Lark Rise to Candleford (53 page)

That attic was very quiet for the next quarter of an hour,
for Laura, still in her bridal veil, was down on her knees on the bare boards,
as happy and busy as a young foal in a field of green corn.

There were volumes of old sermons which she passed over
quickly; a natural history of the world which might have detained her had there
not been so many other vistas to explore; histories and grammars and lexicons
and 'keepsakes' with coloured pictures of beautiful languishing ladies bending
over graves beneath weeping willows, or standing before mirrors dressed for
balls, with the caption 'Will he come to-night?' There were old novels, too,
and poetry. The difficulty was to know what to look at first.

When they missed her downstairs and came to call her to
dinner she was deep in Richardson's
Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded
, and it
was afterwards a standing joke against her that she had jumped and looked dazed
when Amy hissed into her ear, 'Do you like apple dumplings?'

'Laura's a bookworm, a bookworm, a bookworm!' she sang to her
sisters with the air of having made an astonishing discovery, and Laura
wondered if a bookworm might not be something unpleasant, until she added: 'A
bookworm, like Father.'

She had brought the first volume of
Pamela
down with
them to illustrate Laura's bookworminess and now asked her mother if Laura
might not have it to keep. After glancing through it, her mother looked
doubtful, for she gathered that it was a love story, though not, perhaps, the
full extent of its unsuitability for a reader of such tender age. But Uncle
Tom, coming in just then to his dinner and hearing the whole story, said: 'Let
her keep it. No book's too old for anybody who is able to enjoy it, and none
too young, either, for that matter. Let her read what she likes, and when she's
tired of reading to herself she can come to my shop and read to me while I
work.'

'Poor Laura! You're in for it!' laughed mischievous Nell.
'Once you start reading to Dad, he'll never let you go. You'll have to sit in
his smelly old shop and read his dry old books for ever.'

'Now! Now! The less you say about that the better, my girl.
Who was it came to read to me and made such a hash of it that I never asked her
to come again?'

'Me,' and 'Me,' and 'Me', cried the girls simultaneously, and
their father laughed and said: 'You see, Laura, what a lot of dunces they are.
Give them one of their mother's magazines, with fashion pictures and directions
for making silk purses out of sows' ears and pretty little tales that end in
wedding bells, and they'll lap it up like a cat lapping cream; but offer them
something to read that needs a bit of biting on and they're soon tired, or too
hot, or too cold, or they can't stand the smell of cobbler's wax, or think they
hear somebody knocking at the front door and have to go to open it. Molly
started reading
The Pilgrim's Progress
to me over a year ago—her own
choice, because she liked the pictures—and got the poor fellow as far as the
Slough of Despond. Then she had to take an afternoon off to get a new frock
fitted. Then there was something else, and something else, and poor Christian
is still bogged up in the slough for all she knows or cares. But we won't have
The
Pilgrim's Progress
when you read to me, Laura. That is a shade dull for
some young people. I've read it a good many times and hope to read it a good
many more before I wear my eyesight out getting a living for these ungrateful
young besoms. A grand old book,
The Pilgrim's Progress
! But I've
something here you'll like better.
Cranford
. Ever heard of it, Laura?
No, I thought not. Well, you've got a treat in store.'

They sampled
Cranford
that afternoon, and how Laura
loved dear Miss Matty! Her uncle was pleased with her reading, but not too
pleased to correct her faults.

Seated on the end of the bench on which he worked, with both
arms extended as he drew the waxed thread through the leather, his eyes beaming
mildly through his spectacles, he would say: 'Not too fast now, Laura, and not
too much expression. Don't overdo things. These were genteel old bodies, very
prim and proper, who would not have raised their voices much if they'd heard
the last trump sounding.' Or, more gently, in a matter-of-fact tone, as if,
although it did not matter much how words were pronounced as long as one knew
their meaning, it might still be just as well to conform to usage: 'I think
that word is pronounced so-and-so, Laura,' and Laura would repeat the syllables
after him until she had got it more or less correctly. Having read so much to
herself and being a rapid reader, she knew the meanings of hundreds of words
which she had never even attempted to pronounce until she came to read aloud to
her uncle. Though he must have been sorely tempted to do so, he never once
smiled, even at her most grotesque efforts. Years later in conversation he
pronounced magician 'magicun' and added, 'as Laura once called one of that
kidney', and they both laughed heartily at the not altogether inapt rendering.

