Short Stories 1895-1926 (79 page)

The Pear-Tree

The Pear-Tree
1

The northern parts of Cornwall, next the sea, are very destitute of shade for the traveller. And all one summer's afternoon the tinker, so he told me, had been trundling his wheel along a white and arid road towards the sea village of Treboath, when at a meeting of the ways his ear was arrested by the noise of the grinding of an axe. This sound, it appeared, issued from a long green garden over against a sheep field.

Treboath was still a dusty league away; the afternoon refused the least hint of evening; the tinker was tired and thirsty. He pushed his grindstone through a gate in the slate wall, which is substituted for hedges in these parts, and footed it as quickly as the sandy turf would permit towards shade and ease.

Moreover, the odd familiarity of the summons – the whistle, as it were, of decoy to bird on wing – set him thinking of good company, perhaps a convivial chat on hard times over an amicable mug of ale.

He wheeled his grindstone close against the wall, and being a little man, stood on tiptoe, scrambled up, and looked over. It was a garden, very rich, for the locality, in leaf and flower. Yellow stonecrop flared bright against the dark sweet-william and fuchsia bushes; a hive in one corner was populous with bees; and near at hand lay cool shadows about an old grey well, where water dripped scarcely faster than the long sunny minutes. These and the apple and plum trees the tinker took in at a glance, but he more closely scrutinized what seemed to be the owner of the pleasant garden.

He was a lean cadaverous old man, with a large head, and dressed in a white linen jacket. His beard was white and bushy, and as he angrily confronted the tinker, his eyes gleamed singularly clear and keen. He had lifted his axe from the revolving stone at first sound of an intruder, yet it seemed to the tinker just as serviceable so to hold the axe as to whittle the hours away in useless labour; for his stone was old and crazy, and his axe blunted and rusty in the extreme. But the tinker's best policy, as he thought, was to conciliate the old man, for he wanted a rest in the garden and a drink from the well, if not from a yet pleasanter source. So he called out loud, in case the old man were as deaf as he looked, that he would sharpen the axe willingly and for love, if he so desired it; or better yet would lend him a brand-new one, an axe he carried by chance (and had acquired ‘by mistake') in his little cupboard.

The old man drew down his brows, and without making reply returned the more vehemently to his grinding. But the tinker was familiar with Cornish whims and graces, and waited patiently and pleasantly till the uselessness of his toil should put the old man into a more complaisant frame of mind. This presently came to pass, for he threw down his old axe beside the wheel and hobbled, with his great head bent, towards the tinker. The tinker thus, as it were, invited, scrambled over the wall in a twinkling with his axe, and at a venture requested the old man to point out the tree he proposed felling.

The old man peered curiously at him, with his hands in his jacket pockets and his head sidelong.

‘What's the price of your axe, or the loan of it?' he said.

‘Sir,' replied the tinker, ‘my axe is not for sale, and it's not for hire. But it's none the less at your service till nightfall, when I am looked for in Treboath. Perhaps it is merely a little chopping on hand; or a stake or two? For the sake of the green and the shade after these godless roads, I will spare your years and – your ignorance, sir. Point the job out! For, to tell the truth, sir, wheeling a grindstone through Cornwall is not a task congenial to a Christian.'

The old man, so the tinker said, brooded long over this rather glib invitation. There was silence between them – with the bleating of sheep and the sound of bees and waterdrops. Presently he lifted his head, and suddenly, as if in a rage, wheeled round and pointed his finger at a lofty pear-tree growing some fifteen paces from the house along the garden.

‘'Tis him!' he said, ‘and I'll lay him low before sundown.'

The tinker glanced shrewdly at man and tree. ‘Why, and that's a pity,' he said, ‘it's thick with fruit; 'twill soon be stooping with it.'

‘What's the fruit!' said the old man with a kind of flashing contempt. ‘Down him comes leaf and branch and his fruit like buttons on him.' He spoke softly, with suppressed rage, and, to the mind of the tinker, with a tremor of fear in his voice.

‘Tish, sir! I don't gainsay ye,' he answered easily. ‘I did but see the little fruit: and a morning of sun and dust makes the sight of such like Dives' crumbs, though it's a longish day to October yet, sir. I couldn't catch like at the purpose,' he added casually.

‘Be easy o' that,' said the old man gloomily – ‘purpose enough for me if he roost no more up there o' these sevenths of June.'

‘It's a pest, and no mistake,' remarked the tinker cordially.

The old man eyed him. And at that the tinker leered knowingly, but discreetly held his tongue.

‘What have they been telling ye?' demanded the old man.

‘It's my trade, sir,' said the tinker, ‘to tinker and grind. My wits are but passable, and my ears useful as ears go. But as for my tongue, sir, he asks his wages and says thankee. Else, like most of his kind, he's a wastrel and good-for-nothing.'

The old man fumed in thought. ‘Look'ee here, Mr Tinker,' he said, ‘it's better to know all than part. Hoist yourself up into yonder pear-tree and cry what you see!'

The tinker concealed his surprise, and climbed up as quick as might be into the upper branches of the old tree, and thence looked about him.

‘What do ye see?' called the old man up through the foliage.

The disblossomed fruit smelled faintly sweet around and above the tinker.

‘I looks across to the sheep, hundreds of 'em, on the hillside,' said the tinker; ‘and, bless me, there's Grey Tor!'

‘Turn the man round, turn the man round!' cried the old man impatiently, ‘what now, what now?'

‘Now I sees a little old church with a spire in the trees, and there! the blue ocean, calm as a duckpond behind,' began the tinker.

‘Farther, farther,' shouted the old man.

