A GROUP of men and women, who all looked as if they had come out for a very important reason, but didn’t wish to appear to be doing anything unusual, removed themselves one sunny day in March—each holding an umbrella or an overcoat—from a large and many-seated pleasure car that had stopped upon a grassy down which overlooked both the inland country spaces and the sea waves.
A fox is known by its brush, a lemur by its scream, and a postman by his loud, sharp knock; and our ladies and gentlemen can be known at once, by the extreme care that each bestows upon finding his own stick or umbrella, as the field club of the county.
Once safely out of the car, and grateful for being still in possession of their movable property, the company stood about in threes, and for want of anything better to do they looked at the sea.
Each member of the party looked at the sea as if it had been placed there on purpose to interest them, but was, now that they saw it, a very poor kind of show and hardly worth the journey to view.
There was simply the ordinary blue, with the rocky island beyond, that Mr. James Tarr had so often given them lectures about, that was connected, they knew, to the mainland by a broad and continuous line of heaped and stupid pebbles of a flat shape.
The sea, with its rocky island behind it, had so little to say to one member of the field club—Miss Frances Ogle—that she looked in the other direction towards the land.
There she saw wide spaces, hills in the distance, and woods a little nearer. The wide spaces, as she looked to the right or to the left, became other wide spaces, and the hills became merely other hills. When Miss Ogle tried to look further, she encountered a dimness that might have been anything from a cloud to a church tower, or whatever else the onlooker’s fancy might wish it to be.
Miss Ogle now drew her gaze in a little and looked at the wide sweep of the nearer downs that shone green and clear in the midday March sunshine. She noticed some sheep lying down at a distance, and so imbued was she with the learned discoveries in the matter of old transformations made by Mr. Roddy, the president of the club, that for a moment Miss Ogle believed the sheep to be a muster of ancient stones.
The sheep, however, were good enough to express themselves as moderns by rousing and scattering at the loud barking of the shepherd’s dog.
Miss Ogle was glad she hadn’t spoken, and turned quickly to the sea and pointed at some thing—in order to put herself right with the learned as well as with nature—that, if it wasn’t a whale, must be a stone.
The object that Miss Ogle was pointing at appeared to be the one thing that pushed itself out of all the garish prettiness of the spring day, and was something that was consciously itself.
This was a black rock.
‘Look‚’ said Miss Ogle, unable to contain her ideas any longer, ‘there’s a petrified cow in the sea; please, Mr. Roddy, do get it up one day and put it in your museum.’
Miss Ogle had gone a little away from the others when she made this remark, and those who heard her speak merely supposed that she was exclaiming about the beautiful view. But however wrong Miss Ogle had been about the sheep, she was right this time, for the rock that she had pointed to was called ‘The Blind Cow.’ For the simple Mockery minds who lived in the near neighbourhood of the cow had always supposed, and the story was handed down from one generation to another, that a cow which had lost its sight had walked out upon a hot midsummer day upon the sands, as cows will do sometimes. But this one being blind, and thinking that it was merely crossing a little river to reach green meadows upon the other side, swam out of its depth and was drowned. And so the rock came by its name.
But however important to our story Miss Ogle’s discovery had been, none of the assembled company noticed it, because each was wondering what kind of learned remark would be first uttered, and whether Mr. James Tarr or Mr. Roddy would be the first to utter it. Meanwhile, and until the learned thing came, the company stood about and gazed at the distant sea a little disparagingly, as though they said, ‘If only we had gone on driving in the car, we might have been still listening to conversation that certainly would have been of more interest than the sound of distant waves.’ For the car drive upon such an occasion as the present would provide exactly the proper whirl and swing to loose the pretty tongues of scandal, that would wag merrily, although Squire Roddy, the senior member and head of the party, would look sadly at his new gloves and allow five minutes to pass without saying one single word.
During the drive the merry tongues had settled upon two families, the Pinks and the Pattimores, who lived in Mockery village, that was likely to be visited amongst other places where old things might be found.
‘I for one wouldn’t put up with such treatment,’ Miss Ogle had said sternly to Mr. Gollop, who was at the moment deeply wondering whether Miss Ogle’s income was really as high as it was said to be, so that if he married her they could afford a pretty servant.
‘No,’ said Miss Ogle, as the car swayed a little to the side of the road, ‘if my husband treated me as Mr. Pattimore does his wife—I should leave him.’
‘But it’s Mr. Pattimore’s open opinion‚’ said Mr. Roddy harmlessly, ‘and one that is founded upon the Scriptures, that married people should live as though they were not married.’
‘But she’s so nice‚’ said Miss Ogle, looking at Mr. Gollop, ‘and he’s not fit to be a clergyman.’
‘Why not?’ inquired Mr. James Tarr, who always liked to put people to rights; ‘for I do not understand why a man who happens to believe in chastity shouldn’t be a clergyman.’
‘But the clergy have such clever families,’ said Miss Ogle.
Mr. James Tarr stared hard at a church they were passing. ‘They can’t help that,’ he said.
‘I have been told,’ said Miss Ogle, for the motion of the car always kept her talking, ‘that Mr. Pattimore sleeps far away from her in an attic——’
Mr. Roddy looked up from his gloves.
‘Mr. Pink, you know is my agent, and he lives near to the sea, and that’s where we’re going,’ he said quietly.
‘Oh yes, I’ve heard about him‚’ Miss Ogle replied, laughing.