The readings were continued the next summer, when Laura again
spent her summer holidays with her cousins, and afterwards, when Candleford
became for several years her second home. Every afternoon when her cousins
could be persuaded to go out or do what they wanted to do without her, she
would tap at the door of her uncle's workshop and hear the familiar challenge,
'Who goes there?' and reply, 'Bookworms, Limited,' and, receiving the password,
go in and sit by the open window looking out on the garden and river and read
while her uncle worked.

Their reading was often interrupted, for customers came and
went, or sat down to chat in a special chair with a cushion, 'the customer's
chair'. Many sat in that chair who were not there on business, for her uncle
had many friends who liked to look in when passing, especially on days when
there was something of special interest in the newspaper. 'Just wanted to know
what you thought of it,' they would say, and Laura noticed that whatever
opinion he had given them was adopted so thoroughly that it was often advanced
as their own before they left.

In the evening his workshop became a kind of a club for the
young working-men of the neighbourhood, who would sit around on upturned boxes,
smoking and talking or playing draughts or dominoes. Uncle Tom said he liked to
see their young faces round him, and it kept them out of the 'pub'. Their
arrival was the signal for Laura to take up her book and depart; but, when a
day caller arrived, she would sit still in her corner, reading, or trying to
solve that maddening puzzle of the day, 'Getting the teeth in the nigger's
mouth'. The mouth belonged to a face enclosed in a circular glass case and the
teeth were small metal balls which were easier to scatter than to get into
place: One, two, or three, might with infinite patience be coaxed to rest
between the thick lips, but the next gentle jerk, intended to place a fourth,
would send them all rolling around beneath the glass again. Laura never got
more than three in. But perhaps she did not persevere sufficiently; it was much
more interesting to listen.

Uncle Tom had many friends. Some of these, as might have been
expected, were fellow tradesmen of the town who looked in upon him to pass the
time of day, as they said, or to discuss the news or some business
complication. Others were poor people who came to ask his advice on some point,
or to ask him to sign a paper, or to bring him something out of their gardens,
or merely to rest and talk a few minutes. Few of these ever spoke to Laura,
beyond a casual greeting, but she came to know them and could remember their
faces and voices when those of others who had been more to her had become dim.
But it was those Nellie described as 'Dad's queer fish' that she liked best of
all. There was Miss Connie, who wore a thick tweed golf cape and spiked boots,
even in August. 'Let Laura take your cape and sit down and cool off a bit,' Uncle
Tom would say to her when the sun was raging and there was scarcely a breath of
air in the shop, even with both windows wide open. 'No. No, thanks, Tom. Don't
touch it, please, Laura. I wear it to keep the heat from the spine. The spine
should always be protected.'

Miss Constance kept nineteen cats in the big house where she
lived alone, for she could not trust servants; she thought they would always be
spying upon her. Sometimes a kitten would thrust its head between the edges of
her cape as she talked. 'Now, don't you worry, Miss Constance,' Uncle Tom would
be saying. 'You'll get your money all right come quarter day. Some lawyers are
rogues, we know, but not Mr. Steerforth. And nobody can harm you for keeping
your cats, for your house is your own. And don't take any notice of what you
heard Mrs. Harmer say; though, if you'll excuse me for saying it, Miss
Constance, I do think you've got quite enough of them. I wouldn't save any more
kittens, if I were you; and, if you can't bear a maid about the place, why not
get some decent, respectable woman to come in once or twice a week and clean up
a bit? Somebody who likes cats. No. She wouldn't poison them, nor steal your
things. Bless you, there are very few thieves about compared to the number of
honest people in the world. And don't you worry, Miss Constance, or you'll lose
all your pussies. Worry killed the cat, you know,' and at that often-repeated
joke Miss Constance would smile and the smile would transform the poor,
half-mad recluse she was fast becoming to something resembling the bright,
happy girl who had danced all night and ridden to hounds in the days when Uncle
Tom had first fitted her for her country shoes.

