Nicky-Nan, Reservist Part 28

"I do not seek either mirth or music in the little I make use of,"

Mrs Polsue corrected him; "and on general grounds I agree with total abstinence."

[In this the lady said no more than the truth. She had lamented, scores of times, an infirmity of the flesh which, forbidding her to chastise the indulgence of moderate drinking, protected a truly enormous cla.s.s of fellow-creatures from her missionary disapproval.

Often and often she had envied Charity Oliver, who could consume tea with hot sausages and even ham rashers. "To have the stomach of an ostrich must be a privilege indeed," she had once a.s.sured her friend; "though to be sure it tells on the complexion, forcing the blood to the face; so that (from a worldly point of view) at a distance a different construction might be put on it."]

"Tea with sausages, for instance!"

"The same here--Poison!" Mr Latter agreed, delicately indicating where "here" lay for him.

"My father ever kept a generous table, which he was in a position to afford." Mrs Polsue sighed, and added with resignation, "I suppose we must say that the fathers have eaten sour grapes and the children's teeth are set on edge."

"I wouldn' put it just like that, ma'am-not from what I've heard of the old gentleman's knowledge o' liquor."

"It will bear hardly on you, Latter, if the King and Parliament should put the country under Prohibition?"

["Drabbet the old cat!" murmured Mr Latter to himself.

"She's fis.h.i.+ng to get at my banking account, and a lot she'd interfere if 'twas the workhouse with me to-morrow."]

Aloud he said, rubbing his thumb on the edge of the augur and preparing to make incision upon the cask, "Well, ma'am, I reckon as the Lord will provide mortification enough for us before we're out o'

this business, without our troublin' to get in ahead. The way I looks at it is, 'Let's be cheerful.' In my experience o' life there's no bank like cheerfulness for a man to draw upon, to keep hisself fit and industrious. What's more--if I may say it--'most every staid man, afore he gets to forty, has pretty well come to terms with his innards. He knows--if you'll excuse the figger o' speech, ma'am-- what's the pressure 'pon the boiler, an' how to stoke it.

There's folks," said Mr Latter delicately, "as can't stoke hot tea upon sossiges: an' likewise there's folks as'll put forth their best on three goes o' whisky. So why not live an' let live?"

"They say," answered Mrs Polsue, "that the Czar has been advised to prohibit the sale of vodka throughout his vast dominion."

"What's the beverage, ma'am? I don't seem to know it."

"Vodka."

"Oh, well: very likely he has his reasons. . . . It sounds a long way off."

"But that," Mrs Polsue persisted, reproducing what she had a.s.similated from her newspaper,--"_that_ is what folks in Polpier cannot be made to understand. At this moment the Germans are nearer than we are to London, as the crow flies; and here are our working cla.s.ses living on honey and roses, like a City of the Plain.

What are our young men thinking about?"

"Why, ma'am," said Mr Latter, by this time busy with the cask, "they're takin' it slow, I'll own, an' they don't say much. To begin with, 'tis their natur'; an' next, 'tis a bit more they risk than you or me, if I may make bold to say so. Then there's the mothers an'

sweethearts pullin' 'em back."

"Tut! If _I_ had a sweetheart--"

"Oh, certainly, ma'am!" agreed Mr Latter. "That if wars there had been, you'd have driven him to the nearest, I make no doubt at all; though your departed--if I may make so bold--was never the sort to hurt a fly. . . . Though, by G.o.d," wound up Mr Latter in an inaudible murmur as he blew the sawdust from the vent-hole, "the man must have had pluck, too, in his way!"

"There's worse bein' done by Polpier women than holding the men back.

_I_ call it worse, at any rate, to send your wedded husband off to fight for his country and then pick up with another man for protection."

"Can such goin's-on go on in our midst, ma'am, and nothing about in the shape o' fire and brimstone?"

"I am not retailing gossip, Mr Latter. I tell you no more than was openly said to me, and brazenly, before witnesses, by one of the parties involved. As one of the Relief Committee appointed to see that none of our reservists' families are suffering want, I called the other day upon Samuel Penhaligon's wife. From the first the woman showed no sense of our respective positions; and after a question or two she became so violent that it drew quite a small crowd around the door. In the midst of her tirading out steps her partner--"

"What? Sam?"

"How should it be Samuel Penhaligon, when you know as well as I do that he's gone to the War? No: the man, I regret to say, was Nicholas Nanjivell."

"Nicky-Nan? . . . Oh, come, ma'am, I say! Why, what capers could _he_ been cuttin'?"

"I feel justified in speaking of him as her partner, seeing that he avowed as much. She was living under his protection, he said, and he would see that she didn't come to want. He had even the effrontery to a.s.sure me that he had made an arrangement with Penhaligon.

But that, I feel sure, was a shameless lie, and my ears tingle to hear myself repeating it. 'Twas hard enough to keep one's temper with the man standing there and talking big as my lord, when the Almighty knows if for these two years he's seen the colour of a sovereign. . . . Eh? What ails you?" she demanded, as Mr Latter, who had been testing the point of the auger with his thumb, gave a sudden and violent start.

