“THE BOY OUGHT TO HAVE A CRICKET BAT, TOM,” SAID Eva Grieve to her husband one summer evening. He was a farm labourer, very industrious, very poor, and both were so proud of their only child that they sometimes quarrelled about him. They all lived together in a tiny field that was shaped like a harp and full of sweet grass. There was an ash tree in it, a water splash, a garden with green things, and currant bushes in corners; and of course their little cottage.
“He can’t play cricket,” Tom Grieve replied.
“Not without a bat, he can’t; he ought to have a bat, like other boys.”
“Well, I can’t buy him no cricket bats and so he can’t have it,” said Tom.
“Why, you mean wretch—” began Eva with maternal belligerence.
“For one thing,” continued her mate, “he ain’t old enough—only five; and for another thing, I can’t afford no cricket bat.”
“If you had the true spirit of a father”—very scornful Eva was—“You’d make him one, yourself.”
So Tom chopped a cricket bat out of a slice of willow bough and presented it to his son. The child hardly looked at it.
“Course not,” snapped Eva to her sarcastic husband, “he wants a ball, too, don’t he?”
“You’ll be wanting some flannel duds for him next.”
“I’ll make him a ball,” cried Eva.
Eva went into the fields and collected wisps of sheep’s wool off the briars for her firstborn and bound them firmly into a ball with pieces of twine. But the child hardly looked at that either. His mother tossed the ball to him, but he let it fall. She pelted him playfully with it, and it made his nose bleed.
“He’s got no one to play with,” explained Eva, so she cut three sticks for a wicket, and in the evenings she and Tom would take the child out into the harp-shaped field. But the tiny Grieve did not care for cricket; it was not timid, it simply did not care. So Eva and Tom would play while David stood watching them with grave eyes; and at last Tom became very proficient indeed, and so enamoured of the game of cricket that he went and joined the village club and no longer played with Eva; and the child wouldn’t, so she was unhappy.
“He likes looking at things, but he doesn’t want to do anything himself. What he ought to have is a telescope,” said Eva. But how to get a telescope? She did not know. The village store had stocks of hobnailed boots and shovels and peppermint drops, but optical instruments were not in demand, and Eva might for ever have indulged in dreams—as she constantly did—of telescopes that brought the interior of heaven itself close up to you as clear as Crystal Palace. But one day she went to a farm auction, and there had the luck to meet a great strapper of a gypsy man, with a husky voice, a long ragged coat, and a depressed bowler hat, who had bought a bucketful of crockery and coathooks and odds and ends, including a little telescope.
“Here,” Eva approached the gaunt man, “is that telescope a good one?”
“Good!” he growled. “Course it’s a good ’un, and when I say it’s a good ’un I mean the gentleman’s gone to Canada, ain’t he? And he don’t want it. Ho, ho!” he yelled, extending the instrument and tilting it against his solemn eye. “Ho, ho! I give you my oath it’s good. I can see right clean into the insides of that cow over there!” Forty people turned to observe that animal, even the auctioneer and his clerk and his myrmidons. “I can see his liver, I can. Ho, what a liver he has got—I never see such a liver in my life! Here”—he dropped the glass into Eva’s hand—“Two shillings.”
Eva turned it over and over. It looked perfect. “Have a squint at me!”
Eva was too dashed in public to do any such thing.
“How much do you want?”
“Look here, ma’am, no talk for talk’s sake. Two bob.”
Eva quickly gave him back the telescope.
“Eighteenpence, then,” wailed he.
She turned away.
“Come here, a shilling.”
Eva took the telescope and gave the gypsy a shilling. Home she went, and David received the telescope on his birthday. It occupied him for an hour, but he did not seem able to focus it properly, and so he only cared to look through it from the wrong end. He would sit on one side of the table and stare through the cylinder at his mother on the other side. She seemed miles away, and that appeared to amuse him. But Eva was always taking peeps with it and carried it with her wherever she went. She would look at the trees or the neighbouring hill and discover that those grey bushes were really whitebeam; or tell you what old woman had been tiggling after firewood in the hanging copse and was bringing a burden home; or who that man was riding on the slow horse through the shocks of barley. Once when she surveyed the moon she saw a big hole in the planet that no one had ever mentioned to her before; and there wasn’t a man in the moon at all. But David could not contrive to see any of these wonders, and after a while the telescope was laid by.
