Kitabı oku: «Tom Brown at Rugby», sayfa 2
THE BLOWING STONE
"What is the name of your hill, landlord?"
"Blawing Stwun Hill, sir, to be sure."
[Reader. "Sturm?"
Author. "Stone, stupid; The Blowing Stone."]
"And of your house? I can't make out the sign."
"Blawing Stwun, sir," says the landlord, pouring out his old ale from a Toby Philpot jug,66 with a melodious crash, into the long-necked glass.
"What queer names!" say we, sighing at the end of our draught, and holding out the glass to be replenished.
"Bean't queer at all, as I can see, sir," says mine host, handing back our glass, "seeing that this here is the Blawing Stwun itself"; putting his hand on a square lump of stone, some three feet and a half high, perforated with two or three queer holes, like petrified antediluvian67 rat-holes, which lies there close under the oak, under our very nose. We are more than ever puzzled, and drink our second glass of ale, wondering what will come next. "Like to hear un,68 sir?" says mine host, setting down Toby Philpot on the tray, and resting both hands on the "Stwun." We are ready for anything; and he, without waiting for a reply, applies his mouth to one of the rat-holes. Something must come of it, if he doesn't burst. Good heavens! I hope he has no apoplectic tendencies. Yes, here it comes, sure enough, a grewsome69 sound between a moan and a roar, and spreads itself away over the valley, and up the hill-side, and into the woods at the back of the house, a ghost-like awful voice. "Um70 do say, sir," says mine host, rising, purple-faced, while the moan is still coming out of the Stwun, "as they used in old times to warn the country-side, by blawing the Stwun when the enemy was a comin' – and as how folks could make un heered then for seven mile round; leastways, so I've heerd lawyer Smith say, and he knows a smart sight about them old times." We can hardly swallow lawyer Smith's seven miles, but could the blowing of the stone have been a summons, a sort of sending the fiery cross71 round the neighborhood in the old times? What old times? Who knows? We pay for our beer, and are thankful.
"And what's the name of the village just below, landlord?"
"Kingstone Lisle, sir."
"Fine plantations72 you've got here."
"Yes, sir, the Squire's73 'mazin' fond of trees and such like."
"No wonder. He's got some real beauties to be fond of. Good-day, landlord."
"Good-day, sir, and a pleasant ride to 'e."74
FARRINGDON AND PUSEY
And now, my boys, you whom I want to get for readers, have you had enough? Will you give in at once, and say you're convinced, and let me begin my story or will you have some more of it? Remember, I've only been over a little bit of the hill-side yet, what you could ride round easily on your ponies in an hour. I'm only just come down into the vale, by Blowing Stone Hill, and if I once begin about the vale, what's to stop me? You'll have to hear all about Wantage, the birthplace of Alfred, and Farringdon, which held out so long for Charles I. (the vale was near Oxford, and dreadfully malignant;75 full of Throgmortons, Puseys, and Pyes, and such like, and their brawny retainers). Did you ever read Thomas Ingoldsby's "Legend of Hamilton Tighe"?76 If you haven't, you ought to have. Well, Farringdon is where he lived, before he went to sea; his real name was Hampden Pye, and the Pyes were the great folk at Farringdon. Then there's Pusey. You've heard of the Pusey horn,77 which King Canute gave to the Puseys of that day, and which the gallant old squire, lately gone to his rest (whom Berkshire freeholders78 turned out of last Parliament, to their eternal disgrace, for voting according to his conscience), used to bring out on high days, holidays, and bonfire nights. And the splendid old Cross church at Uffington, the Uffingas town; how the whole country-side teems with Saxon names and memories! And the old moated grange79 at Compton, nestled close under the hill-side, where twenty Marianas80 may have lived, with its bright water-lilies in the moat, and its yew walk "the cloister walk," and its peerless terraced gardens. There they all are, and twenty things besides, for those who care about them, and have eyes. And these are the sort of things you may find, I believe, every one of you, in any common English country neighborhood.
