Furze the Cruel

Brightly was celebrating the general holiday by exchanging one form of labour for another. It would have been useless to follow his usual calling of purveyor of rabbit-skins that day, so he had become for the time being a general merchant. He had obtained a trayful of small goods on credit. Brightly had one fault, a grave one in business; he was honest. So far he had sold nothing. He was merely demonstrating the marvellous purchasing powers of a penny. It never occurred to him that he was opposing his miserable little trayful of rubbish to all the booths and pleasures of the great fair. Tie-clips and clay-pipes were all he had to offer in competition with attractions which had delighted kings and princes, if the honesty of the showmen could be accepted as advertised. Even the fat woman admitted that royal personages had pinched her legs. If Brightly had followed the fat lady's example, and declared in a loud enough voice that autocrats smoked nothing but his clay-pipes, and kept their decorations in place with his tie-clips, he might have acquired many pennies.

Above the town, where the cattle-fair was in full swing, various hawkers had established themselves; men who looked as if they had been made out of metal, with faces of copper and tongues of brass. One man was giving away gold rings, and if a recipient was not satisfied he threw in a silver watch as well. He couldn't explain why he did such things. It was his evil fate to have been born a philanthropist. He owned he had come to the fair with the idea of selling his goods; but when he found himself among so many happy, smiling people, fine young men, beautiful girls, dear old folks who reminded him of his own parents, all making holiday and enjoying themselves, with the sun shining and Nature at her best, he felt totally unable to restrain his benevolence. He couldn't take their money. It was weak and foolish of him, he knew, but he had to give them the rings and watches, which, as they could see for themselves, had cost him pounds, shillings, and pence, because he wanted to send them home happy. His only idea was to give them a little present so that they would remember him, and tell their friends what a simple and generous creature they had encountered at the fair. So he flowed on, with an eloquence which any missionary would have envied. And then he produced a black bag, and said he wished to draw their attention to something which he must really ask them to buy, not because he wanted their money, but because he knew that people never really valued a thing unless they gave something for it. It was a fatal thing, this philanthropy, but it made him happy to be kind to others. Out of the bag came some more rubbish, and the rascal was soon doing a roaring trade. What chance had Brightly against a metallic creature like that?

Higher up the road another gentleman established himself. He was well dressed, his mottled hands were gleaming with immense rings, and his clean-shaven face was as red as rhubarb. He assumed an academic cap and gown, casually informing those who gathered around that he was entitled to do so, as he was not only a man of gentle birth, but a graduate of "one of our oldest universities," and a duly qualified physician also. He stated with emphasis, and a slight touch of cynicism, that he was no philanthropist. He belonged to an overcrowded profession; he had no settled practice; and knowing how unwilling country-people were to come to a medical man until they had to, when it was usually too late, and knowing also how grievously afflicted many of them were with divers diseases, he had decided to come out by the wayside and heal them. It was entirely a matter of business. He was going to cure them of a number of ailments which they were harbouring unawares, and they would pay him a trifling sum in return. He wasn't going to give anything away. He couldn't afford to be generous. He begged the people not to crowd about him so closely, as there was plenty of time, and he would undertake to attend to every one.

This man ought to have been a genius, if he hadn't been a rogue. He went on to warn his listeners against quack doctors and patent medicines. They were all frauds, he assured them, and he described in homely language how he had often restored some poor sufferer whose health had been undermined by the mischievous attentions of unqualified impostors. He took a small boy, set him in the midst, and in flowing phrase explained his internal structure. It was the liver which was the origin of disease among men; liver, which caused women to faint, and men to feel run down. Heart disease, consumption, eczema, cold feet, red nose, and a craving for liquor were all caused by an unhealthy liver, and were so many different names for the same disease. So far nobody but himself had discovered any safe cure for the liver. There were a thousand remedies mentioned in the British Encyclopædia– possibly he meant pharmacopoeia – but not a genuine medicine among them. He had devoted his life and fortune to discovering a remedy, and he had discovered it; and his listeners should be allowed to benefit by it; for it needed but a glance at their faces to convince him that the liver of every man and woman in that circle was grievously out of order.

At that moment Peter and Mary came up, considerably elevated, and gazed with immense satisfaction at the figure in cap and gown, Mary exclaiming in her noisy way: "Aw, Peter! 'Tis a preacher."