A singularly disinterested child was David; not exactly morose, and certainly never peevish, but how quiet he was! Quiet as an old cat. “He’ll twine away!” sighed his mother. Gay patient Eva would take him into the spring woods to gather flowers, but he never picked a bloom and only waited silent for her.
“Look at this, I declare!” cried she, kneeling down in a timber lane before a strange plant. When its green shoots had first peered into light they pushed themselves up through a hole in a dead leaf that had lain upon them. They had grown up now to four or five inches, but they still carried the dead constricting leaf as if it were a collar that bound them together; it made them bulge underneath it, like a lettuce tied with bast, only it was much smaller. Eva pulled at the dead leaf; it split, and behold! the five released spears shot apart and stretched themselves flat on the ground.
“They’re so pleased now,” cried she. “It’s a bluebell plant.”
And Eva, singular woman, delighted in slugs! At a threat of rain the grass path in the harplike field would be strewn with them, great fat creatures, ivory or black, with such delicate horns. Eva liked the black ones most.
“See!” she would say to her son. “It’s got a hole in its neck, that little white hole, you can see right into it. There!” And she would take a stalk of grass and tickle the slug. At once the hole would disappear and the horns collapse. “That’s where it breathes.” She would trot about tickling slugs to make them shut those curious valves. David was neither disgusted nor bored; he just did not care for such things, neither flowers, nor herbs, nor fine weather, nor the bloom of trees.
One day they met a sharp little man with grey eyebrows that reminded you of a goat’s horns. There was a white tie to his collar, shiny brown gaiters to his legs, and an umbrella slanted through his arm as if it were a gun.
“How is your cherry tree doing this year, Mr. Barnaby?”
Mr. Barnaby wagged his head and gazed critically down at Eva’s son.
“There was a mazing lot of bloom, Eva; it hung on the tree like—like fury, till it come a cold wind and a sniggling frost. That coopered it. A nightingale used to sing there; my word it could sing, it didn’t half used to chop it off!” Then he addressed the lad. “Ever you see a nightingale part its hair?”
David gazed stolidly at Mr. Barnaby.
“Say no,” commanded Eva, shaking him.
The boy only shook his head.
“No, you wouldn’t,” concluded the man.
“There’s no life in him. I’m feared he’ll twine away,” said Eva.
For David’s ninth birthday she procured him a box of paints and a book with outlines of pigs and wheelbarrows and such things, to be coloured. David fiddled about with them for a while and then put them aside. It was Eva who filled up the book with magnificent wheelbarrows and cherubic pigs. She coloured a black-and-white engraving of The Miraculous Draught of Fishes, every fish of a different hue, in a monstrous gamboge ocean; a coloured portrait of David himself was accomplished, which made her husband weep with laughter; and a text, extravagantly illuminated, I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life, which was hung above David’s bed. To what ambitious lengths this art might have carried her it is impossible to say, the intervention of another birthday effecting a complete diversion. This time the lad was given a small melodeon by his fond parents, but its harmonic complications embarrassed him, baffled him; even the interpretations of All hail the power or My Highland Laddie which Eva wrung from its desperate bosom were enough to unhinge the mind of a dog, let alone poor David.
David seemed to be a good scholar, he was obedient and clean, and by the time he was due to leave school at the age of fourteen he had won the right to a free apprenticeship with an engineer who specialized in steam-rollers. How proud Eva was! Tom too, how proud!
Yet he had not been at work three months when he was stricken with a spinal infirmity that obliged him to take to his bed. There he remained a long time. The doctor prescribed rest, and David rested and rested and rested, but he did not get better. At the end of a year he was still as helpless. There was no painful manifestation of disease, but it seemed as if his will were paralysed, as if he had surrendered a claim on life which he did not care to press. Two years, three years rolled on, and four years went by. The long thin youth, prematurely nipped, and helpless, was a burden like the young cuckoo that usurps a dunnock’s nest. But even the cuckoo flits, and David Grieve did not. For seven years thus he lay. There were ill-speaking folk who hinted that he was less ill than lazy, that his parents were too easy with him, that he wanted not rest but a stick. At times Tom, who had begun to feel the heavy burden of years, seemed to agree, for there was nothing the brooding invalid was interested in save brandy in lieu of medicine, and a long row of bottles in Eva’s kitchen testified that the treatment had been generous. It had, to the point of sacrifice. Decent steady-going people the Grieves had been, with the most innocent vices—for vice comes to all—but at last Tom had to sink the remnant of his savings in a specialist doctor from London. To the joy of the devoted parents the doctor declared that a certain operation might effect a cure.
