One of the commonest sights in the vale was a certain man on a bicycle carrying a bag full of newspapers. He was as much a sound as a sight, for what distinguished him from all other men to be encountered there on bicycles was not his appearance, though that was noticeable; it was his sweet tenor voice, heard as he rode along singing each morning from Cobbs Mill, through Kezzal Predy Peter, Thasper, and Buzzlebury, and so on to Trinkel and Nuncton. All sorts of things he sang, ballads, chanties, bits of glees, airs from operas, hymns, and sacred anthems—he was leader of Thasper church choir—but he seemed to observe some sort of rotation in their rendering. In the forepart of the week it was hymns and anthems; on Wednesday he usually turned to modestly secular tunes; he was rolling on Thursday and Friday through a gamut of love songs and ballads undoubtedly secular and not necessarily modest, while on Saturday—particularly at eve, spent in the tap of “The White Hart”—his programme was entirely ribald and often a little improper. But always on Sunday he was the most decorous of men, no questionable liquor passed his lips, and his comportment was a credit to the church, a model even for soberer men.  
Dan Pavey was about thirty-five years old, of medium height and of medium appearance except as to his hat (a hard black bowler which seemed never to belong to him, though he had worn it for years) and as to his nose. It was an ugly nose, big as a253 baby’s elbow; he had been born thus, it had not been broken or maltreated, though it might have engaged in some pre-natal conflict when it was malleable, since when nature had healed, but had not restored it. But there was ever a soft smile that covered his ugliness, which made it genial and said, or seemed to say: Don’t make a fool of me, I am a friendly man, this is really my hat, and as for my nose—God made it so.
 
The six hamlets which he supplied with newspapers lie along the Icknield Vale close under the ridge of woody hills, and the inhabitants adjacent to the woods fell the beech timber and, in their own homes, turn it into rungs or stretchers for chair manufacturers who, somewhere out of sight beyond the hills, endlessly make chair, and nothing but chair. Sometimes in a wood itself there may be seen a shanty built of faggots in which sits a man turning pieces of chair on a treadle lathe. Tall, hollow, and greenly dim are the woods, very solemn places, and they survey the six little towns as a man might look at six tiny pebbles lying on a green rug at his feet.
 
One August morning the newspaper man was riding back to Thasper. The day was sparkling like a diamond, but he was not singing, he was thinking of Scroope, the new rector of Thasper parish, and the thought of Scroope annoyed him. It was not only the tone of the sermon he had preached on Sunday, “The poor we have always with us,” though that was in bad taste from a man reputed rich and with a heart—people said—as hard as a door-knocker; it was something more vital, a congenital difference254 between them as profound as it was disagreeable. The Rev. Faudel Scroope was wealthy, he seemed to have complete confidence in his ability to remain so, and he was the kind of man with whom Dan Pavey would never be able to agree. As for Mrs. Scroope, gloom pattered upon him in a strong sighing shower at the least thought of her.
 
At Larkspur Lane he came suddenly upon the rector talking to an oldish man, Eli Bond, who was hacking away at a hedge. Scroope never wore a hat, he had a curly bush of dull hair. Though his face was shaven clean it remained a regular plantation of ridges and wrinkles; there was a stoop in his shoulders, a lurch in his gait, and he had a voice that howled.
 
“Just a moment, Pavey,” he bellowed, and Dan dismounted.
 
“All those years,” the parson went on talking to the hedger; “all those years, dear me!”
 
“I were born in Thasper sixty-six year ago, come the twenty-third of October, sir, the same day—but two years before—as Lady Hesseltine eloped with Rudolf Moxley. I was reared here and I worked here sin’ I were six year old. Twalve children I have had (though five on ’em come to naught and two be in the army) and I never knowed what was to be out of work for one single day in all that sixty year. Never. I can’t thank my blessed master enough for it.”
 
“Isn’t that splendidly feudal,” murmured the priest, “who is your good master?”
 
The old man solemnly touched his hat and said:255 “God.”
 
“O, I see, yes, yes,” cried the Rev. Scroope. “Well, good health and constant, and good work and plenty of it, are glorious things. The man who has never done a day’s work is a dog, and the man who deceives his master is a dog too.”
 
“I never donn that, sir.”
 
“And you’ve had happy days in Thasper, I’m sure?”
 
“Right-a-many, sir.”
 
“Splendid. Well ... um ... what a heavy rain we had in the night.”
 
“Ah, that was heavy! At five o’clock this morning I daren’t let my ducks out—they’d a bin drownded, sir.”
 
“Ha, now, now, now!” warbled the rector as he turned away with Dan.
 
“Capital old fellow, happy and contented. I wish there were more of the same breed. I wish....” The parson sighed pleasantly as he and Dan walked on together until they came to the village street where swallows were darting and flashing very low. A small boy stood about, trying to catch them in his hands as they swooped close to him. Dan’s own dog pranced up to his master for a greeting. It was black, somewhat like a greyhound, but stouter. Its tail curled right over its back and it was cocky as a bird, for it was young; it could fight like a tiger and run like the wind—many a hare had had proof of that.
 
Said Mr. Scroope, eyeing the dog: “Is there much poaching goes on here?”
 
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“Poaching, sir?”
 
“I am told there is. I hope it isn’t true for I have rented most of the shooting myself.”
 
“I never heard tell of it, sir. Years ago, maybe. The Buzzlebury chaps one time were rare hands at taking a few birds, so I’ve heard, but I shouldn’t think there’s an onlicensed gun for miles around.”
 