The quack wiped his hands and face with a silk handkerchief, opened a bag, and producing a small green bottle half full of grimy pellets, continued solemnly; "The result of a life devoted to medical studies, my friends. The one and only liver cure. The triumph of the human intellect; more wonderful than the Pyramids of America; long life and happiness in a small bottle; and the price only one shilling."

There was not much demand at first for long life and happiness in bottle form. The listeners had come to Goose Fair to enjoy themselves, not to buy pills. They were all obviously as healthy as wayside weeds. But the artful rogue had only been playing with them so far. He made his living by the gift of a tongue, and so far he had not used it. The time had come for him to terrify them. He removed his cap, threw his shoulders back and his arms out, and lectured them furiously; telling them they were dying, not merely ill, but hovering every one of them on the brink of the grave; that tan of health upon their faces was a deception; it was actually a fatal symptom, a sign of physical degeneracy, a herald of bodily impotence. They were all suffering from liver in some shape or form, and with the majority, he feared, the disease was already too far advanced to be arrested by any treatment, except one only – the little green bottle of pills, which might be theirs for one shilling. He choked them with eloquence for ten minutes, frightening, converting, and making them feel horribly ill. He was irresistible, especially when he spoke with pathos of his devotion for his fellow-creatures, and his pain when he saw them suffering. That man would have made an ideal preacher, if he had known how to speak the truth.

Mary listened open-mouthed. A bee flew in, and she spat it out and gasped. For the first time in her life she realised she was in a state of delicate health.

The quack advanced to Peter, who was looking particularly despondent, being fully persuaded he had not long to live, and with a grave shake of the head punched him in the body. "Does that hurt?" he asked.

"Cruel," said Peter.

"Enlarged liver, my friend," said the rogue. "It is not too late to save the patient if he takes the remedy at once. Let me tell you how you feel," and he went on to describe a condition of ill-health, which most of his other hearers felt coming upon themselves also under the potent influence of mere suggestion.

"Du'ye feel like that, Peter?" demanded Mary with great anxiety.

"I du," said Peter miserably.

"So du I," declared Mary. "I feels tired when I goes to bed, just like he ses."

"Better have three bottles each," said the friend of mankind. "One arrests the disease, three remove it."

That would have meant six shillings, which of course was not to be thought of. Even ill-health was to be preferred to such an expenditure. As Peter reminded his sister, he could almost bury her for that sum. Finally they bought one bottle of pellets. Not even the quack's conviction that Mary was suffering from an undue secretion of bile could persuade them to purchase more. The rogue collected a pound's worth of silver from the circle, and went on his way to capture a fresh lot of gulls; and so the dishonesty and fun of the fair went on side by side; while there was half-blind Brightly, squeezing against the railings of the church, with his ridiculous honesty, and his trayful of pipes and tie-clips which never grew less. Honesty is a money-making policy in the land of Utopia, but not elsewhere; and Utopia means nowhere. Christianity has been preached for nearly two thousand years, and still the man is a fool who leaves his silver-mounted stick outside the door.

The next thing was luncheon, as elegant folk have it; or a proper old guzzle, according to Peter. The savages had made up their minds to do the fair properly, and eating was certainly a chief item of the programme. Savoury goose, with plenty of sage and onions, was the dish of the day. Peter put the pills in his pocket, and forgot that his liver was out of order, as Mary ignored the untruth that she suffered from "too much oil." It was useless to try strange words upon her. While she was eating that portion of goose appointed for the day she tried to make her brother explain how the oil had got into her system, but Peter was much too busy to answer. He was guzzling like a monkey, with his face in the plate, half choking in his hurry, gulping, perspiring, gasping with sheer greediness, and splashing in the rich gravy very much as the goose he was feeding on had once flopped through some moorland bog.