Will you look for them under your own noses, or will you not? Well, well, I've done what I can to make you, and if you will go gadding over half Europe now every holiday, I can't help it. I was born and bred a west-countryman,81 thank God! a Wessex man, a citizen of the noblest Saxon kingdom of Wessex, a regular "Angular Saxon,"82 the very soul of me "adscriptus glebæ."83 There's nothing like the old country-side for me, and no music like the twang of the real old Saxon tongue, as one gets it fresh from the veritable chaw84 in the White Horse Vale; and I say with "Gaarge Ridler," the old west-country yeoman,
SQUIRE BROWN AND HIS HOUSEHOLD
Here at any rate lived and stopped at home Squire Brown, J. P.88 for the county of Berks, in a village near the foot of the White Horse range. And here he dealt out justice and mercy in a rough way, and brought up sons and daughters, and hunted the fox, and grumbled at the badness of the roads and the times. And his wife dealt out stockings, and calico89 shirts, and smock frocks,90 and comforting drinks to the old folks with the "rheumatiz," and good counsel to all; and kept the coal and clothes clubs going, for Yule-tide,91 when the bands of mummers92 came round dressed out in ribbons and colored paper caps, and stamped round the Squire's kitchen, repeating in true sing-song vernacular93 the legend of St. George and his fight, and the ten-pound doctor,94 who plays his part at healing the Saint – a relic, I believe, of the old middle-age mysteries.95 It was the first dramatic representation which greeted the eyes of little Tom, who was brought down into the kitchen by his nurse to witness it, at the mature age of three years. Tom was the eldest child of his parents, and from his earliest babyhood exhibited the family characteristics in great strength. He was a hearty, strong boy from the first, given to fighting with and escaping from his nurse, and fraternizing with all the village boys, with whom he made expeditions all round the neighborhood. And here in the quiet, old-fashioned country village, under the shadow of the everlasting hills, Tom Brown was reared, and never left it till he went first to school when nearly eight years of age, for in those days change of air twice a year was not thought absolutely necessary for the health of all her majesty's lieges.96
THE OLD BOY ABUSETH MOVING ON
I have been credibly informed, and am inclined to believe, that the various Boards of Directors of Railway Companies, those gigantic jobbers97 and bribers, while quarrelling about everything else, agreed together some ten years back to buy up the learned profession of medicine, body and soul. To this end they set apart several millions of money, which they continually distribute judiciously among the doctors, stipulating only this one thing, that they shall prescribe change of air to every patient who can pay, or borrow money to pay, a railway fare, and see their prescription carried out. If it be not for this, why is it that none of us can be well at home for a year together? It wasn't so twenty years ago, – not a bit of it. The Browns didn't go out of the county once in five years. A visit to Reading or Abingdon twice a year, at Assizes or Quarter Sessions98 which the Squire made on his horse, with a pair of saddle-bags containing his wardrobe – a stay of a day or two at some country neighbor's – or an expedition to a county ball or the yeomanry review —99 made up the sum of the Brown locomotion in most years. A stray Brown from some distant county dropped in every now and then; or from Oxford, on grave nag, an old don100 contemporary of the Squire; and were looked upon by the Brown household and the villagers with the same sort of feeling with which we now regard a man who has crossed the Rocky Mountains, or launched a boat on the great lake in Central Africa. The White Horse Vale, remember, was traversed by no great road; nothing but country parish roads, and these very bad. Only one coach ran there, and this one only from Wantage to London, so that the western part of the vale was without regular means of moving on, and certainly didn't seem to want them. There was the canal, by the way, which supplied the country-side with coal, and up and down which continually went the long barges with the big black men lounging by the side of the horses along the towing-path, and the women in bright-colored handkerchiefs standing in the sterns steering. Standing, I say, but you could never see whether they were standing or sitting, all but their heads and shoulders being out of sight in the cozy little cabins which occupied some eight feet of the stern and which Tom Brown pictured to himself as the most desirable of residences. His nurse told him that those good-natured-looking women were in the constant habit of enticing children into the barges and taking them up to London and selling them, which Tom wouldn't believe, and which made him resolve as soon as possible to accept the oft-proffered invitation of these sirens101 to "young master," to come in and have a ride. But as yet the nurse was too much for Tom.
THE OLD BOY APPROVETH MOVING ON
Yet why should I, after all, abuse the gadabout propensities of my countrymen? We are a vagabond nation now, that's certain, for better, for worse. I am a vagabond; I have been away from home no less than five distinct times in the last year. The Queen sets us the example – we are moving on from top to bottom. Little dirty Jack, who abides in Clement's Inn102 gateway, and blacks my boots for a penny, takes his month's hop-picking103 every year as a matter of course. Why shouldn't he? I am delighted at it. I love vagabonds, only I prefer poor to rich ones; – couriers104 and ladies' maids, imperials105 and travelling carriages are an abomination unto me – I cannot away with them. But for dirty Jack, and every good fellow who, in the words of the capital French song, moves about,
on his own back, why, good luck to them, and many a merry road-side adventure, and steaming supper in the chimney-corners of road-side inns, Swiss châlets,107 Hottentot kraals,108 or wherever else they like to go. So having succeeded in contradicting myself in my first chapter (which gives me great hopes that you will all go on, and think me a good fellow, notwithstanding my crotchets), I shall here shut up for the present, and consider my ways; having resolved to "sar' it out,"109 as we say in the Vale, "holus bolus,"110 just as it comes, and then you'll probably get the truth out of me.
