The Greatest Works of J. S. Fletcher (64+ Titles in One Illustrated Edition). J. S. Fletcher
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setting down upon them of overflowing pots and mugs; the walls, originally washed in some indefinite tint of yellow or drab, and now stained and discoloured by damp and neglect, were relieved from sheer bleakness by framed advertisements of ales and spirits, and here and there by a grocer's fly-blown almanack. One side of the room was filled up by a bar, covered over with zinc sheeting, out of which projected three beer-pulls standing up like ninepins; behind it, on shelves ranged against the walls, were displayed a few bottles of spirits, an ancient cigar-box or two, and some rows of cloudy glasses. The whole place was down at heel and disconsolate: Perris, however, noticed nothing of its shabbiness: his eyes were no more offended by the squalor and the untidiness than his nose was vexed by the unpleasant atmosphere. He sat down heavily at the table nearest to the bar, and tapped on its surface with his ash switch.
A man emerged lazily from an inner apartment—a gross-habited, bloated man, about whose thickly-jowled face coarse black hair grew in sparse tufts. The silence with which he advanced to the bar was due to the fact that although the afternoon was merging towards eventide, he still retained the slippers into which he had thrust his feet on rising; it needed no particular observation to see that so far he had performed no ablutions nor made his toilet. His trousers were kept in place by a single suspender; between them and his open waistcoat, almost destitute of buttons and greasy from much spilling of fat meats, large rolls of coarse linen forced themselves and suggested that he considered an allowance of one shirt a week ample for his requirements. He wore neither collar nor necktie: his unbuttoned shirt revealed a thick bull neck, and beneath it a chest covered as with the pelt of an animal.
"Day," said Perris, nodding mechanically. "I'll take a drop of Irish, if you please."
He reached up to the counter and laid a sixpenny-piece on it, and the landlord turned to a bottle behind him and poured some of its muddy-looking contents into a glass.
"Happen you'll take a drop o' summat yourself, like?" suggested Perris generously.
"Well, I'll just take a twopennorth o' gin," replied the landlord, helping himself from another bottle. "Here's my best respects."
"Best respects," murmured Perris. He picked up the penny which the landlord pushed across the counter, and dropped it into his pocket. "Quietish about here, isn't it?" he said.
The landlord leaned across the counter and stroked his sparse beard.
"Aye, there's naught much doing," he said. "This place is over far out o' the village, and them as comes by train doesn't turn in here very oft. It's naught to me—I was only put in to manage it, like: it's a tied house. Which way might you be going?"
"Nay, I come fro' Martinsthorpe yonder," answered Perris, nodding his head towards the south. "Least-ways, fro' Cherry-trees Farm—I been farming there this last two year. I don't oft come this way—it isn't in my direction for anywhere."
"How's things out your way, like?" asked the landlord.
"Middlin', middlin'," answered Perris, tapping his switch on the floor. "There's naught much to be made at it. It's naught but scrattin' a livin' out o' t' land."
"Why, it's summat to do that," observed the landlord. "There's some as can't scrat that much. And there's some as can. I'll lay yon neighbour o' yours at Martinsthorpe Limepits scrats more nor a livin'."
"Mestur Taffendale?" said Perris, looking up. "Ah, yes, but he were one o' them 'at's born wi' silver spoons i' their mouths, accordin' to what I understand. Yes, I understand that he's part brass, has Mestur Taffendale."
The landlord held out his hand for Perris's glass and replenished it and his own.
"Aye, he has so!" he observed. "And them that has aught, always gets more to put to it. I'll lay Taffendale could buy up all t' farmers i' Martinsthorpe."
Perris sipped his whisky and laughed feebly and foolishly.
"I'll lay he could buy me up!" he said. "It's our rent-day next week, and I'm sure a body's hard put to it to raise t' rent nowadays. There'll have to be some reductions or abatements, or summat, or else us little farmers 'll be sore tried."
The landlord made no reply to these remarks. He glanced the caller up and down, and drew his own conclusions. And Perris presently drank off his whisky, and rising to his feet looked indefinitely about him.
"Well, I must be off," he said. "It's four mile to my place. I think I'll take a sup o' whisky in a bottle, like, as there's no callin' place on t' way."
"Shillingsworth?" asked the landlord.
"Aye, shillingsworth or eighteenpennorth, it makes no difference," replied Perris, fumbling in his pocket and producing a florin. "Here, there's two shilling—make it eighteenpennorth, and we'll have another glass out o' t' change. And there's another penny, and I'll have a twopenny smoke."
With a rank cigar between his teeth, and a small bottle of bad whisky in the tail of his coat, Perris set out homeward along the highway. He had pushed his last coin across the zinc-covered counter, and his purse and pockets were now empty, yet he laughed as he shambled on beneath the wayside trees and the high hedgerows, carelessly swishing at weed or flower with his ashplant. But when he had gone a mile he paused, and leaning over a gate he drew out and took a long pull at his bottle and shook his head.
"I mun tell Rhoda how things is," he muttered. "She's a sharp un, is Rhoda; she'll happen be able to make out a bit. She might be for sellin' t' cows, and very like she's gotten a bit put away out o' them cocks and hens—women contrives to save a shillin' or two here and there where us men can't. Aye, I mun hev' a word or two wi' Rhoda."
Rhoda was alone when Perris came slowly in at the side gate and shambled along the cobble-paved path which lay between the fold and the house. He had drunk all his whisky and had thrown away the bottle, but the stump of his twopenny cigar still remained between his teeth, and he smiled weakly around it as he turned the door.
"I've corned, ye see, my lass," he said, dropping into the nearest chair. "Aye, and I didn't aim at gettin' back till to-morrow, but there were naught no more to do over yonder, so I thought I might as well be steppin', like. I could do wi' a bit o' supper, Rhoda, my lass."
Rhoda, who had got rid of Pippany, and having just seen Tibby Graddige depart, was trying to reduce the untidy house-place to something like order, turned from the hearth, looking at her husband with anything but a friendly glance. She instinctively compared his careless and forlorn appearance, his weak and fatuous face, with the vastly different impression which Mark Taffendale had left upon her, and she was suddenly conscious of an intense dislike, a fierce loathing of something which was not exactly Abel Perris, but with which he was somehow inextricably mixed up. Her glance lighted on the bright blue satin necktie, and she felt an almost insane impulse to snatch it from Perris's long, thin neck and stamp on it.
"How do you expect me to have any supper ready, or likely to be ready, when I didn't know you were coming?" she exclaimed. "You should come home when you say you're coming—there isn't so much as even a bone in the larder—yon there Pippany finished up what there was for his supper."
Perris, who was making vain attempts to relight the sucked and soddened stump of his cigar, looked up to where the shrunk shank of what had been a ham dangled from the rafters. There was little flesh left on it, but from the adjacent hooks hung a respectable piece of a flitch of bacon.
"Ye could fry a bit o' that bacon, my lass," he suggested. "And happen a egg or two wi' it."
"I can't spare any eggs," said Rhoda. "I want all the eggs I have for market. And if you must have some tea, you'd better go and fill that kettle. I wish you'd stopped away till to-morrow."
Perris took the kettle out to the pump, filled it, came back and placed it on the fire, and having reseated himself again tried to induce the cigar to burn.
"I didn't see no use i' stoppin' away when I'd done mi business," he remarked suddenly. "When business is done, it is done, and so there's an end on 't."
"And I hope you did whatever it was you set off to do," said Rhoda, who, mounted on a chair, was cutting slices off the flitch of bacon and tossing them into the frying-pan