But now the tinker answered not at all, for he was looking betwixt the boughs clear into a window of the old stone house, where sat sewing a woman pale as Death himself, yet young and marvellously lovely, between her dimity curtains, her brown hair braided on her head.

‘Well,' began the tinker slowly, ‘why, now I see your daughter sewing at the window: and as like a heavenly angel as ever I did behold,' he added, so he told me, under his breath.

‘Come down, come down again!' bellowed the old man in a rage; ‘it's my wife you're looking upon from the tree.'

And at that the tinker looked again at the lovely creature stooping, so young, sad, and patient, over her needle; and then slid down again to the foolish old man below. And he stood there staring into the tinker's face, as grey and gloomy as a winter's mist. Till at last the tinker said, catching as best he could at the clue:

‘Oh, now, then it's from
this
tree, then, the young vagabond whistles these moonlit nights?'

The old man clutched the tinker's sleeve.

‘Down with him, down with him, I beseech ye; have him down before nightfall! I could not bear to see his shape again.'

‘Shape, shape!' repeated the tinker to himself, and looked at the old man a little aloof.

And thereupon the old man led him to a bench, so the tinker said, and told him the story from the beginning. It seemed then, the young man he spoke of had been from childhood the playmate and sweetheart of his wife. But, when come to manhood, he had proved of too adventurous and unprofitable a temperament in her parents' estimation to be accepted as a suitor. Yet they had met again and again, these two, William and his sweetheart, on the lonely stretches of the seashore, in the country lanes, anywhere where love may imagine the world far distant, and facts are but fancy, until the girl was betrothed and speedily wedded to this old moneyed man some seven years ago. His sweetheart gone, the young man William went from bad to worse, and left the village far easier for his absence. But back he comes again in a while, rash, bitter, and unscrupulous; and with such a contemptuous hatred of the old man as almost smothered his love for his wife. Every means he tried to reach the poor girl. But she was lonely and timid, afraid of him and of herself; and the old man was always alert.

But one May evening the old man was sitting in his kitchen reading his chapter of the Bible, and she in her bedchamber, when he thought to hear voices whispering. He got up from his chair, burning and trembling, and stole out to his garden-door ajar, to listen to this same William hidden above on high in the pear-blossom, tempting and cajoling, and pleading with the young wife as never serpent wooed Eve to the apple.

The old man listened on in a kind of helpless patience, doubtless recognizing, thought the tinker, the awful justice of youth and beauty coming together, and remembering, too, the May moon and all the spring flowers ascending in perfume to his unhappy young wife at the window. Yet he listened on in patience, for she made no answer to the wild and passionate words. Still William argued and pleaded, and his voice rose and fell softly in the silence of the night like a bird's singing in the tree to one so eager, yet so loth to listen and heed. Until at last, and her voice seemed to echo in and out among the motionless trees – at last the poor child answered that she did indeed love her lover, and ever would, and besought him to go and come no more.

And then the old man broke out, and snatching up his gun from behind the door, ran down like a beast to the pear-tree, brandishing it and calling on the young man to come down. Without the least fear of him William leapt down out of the tree, not knowing that the old man was armed. And before he could turn to defend himself, the butt of the gun descended on his head, blinding and half-stupefying him.

He reeled aside in terror and astonishment. But the old man pursued him, and when he came to the well, sightless and giddy, the poor fellow tripped and fell headlong into its deep and narrow waters.

‘It wasn't murder, by no law of man,' agreed the tinker sagely, ‘neither in fact nor deed; and even if murder, as things go, why, justifiable homicide,' the tinker considered. Yet remembrance of it lay heavy and unabsolved on the old man's heart, ‘as well it might'. And though the body of the young man was fetched up out of the well and decently buried ‘in consecrated ground'; and though the well was fed by a never-failing, clear-as-crystal spring, the old man used its waters no more, not even for watering his flowers. Nor did he upbraid his wife – said nought, and drew apart brooding over her confession (‘that, after all, was no news to him,' said the tinker), and thinking of the unhappy dead and the May night and all.

But, strangely enough, it was not in the month of May when the ghost of the young man first appeared, but on his own birthday – the seventh of June, a day the people thereabouts remembered as that whereon, when boy and girl, these two children had plighted their troth in the hay-fields. The old man, sitting in his kitchen before his open book, heard his wife in the room above leap up and run weeping to the window. And he himself went out, a fine rain falling in the grey light (a moon stood over behind clouds), and there in the branches of the pear-tree he saw the ghost of William, white as the fallen bloom, his hand clasped round the bough.

The old man stood still in dismay, his heart drawn up, hearing the small rain rustling on the leaves, regarding the spirit of the young man in the gloomy light of the moon, speechless and still.

And so afterwards, as returning spring broke and bloomed and faded into June, so this same awful fear came upon him of this seventh night, until now, worn-out, lonely, beaten down, and not too clear in his wits, he was bent on felling the tree once and for ever and daring all.

But yet at the last (the tinker told me), his courage failed him. For the tinker, being by nature glib and persuasive, enlarged vividly on the revenges which the injured spirit might take on the old man in this world and the next for such a retaliation. And this he did because he was burning curious to see the ghost in the pear-tree with his own eyes. ‘For my mother saw a ghost once, but a little before I came into the world, and here's the mark of it yet,' the tinker said.

So the tinker and the old man sat down together beside the kitchen door. It was a dark and moonless night. A window had long since been wide-opened to the night above them; and now all was perfectly still for the cricket to be whistling.

They waited on in silence, watching a pear-tree still and empty but for its foliage and newly-set fruit. And though ever and again the old man would shrink back and mutter, opening wide his light-grey eyes, so as almost to seem a ghost himself in his white jacket, all was still and solitary, and the cricket shrilling clear above the croaking of the frogs the only sounds to be heard.