Short Stories 1895-1926 (28 page)

Lichen

Lichen
1

Except for one domed and mountainous cloud of snow and amber, the sky was blue as a child's eyes, blue as the tiny chasing butterflies which looped the air above our shimmering platform – bluer far, in fact, than my new silk sunshade. I just sat and basted my travel-wearied bones in the sunshine; and thanked heaven for so delicious a place to be alive in.

It was, I agree, like catching sight of it in hungry glimpses through a rather dingy window. There had been frequent interruptions. First had come a goods train. It had shunted this way, it shunted that. Its buffers crashed; its brakes squealed; its sheep baa-ed, and its miserable, dribbling cattle, with their gleaming horns, stared blindly out at us under their long eyelashes in a stagnant dumb despair.

When that had gone groaning on its way, a ‘local' – a kind of nursery train – puff-puffed in on the other side. And then we enjoyed a Strauss-like interlude of milk-cans and a vociferous Sunday school excursion – the scholars (merely tiny tots, many of them) engaged even on this weekday in chaunting at intervals the profoundest question man can address to the universe: ‘Are we downhearted? No!'

These having at last wandered off into a dark-mouthed tunnel, the noonday express with a wildly-soaring crescendo of lamentation came sweeping in sheer magnificence of onset round its curve, roared through the little green empty station – its windows a long broken faceless glint of sunlit glass – and that too vanished. Vanished!

A swirl of dust and an unutterable stillness followed after it. The skin of a banana on the platform was the only proof that it had come and gone. Its shattering clamour had left for contrast an almost helpless sense of peace. ‘Yes, yes!' we all seemed to be whispering – from the Cedar of Lebanon to the little hyssop in the wall – ‘here we all are; and still, thank heaven, safe.
Safe
.'

The snapdragons and sweet-williams burned on in their narrow flint-bordered bed. The hollow of beautiful verdure but a stone's throw beyond the further green bank, with its square bell-tower and its old burial stones, softly rang again with faint trillings. I turned instinctively to the old gentleman who was sharing the hard, ‘grained', sunny bench with me, in sure and certain hope of his saying Amen to my relief. It was a rather heedless impulsiveness, perhaps; but I could not help myself – I just turned.

But no. He tapped the handle of his umbrella with gloved fingers. ‘As you will, ma'am,' he said pettishly. ‘But
my
hopes are in the past.'

‘I was merely thinking,' I began, ‘the contrast, you know; and now – how peaceful it all is.'

He interrupted me with a stiff little bow. ‘Precisely. But the thought was sentimental, ma'am. You would deafen us all to make us hear. You tolerate what you should attack – the follies, vexations, the evils which that pestilent monster represents; haste, restlessness, an impious money-grubbing. I hate the noise; I hate the trespass; the stench; the futility. Fifty years ago there wasn't a sound for leagues about us but the wind and the birds. Few came; none went. It was an earthly Paradise. And over there, as you see, lay its entry elsewhither. Fifty years ago you could have cradled an infant on that old tombstone yonder – Zadakiel Puncheon's – and it would have slept the sun down. Now, poor creature, his ashes are jarred and desecrated a dozen times a day – by mechanisms like
that
!'

He flicked a gaudy bandana handkerchief in the direction the departing dragon had taken – a dragon already leagues out of sight and hearing.

‘But how enchanting a name!' I murmured placatingly. ‘Zadakiel Puncheon! It might have come out of Dickens, don't you think – a godfather of Martin Chuzzlewit's? Or, better still, Nathaniel Hawthorne.'

He eyed me suspiciously over his steel spectacles. ‘Well, Dickens, maybe. But Hawthorne: I admit him reluctantly; a writer, with such a text to his hand that — And how many, pray, of his fellow-countrymen ever read him; and how many of
them
pay heed to him?'

‘But surely,' I interposed hastily, ‘think of St Francis, of Madame Guyon, of – of all the mystics! Or even of the cities where, you know, Lot … just the five righteous … Besides, even though Hawthorne didn't preach – well, hard
enough;
even if
no
one reads him, we can't blame Dickens – we've no right to do that.
Surely
!' I had grown quite eloquent – and scarlet.

He waved me blandly aside. ‘I blame nobody, my dear young lady. Mine are merely old-fashioned opinions; and I have no wish to enforce them. Nor even to share them. My
views,
I mean' – he whisked me a generous little bow – ‘not these few sunny minutes. They indeed are a rare privilege. No, I loved old things when I was a child; I love them now. I despise nothing simply because the Almighty has concealed its uses. I see no virtue in mere size, or in mere rapidity of motion. Nor can I detect any particular preciousness in time “saved”, as you call it, merely to be wasted.'

The gay handkerchief flicked these sentiments to the heavens as if in contemptuous challenge of the complete Railway Companies of the Solar System, and dismayed with the burden of my responsibility, I gazed out once more into the bird-enchanted, shadowy greenland – whispering its decoy to us immediately on the other side of its low stone wall.

A brief silence fell. There seemed suddenly to be nothing left to talk about. The old gentleman peered sidelong at me an instant, then thrust out a cramped-up hand, and lightly touched my sleeve.