But even Miss Constance was not quite so strange as the big
fat man who wore the dark inverness cloak and soft black felt hat. He was a
poet, Laura was told, and that was why he dressed like that and wore his hair
so long. He came every market day, having walked from a village called Isledon,
six or seven miles away, and, after puffing and blowing and mopping his brow,
he would draw out a paper from his breast pocket and say, 'I must read you
this, Tom,' and Uncle Tom would say, 'So you've been at it again. Oh, you
poets!' To her great disappointment, although she listened intently, Laura
could never grasp exactly what his poems were about. There were eagles in most
of them, but not the kind of eagles she had read of, which circled over
mountains and carried off lambs and babies; these eagles of his were eagles one
moment and Pride or Hate the next; and if there were flowers in his poems he
had always chosen the ugliest, such as nightshade or rue. But it all sounded
very learned and grand, read in his rich, sonorous voice, and she had the
comfort of knowing that, if she could not make much sense of it, her uncle
could not either, for she heard him say many times: 'You know I'm no judge of
poetry. If it were prose now… . But it's certainly got a fine roll and swell to
it. That I do know.'

After the reading, they would settle down to talk about
flowers and birds and what was going on in the fields, for the poet loved all
these, although he did not write about them. Or sometimes he would talk of his
home and children and praise his wife for allowing him to come away into the
country alone for a whole summer to write. 'Shows she believes in you as a
poet,' Uncle Tom said once, and the poet drew himself up from his chair and
said, 'She does and she'll be justified, though perhaps not in my lifetime.
Posterity will judge.'

'Fine words! Fine words!' said Uncle Tom after he had gone.
'But I doubt it. I doubt.'

Less odd, and therefore less interesting to Laura, though
dearer to her Uncle Tom's heart, was the young doctor with the keen, eager face
and grey eyes set deep under heavy dark brows. From what she heard then, she
thought, looking back in after years, that he was trying to work up a practice
and finding it heavy going. He certainly had a good deal of spare time.

'It's a rotten shame,' he would begin, as he burst into the
workshop and turned up the tails of his frock coat to keep them from contact
with the customers' chair. 'It's a rotten shame' was the beginning of most of
his conversations. It was a rotten shame that cottage roofs should leak, that
children living on farms should not know the taste of fresh milk, that wells
should be in use of which the water was contaminated, or that families should
have to sleep eight in a room.

Uncle Tom was just as sorry about it all as he was; but he
was not so angry; though Laura did once hear him say that something they were
talking about was damnable. 'You take things too hard,' Laura once heard him
say. 'You fret, and it's no good fretting. You can only do what you can, and
God knows you're doing your full share. Things'll be better in time. You mark
my words, they will. They're better already: you should have seen Spittals'
Alley when I was a boy!' And when the young man had taken down his top hat from
the shelf which was kept covered with clean paper for its reception, and jammed
it down on his head and gone out, still declaring that it was a rotten shame,
her uncle said, perhaps to her, perhaps to himself: 'That young fellow-me-lad's
going to make a big stir in the world, or else he's going to build up a fat
practice, marry and settle down, and I don't know which to wish for him.'

It was the young doctor who named Laura 'the mouse'. 'Hullo,
Mouse!' he would say if he happened to notice her. That seldom happened, for he
had no eye for plain little girls with books on their knees, unless they were
ill or hungry. When one of her pretty cousins burst in at the door, her healthy
high spirits stirring the air like a breeze, his face lit up, for she was the
type of what he believed all children would be, if they could be properly fed
and cared for.

Excepting the doctor, none of those known as Uncle Tom's
'queer fish' seemed to have any work to do or business to attend to, and,
excepting Miss Connie, none of them were Candleford people. Some were regular
visitors to farmhouses where boarders were taken; others were staying for the
fishing at village inns, or had their own homes in one of the surrounding
villages. Uncle Tom's chief friend among them, a Mr. Mostyn, took a furnished
cottage outside the town every summer. How they had first become acquainted,
Laura never heard, but by the time of her regular visits to Candleford he was a
frequent visitor.