So David was bundled off to the county hospital and operated upon. For a while Eva breathed with gaiety, an incubus was gone; it was almost as if she herself had been successfully operated upon. But soon, like a plant that flourishes best in shade, she began to miss not only David but the fixed order his poor life had imposed on her. His twenty-second birthday occurred as he was beginning to recover, and so they sent him a brand-new suit of clothes, the first he had had since boyhood.
Dear Son, [Eva wrote to him]
We are pleased to hear of you getting so well thank God we are very pleased and miss you a lot but cant expect no other you being our only little pipit. Your father has bought you a suit for you to ware when you get up and you can walk a drak serge like himself, what a tof. And will send them by the parcel post off next week. Look careful in the pockets.
And God bless love from
Tom and Eva
He looked careful in the pockets—and found a halfcrown.
It was on an April day that he returned to his parents, very much enfeebled, neither man nor child. Seven years of youth he had forgone, his large bones seemed too cumbersome for him, and adult thoughts still hung beyond his undeveloped flight. But even to him the absence had taught something: his mother had lost her sprightly bloom, his father was setting towards the sere. Both of them kissed him with joy, and Eva hung upon his neck in an ecstasy of tears that made him gasp and stagger to a chair.
Restoration to vigour was still far off. Sometimes a villager would come in of an evening and chat with him, or invite him to a party or a “do” of some sort, but David did not go; he was frail, and as it were immobile. He was on his feet again, but hardly more than enough to convey him about the harplike field. Restless and irritable he grew; his life was empty, quite empty, totally irremediably empty. The weather, too, also unmanned him; summer though it was, the storms of rain were unending and he would sit and sigh.
“What is that you’re saying?” asks Eva.
“Rain again!”
“Oh lord,” says his mother, “so it is. Well!”
The grass was lush in the field, the corn grew green and high, but the bloom of the flowering trees was scattered and squandered. Whole locks of laburnum would lie in the lane, the blossomy cream of the quicken trees was consumed, and the chestnut flowers were no more than rusty cages.
But on one brighter eve he suddenly took a stick and hobbled off for to take a walk. The wrath of the morning had gone like the anger of a good woman. The sky was not wholly clear, but what was seen was radiant, and the shadows were august. Trees hummed in the bright glow, bees scoured the blooms without sound, and a tiny bird uttered its one appealing note—Please! For half an hour he strolled along a road amid woods and hills; then the sky overdarkened quickly again, and he waited under a thick tree to watch a storm pass over. Clouds seemed to embrace the hills, and the woods reeled in a desperate envy. Rain fell across the meads in drooping curtains, and died to nothing. Then, in a vast surprise, heaven’s blue waves rocked upon a reef all gold, and with a rainbow’s coming the hills shone, so silent, while the trees shone and sung.
There was no song in the heart of the desolate man; his life was empty, and even its emptiness had a weight, a huge pressure; it was a fearful burden—the burden of nothingness. Grieve turned back, and when he came to an inn he entered and drank some brandy. Others there who knew him offered him ale, and he sat with them until his sorrow fell away. But when he got up to go, the world too seemed to fall away, his legs could not support him, nor his mind guide him. Two companions took him and with his arms around their necks conveyed him home.
“He’s drunk, then?” uttered Tom harshly.
“No, it’s the weakness,” cried Eva.
“That’s it,” corrected one of the men. “That beer at the Drover ain’t worth gut room. If you has five or six pints you be giddy as a goose.”
For a week David could not rise from his bed, but as soon as he was up he went out again, and as often as he went out, he was carried home, tipsy. Tom took his money away from him, but that did not cure him.
“He’s mad,” said the father, and at last Tom took the suit of clothes, too, rolled them into a bundle, and went and sold them to a neighbour.
So David Grieve lies on his bed, and his mother cherishes him. Sometimes he talks to her of his childhood and of school-treats he remembers on days that smelt—so he says—like coconut. Eva has ransacked her cupboards and found a melodeon and a box of paints and a telescope. The sick man watches for her to come and feed him, and then he sleeps; or, propped against a pillow, he hugs the melodeon to his breast and puffs mad airs. Or he takes the telescope and through the reverse end stares at a world that is not so far away as it looks. Eva has taught him to paint inscriptions, but he repeats himself and never does any other than Lead Kindly Light, because it is easy to do, and the letters are mostly straight ones.
Fishmonger’s Fiddle (1925)