Crefton Lockyer sat at his ease, an ease alike of body and soul,
in the little patch of ground, half-orchard and half-garden, that
abutted on the farmyard at Mowsle Barton. After the stress and
noise of long years of city life, the repose and peace of the
hill-begirt homestead struck on his senses with an almost dramatic
intensity. Time and space seemed to lose their meaning and their
abruptness; the minutes slid away into hours, and the meadows and
fallows sloped away into middle distance, softly and
imperceptibly. Wild weeds of the hedgerow straggled into the
flower-garden, and wallflowers and garden bushes made counter-
raids into farmyard and lane. Sleepy-looking hens and solemn
preoccupied ducks were equally at home in yard, orchard, or
roadway; nothing seemed to belong definitely to anywhere; even the
gates were not necessarily to be found on their hinges. And over
the whole scene brooded the sense of a peace that had almost a
quality of magic in it. In the afternoon you felt that it had
always been afternoon, and must always remain afternoon; in the
twilight you knew that it could never have been anything else but
twilight. Crefton Lockyer sat at his ease in the rustic seat
beneath an old medlar tree, and decided that here was the life-
anchorage that his mind had so fondly pictured and that latterly
his tired and jarred senses had so often pined for. He would make
a permanent lodging-place among these simple friendly people,
gradually increasing the modest comforts with which he would like
to surround himself, but falling in as much as possible with their
manner of living.
As he slowly matured this resolution in his mind an elderly woman
came hobbling with uncertain gait through the orchard. He
recognized her as a member of the farm household, the mother or
possibly the mother-in-law of Mrs. Spurfield, his present
landlady, and hastily formulated some pleasant remark to make to
her. She forestalled him.
"There's a bit of writing chalked up on the door over yonder.
What is it?"
She spoke in a dull impersonal manner, as though the question had
been on her lips for years and had best be got rid of. Her eyes,
however, looked impatiently over Crefton's head at the door of a
small barn which formed the outpost of a straggling line of farm
buildings.
"Martha Pillamon is an old witch " was the announcement that met
Crefton's inquiring scrutiny, and he hesitated a moment before
giving the statement wider publicity. For all he knew to the
contrary, it might be Martha herself to whom he was speaking. It
was possible that Mrs. Spurfield's maiden name had been Pillamon.
And the gaunt, withered old dame at his side might certainly
fulfil local conditions as to the outward aspect of a witch.
"It's something about some one called Martha Pillamon," he
explained cautiously.
"What does it say?"
"It's very disrespectful," said Crefton; "it says she's a witch.
Such things ought not to be written up."
"It's true, every word of it," said his listener with considerable
satisfaction, adding as a special descriptive note of her own,
"the old toad."
And as she hobbled away through the farmyard she shrilled out in
her cracked voice, "Martha Pillamon is an old witch!"
"Did you hear what she said?" mumbled a weak, angry voice
somewhere behind Crefton's shoulder. Turning hastily, he beheld
another old crone, thin and yellow and wrinkled, and evidently in
a high state of displeasure. Obviously this was Martha Pillamon
in person. The orchard seemed to be a favourite promenade for the
aged women of the neighbourhood.
"'Tis lies, 'tis sinful lies," the weak voice went on. "'Tis
Betsy Croot is the old witch. She an' her daughter, the dirty
rat. I'll put a spell on 'em, the old nuisances."
As she limped slowly away her eye caught the chalk inscription on
the barn door.
"What's written up there?" she demanded, wheeling round on
Crefton.
"Vote for Soarker," he responded, with the craven boldness of the
practised peacemaker.
The old woman grunted, and her mutterings and her faded red shawl
lost themselves gradually among the tree-trunks. Crefton rose
presently and made his way towards the farm-house. Somehow a good
deal of the peace seemed to have slipped out of the atmosphere.
The cheery bustle of tea-time in the old farm kitchen, which
Crefton had found so agreeable on previous afternoons, seemed to
have soured to-day into a certain uneasy melancholy. There was a
dull, dragging silence around the board, and the tea itself, when
Crefton came to taste it, was a flat, lukewarm concoction that
would have driven the spirit of revelry out of a carnival.
"It's no use complaining of the tea," said Mrs. Spurfield hastily,
as her guest stared with an air of polite inquiry at his cup.
"The kettle won't boil, that's the truth of it."
Crefton turned to the hearth, where an unusually fierce fire was
banked up under a big black kettle, which sent a thin wreath of
steam from its spout, but seemed otherwise to ignore the action of
the roaring blaze beneath it.
"It's been there more than an hour, an' boil it won't," said Mrs.
Spurfield, adding, by way of complete explanation, "we're
bewitched."
"It's Martha Pillamon as has done it," chimed in the old mother;
"I'll be even with the old toad. I'll put a spell on her."
"It must boil in time," protested Crefton, ignoring the
suggestions of foul influences. "Perhaps the coal is damp."
"It won't boil in time for supper, nor for breakfast to-morrow
morning, not if you was to keep the fire a-going all night for
it," said Mrs. Spurfield. And it didn't. The household subsisted
on fried and baked dishes, and a neighbour obligingly brewed tea
and sent it across in a moderately warm condition.
"I suppose you'll be leaving us, now that things has turned up
uncomfortable," Mrs. Spurfield observed at breakfast; "there are
folks as deserts one as soon as trouble comes."
Crefton hurriedly disclaimed any immediate change of plans; he
observed, however, to himself that the earlier heartiness of
manner had in a large measure deserted the household. Suspicious
looks, sulky silences, or sharp speeches had become the order of
the day. As for the old mother, she sat about the kitchen or the
garden all day, murmuring threats and spells against Martha
Pillamon. There was something alike terrifying and piteous in the
spectacle of these frail old morsels of humanity consecrating
their last flickering energies to the task of making each other
wretched. Hatred seemed to be the one faculty which had survived
in undiminished vigour and intensity where all else was dropping
into ordered and symmetrical decay. And the uncanny part of it
was that some horrid unwholesome power seemed to be distilled from
their spite and their cursings. No amount of sceptical
explanation could remove the undoubted fact that neither kettle
nor saucepan would come to boiling-point over the hottest fire.
Crefton clung as long as possible to the theory of some defect in
the coals, but a wood fire gave the same result, and when a small
spirit-lamp kettle, which he ordered out by carrier, showed the
same obstinate refusal to allow its contents to boil he felt that
he had come suddenly into contact with some unguessed-at and very
evil aspect of hidden forces. Miles away, down through an opening
in the hills, he could catch glimpses of a road where motor-cars
sometimes passed, and yet here, so little removed from the
arteries of the latest civilization, was a bat-haunted old
homestead, where something unmistakably like witchcraft seemed to
hold a very practical sway.
Passing out through the farm garden on his way to the lanes
beyond, where he hoped to recapture the comfortable sense of
peacefulness that was so lacking around house and hearth--
especially hearth--Crefton came across the old mother, sitting
mumbling to herself in the seat beneath the medlar tree. "Let un
sink as swims, let un sink as swims," she was, repeating over and
over again, as a child repeats a half-learned lesson. And now and
then she would break off into a shrill laugh, with a note of
malice in it that was not pleasant to hear. Crefton was glad when
he found himself out of earshot, in the quiet and seclusion of the
deep overgrown lanes that seemed to lead away to nowhere; one,
narrower and deeper than the rest, attracted his footsteps, and he
was almost annoyed when he found that it really did act as a
miniature roadway to a human dwelling. A forlorn-looking cottage
with a scrap of ill-tended cabbage garden and a few aged apple
trees stood at an angle where a swift flowing stream widened out
for a space into a decent sized pond before hurrying away again
through the willows that had checked its course. Crefton leaned
against a tree-trunk and looked across the swirling eddies of the
pond at the humble little homestead opposite him; the only sign of
life came from a small procession of dingy-looking ducks that
marched in single file down to the water's edge. There is always
something rather taking in the way a duck changes itself in an
instant from a slow, clumsy waddler of the earth to a graceful,
buoyant swimmer of the waters, and Crefton waited with a certain
arrested attention to watch the leader of the file launch itself
on to the surface of the pond. He was aware at the same time of a
curious warning instinct that something strange and unpleasant was
about to happen. The duck flung itself confidently forward into
the water, and rolled immediately under the surface. Its head
appeared for a moment and went under again, leaving a train of
bubbles in its wake, while wings and legs churned the water in a
helpless swirl of flapping and kicking. The bird was obviously
drowning. Crefton thought at first that it had caught itself in
some weeds, or was being attacked from below by a pike or water-
rat. But no blood floated to the surface, and the wildly bobbing
body made the circuit of the pond current without hindrance from
any entanglement. A second duck had by this time launched itself
into the pond, and a second struggling body rolled and twisted
under the surface. There was something peculiarly piteous in the
sight of the gasping beaks that showed now and again above the
water, as though in terrified protest at this treachery of a
trusted and familiar element. Crefton gazed with something like
horror as a third duck poised itself on the bank and splashed in,
to share the fate of the other two. He felt almost relieved when
the remainder of the flock, taking tardy alarm from the commotion
of the slowly drowning bodies, drew themselves up with tense
outstretched necks, and sidled away from the scene of danger,
quacking a deep note of disquietude as they went. At the same
moment Crefton became aware that he was not the only human witness
of the scene; a bent and withered old woman, whom he recognized at
once as Martha Pillamon, of sinister reputation, had limped down
the cottage path to the water's edge, and was gazing fixedly at
the gruesome whirligig of dying birds that went in horrible
procession round the pool. Presently her voice rang out in a
shrill note of quavering rage:
"'Tis Betsy Croot adone it, the old rat I'll put a spell on her,
see if I don't."
Crefton slipped quietly away, uncertain whether or no the old
woman had noticed his presence. Even before she had proclaimed
the guiltiness of Betsy Croot, the latter's muttered incantation
"Let un sink as swims " had flashed uncomfortably across his mind.
But it was the final threat of a retaliatory spell which crowded
his mind with misgiving to the exclusion of all other thoughts or
fancies. His reasoning powers could no longer afford to dismiss
these old-wives' threats as empty bickerings. The household at
Mowsle Barton lay under the displeasure of a vindictive old woman
who seemed able to materialize her personal spites in a very
practical fashion, and there was no saying what form her revenge
for three drowned ducks might not take. As a member of the
household Crefton might find himself involved in some general and
highly disagreeable visitation of Martha Pillamon's wrath. Of
course he knew that he was giving way to absurd fancies, but the
behaviour of the spirit-lamp kettle and the subsequent scene at
the pond had considerably unnerved him. And the vagueness of his
alarm added to its terrors; when once you have taken the
Impossible into your calculations its possibilities become
practically limitless.
Crefton rose at his usual early hour the next morning, after one
of the least restful nights he had spent at the farm. His
sharpened senses quickly detected that subtle atmosphere of
things-being-not-altogether well that hangs over a stricken
household. The cows had been milked, but they stood huddled about
in the yard, waiting impatiently to be driven out afield, and the
poultry kept up an importunate querulous reminder of deferred
feeding-time; the yard pump, which usually made discordant music
at frequent intervals during the early morning, was to-day
ominously silent. In the house itself there was a coming and
going of scuttering footsteps, a rushing and dying away of hurried
voices, and long, uneasy stillnesses. Crefton finished his
dressing and made his way to the head of a narrow staircase. He
could hear a dull, complaining voice, a voice into which an awed
hush had crept, and recognized the speaker as Mrs. Spurfield.
"He'll go away, for sure," the voice was saying; "there are those
as runs away from one as soon as real misfortune shows itself."
Crefton felt that he probably was one of "those," and that there
were moments when it was advisable to be true to type.
He crept back to his room, collected and packed his few
belongings, placed the money due for his lodgings on a table, and
made his way out by a back door into the yard. A mob of poultry
surged expectantly towards him; shaking off their interested
attentions he hurried along under cover of cowstall, piggery, and
hayricks till he reached the lane at the back of the farm. A few
minutes' walk, which only the burden of his portmanteaux
restrained from developing into an undisguised run, brought him to
a main road, where the early carrier soon overtook him and sped
him onward to the neighbouring town. At a bend of the road he
caught a last glimpse of the farm; the old gabled roofs and
thatched barns, the straggling orchard, and the medlar tree, with
its wooden seat, stood out with an almost spectral clearness in
the early morning light, and over it all brooded that air of magic
possession which Crefton had once mistaken for peace.
The bustle and roar of Paddington Station smote on his ears with a
welcome protective greeting.
"Very bad for our nerves, all this rush and hurry," said a fellow-
traveller; "give me the peace and quiet of the country."
Crefton mentally surrendered his share of the desired commodity.
A crowded, brilliantly over-lighted music-hall, where an exuberant
rendering of "1812" was being given by a strenuous orchestra, came
nearest to his ideal of a nerve sedative.
_________
-THE END-
[Hector Hugh Munro] Saki's short story: The Peace Of Mowsle Barton
GO TO TOP OF SCREEN