CHAPTER II
THE "VEAST."
"And the King commandeth and forbiddeth, that from henceforth neither fairs nor markets be kept in church-yards, for the honor of the church." —Statutes: 13 Edw. I. Stat. II. Chap. VI.
As that venerable and learned poet111 (whose voluminous works we all think it the correct thing to admire and talk about, but don't read often) most truly says, "The child is father to the man;" a fortiori,112 therefore he must be father to the boy." So, as we are going at any rate to see Tom Brown through his boyhood, supposing we never get any farther (which, if you show a proper sense of the value of this history, there is no knowing but what we may), let us have a look at the life and environments113 of the child, in the quiet country village to which we were introduced in the last chapter.
TOM BROWN'S NURSE
Tom, as has been already said, was a robust and combative urchin, and at the age of four began to struggle against the yoke and authority of his nurse. That functionary114 was a good-hearted, tearful, scatter-brain115 girl, lately taken by Tom's mother, Madam Brown, as she was called, from the village school to be trained as nursery-maid. Madam Brown was a rare trainer of servants, and spent herself freely in the profession; for profession it was, and gave her more trouble by half than many people take to earn a good income. Her servants were known and sought after for miles round. Almost all the girls who attained a certain place in the village school were taken by her, one or two at a time, as house-maids, laundry-maids, nursery-maids, or kitchen-maids, and, after a year or two's drilling, were started in life amongst the neighboring families, with good principles and wardrobes. One of the results of this system was the perpetual despair of Mrs. Brown's cook and own maid, who no sooner had a notable116 girl made to their hands, than missus was sure to find a good place for her and send her off, taking in fresh importations from the school. Another was, that the house was always full of young girls with clean, shining faces; who broke plates and scorched linen, but made an atmosphere of cheerful homely life about the place, good for every one who came within its influence. Mrs. Brown loved young people, and in fact human creatures in general, above plates and linen. They were more like a lot of elder children than servants, and felt to her more as a mother or aunt than as a mistress.
Tom's nurse was one who took in her instruction very slowly, – she seemed to have two left hands and no head; and so Mrs. Brown kept her on longer than usual that she might expend her awkwardness and forgetfulness upon those who would not judge and punish her too strictly for them.
Charity Lamb was her name. It had been the immemorial habit of the village to christen children either by Bible names, or by those of the cardinal117 and other virtues; so that one was forever hearing in the village street, or on the green, shrill sounds of "Prudence! Prudence! thee cum' out o' the gutter"; or "Mercy! drat118 the girl, what bist119 thee a doin' wi' little Faith?" and there were Ruths, Rachels, Keziahs, in every corner. The same with the boys; they were Benjamins, Jacobs, Noahs, Enochs. I suppose the custom has come down from puritan120 times – there it is, at any rate, very strong still in the Vale.
TOM BROWN'S FIRST REBELLION
Well, from early morn till dewy eve, when she had it out of him in the cold tub before putting him to bed, Charity and Tom were pitted against one another. Physical power was as yet on the side of Charity, but she hadn't a chance with him wherever head-work was wanted. This war of independence began every morning before breakfast, when Charity escorted her charge to a neighboring farm-house which supplied the Browns, and where by his mother's wish, Master Tom went to drink whey,121 before breakfast. Tom had no sort of objection to whey, but he had a decided liking for curds, which were forbidden as unwholesome, and there was seldom a morning that he did not manage to secure a handful of hard curds, in defiance of Charity and the farmer's wife. The latter good soul was a gaunt angular woman, who, with an old black bonnet on the top of her head, the strings dangling about her shoulders, and her gown tucked through her pocket holes, went clattering about the dairy, cheese-room, and yard, in high pattens.122 Charity was some sort of niece of the old lady's, and was consequently free of the farm-house and garden, into which she could not resist going for the purposes of gossip and flirtation with the heir-apparent,123 who was a dawdling fellow, never out at work as he ought to have been. The moment Charity had found her cousin, or any other occupation, Tom would slip away; and in a minute shrill cries would be heard from the dairy: "Charity, Charity, thee lazy huzzy, where bist?" and Tom would break cover,124 hands and mouth full of curds, and take refuge on the shaky surface of the great muck reservoir in the middle of the yard, disturbing the repose of the great pigs. Here he was in safety, as no grown person could follow without getting over his knees; and the luckless Charity, while her aunt scolded her from the dairy-door, for being "allus hankering about arter our Willum, instead of minding Master Tom," would descend from threats to coaxing, to lure Tom out of the muck, which was rising over his shoes and would soon tell a tale on his stockings for which she would be sure to catch it from missus's maid.
