Christmas passed merrily at Bosula that year. Martha was an authority on “feasten” rites and delicacies, and Christmas was the culmination. Under her direction the brothers festooned the kitchen with ropes of holly and ivy, and hung the “kissing bush”—two barrel hoops swathed in evergreens—from the middle beam. Supper was the principal event of the day, a prodigious spread; goose giblet pie, squab pie made of mutton, raisins and onions, and queer-shaped saffron cakes, the whole washed down with draughts of “eggy-hot,” an inspiring compound of eggs, hot beer, sugar and rum, poured from jug to jug till it frothed over.
The Bosula household sat down at one board and gorged themselves till they could barely breathe. Upon them in this state came the St. Gwithian choir, accompanied by the parish fiddler, “Jiggy” Dan, and a score or so of hangers on. They sang the sweet and simple old “curls” of the West Country, “I saw three ships come sailin’ in,” “Come and I will sing you,” “The first good joy that Mary had,” and
“Go the wayst out, Child Jesus,
Go the wayst out to play;
Down by God’s Holy Well
I see three pretty children
As ever tongue can tell.”
Part singing is a natural art in Cornwall. The Gwithian choir sang well, reverently and without strain. Teresa, full-fed after long moderation, was in melting mood. The carols made her feel pleasantly tearful and religious. She had not been to church since the unfortunate affair with the curate, but determined she would go the very next Sunday and make a rule of it.
She gave the choir leader a silver crown and ordered eggy-hot to be served round. The choir’s eyes glistened. Eggy-hot seldom came their way; usually they had to be content with cider.
Martha rounded up the company. The apple trees must be honored or they would withhold their fruit in the coming year. Everybody adjourned to the orchard, Martha carrying a jug of cider, Bohenna armed with the flintlock, loaded nearly as full as himself. Wany alone was absent; she was slipping up the valley to the great barrow to hear the Spriggans, the gnome-miners, sing their sad carols as was the custom of a Christmas night.
The Bosula host grouped, lantern-lit, round the king tree of the orchard; Martha dashed the jug against the trunk and pronounced her incantation:
“Health to thee, good apple tree!
Hatsful, packsful, great bushel-bags full!
Hurrah and fire off the gun.”
Everybody cheered. Bohenna steadied himself and pulled the trigger. There was a deafening roar, a yard-long tongue of flame spurted from the muzzle, Bohenna tumbled over backwards and Jiggy Dan, uttering an appalling shriek, fell on his face and lay still.
The scared spectators stooped over the fiddler.
“Dead is a?”
“Ess, dead sure ’nough—dead as last year, pore soul.”
Panegyrics on the deceased were delivered.
“A brilliant old drinker a was.”
“Ess, an’ a clean lively one to touch the strings.”
“Shan’t see his like no more.”
“His spotty sow coming to her time too—an’ a brearly loved roast sucking pig, the pretty old boy.”
Bohenna sat up in the grass and sniffed.
“There’s a brear strong smell o’ burning, seem me?”
The company turned on him reproachfully. “Thou’st shotten Jiggy Dan. Shot en dead an’ a-cold. Didst put slugs in gun by mistake, Ned?”
Bohenna scratched his head. “Couldn’t say rightly this time o’ night . . . maybe I did . . . but, look ’ee, there wasn’t no offense meant; ’twas done in good part, as you might say.” He sniffed again and stared at the corpse of his victim.
“Slugs or no seem me the poor angel’s more hot than cold. Lord love, he’s afire! . . . The wad’s catched in his coat!”
That such was the case became painfully apparent to the deceased at the same moment. He sprang to his feet and bounded round and round the group, uttering ghastly howls and belaboring himself behind in a fruitless endeavor to extinguish the smoldering cloth. The onlookers were helpless with laughter; they leaned against each other and sobbed. Teresa in particular shook so violently it hurt her.
Somebody suggested a bucket of water, between chokes, but nobody volunteered to fetch it; to do so would be to miss the fun.
“The stream,” hiccoughed Bohenna, holding his sides. “Sit ’ee down in stream, Dan, my old beauty, an’ quench thyself.”
A loud splash in the further darkness announced that the unhappy musician had taken his advice.
The apple trees fully secured for twelve months, the party returned to the kitchen, but the incident of Dan had dissipated the somewhat pious tone of the preceding events. Teresa, tears trickling down her cheeks, set going a fresh round of eggy-hot. Ortho pounced on Tamsin Eva, the prettiest girl in the room, carried her bodily under the kissing bush and saluted her again and again. Other men and boys followed suit. The girls fled round the kitchen in mock consternation, pursued by flushed swains, were captured and embraced, giggling and sighing. Jiggy Dan, sniffing hot liquor as a pointer sniffs game, limped, dripping, in from the stream, was given an old petticoat of Martha’s to cover his deficiencies, a pot of rum, propped up in a corner and told to fiddle for dear life. The men, headed by Ortho, cleared the kitchen of furniture, and then everybody danced old heel and toe country dances, skipped, bowed, sidled, passed up and down the middle and twirled around till the sweat shone like varnish on their scarlet faces.
The St. Gwithian choir flung themselves into it heart and soul. They were expected at Monks Cove to sing carols, were overdue by some hours, but they had forgotten all about that.
Teresa danced with the best, with grace and agility extraordinary in a woman of her bulk. She danced one partner off his feet and all but stunned another against the corner of the dresser, bringing most of the crockery crashing to earth. She then produced that relic of her vagabondage, the guitar, and joined forces with Jiggy Dan.
