In the meanwhile the Penhale brothers grew and grew. Martha took a sketchy charge of their infancy, but as soon as they could toddle they made use of their legs to gain the out o’ doors and freedom. At first Martha basted them generously when they came in for meals, but they soon put a stop to that by not showing up at the fixed feeding times, watching her movements from coigns of vantage in the yard and robbing the larder when her back was turned. Martha, thereupon, postponed the whippings till they came in to bed. Once more they defeated her by not coming in to bed; when trouble loomed they spent the night in the loft, curled up like puppies in the hay. Martha could not reach them there. She dared not trust herself on the crazy ladder and Bohenna would give her no assistance; he was hired to tend stock, he said, not children. For all that the woman caught the little savages now and again, and when she did she dressed them faithfully with a birch of her own making. But she did not long maintain her physical advantage.
One afternoon when Ortho was eight and Eli six she caught them red-handed. The pair had been out all the morning, sailing cork boats and mudlarking in the marshes. They had had no dinner. Martha knew they would be homing wolfish hungry some time during the afternoon and that a raid was indicated. There were two big apple pasties on the hearth waiting the mistress’ supper and Martha was prepared to sell her life for them, since it was she that got the blame if anything ran short and she had suffered severely of late.
At about three o’clock she heard the old sheep dog lift up its voice in asthmatic excitement and then cease abruptly; it had recognized friends. The raiders were at hand. She hid behind the settle near the door. Presently she saw a dark patch slide across the east door-post—the shadow of Ortho’s head. The shadow slid on until she knew he was peering into the kitchen. Ortho entered the kitchen, stepping delicately, on bare, grimy toes. He paused and glanced round the room. His eye lit on the pasties and sparkled. He moved a chair carefully, so that his line of retreat might be clear, beckoned to the invisible Eli, and went straight for the mark. As his hands closed on the loot Martha broke cover. Ortho did not look frightened or even surprised; he did not drop the pasty. He grinned, dodged behind the table and shouted to his brother, who took station in the doorway.
Martha, squalling horrid threats, hobbled halfway round the table after Ortho, who skipped in the opposite direction and nearly escaped her. She just cut him off in time, but she could not save the pasty. He slung it under her arm to his confederate and dodged behind the table again. Eli was fat and short-legged. Martha could have caught him with ease, but she did not try, knowing that if she did Ortho would have the second pasty. As it was, Ortho was hopelessly cornered; he should suffer for both. Ortho was behind the table again and difficult to reach. She thought of the broom, but it was at the other side of the kitchen; did she turn to get it Ortho would slip away.
Eli reappeared in the doorway lumpish and stolid; he had hidden the booty and come back to see the fun. Martha considered, pushed the table against the wall and upturned it. Ortho sprang for the door, almost gained it, but not quite. Martha grasped him by the tail of his smock, drew him to her and laid on. But Ortho, instead of squirming and whimpering as was his wont, put up a fight. He fought like a little wild cat, wriggling and snarling, scratching with toes and finger nails. Martha had all she could do to hold him, but hold him she did, dragged him across the floor to the peg where hung her birch (a bunch of hazel twigs) and gave him a couple of vicious slashes across the seat of his pants. She was about to administer a third when an excruciating pain nipped her behind her bare left ankle. She yelled, dropped Ortho and the birch as if white-hot, and grabbed her leg. In the skin of the tendon was imprinted a semi-circle of red dents—Eli’s little sharp teeth marks. She limped round the kitchen for some minutes, vowing dreadful vengeance on the brothers, who, in the meanwhile, were sitting astride the yard gate munching the pasty.
The pair slept in the barn for a couple of nights, and then, judging the dame’s wrath to have passed, slipped in on the third. But Martha was waiting for Eli, birch in hand, determined to carry out her vengeance. It did not come off. She caught Eli, but Ortho flew to the rescue this time. The two little fiends hung on her like weasels, biting, clawing, squealing with fury, all but dragging the clothes off her. She appealed to Teresa for help, but the big woman would do nothing but laugh. It was as good as a bear-bait. Martha shook the brothers off somehow and lowered her flag for good. Next day Ortho burnt the birch with fitting ceremony, and for some years the brothers ran entirely wild.
If Martha failed to inspire any respect in the young Penhales they stood in certain awe of her daughter Wany on account of her connection with the supernatural. In the first place she was a changeling herself. In the second, Providence having denied her wits, had bequeathed her an odd sense. She was weather-wise; she felt heat, frost, rain or wind days in advance; her veins might have run with mercury. In the third place, and which was far more attractive to the boys, she knew the movements of all the “small people” in the valley—the cows told her.
