceded them. To get a young woman with child was in his eyes a trivial mischance. He could have forgiven that; he could even, at a pinch, have stomached the marriage of his dull prosing son to a country serving wench; but the stocks and the ceremonial confession proved too much for his pride, and disgust wrought so fiercely in him that Erasmus accounted himself lucky, as indeed he was, to find himself, within a little while, established as the landlord of a village inn as remote from his father’s house as from the scene of his own disaster. Here he had remained, and here he is now, pretending to regret his negligible loss of status in order by that pretence to hide from himself his real regret. And the endeavour succeeds, baffling both himself and us. His phantom trouble, even though we catch a glimpse of it mistily haunting him, is too vague for definition, too quickly gone, now here now away, to be caught in any category of our devising. The question that comes to him in this quiet and solitary moment is subtle and secret, like the night breath of flowers, like the finger of moonlight laid upon his hand. It is gone before his mind can begin to frame it. Can it be the moon, a mere reflector, that makes this music in us? And is it a moon, no more and no less, that this music sets us desiring?