‘I see you don't much affect my old-fashioned tune, ma'am. But such things will not pester you for long. Most of my school have years since set out on the long vacation. Soon they'll be packing me off too; and not a soul left to write my epitaph …

‘How'll that do, heh?' He rocked gently on his gingham.' “Sam Gilpin once …” But that's gone too,' he added, as if he were over-familiar with the thought.

‘But I
do
understand, perfectly,' I managed to blurt out at last. ‘And I agree. And it's hateful. But we can't help ourselves! You see we
must
go on. It's the – the momentum; the sheer impetus.'

He openly smiled on me. ‘Well, well, well!' he said. ‘
Must
go on, eh? And soon, too, must I. So we're both of a mind at last. And that being so, I wish I could admit you into my museum over yonder. It is my last resource. I spend a peaceful hour in it whenever I can. Hardly a day passes just now but I make my pilgrimage there – between (to be precise, my dear young lady) – between the 7.23
up
and the 8.44
down
.'

‘And there are epitaphs?' I cried gaily, with that peculiar little bell-peal in the voice, I'm afraid, which one simply cannot avoid when trying to placate infants, the ailing, and the aged.

‘Ay, epitaphs,' he repeated. ‘But very few of
this
headlong century. The art is lost; the spirit's changed. Once the living and the dead were in a good honest humour with one another. You could chisel the truth in, even over a lifelong crony's clay. You could still share a jest together; one on this side of the grave, one on that. But now the custom's gone with the mind. We are too mortal solemn or too mortal hasty and shallow.

‘Why, over there, mark ye' – he pointed the great fat-ferruled stump of his umbrella towards the half-buried tombstones once more – ‘over
there,
such things are as common as buttercups. And I know most of 'em by heart. My father, ma'am, was the last human creature laid to rest in that graveyard. He was a scholar of a still older school than I – and that's next quietest to being in one's grave. I remember his tree there when it sighed no louder than a meadow brook. Shut your eyes now of a windy evening, and it might be the Atlantic. There they lie. And I'll crawl in somewhere yet, like the cat in the adage – out of this noisy polluted world!' A little angry cloud began to settle on his old face once more.

‘And there's two things else make it an uncommon pleasant place to rest in – a little brawling stream, that courses along upon its southern boundary, and the bees and butterflies and birds. There's rare plantage there, and it attracts rare visitors – though not, I am grateful to say, the human biped. No.'

Yet again a swallow swooped in from the noonday blue in a flight serene and lovely as a resting moonbeam. Somewhere behind the peculiar fretwork with which all railway directors embellish their hostels it deposited its tiny bundle of flies in squawking mouths out of sight though not out of hearing, and, with a flicker of pinion, was out, off, away again, into the air.

My old gentleman had not noticed it. He was still gently fuming over the murdered past: still wagging his head in dudgeon in his antique high hat.

‘But I had no idea,' I ventured to insinuate at last, ‘there were ever many really original epi —'

‘I am not expectant of “ideas” nowadays, ma'am,' he retaliated. ‘We don't think: we plot. We don't live: we huddle. We deafen ourselves by shouting. “There is no
peace,
saith my God …” and I'll eat my hat, if He did not mean for the blind worms as well as “for the wicked”.'

He stooped forward to look into my face. ‘Smile you may, ma'am,' he went on a little petulantly, patting his emphasis once more on the yellowed ivory handle of his umbrella, ‘you know there is
not.
But there, they too had their little faults. They were often flints to the poor; merciless to the humble:

‘
That's
there, I grant ye; to commemorate what they called a charity brat; that's there, and it was true to the times.'

His voice had completely changed in his old-fashioned recitation of the little verses; he declaimed them with oval mouth, without gesture, and yet with a kind of half-timid enthusiasm.

‘And then,' he continued, ‘there's little Ann Hards:

‘And not many yards distant is a spinster lady who used to live in that old Tudor house whose chimney-stacks you can see there above the trees. She was a little “childish”, poor creature, but a gentle loving soul – Alice Hew:

I leant forward in the warm ambrosial air. It seemed I could almost read the distant stones myself in its honey-laden clearness. ‘Please, please go on – if it does not tire you. How I wish I could venture in! But there goes the station master – the “Station Master”! Isn't
that
medieval enough? And I
suppose
there'll be no time!'

‘Right once more: the bull's-eye once more,' he retorted in triumph. ‘No time; and less eternity. Think of it: I must have been fifty years on this world before those young eyes of yours were even opened. And was the spirit within
you
in a worse place then than this, think ye? And for the fifty years that you, perhaps, have yet to endure, shall I be in a worse, think ye?' A queer zestful look had spread over his features; and once again he lifted his voice, decanting the next lines as if in praise of some old vintage port:

‘I knew Groat's nephews. “Old Tom” he used to be called; and by the wags, “Unsweetened”. In three years they drank down the money that he had taken fifty to amass. He died of a stroke the night before my father was born – with a lighted candle and a key in his hand. Going to bed, ma'am.

‘Then there's old Sammie Gurdon's. Another character – twenty stone to the ounce; redder than his own Christmas baron of beef; with a good lady to match. But the inn's pulled down now, and a chocolate-coloured jail has been erected over its ruins they call an hotel. And his son's dead too: