Amaryllis at the Fair Part 5

I said they were not equal in value to the sheep--why, they're not worth anything when they're dead. You cannot even sell the skins of the Things!

Slip-slop in the dust they drive along to the fair, where there will be an immense amount of eating and a far larger amount of drinking all round them, in every house they pa.s.s, and up to midnight. They will see valuable animals, and men with well-lined pockets. What on earth can a tramp find to please him among all this? It is not for him; yet he goes to see it.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

CHAPTER VII.

THE crowd began to pa.s.s more thickly, when Amaryllis saw a man coming up the road in the opposite direction to that in which the mult.i.tude was moving. They were going to the fair; he had his back to it, and a party in a trap rallied him smartly for his folly.

"What! bean't you a-going to fair? Why, Measter Duck, what's up? Looking for a thunderstorm?"--which young ducks are supposed to enjoy. "Ha! ha!

ha!"

Measter Duck, with a broad grin on his face, nevertheless plodded up the hill, and pa.s.sed beneath Amaryllis.

She knew him very well, for he lived in the hamlet, but she would not have taken any notice of him had he not been so elaborately dressed. His high silk hat shone glossy; his black broadcloth coat was new and carefully brushed; he was in black all over, in contrast with the ma.s.s of people who had gone by that morning. A blue necktie, bright and clean, spotless linen, gloves rolled up in a ball in one hand, whiskers brushed, boots s.h.i.+ning, teeth clean, Johnny was off to the fair!

The coat fitted him to a nicety; it had, in fact, no chance to do otherwise, for his great back and shoulders stretched it tight, and would have done so had it been made like a sack. Of all the big men who had gone by that day Jack Duck was the biggest; his back was immense, and straight, too, for he walked upright for a farmer, nor was his bulk altogether without effect, for he was not over-burdened with abdomen, so that it showed to the best advantage. He was a little over the average height, but not tall; he had grown laterally.

He could lift two sacks of wheat from the ground. You just try to lift _one_.

His sleeves were too long, so that only the great knuckles of his speckled hands were visible. Red whiskers, red hair, blue eyes, speckled face, straight lips, thick, like the edge of an earthenware pitcher, and of much the same coa.r.s.e red hue, always a ready grin, a round, hard head, which you might have hit safely with a mallet; and there is the picture.

For some reason, very big men do not look well in glossy black coats and silk hats; they seem to want wideawakes, bowlers, caps, anything rather than a Paris hat, and some loose-cut jacket of a free-and-easy colour, suitable for the field, or cricket, or boating. They do not belong to the town and narrow doorways; Nature grew them for hills and fields.

Compared with the Continental folk, most Englishmen are big, and therefore, as their "best" suits do not fit in with their character as written in limbs and shoulders, the Continent thinks us clumsy. The truth is, it is the Continent that is little.

"Isn't he ugly?" thought Amaryllis, looking down on poor John Duck.

"Isn't he ugly?" Now the top of the wall was crusted with moss, which has a way of growing into bricks and mortar, and attaching particles of brick to its roots. As she watched the people she unconsciously trifled with a little piece of moss--her hand happened at the moment to project over the wall, and as John Duck went under she dropped the bit of moss straight on his glossy hat. Tap! the fragment of brick adhering to the moss struck the hollow hat smartly like a drum.

She drew back quickly, laughing and blus.h.i.+ng, and angry with herself all at the same time, for she had done it without a thought.

Jack pulled off his hat, saw nothing, and put it on again, suspecting that some one in a pa.s.sing gig had "chucked" something at him.

In a minute Amaryllis peeped over the wall, and, seeing his broad back a long way up the road, resumed her stand.

"How ever could I do such a stupid thing?" she thought. "But isn't he ugly? Aren't they _all_ ugly? All of them--horridly ugly."

The entire unknown race of Man was hideous. So coa.r.s.e in feature--their noses were thick, half an inch thick, or enormously long and k.n.o.bbed at the end like a walking-stick, or curved like a reaping-hook, or slewed to one side, or flat as if they had been smashed, or short and stumpy and incomplete, or spotted with red blotches, or turned up in the vulgarest manner--n.o.body had a good nose.

Their eyes were goggles, round and staring--like liquid marbles--they had no eyelashes, and their eyebrows were either white and invisible, or s.h.a.ggy, as if thistles grew along their foreheads.

Their cheeks were speckled and freckled and red and brick-dust and leather-coloured, and enclosed with scrubby whiskers, like a garden hedge.

Upon the whole, those who shaved and were smooth looked worse than those who did not, for they thus exposed the angularities of their chins and jaws.

They wore such horrid hats on the top of these roughly-sketched faces--sketched, as it were, with a bit of burnt stick. Some of them had their hats on the backs of their heads, and some wore them aslant, and some jammed over their brows.

They went along smoking and puffing, and talking and guffawing in the vulgarest way, _en route_ to swill and smoke and puff and guffaw somewhere else.

Whoever could tell what they were talking about? these creatures.

They had no form or grace like a woman--no lovely sloped shoulders, no beautiful bosom, no sweeping curve of robe down to the feet. No softness of cheek, or silky hair, or complexion, or taper fingers, or arched eyebrows; no sort of style whatever. They were mere wooden figures; and, in short, sublimely ugly.

There was a good deal of truth in Amaryllis' reflections; it was a pity a woman was not taken into confidence when the men were made.

Suppose the women were like the men, and we had to make love to such a set of bristly, grisly wretches!--pah! shouldn't we think them ugly! The patience of the women, putting up with us so long!

As for the muscles on which we pride ourselves so much, in a woman's eyes (though she prefers a strong man) they simply increase our extraordinary ugliness.

But if we look pale, and slim, and so forth, then they despise us, and there is no doubt that altogether the men were made wrong.

"And Jack's the very ugliest of the lot," thought Amaryllis. "He just _is_ ugly."

Pounding up the slope, big John Duck came by-and-by to the gateway, and entering without ceremony, as is the custom in the country, found Mr.

Iden near the back door talking to a farmer who had seated himself on a stool.

He was a middle-aged man, stout and florid, rough as a chunk of wood, but dressed in his best brown for the fair. Tears were rolling down his vast round cheeks as he expatiated on his grievances to Mr. Iden:--

"Now, just you see how I be helped up with this here 'ooman," he concluded as Duck arrived. Mr. Iden, not a little glad of an opportunity to escape a repet.i.tion of the narrative, to which he had patiently listened, took Jack by the arm, and led him indoors. As they went the man on the stool extended his arm towards them hopelessly:--"Just you see how I be helped up with this here 'ooman!"

A good many have been "helped up" with a woman before now.

Mrs. Iden met Jack with a gracious smile--she always did--yet there could not have been imagined a man less likely to have pleased her.

A quick, nervous temperament, an eye sharp to detect failings or foolishness, an admirer of briskness and vivacity, why did she welcome John Duck, that incarnation of stolidity and slowness, that enormous mountain of a man? Because extremes meet? No, since she was always complaining of Iden's dull, motionless life; so it was not the contrast to her own disposition that charmed her.

John Duck was Another Man--not Mr. Iden.

The best of matrons like to see Another Man enter their houses; there's no viciousness in it, it is simply nature, which requires variety. The best of husbands likes to have another woman--or two, or three--on a visit; there's nothing wrong, it is innocent enough, and but gives a spice to the monotony of existence.

Besides, John Duck, that mountain of slowness and stolidity, was not perhaps a fool, notwithstanding his outward clumsiness. A little attention is appreciated even by a matron of middle age.

"Will you get us some ale?" said Iden; and Mrs. Iden brought a full jug with her own hands--a rare thing, for she hated the Goliath barrel as Iden enjoyed it.

"Going to the fair, Mr. Duck?"

"Yes, m'm," said John, deep in his chest and gruff, about as a horse might be expected to speak if he had a voice. "You going, m'm? I just come up to ask if you'd ride in my dog-trap?"

John had a first-rate turn-out.

Mrs. Iden, beaming with smiles, replied that she was not going to the fair.