The Adventures of Harry Richmond. Complete. George Meredith
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farmer should know what I meant; he laughed enough.
While he was fielding against the opposite eleven, the tramp came into the booth, and we had a match of cunning.
‘Schoolmaster’s out after you, young gentleman,’ said he, advising me to hurry along the road if I sought to baffle pursuit.
I pretended alarm, and then said, ‘Oh, you’ll stand by me,’ and treated him to ale.
He assured me I left as many tracks behind me as if I went spilling a box of lucifer-matches. He was always for my hastening on until I ordered fresh ale for him. The girl and he grimaced at one another in contempt. So we remained seeing the game out. By the time the game ended, the tramp had drunk numbers of glasses of ale.
‘A fine-flavoured fat goose,’ he counted his gains since the commencement of our acquaintance, ‘bottles of ale and ginger-pop, two half-crowns, more ale, and more to follow, let’s hope. You only stick to your friends, young gentleman, won’t you, sir? It’s a hard case for a poor man like me if you don’t. We ain’t got such chances every morning of our lives. Do you perceive, sir? I request you to inform me, do you perceive, sir? I’m muddled a bit, sir, but a man must look after his interests.’
I perceived he was so muddled as to be unable to conceal that his interests were involved in my capture; but I was merry too. Farmer Eckerthy dealt the tramp a scattering slap on the back when he returned to the booth, elated at having beaten the enemy by a single run.
‘Master Harry Richmond go to Riversley to his grandfather in your company, you scoundrel!’ he cried in a rage, after listening to him. ‘I mean to drive him over. It ‘s a comfortable ten-mile, and no more. But I say, Master Harry, what do you say to a peck o’ supper?’
He communicated to me confidentially that he did not like to seem to slink away from the others, who had made up their minds to stop and sup; so we would drive home by moonlight, singing songs. And so we did. I sat beside the farmer, the girl scrambled into the hinder part of the cart, and the tramp stood moaning, ‘Oh dear! oh dear! you goes away to Riversley without your best friend.’
I tossed him a shilling. We sang beginnings and ends of songs. The farmer looked at the moon, and said, ‘Lord! she stares at us!’ Then he sang:
‘The moon is shining on Latworth lea,
And where’ll she see such a jovial three
As we, boys, we? And why is she pale?
It’s because she drinks water instead of ale.’
‘Where ‘s the remainder? There’s the song—!
“Oh! handsome Miss Gammon
Has married Lord Mammon,
And jilted her suitors,
All Cupid’s sharpshooters,
And gone in a carriage
And six to her marriage,
Singing hey! for I’ve landed my salmon, my salmon!”
Where’s the remainder? I heard it th’ only time I ever was in London town, never rested till I’d learnt it, and now it’s clean gone. What’s come to me?’
He sang to ‘Mary of Ellingmere’ and another maid of some place, and a loud song of Britons.
It was startling to me to wake up to twilight in the open air and silence, for I was unaware that I had fallen asleep. The girl had roused me, and we crept down from the cart. Horse and farmer were quite motionless in a green hollow beside the roadway. Looking across fields and fir plantations, I beheld a house in the strange light of the hour, and my heart began beating; but I was overcome with shyness, and said to myself, ‘No, no, that’s not Riversley; I’m sure it isn’t’; though the certainty of it was, in my teeth, refuting me. I ran down the fields to the park and the bright little river, and gazed. When I could say, ‘Yes, it is Riversley!’ I turned away, hurt even to a sense of smarting pain, without knowing the cause. I dare say it is true, as the girl declared subsequently, that I behaved like one in a fit. I dropped, and I may have rolled my body and cried. An indefinite resentment at Riversley was the feeling I grew conscious of after very fast walking. I would not have accepted breakfast there.
About mid-day, crossing a stubble-field, the girl met a couple of her people-men. Near evening we entered one of their tents. The women set up a cry, ‘Kiomi! Kiomi!’ like a rising rookery. Their eyes and teeth made such a flashing as when you dabble a hand in a dark waterpool. The strange tongue they talked, with a kind of peck of the voice at a word, rapid, never high or low, and then a slide of similar tones all round,—not musical, but catching and incessant,—gave me an idea that I had fallen upon a society of birds, exceedingly curious ones. They welcomed me kindly, each of them looking me in the face a bright second or so. I had two helps from a splendid pot of broth that hung over a fire in the middle of the tent.
Kiomi was my companion’s name. She had sisters Adeline and Eveleen, and brothers Osric and William, and she had a cousin a prizefighter. ‘That’s what I’ll be,’ said I. Fiddling for money was not a prospect that charmed me, though it was pleasant lying in Kiomi’s arms to hear Osric play us off to sleep; it was like floating down one of a number of visible rivers; I could see them converging and breaking away while I floated smoothly, and a wonderful fair country nodded drowsy. From that to cock-crow at a stride. Sleep was no more than the passage through the arch of a canal. Kiomi and I were on the heath before sunrise, jumping gravel-pits, chasing sandpipers, mimicking pewits; it seemed to me I had only just heard the last of Osric’s fiddle when yellow colour filled in along the sky over Riversley. The curious dark thrill of the fiddle in the tent by night seemed close up behind the sun, and my quiet fancies as I lay dropping to sleep, followed me like unobtrusive shadows during daylight, or, to speak truthfully, till about dinner-time, when I thought of nothing but the great stew-pot. We fed on plenty; nicer food than Rippenger’s, minus puddings. After dinner I was ready for mischief. My sensations on seeing Kiomi beg of a gentleman were remarkable. I reproached her. She showed me sixpence shining in the palm of her hand. I gave her a shilling to keep her from it. She had now got one and sixpence, she said: meaning, I supposed upon reflection, that her begging had produced that sum, and therefore it was a good thing. The money remaining in my pocket amounted to five shillings and a penny. I offered it to Kiomi’s mother, who refused to accept it; so did the father, and Osric also. I might think of them, they observed, on my return to my own house: they pointed at Riversley. ‘No,’ said I, ‘I shan’t go there, you may be sure.’ The women grinned, and the men yawned. The business of the men appeared to be to set to work about everything as if they had a fire inside them, and then to stretch out their legs and lie on their backs, exactly as if the fire had gone out. Excepting Osric’s practice on the fiddle, and the father’s bringing in and leading away of horses, they did little work in my sight but brown themselves in the sun. One morning Osric’s brother came to our camp with their cousin the prizefighter—a young man of lighter complexion, upon whom I gazed, remembering John Thresher’s reverence for the heroical profession. Kiomi whispered some story concerning her brother having met the tramp. I did not listen; I was full of a tempest, owing to two causes: a studious admiration of the smart young prizefighter’s person, and wrathful disgust at him for calling Kiomi his wife, and telling her he was prepared to marry her as soon as she played her harp like King David. The intense folly of his asking a girl to play like David made me despise him, but he was splendidly handsome and strong, and to see him put on the gloves for a spar with big William, Kiomi’s brother, and evade and ward the huge blows, would have been a treat to others besides old John of Dipwell Farm. He had the agile grace of a leopard; his waistcoat reminded me of one; he was like a piece of machinery in free action. Pleased by my enthusiasm, he gave me a lesson, promising me more.
‘He’ll be champion some day,’ said Kiomi, at gnaw upon an apple he had given her.
I knocked the apple on the ground, and stamped on it. She slapped my cheek. In a minute we stood in a