The cows were Wany’s special province. She could not be trusted with any housework however simple, because she could not bring her mind to it for a minute. She had no control over her mind at all; it was forever wandering over the hills and far away in dark, enchanted places.
But cows she could manage, and every morning the cows told her what had passed in the half-world the night before.
There were two tribes of “small people” in the Keigwin Valley, Buccas and Pixies. In the Buccas there was no harm; they were poor foreigners, the souls of the first Jew miners, condemned for their malpractices to perpetual slavery underground. They inhabited a round knoll formed of rocks and rubble thrown up by the original Penhale and were seldom seen, even by the cows, for they had no leisure and their work lay out of sight in the earth’s dark, dripping tunnels. Once or twice the cows had glimpsed a swarthy, hook-nosed old face, caked in red ore and seamed with sweat, gazing wistfully through a crack in the rocks—but that was all. Sometimes, if, under Wany’s direction, you set your ear to the knoll and listened intently, you could hear a faint thump and scrape far underground—the Buccas’ picks at work. Bohenna declared these sounds emanated from badgers, but Bohenna was of the earth earthy, a clod of clods.
The Pixies lived by day among the tree roots at the north end of Bosula woods, a sprightly but vindictive people. At night they issued from a hollow oak stump, danced in their green ball rooms, paid visits to distant kinsfolk or made expeditions against offending mortals. The cows, lying out all night in the marshes, saw them going and coming. There were hundreds of them, the cows said; they wore green jerkins and red caps and rode rabbits, all but the king and queen, who were mounted on white hares. They blew on horns as they galloped, and the noise of them was like a flock of small birds singing. On moonless nights a cloud of fireflies sped above them to light the way. The cows heard them making their plans as they rode afield, laughing and boasting as they returned, and reported to Wany, who passed it on to the spellbound brothers.
But this did not exhaust the night life in the valley. According to Wany, other supernaturals haunted the neighborhood, specters, ghosts, men who had sold their souls to the devil, folk who had died with curses on them, or been murdered and could not rest. There was a demon huntsman who rode a great black stallion behind baying hellhounds; a woman who sat by Red Pool trying to wash the blood off her fingers; a baby who was heard crying but never seen. Even the gray druid stones she invested with periodic life. On such and such a night the tall Pipers stalked across the fields and played to the Merry Maidens who danced round thrice; the Men-an-Tol whistled; the Logan rocked; up on misty hills barrows opened and old Cornish giants stepped out and dined hugely, with the cromlechs for tables and the stars for tapers.
The stories had one virtue, namely that they brought the young Penhales home punctually at set of sun. The wild valley they roamed so fearlessly by day assumed a different aspect when the enchanted hours of night drew on; inanimate objects stirred and drew breath, rocks took on the look of old men’s faces, thorn bushes changed into witches, shadows harbored nameless, crouching things. The creak of a bough sent chills down their spines, the hoot of an owl made them jump, a patch of moonlight on a tree trunk sent them huddling together, thinking of the ghost lady; the bark of a fox and a cow crashing through undergrowth set their hearts thumping for fear of the demon huntsman. If caught by dusk they turned their coats inside out and religiously observed all the rites recommended by Wany as charms against evil spirits. If they were not brought up in the love of God they were at least taught to respect the devil.
With the exception of this spiritual concession the Penhale brothers knew no restraint; they ran as wild as stoats. They arose with the sun, stuffed odds and ends of food in their pockets and were seen no more while daylight lasted.
In spring there was plenty of bird’s-nesting to be done up the valley. Every other tree held a nest of some sort, if you only knew where to look, up in the forks of the ashes and elms, in hollow boles and rock crevices, cunningly hidden in dense ivy-clumps or snug behind barbed entanglements of thorn. Bohenna, a predatory naturalist, marked down special nests for them, taught them to set bird and rabbit snares and how to tickle trout.
In spring they hunted gulls’ eggs as well round the Luddra Head, swarming perpendicular cliffs with prehensile toes and fingers hooked into cracks, wriggling on their stomachs along dizzy foot-wide shelves, leaping black crevices with the assurance of chamois. It was an exciting pursuit with the sheer drop of two hundred feet or so below one, a sheer drop to jagged rock ledges over which the green rollers poured with the thunder of heavy artillery and then poured back, a boil of white water and seething foam. An exciting pursuit with the back draught of a southwesterly gale doing its utmost to scoop you off the cliffside, and gull mothers diving and shrieking in your face, a clamorous snowstorm, trying to shock you off your balance by the whir of their wings and the piercing suddenness of their cries.
The brothers spent most of the summer at Monks Cove playing with the fisher children, bathing and scrambling along the coast. The tide ebbing left many pools, big and little, among the rocks, clear basins enameled with white and pink sea lichen, studded with limpets, yellow snails, ruby and emerald anemones. Delicate fronds of colored weed grew in these salt-water gardens, tiny green crabs scuttered along the bottom, gravel-hued bull-cod darted from shadow to shadow. They spent tense if fruitless hours angling for the bull-cod with bent pins, limpet baited. In the largest pool they learnt to swim. When they were sure of themselves they took to the sea itself.
Their favorite spot was a narrow funnel between two low promontories, up which gulf the rollers raced to explode a white puff of spray through a blow-hole at the end. At the mouth of the funnel stood a rock they called “The Chimney,” the top standing eight feet above low water level. This made an ideal diving place. You stood on the “Chimney Pot,” looked down through glitters and glints of reflected sunshine, down through four fathoms of bottle-green water, down to where fantastic pennants of bronze and purple weed rippled and purled and smooth pale bowlders gleamed in the swaying light—banners and skulls of drowned armies. You dived, pierced cleanly through the green deeps, a white shooting star trailing silver bubbles. Down you went, down till your fingers touched the weed banners, curved and came up, saw the water changing from green to amber as you rose, burst into the blaze and glitter of sunlight with the hiss of a breaker in your ears, saw it curving over you, turned and went shoreward shouting, slung by giant arms, wallowing in milky foam, plumed with diamond spray. Then a quick dash sideways out of the sparkling turmoil into a quiet eddy and ashore at your leisure to bask on the rocks and watch the eternal surf beating on the Twelve Apostles and the rainbows glimmering in the haze of spindrift that hung above them.
Porpoises went by, skimming the surface with beautiful, lazy curves, solitary cormorants paddled past, popping under and reappearing fifty yards away, with suspicious lumps in the throat. Now and then a shoal of pilchards crawled along the coast, a purple stain in the blue, with a cloud of vociferous gannets hanging over it, diving like stones, rising and poising, glimmering in the sun like silver tinsel. Sometimes a brown seal cruised along, sleek, round-headed, big-eyed, like a negro baby.
There was the Channel traffic to watch as well, smacks, schooners, ketches and scows, all manner of rigs and craft; Tyne collier brigs, grimy as chimney-sweeps; smart Falmouth packets carrying mails to and from the world’s ends; an East Indiaman, maybe, nine months from the Hooghly, wallowing leisurely home, her quarters a-glitter of “gingerbread work,” her hold redolent with spices; and sometimes a great First-Rate with triple rows of gun-ports, an admiral’s flag flying and studding sails set, rolling a mighty bow-wave before her.
Early one summer morning they heard the boom of guns and round Black Carn came a big Breton lugger under a tremendous press of sail, leaping the short seas like a greyhound. On her weather quarter hung a King’s Cutter, gaff-topsail and ring-tail set, a tower of swollen canvas. A tongue of flame darted from the Breton’s counter, followed by a mushroom of smoke and a dull crash. A jet of white water leapt thirty feet in the air on the cutter’s starboard bow, then another astern of her and another and another. She seemed to have run among a school of spouting whales, but in reality it was the ricochets of a single round-shot. The cutter’s bow-chaser replied, and jets spouted all round the lugger. The King’s ship was trying to crowd the Breton ashore and looked in a fair way to do so. To the excited boys it appeared that the lugger must inevitably strike the Twelve Apostles did she hold her course. She held on, passed into the drag of the big seas as they gathered to hurl themselves on the reef. Every moment the watchers expected to see her caught and crashed to splinters on the jagged anvil. She rose on a roaring wave crest, hung poised above the reef for a breathless second and clawed by, shaking the water from her scuppers.
The Cove boys cheered the lugger as she raced by, waving strips of seaweed and dancing with joy. They were not so much for the French as against the Preventive; a revenue cutter was their hereditary foe, a spoke in the Wheel of Fortune.
“Up the Froggy,” they yelled. “Up Johnny Roscoff! Give him saltpeter soup Moosoo! Hurrah! Hooroo!”
The two ships foamed out of sight behind the next headland, the boom of their pieces sounding fainter and fainter.
Those were good days for the Penhale brothers, the days of early boyhood.