Mr. Roddy held out his gloved hand and touched a tree that the car swayed nearly into as it passed a cart in the road. It was always like that during the drive: there were things that could be said, but when once the goal was reached and the green grass trod upon, or the castle stones, and the real business of the day commenced, the very simplest conversation was always out of reach and scandal was silenced.
And now that the drive was over, even Miss Ogle felt the same difficulty as all the other members of the party about what should be said or done.
But Miss Ogle was a resourceful lady, and so she dropped her walking-stick. Mr. Roddy picked it up, and Miss Ogle, in an offhand manner that no one but she would have dared to use upon such an important occasion, invited Mr. Roddy to climb a large tumulus that happened to be there, and to tell them how rocks were made.
Although this setting of Mr. Roddy up above all the others was quite unseemly and utterly out of the order of the day at that point in the proceedings, yet Mr. Roddy climbed the mound, abstracting from his pocket as he did so a parcel of typed notes relating to the life-history of cliffs, valleys, hills, and rivers. Even extremely gifted people, who wear really expensive stockings, at least the gentlemen, and the ladies with their fine walking-shoes, must look at something besides gorse bushes and rabbit-holes. And our fine ones, each surrounded with a cloak of the grand manners, having eyes, watched. And what they saw was—and they all blamed Miss Ogle for bringing about a scene so discreditable to the common decencies practised by field societies—that Mr. James Tarr had begun to climb the tumulus at the same moment as Mr. Roddy, only from the other side. Mr. James Tarr was a gentleman of an argumentative temper, whose favourite remark was, ‘I wish to do it my own way.’ And his own way in this case was to spring in leaps up the mound, and to encounter, with his rugged and determined countenance looking more grim than usual, mild Mr. Roddy at the top of it.
‘You can’t both talk at once, you know,’ Miss Ogle most shamefully called out, ‘though you may want to.’
Every one looked anywhere but at Miss Ogle.
‘Don’t you two begin to fight up there,’ she called louder than ever.
It was most fortunate that Mr. Gollop was of the party.
‘Come,’ he said, leading Miss Ogle gently but firmly away by the arm, ‘do look at those birds in the bushes.’
Every one now was relieved, and also most grateful to the Rev. Alfred Gollop for having saved their ears, at least at the moment, from any more of Miss Ogle.
‘Those birds aren’t larks,’ said Mr. Gollop, letting go the lady’s arm and going nearer to the gorse bushes so that he could see the birds more distinctly.
‘What are they, then?’ inquired the lady.
‘I think they’re sparrows,’ said Mr Gollop innocently, but the lady had turned to the mound again.
And there Mr. Roddy—for Mr. James Tarr had descended again—was explaining in a mild and almost an apologetic voice, very different from His that made it, what the seemingly stupid affairs of nature were really all about.
Pointing with his glove, he was saying when Miss Ogle returned from watching the sparrows, ‘To the westward, by Weyminster Bay, there the oolites live, which form a cushion; below these are potter’s and pile clay, firebricks, bituminous shales, sheep and cattle, potatoes and cider, and for the meadows the catch-water plan is used.’
‘And what kind of plan is that?’ asked Miss Ogle simply.
Mr. Roddy shook his head and came down; he saw the vital necessity, if Miss Ogle continued to come to their meetings, of impressing her with the real seriousness of these occasions.
The most simple way to do this appeared to Mr. Roddy to be to make himself look grand in her eyes.
In order to do so in the way that he thought to be most telling, Mr. Roddy picked up from the grass a handful of little white shells.
These little shells he showed to Miss Ogle. ‘They are called by my name‚’ he said; ‘they are Roddites, and I am the discoverer of them.’
Miss Ogle looked at the shells carelessly. ‘Pretty Roddites‚’ she said, and then without a word to the discoverer of them she called out, ‘And now I’ve seen the Roddites I want Mr. James Tarr to tell me about that little church in the valley.’
Mr. Tarr sprang to the top of the mound again in three leaps.
‘Mockery Church‚’ he said, taking out some notes, though written ones, as Mr. Roddy had done, and pointing down into the valley with them, ‘is a cruciform edifice of stone; it possesses an embattled tower that contains only one bell, while the church itself affords one hundred and eighty-two sittings.
‘The word Mockery is derived, of course, from Monksbury, and that word explains itself.’
‘It doesn’t explain itself to me.’ interrupted Miss Ogle, who was the only listener who had really listened to Mr. Tarr.
Mr. Tarr stepped down; to be interrupted at all was more than he could usually bear, but to be interrupted by a lady who had only joined the club a week before, and didn’t belong to any county family, was no petty rudeness but a high aggravation.
And now something occurred that went near to breaking up the party, out of sheer horror at the incident; for Miss Ogle mounted the tumulus in the place of Mr. Tarr, and said, excitingly waving her walking-stick, that she wanted to speak too.
When he saw that she really meant to address them, Mr. Roddy began collecting the Roddites again, and making a little heap of them that he intended to carry home with him later; while Mr. James Tarr, whose temper was of another colour, said boldly to those near to him that ‘he would throw Miss Ogle into the sea, if the sea had only the decency to flow up to the tumulus as it once did one hundred million years ago.’
When Miss Ogle had reached a point in her discourse and was talking about the edible octopus, a fish that a poor fisherman of Mockery, Mr. Dobbin, had once offered her—when trying to sell his catch in the town—for a shilling, she happened to look below her and saw that the hill was deserted.