The fun became furious. The girls shook the tumbled hair from their eyes, laughed roguishly; the men whooped and thumped the floor with their heavy boots. Jiggy Dan, constantly primed with rum by the attentive Martha, scraped and sawed at his fiddle, beating time with his toe. Teresa plucked at the guitar till it droned and buzzed like a hive of melodious bees. Occasionally she sang ribald snatches. She was in high feather, the reaction from nine months’ abstinence. The kitchen, lit by a pile of dry furze blazing in the open hearth, grew hotter and hotter.
The dancers stepped and circled in a haze of dust, steaming like overdriven cattle. Eli alone was out of tune with his surroundings. The first effects of the drink had worn off, leaving him with a sour mouth and slightly dizzy. The warmer grew the others, the colder he became.
He scowled at the junketers from his priggish altitude and blundered bedward to find it already occupied by the St. Gwithian blacksmith, who, dark with the transferable stains of his toil, lay sprawled across it, boots where his head should have been. Eli rolled the unconscious artificer to the floor (an act which in no way disturbed that worthy’s slumbers) and turned in, sick and sulky.
With Ortho, on the other hand, things were never better. He had not drunk enough to cloud him and he was getting a lot of fun out of Tamsin Eva and her “shiner.” Tamsin, daughter of the parish clerk, was a bronze-haired, slender creature with a skin like cream and roses and a pretty, timid manner. Ortho, satiated with swarthy gypsy charmers, thought her lovely and insisted upon dancing with her for the evening. That her betrothed was present and violently jealous only added piquancy to the affair. The girl was not happy—Ortho frightened her—but she had not enough strength of mind to resist him. She shot appealing glances at her swain, but the boy was too slow in his movements and fuddled with unaccustomed rum. The sober and sprightly Ortho cut the girl out from under his nose time and time again. Teresa, extracting appalling discords from the guitar, noted this by-play with gratification; this tiger cub of hers promised good sport.
Towards one o’clock the supply of spirituous impulse having given out, the pace slackened down. Chastened husbands were led home by their wives. Single men tottered out of doors to get a breath of fresh air and did not return, were discovered at dawn peacefully slumbering under mangers, in hen roosts and out-of-the-way corners. Tamsin Eva’s betrothed was one of these. He was entering the house fired with the intention of wresting his lass from Ortho and taking her home when something hit him hard on the point of the jaw and all the lights went out. He woke up next morning far from clear as to whether he had blundered into the stone door post or somebody’s ready fist. At all events it was Ortho who took Tamsin home.
Teresa fell into a doze and had an uncomfortable dream. All the people she disliked came and made faces at her, people she had forgotten ages ago and who in all decency should have forgotten her. They flickered out of the mists, distorted but recognizable, clutched at her with hooked fingers, pressed closer and closer, leering malevolently. Teresa was dismayed. Not a friend anywhere! She lolled forward, moaning, “John! Oh, Jan!” Jiggy Dan’s elbow hit her cheek and she woke up to an otherwise empty kitchen filled with the reek of burnt pilchard oil, a dead hearth, and cold night air pouring in through the open door. She shuddered, rubbed her sleepy lids and staggered, yawning, to bed.
Jiggy Dan, propped up in the corner, fiddled on, eyes sealed, mind oblivious, arm sawing mechanically.
They found him in the morning on the yard muck heap, Martha’s petticoat over his head, fiddle clasped to his bosom, back to back with a snoring sow.
The Christmas festivities terminated on Twelfth Night with the visit of goose dancers from Monks Cove, the central figure of whom was a lad wearing the hide and horns of a bullock attended by other boys dressed in female attire. Horse-play and crude buffoonery was the feature rather than dancing, and Teresa got some more of her crockery smashed.
Next morning Eli went to Helston for his last term and Ortho took off his coat.
When Eli came home at midsummer he could hardly credit his eyes. Ortho had performed miracles. Very wisely he had not attempted to fight back the moor everywhere, but had concentrated, and the fields he had put in crop were done thoroughly, deep-plowed, well manured and evenly sown—Penaluna could not make a better show.
The brothers walked over the land on the evening of Eli’s return; everywhere the young crops stood up thick and healthy, pushing forwards to fruition. Ortho glowed with justifiable pride, talked farming eagerly. He and Ned had given the old place a hammering, he said. By the Holy they had! Mended the buildings, whitewashed the orchard trees, grubbed, plowed, packed ore-weed and sea-sand, harrowed and hoed from dawn-blink to star-wink, day in, day out—Sundays included. But they’d get it all back—oh, aye, and a hundredfold.
Eli had been in the right; agriculture was the thing—the good old soil! You put in a handful and picked up a bushel in a few months. Cattle—pah! One cow produced but one calf per annum and that was not marketable for three or four years. No—wheat, barley and oats forever!
Now Eli was home they could hold all they’d got and reclaim a field or so a year. In next to no time they’d have the whole place waving yellow from bound to bound. Ortho even had designs on the original moor, saw no reason why they should not do their own milling in time—they had ample water power. He glowed with enthusiasm. Eli’s cautious mind discounted much of these grandiose schemes, but his heart went out to Ortho; the mellowing fields before him had not been lightly won.
Ortho was as lean as a herring-bone, sweated down to bare muscle and sinew. His finger nails were broken off short, his hands scarred and calloused, his face was torn with brambles and leathern with exposure. He had fought a good fight and was burning for more. Oh, splendid brother!
Ned Bohenna was loud in Ortho’s praise. He was a marvel. He was quicker in the uptake than even John had been and no work was too hard for him. The old hind was most optimistic. They had seeded a fine area and crops were looking famous. Come three years at this pace the farm would be back where it was at John’s death, the pick of the parish.
For the rest, there was not much news. Martha had been havin............