Boodles and Aubrey went to the Queen's Hotel for their goose dinner; a place where good English fare may still be seen and eaten. Boodles had witnessed the pleasure-fair only, the gay and noisy side of things, and though the debased faces of some of the booth proprietors had alarmed her at first, she had seen nothing actually nasty. Cruelty was not there, or at least it had been out of sight. She did not go upon the other side, where the rogues foregathered, and where beasts were bought and sold; where sheep were penned in a mass of filth, with their mouths open, tasting nothing but heat and dust; where ponies were driven from side to side, half mad with fright, while drovers with faces like a nightmare yelled and waved their hats at them, and brought their cudgels down like hammers upon their sweating flanks; where calves, with big patient eyes protruding with pain and terror, were driven through the crowd by a process of tail-twisting; where fowls were stuffed in crates and placed in the full heat of the sun; and stupid little pigs were kicked on their heads to make them sensible. Boodles saw nothing of that, and it was just as well, for it might have spoilt her day, and have reminded her that, for some cause unexplained, the dominant note of all things is cruelty; from the height of the unknown God, who gives His beings a short life and scourges them through it, to the depth of the invisible mite who rends a still smaller mite in pieces. Living creatures were placed in the world, it is said, to perform the duty of reproducing their species. It seems as reasonable to suggest that their duty is to stamp out some other species; for the instinct of destruction is at least as strong as the instinct of reproduction, making the world a cold place often for the tender-hearted.

It was not a cold place for Boodles that day, because she was in a happy state of love and ignorance. She was not worrying herself about Nature, who vivisects most people under the base old plea of physiological research. She and Aubrey went up a sage-and-onion-scented street, into the similarly perfumed hotel, up a flight of stairs fragrant with stuffing, and into a long room, to find themselves in a temple of feasting, with incense to St. Goose streaming upward, and two score famished and rather ill-bred folk licking their lips ostentatiously and casting savage glances at the knives and forks.

Everything was on the grand scale. It was just such a meal as the eighteenth-century post-houses gave passengers on the road before railways had come to ruin appetites. It was a true Hogarthian dinner; not a meal to approach with a pingling stomach; not a matter of "a ragout of fatted snails and a chicken not two hours from the shell"; but mighty geese, and a piece of beef as big as a Dartmoor tor – the lusty cook's knees bowed as he staggered in with it – mounds of vegetables, pyramids of dumplings, gravy enough to float a fishing-smack, and beer and cider sufficient to bathe in. The diners were in complete sympathy with the vastness of the feast, being mostly from ravenous Dartmoor. A beefy farmer was voted to the chair, and carved until perspiration trickled down his nose. A gentleman of severe appearance insisted upon saying grace, but nobody took any notice. They were too busy sniffing, and one who had been already helped was making strange noises with his lips and throat. Boodles was laughing at his manners, and pinching Aubrey's hand. "Such fun," she whispered.

"Ladies first," cried the carver.

"Quite right," gasped the man who had been served first, having snatched the plate from the waiter as he was about to pass him. Then he gaped and admitted an entire dumpling, nearly as big as a cricket-ball, and had nothing else to say, except "Bit more o' that stuffing," for ten minutes.

"What am I to do with it?" sighed Boodles, when the heaped plate was set in front of her.

"Eat 'en, my dear!" said a commoner, who was wolfing bread until his time came. "'Tis Goosie Vair," he added encouragingly.

"Take it, Aubrey," she said, with a slight titter.

"Go ahead," he replied. "Eat what you can, and leave the rest."

"I wish we were alone," she whispered. "These people are pigs."

Had they been alone they would probably have fed off the same plate, and given each other kisses between every mouthful. As it was they could do nothing, except play with each other's feet beneath the table. Everybody else was hard at work. Faces were swollen on every side, and the sounds were more suggestive of a farmyard at feeding time than a party of immortal beings taking a little refreshment. There was no conversation. All that had been done during the time of waiting. "'Tis a butiful day, sure enough," and "A proper fine vair," had exhausted the topics. Boodles was rather too severe when she called the feasters pigs, but they were not pleasant to watch, and they seemed to have lost the divine spark somehow. Philosophers might have wondered whether the species was worth reproducing.

The young people soon left the table, and a couple very differently constituted pressed themselves into the vacant places. The others were not half satisfied. Some of them would stuff to the verge of apoplexy, then roll down-stairs, and swill whisky-and-water by the tumblerful. It was holiday; a time of over-eating and over-drinking. They had little self-control. They unbuttoned their clothes at table, and wiped their streaming faces with the cloth.

"I'm glad we went to goose dinner, but I shouldn't go again. It was gorging, not eating," said Boodles, as they went along the street.