TOM BROWN'S ABETTORS – NOAH
Tom had two abettors in the shape of a couple of old boys, Noah and Benjamin by name, who defended him from Charity, and expended much time upon his education. They were both of them retired servants of former generations of the Browns. Noah Crooke was a keen, dry old man of almost ninety, but still able to totter about. He talked to Tom quite as if he were one of his own family, and indeed had long completely identified the Browns with himself. In some remote age he had been the attendant of a Miss Brown, and had conveyed her about the country on a pillion.125 He had a little round picture of the identical gray horse caparisoned with the identical pillion, before which he used to do a sort of fetish126 worship and abuse turnpike roads and carriages. He wore an old full-bottomed wig,127 the gift of some dandy old Brown whom he had valeted128 in the middle of last century, which habiliment Master Tom looked upon with considerable respect, not to say fear; and indeed his whole feeling toward Noah was strongly tainted with awe; and when the old gentleman was gathered to his fathers, Tom's lamentation over him was not unaccompanied by a certain joy at having seen the last of the wig: "Poor old Noah, dead and gone," said he, "Tom Brown so sorry! Put him in the coffin, wig and all!"
TOM BROWN'S ABETTORS – BENJY
But old Benjy was young master's real delight and refuge. He was a youth by the side of Noah, scarce seventy years old. A cheery, humorous, kind-hearted old man, full of sixty years of Vale gossip, and of all sorts of helpful ways for young and old, but above all for children. It was he who bent the first pin with which Tom extricated his first stickleback129 out of "Pebbly Brook," the little stream which ran through the village. The first stickleback was a splendid fellow, with fabulous red and blue gills. Tom kept him in a small basin till the day of his death, and became a fisherman from that day. Within a month from the taking of the first stickleback, Benjy had carried off our hero to the canal, in defiance of Charity; and between them, after a whole afternoon's pop-joying,130 they had caught three or four coarse fish and a perch, averaging perhaps two and a half ounces each, which Tom bore home in rapture to his mother as a precious gift, and which she received like a true mother with equal rapture, instructing the cook nevertheless, in a private interview, not to prepare the same for the squire's dinner. Charity had appealed against old Benjy in the meantime, representing the dangers of the canal banks; but Mrs. Brown, seeing the boy's inaptitude for female guidance, had decided in Benjy's favor, and from thenceforth the old man was Tom's dry nurse. And as they sat by the canal watching their little green and white float,131 Benjy would instruct him in the doings of deceased Browns. How his grandfather, in the early days of the great war, when there was much distress and crime in the Vale, and the magistrates had been threatened by the mob, had ridden in with a big stick in his hand, and held the Petty Sessions132 by himself. How his great uncle, the rector, had encountered and laid the last ghost, who had frightened the old women, male and female, of the parish, out of their senses, and who turned out to be the blacksmith's apprentice, disguised in drink and a white sheet. It was Benjy too who saddled Tom's first pony, and instructed him in the mysteries of horsemanship, teaching him to throw his weight back and keep his hand low; and who stood chuckling outside the door of the girls' school when Tom rode his little Shetland into the cottage and round the table, where the old dame and her pupils were seated at their work.
Benjy himself was come of a family distinguished in the Vale for their prowess in all athletic games. Some half-dozen of his brothers and kinsmen had gone to the wars, of whom only one had survived to come home, with a small pension, and three bullets in different parts of his body; he had shared Benjy's cottage till his death, and had left him his old dragoon's133 sword and pistol, which hung over the mantle-piece, flanked by a pair of heavy single-sticks, with which Benjy himself had won renown long ago as an old gamester,134 against the picked men of Wiltshire, and Somersetshire,135 in many a good bout at the revels and pastimes of the country-side. For he had been a famous back-sword man in his young days, and a good wrestler at elbow and collar.