"Thank 'ee, ma'am--there's no blood drawn, as it happens," said Mr Latter, "but 'twas nibby-jibby,[1] the way you outed with it, and took me of a heap. If you'd ever happened now to stand up to a man and him gettin' his fist full on your wind--no, you _wouldn't_, o'

course. But 'twas a knock-out. . . . 'Nicky-Nan,' says you, 'an'not a sovereign to bless hisself'--Why the man's fairly _leakin_ sovereigns!--sheddin' 'em about like fish-scales!"

"Mr Latter--are you _intoxicated?_"

"I wish I was, ma'am. 'Twould be some kind of an explanation, though mebbe not the most satisfactory. . . . When I tell you that the man walked into my bar, three days since, an' scattered sovereigns all over my floor! When I tell you he couldn' pull out a han'kerchief to blow his nose but he _sneezed_ sovereigns!"

Mrs Polsue gasped.

"--When I tell you," Mr Latter pursued, flouris.h.i.+ng his auger and rapping it on the flat of his palm, "that one o' these soldiers--a Corporal too, and named Sanderc.o.c.k--was talkin' in my bar not two hours ago, an' says he, 'You've a man called Nanjivell lives here by the bridge.' 'Ay,' says I. 'Bit of an eccentric?' says he. 'How?'

says I. 'The way he drops his gold about,' says the Corporal.

'Ho?' says I, p.r.i.c.kin' up my ears, but not choosin' to be talkative with a stranger. 'So folks have been tellin' you that story already?' says I. '_Tellin_ me?' says he. 'Why, I see'd it with my own eyes!' 'Come,' thinks I to myself, 'this fellow's a bra' bit of a liar, wherever he hails from.' 'With my own eyes,' he repeats.

'I see'd 'en drop a sovereign in gold, up by that 'taty-patch of his where the Company's runnin' a trench: an' later on, as I started clearin' his crop, I came on two more in the soil, just where he'd been standin'. 'Hullo!' thinks I, 'this ben't the same story, but another one altogether.' I didn't say that aloud, though. What I said aloud was, 'You mustn't take notice of everything you see Nicky-Nan do. 'Tis only his tricks.' 'Tricks?' says the Corporal.

'If a man behaved like that down to Penryn we should call 'en an eccentric.' That's the tale, ma'am: an' the best part o' last night, what with puttin' two an' two together an' makin' neither head nor tail of it, I scarce closed an eye in my head."

"I saw the man,"--Mrs Polsue, after a sharp intake of breath, said it slowly in a hushed tone of surmise. "On Sunday, on my way home from service, I saw him hand the money over. I wasn't near enough to catch all that pa.s.sed in the way of conversation. But the soldiers were delivering a quant.i.ty of potatoes they had dug up in the man's patch, and I concluded that Government, in its wasteful way, was paying him some sort of compensation over and above saving his crop for him. I remember saying to Miss Oliver that somebody ought to write to the War Office about it. . . . A man that already takes the taxpayers' money for pretending to be a Reservist, and then, when war breaks out, prefers to skulk at home in open sin or next door to it!"

"I wouldn't go so far as all that, ma'am," said Mr Latter. "In fact, I b'lieve you're under some mistake about Mrs Penhaligon, who is reckoned as vartuous a woman as any in the parish; while 'tis known that no doctor'd pa.s.s Nanjivell for service. But if you ask me, I've a great idea the man has come into a legacy, or else struck a store of gold--"

The landlord checked his tongue abruptly. Some phrase about a 'taty-patch floated across his memory. Had the phrase been his own, or Nicky-Nan's? He must give himself time to think this out, for it might well be the clue. The Corporal had spoken of finding two of the three sovereigns under the soil. . . . While Mr Latter's brain worked, he cast a quick glance at Mrs Polsue, in fear that he had gone too far.

But, although she had heard him, it happened that Mrs Polsue's mind was working on a widely divergent scent. She also was preoccupied with something that haunted her memory: a paragraph in that morning's newspaper. She, too, had no present intention of unveiling her surmise.

"Nonsense!" she said. "Folks don't happen on buried treasure in Polpier; and you can't have a legacy without its getting into the papers."

Mr Latter had no sooner departed than she put on her bonnet and paid a call on her friend Miss Charity Oliver.

"If Mr Pamphlett were only a magistrate--" said Mrs Polsue, after telling her story. "He was as good as promised it before the Unionists went out of office, as his services to the party well deserved. _This_ Government appoints none but its own creatures.

. . . And Squire Tresawna living three miles away--with the chance, when you get there, of finding he's not at home--"

"You might send him a letter," suggested Miss Oliver.

"One has to be very careful what one puts down on paper," said Mrs Polsue. "I don't want to compromise myself unnecessarily, even for the sake of my country. A personal interview is always more advisable . . . But, apart from the distance, I don't fancy the idea of consulting the Squire. He dislikes hearing ill of anybody. Oh, I quite agree!--If he takes that line, he has no business on the Bench.

What else is a magistrate _for?_"

"Well, dear, I don't know much about the law. But I've heard it laid down as a rule that every man is supposed to be innocent until you prove that he's guilty--"

"And I never could understand why," Mrs Polsue interjected; "seeing that five out of every six persons charged are found guilty. To my mind the law would be more sensible if it learnt by experience and took some account of the odds."

"There's a good deal to be said for that, no doubt," Miss Oliver agreed. "But the Squire--or any other magistrate, for that matter-- will look on the law as it stands; and if you are going to lay information against Nicholas Nanjivell--"