"Let's go and see the living pictures," said Aubrey.

"But we've seen them."

"We'll go again. Perhaps they will turn on a fresh lot."

They liked the living pictures, because the lights were turned down, and they could snuggle together like two kittens and bite each other's fingers.

"Then we'll go for a walk – our walk. But no," sighed Boodles; "we can't. It will be time for the ordeal."

The fairy-tale was getting on. Ogre time had come. Boodles was to go and drink tea with her boy's parents.

"Perhaps we can go our walk later on."

"It won't be a real day if we don't," said she.

"Our walk" was beside the Tavy, where they had kissed as babies, and loved to wander now that they were children. They thought they were grown up, but that was absurd. People who are in love remain as they were, and never grow up until some one opens the window and lets the cold wind in. "Our walk" was fairyland; a strange and pleasant place after goose dinner and Goose Fair.

Brightly was against the railings, and had done no business, although the day was far spent. There was no demand for tie-clips or clay-pipes. Somebody was playing the organ in the church, and Brightly had that music for his dinner. Everybody seemed to be doing well, and he was the one miserable exception. He put up his sharp face, and chirped pathetically: "Wun't ye buy 'em, gentlemen? Tie-clips, penny each. Dree for duppence. Butiful pipes, brave and shiny, two a penny."

The roundabout over the way was taking pennies by the bushel; but the roundabout supplied a demand, and Brightly did not. A fat be-ribboned dog passed and snapped at Ju. She took it patiently, having learnt the lesson from her master. Then two young people swept round, and one of them collided with Brightly, and almost knocked his thin figure through the railings.

"I beg your pardon," said a bright young voice. "I hope I didn't hurt you."

"You'm welcome, sir," said Brightly, wondering what on earth the young gentleman was apologising for.

"Why, it's the man with the rabbit-skins. What does he do with them? Now he's selling pipes. Aubrey, I'm going to buy some. Oh, look at the poor little dog! How it shivers! What is the matter with it?"

"She'm hungry," explained Brightly.

"You look as if you were hungry too," said Aubrey with boyish candour.

"I be a bit mazed like, sir," admitted Brightly.

"I want some pipes, please – a lot. Don't laugh, Aubrey," said Boodles, looking down on the tray, with moisture in each eye and a frown on her forehead. She had no money to spare, poor child, only a threepenny-bit and four coppers; but she would have parted with the lot to feed the hungry had not Aubrey taken and restrained her charitable little hand.

"Give him this," he whispered.

"Feed the little dog," said Boodles, as she gave Brightly the coin, which was half-a-crown, as white and big, it seemed to Brightly, as the moon itself. Then they went on, while Brightly was left to see visions and to dream. He called out to tell them they had taken neither pipes nor tie-clips, but his asthmatic voice was drowned as usual by the noises of the fair, and it was quite a different set of faces and figures that went before him. He picked Ju up, tucked her under his arm, and shuffled away to buy food. He had seen the girl's face with pity on it through his big glasses, only dimly, but it was enough to show him what she was; something out of the church window, or out of the big black book they read from, the book that rested upon the wings of a golden goose, or perhaps she had come from the wonderful restaurant called Jerusalem just to show him and Ju there was somewhere or other, either in Palestine or above Dartmoor, some very superior Duke of Cornwall who took a kindly interest in worms, himself, and other creeping things. Brightly stopped, oblivious to holiday-makers, and tried to think of Boodles' name. He found it just as he reached the place where he could obtain a royal meal of scraps for threepence. "Her's a reverent angel, Ju," he whispered.

