Lorna Doone: A Romance of Exmoor
after them; and the great boys vex no more the small ones, and the small
boys stick up to the great ones. One with another, hard they go, to see
the gain of the waters, and the tribulation of Cop, and are prone to
kick the day-boys out, with words of scanty compliment. Then the masters
look at one another, having no class to look to, and (boys being no more
left to watch) in a manner they put their mouths up. With a spirited
bang they close their books, and make invitation the one to the other
for pipes and foreign cordials, recommending the chance of the time, and
the comfort away from cold water.
But, lo! I am dwelling on little things and the pigeons' eggs of the
infancy, forgetting the bitter and heavy life gone over me since then.
If I am neither a hard man nor a very close one, God knows I have had no
lack of rubbing and pounding to make stone of me. Yet can I not somehow
believe that we ought to hate one another, to live far asunder, and
block the mouth each of his little den; as do the wild beasts of the
wood, and the hairy outrangs now brought over, each with a chain upon
him. Let that matter be as it will. It is beyond me to unfold, and
mayhap of my grandson's grandson. All I know is that wheat is better
than when I began to sow it.
CHAPTER II
AN IMPORTANT ITEM
Now the cause of my leaving Tiverton school, and the way of it, were as
follows. On the 29th day of November, in the year of our Lord 1673, the
very day when I was twelve years old, and had spent all my substance in
sweetmeats, with which I made treat to the little boys, till the large
boys ran in and took them, we came out of school at five o'clock, as
the rule is upon Tuesdays. According to custom we drove the day-boys
in brave rout down the causeway from the school-porch even to the gate
where Cop has his dwelling and duty. Little it recked us and helped
them less, that they were our founder's citizens, and haply his own
grand-nephews (for he left no direct descendants), neither did we much
inquire what their lineage was. For it had long been fixed among us,
who were of the house and chambers, that these same day-boys were all
“caddes,” as we had discovered to call it, because they paid no groat
for their schooling, and brought their own commons with them. In
consumption of these we would help them, for our fare in hall fed
appetite; and while we ate their victuals, we allowed them freely to
talk to us. Nevertheless, we could not feel, when all the victuals
were gone, but that these boys required kicking from the premises
of Blundell. And some of them were shopkeepers' sons, young grocers,
fellmongers, and poulterers, and these to their credit seemed to know
how righteous it was to kick them. But others were of high family, as
any need be, in Devon--Carews, and Bouchiers, and Bastards, and some of
these would turn sometimes, and strike the boy that kicked them. But
to do them justice, even these knew that they must be kicked for not
paying.
After these “charity-boys” were gone, as in contumely we called
them--“If you break my bag on my head,” said one, “how will feed thence
to-morrow?”--and after old Cop with clang of iron had jammed the double
gates in under the scruff-stone archway, whereupon are Latin verses,
done in brass of small quality, some of us who were not hungry, and
cared not for the supper-bell, having sucked much parliament and dumps
at my only charges--not that I ever bore much wealth, but because I had
been thrifting it for this time of my birth--we were leaning quite at
dusk against the iron bars of the gate some six, or it may be seven of
us, small boys all, and not conspicuous in the closing of the daylight
and the fog that came at eventide, else Cop would have rated us up the
green, for he was churly to little boys when his wife had taken their
money. There was plenty of room for all of us, for the gate will hold
nine boys close-packed, unless they be fed rankly, whereof is little
danger; and now we were looking out on the road and wishing we could get
there; hoping, moreover, to see a good string of pack-horses come by,
with troopers to protect them. For the day-boys had brought us word that
some intending their way to the town had lain that morning at Sampford
Peveril, and must be in ere nightfall, because Mr. Faggus was after
them. Now Mr. Faggus was my first cousin and an honour to the family,
being a Northmolton man of great renown on the highway from Barum town
even to London. Therefore of course, I hoped that he would catch the
packmen, and the boys were asking my opinion as of an oracle, about it.
A certain boy leaning up against me would not allow my elbow room, and
struck me very sadly in the stomach part, though his own was full of my
parliament. And this I felt so unkindly, that I smote him straightway in
the face without tarrying to consider it, or weighing the question duly.
Upon this he put his head down, and presented it so vehemently at the
middle of my waistcoat, that for a minute or more my breath seemed
dropped, as it were, from my pockets, and my life seemed to stop from
great want of ease. Before I came to myself again, it had been settled
for us that we should move to the “Ironing-box,” as the triangle of turf
is called where the two causeways coming from the school-porch and the
hall-porch meet, and our fights are mainly celebrated; only we must
wait until the convoy of horses had passed, and then make a ring by
candlelight, and the other boys would like it. But suddenly there came
round the post where the letters of our founder are, not from the way
of Taunton but from the side of Lowman bridge, a very small string of
horses, only two indeed (counting for one the pony), and a red-faced man
on the bigger nag.
“Plaise ye, worshipful masters,” he said, being feared of the gateway,
“carn 'e tull whur our Jan Ridd be?”
“Hyur a be, ees fai, Jan Ridd,” answered a sharp little chap, making
game of John Fry's language.
“Zhow un up, then,” says John Fry poking his whip through the bars at
us; “Zhow un up, and putt un aowt.”