Beyond the bridge, which crossed the Tavy near the entrance to the field where the main pleasure-fair was making noises curiously suggestive of a savage war-dance, Thomasine walked slowly to and fro. She had been doing that ever since eleven o'clock, varying the occupation by standing still for an hour or so gazing with patient cow's eyes along the road. Pendoggat had promised to meet her there, and treat her to all the fun of the fair. He had told her not to move from that spot until he arrived, and she had to be obedient. She had been waiting four hours in her best clothes, sometimes shaking the dust from her new petticoat, or wiping her eyes with her Sunday handkerchief, but never going beyond the bridge or venturing into the fair-field. One or two young men had accosted her, but she had told them in a frightened way she was waiting for a gentleman. She had seen her former young man. Will Pugsley, pass with a new sweetheart upon his arm; and although Thomasine was unable to reason she was able to feel miserable. Pendoggat was upon the other side, kicking a calf he had purchased along the road, enjoying himself after his own manner. He had forgotten all about Thomasine, and all that his promise and the holiday meant to her. Besides, Annie Crocker was with him like a sort of burr, clinging wherever he went, and not to be easily shaken off; and she too wanted to be in the fair-field; only, as she kept on reminding him, it was no place for a decent woman alone, and she couldn't go unless he took her. To which Pendoggat replied that she wasn't a decent woman, and if she had been nobody would want to speak to her. They swore at each other in a subdued fashion whenever they found themselves in a quiet corner.

"Come on, my love! Come along wi' I, and have a ride on the whirligig," shouted a drunken soldier with a big wart on his nose, staggering up to Thomasine, and grabbing at her arm. The girl trembled, but allowed the soldier to catch hold of her, because she did not know she had a legal right to resist. After all this was a form of courtship, though it was rather rough and sudden. Like many girls of her class Thomasine did not see anything strange in being embraced by a man before she knew what his name was. The soldier dragged her to the parapet of the bridge and kissed her savagely, heedless of the passers-by. Then he began to take her to the fair-ground, swearing at her when she hung back.

"I've got to bide here," she pleaded. "I'm waiting for a gentleman."

The drunken soldier declared he would smash the gentleman, or any one else, who tried to take his prize from him; but he proved to be a man whose words were mightier than his deeds, for when he saw a big policeman approaching with a question in his eye he abandoned Thomasine and fled. The girl dusted her clothes in a patient fashion and went on waiting.

The next local excitement was the arrival of Peter and Mary in a kind of whirlwind, both of them well warmed with excitement and Plymouth gin. Thomasine nodded to them, but they did not see her. Mary had been buying flower-seeds for her garden, a whole packet of sweet-peas and some mignonette. Peter had objected to such folly when he discovered that the produce would not be edible. Their garden was small, and they could not waste good soil for the purpose of growing useless flowers. But Mary was always insisting upon being as civilised as she could. "Miss Boodles du grow a brave lot o' flowers in her garden, and she'm a proper young lady," she said. Mary knew she could not become a proper lady, but she might do her best by trying to grow "a brave lot o' flowers" in her garden.

Later Thomasine saw Boodles and Aubrey pass over the bridge, walking solemnly for the first time that day. The little girl was about to be tried by ordeal, and she was getting anxious about her personal appearance. Her shoes were so dusty, and there was a tiny hole in her stocking right over her ankle, and her face was hot, and her hat was crooked. "You did it, Aubrey," she said. She wasn't looking at all nice, and her hair was tumbling, and threatening to be down her back any moment. "And I'm only seventeen, Aubrey. I know they'll hate me."

They went up the hill among the green trees; and beneath the wall, where nobody could see them, Aubrey dusted his sweetheart's shoes, and put her hat straight, and guided her hands to where hairpins were breaking loose from the radiant head, and told her she was sweetness itself down to the smallest freckle. "Well, if they are not nice I shall say I'm only a baby and can't help it. And then you must say it was all your fault, because you came and kissed me with your pretty girl's face and made me love it."

Thomasine watched Boodles as she went out of sight, trying to think, but not succeeding. She regarded Boodles as a young lady, a being made like herself, and belonging to her species, and yet as different from her as Pendoggat was different from old Weevil. Boodles could talk, and Thomasine could not; Boodles could walk prettily, while she could only slouch; Boodles adorned her clothes, while she could only hang them upon her in a misfitting kind of way. The life of the soul was in the eyes of Boodles; the life of the body in Thomasine's. It was all the difference between the rare bird which is costly, and the common one which any one may capture, had Thomasine known it. She knew nothing except that she was totally unlike the little girl of the radiant head. She did not know how debased she was, how utterly ignorant, and how vilely cheap. She had been accustomed to put a low price upon herself, because the market was overstocked with girls as debased, ignorant, and cheap, as herself; girls who might have been feminine, but had missed it somehow; girls whose bodies cost twopence, and whose souls a brass ring.