The other little chaps pointed at me, and some began to hallo; but I
knew what I was about.
“Oh, John, John,” I cried, “what's the use of your coming now, and Peggy
over the moors, too, and it so cruel cold for her? The holidays don't
begin till Wednesday fortnight, John. To think of your not knowing
that!”
John Fry leaned forward in the saddle, and turned his eyes away from
me; and then there was a noise in his throat like a snail crawling on a
window-pane.
“Oh, us knaws that wull enough, Maister Jan; reckon every Oare-man knaw
that, without go to skoo-ull, like you doth. Your moother have kept arl
the apples up, and old Betty toorned the black puddens, and none dare
set trap for a blagbird. Arl for thee, lad; every bit of it now for
thee!”
He checked himself suddenly, and frightened me. I knew that John Fry's
way so well.
“And father, and father--oh, how is father?” I pushed the boys right and
left as I said it. “John, is father up in town! He always used to come
for me, and leave nobody else to do it.”
“Vayther'll be at the crooked post, tother zide o' telling-house.* Her
coodn't lave 'ouze by raison of the Chirstmas bakkon comin' on, and zome
o' the cider welted.”
* The “telling-houses” on the moor are rude cots where the
shepherds meet to “tell” their sheep at the end of the
pasturing season.
He looked at the nag's ears as he said it; and, being up to John Fry's
ways, I knew that it was a lie. And my heart fell like a lump of lead,
and I leaned back on the stay of the gate, and longed no more to fight
anybody. A sort of dull power hung over me, like the cloud of a brooding
tempest, and I feared to be told anything. I did not even care to stroke
the nose of my pony Peggy, although she pushed it in through the rails,
where a square of broader lattice is, and sniffed at me, and began to
crop gently after my fingers. But whatever lives or dies, business must
be attended to; and the principal business of good Christians is, beyond
all controversy, to fight with one another.
“Come up, Jack,” said one of the boys, lifting me under the chin; “he
hit you, and you hit him, you know.”
“Pay your debts before you go,” said a monitor, striding up to me, after
hearing how the honour lay; “Ridd, you must go through with it.”
“Fight, for the sake of the junior first,” cried the little fellow in my
ear, the clever one, the head of our class, who had mocked John Fry, and
knew all about the aorists, and tried to make me know it; but I never
went more than three places up, and then it was an accident, and I came
down after dinner. The boys were urgent round me to fight, though my
stomach was not up for it; and being very slow of wit (which is not
chargeable on me), I looked from one to other of them, seeking any cure
for it. Not that I was afraid of fighting, for now I had been three
years at Blundell's, and foughten, all that time, a fight at least once
every week, till the boys began to know me; only that the load on my
heart was not sprightly as of the hay-field. It is a very sad thing to
dwell on; but even now, in my time of wisdom, I doubt it is a fond thing
to imagine, and a motherly to insist upon, that boys can do without
fighting. Unless they be very good boys, and afraid of one another.
“Nay,” I said, with my back against the wrought-iron stay of the gate,
which was socketed into Cop's house-front: “I will not fight thee now,
Robin Snell, but wait till I come back again.”
“Take coward's blow, Jack Ridd, then,” cried half a dozen little boys,
shoving Bob Snell forward to do it; because they all knew well enough,
having striven with me ere now, and proved me to be their master--they
knew, I say, that without great change, I would never accept that
contumely. But I took little heed of them, looking in dull wonderment
at John Fry, and Smiler, and the blunderbuss, and Peggy. John Fry was
scratching his head, I could see, and getting blue in the face, by the
light from Cop's parlour-window, and going to and fro upon Smiler, as if
he were hard set with it. And all the time he was looking briskly from
my eyes to the fist I was clenching, and methought he tried to wink at
me in a covert manner; and then Peggy whisked her tail.
“Shall I fight, John?” I said at last; “I would an you had not come,
John.”
“Chraist's will be done; I zim thee had better faight, Jan,” he
answered, in a whisper, through the gridiron of the gate; “there be a
dale of faighting avore thee. Best wai to begin gude taime laike. Wull
the geatman latt me in, to zee as thee hast vair plai, lad?”
He looked doubtfully down at the colour of his cowskin boots, and the
mire upon the horses, for the sloughs were exceedingly mucky. Peggy,
indeed, my sorrel pony, being lighter of weight, was not crusted much
over the shoulders; but Smiler (our youngest sledder) had been well in
over his withers, and none would have deemed him a piebald, save of red
mire and black mire. The great blunderbuss, moreover, was choked with a
dollop of slough-cake; and John Fry's sad-coloured Sunday hat was indued
with a plume of marish-weed. All this I saw while he was dismounting,
heavily and wearily, lifting his leg from the saddle-cloth as if with a
sore crick in his back.
By this time the question of fighting was gone quite out of our
discretion; for sundry of the elder boys, grave and reverend signors,
who had taken no small pleasure in teaching our hands to fight, to ward,
to parry, to feign and counter, to lunge in the manner of sword-play,
and the weaker child to drop on one knee when no cunning of fence might
baffle the onset--these great masters of the art, who would far liefer