“I’m not thinking so much of guns. Farmer Prescott had his warren netted by someone last week and lost fifty or sixty rabbits. There’s scarcely a hare to be seen, and I find wires wherever I go. It’s a crime like anything else, you know,” Scroope’s voice was loud and strident, “and I shall deal very severely with poaching of any kind. O yes, you have to, you know, Pavey. O yes. There was a man in my last parish was a poacher, cunning scoundrel of the worst type, never did a stroke of work, and he had a dog, it wasn’t unlike your dog—this is your dog, isn’t it? You haven’t got your name on its collar, you should have your name on a dog’s collar—well, he had a perfect brute of a dog, carried off my pheasants by the dozen; as for hares, he exterminated them. Man never did anything else, but we laid him by the heels and in the end I shot the dog myself.”
 
“Shot it?” said Dan. “No, I couldn’t tell a poacher if I was to see one. I know no more about 'em than a bone in the earth.”
 
“We shall be,” continued Scroope, “very severe with them. Let me see—are you singing the Purcell on Sunday evening?“
 
”He Shall Feed His Flock—sir—like a Shepherd.”
 
“Splendid! Good-day, Pavey.”
 
Dan, followed by his bounding, barking dog,257 pedalled home to a little cottage that seemed to sag under the burden of its own thatch; it had eaves a yard wide, and birds’ nests in the roof at least ten years old. Here Dan lived with his mother, Meg Pavey, for he had never married. She kept an absurd little shop for the sale of sweets, vinegar, boot buttons and such things, and was a very excellent old dame, but as na?ve as she was vague. If you went in to her counter for a newspaper and banged down a halfcrown she would as likely as not give you change for sixpence—until you mentioned the discrepancy, when she would smilingly give you back your halfcrown again.
 
Dan passed into the back room where Meg was preparing dinner, threw off his bag, and sat down without speaking. His mother was making a heavy succession of journeys between the table and a larder.
 
“Mrs. Scroope’s been here,” said Meg, bringing a loaf to the table.
 
“What did she want?”
 
“She wanted to reprimand me.”
 
“And what have you been doing?”
 
Meg was in the larder again. “’Tis not me, ’tis you.”
 
“What do you mean, mother?”
 
“She’s been a-hinting,” here Meg pushed a dish of potatoes to the right of the bread, and a salt-cellar to the left of the yawning remains of a rabbit pie,258 “about your not being a teetotal. She says the boozing do give the choir a bad name and I was to persuade you to give it up.”
 
“I should like to persuade her it was time she is dead. I don’t go for to take any pattern from that rich trash. Are we the grass under their feet? And can you tell me why parsons’ wives are always so much more awful than the parsons themselves? I never shall understand that if I lives a thousand years. Name o’ God, what next?”
 
“Well, ’tis as she says. Drink is no good to any man, and she can’t say as I ain’t reprimanded you.”
 
“Name o’ God,” he replied, “do you think I booze just for the sake o’ the booze, because I like booze? No man does that. He drinks so that he shan’t be thought a fool, or rank himself better than his mates—though he knows in his heart he might be if he weren’t so poor or so timid. Not that one would mind to be poor if it warn’t preached to him that he must be contented. How can the poor be contented as long as there’s the rich to serve? The rich we have always with us, that’s our responsibility, we are the grass under their feet. Why should we be proud of that? When a man’s poor the only thing left him is hope—for something better: and that’s called envy. If you don’t like your riches you can always give it up, but poverty you can’t desert, nor it won’t desert you.”
 
“It’s no good flying in the face of everything like that, Dan, it’s folly.”
 
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“If I had my way I’d be an independent man and live by myself a hundred miles from anywheres or anybody. But that’s madness, that’s madness, the world don’t expect you to go on like that, so I do as other folks do, not because I want to, but because I a’nt the pluck to be different. You taught me a good deal, mother, but you never taught me courage and I wasn’t born with any, so I drinks with a lot of fools who drink with me for much the same reason, I expect. It’s the same with other things besides drink.”
 
His indignation lasted throughout the afternoon as he sat in the shed in his yard turning out his usual quantity of chair. He sang not one note, he but muttered and mumbled over all his anger. Towards evening he recovered his amiability and began to sing with a gusto that astonished even his mother. He went out into the dusk humming like a bee, taking his dog with him. In the morning the Rev. Scroope found a dead hare tied by the neck to his own door-knocker, and at night (it being Saturday) Dan Pavey was merrier than ever in “The White Hart.” If he was not drunk he was what Thasper calls “tightish,” and had never before sung so many of those ribald songs (mostly of his own composition) for which he was noted.
 
A few evenings later Dan attended a meeting of the Church Men’s Guild. A group of very mute countrymen sat in the village hall and were goaded into speech by the rector.
 
“Thasper,” declared Mr. Scroope, “has a great name for its singing. All over the six hamlets there is surprising musical genius. There’s the Buzzlebury band—it is a capital band.”
 
“It is that,” interrupted a maroon-faced butcher from Buzzlebury,260 “it can play as well at nine o’clock in the morning as it can at nine o’clock at night, and that’s a good band as can do it.”
 
“Now I want our choir to compete at the county musical festival next year. Thasper is going to show those highly trained choristers what a native choir is capable of. Yes, and I’m sure our friend Pavey can win the tenor solo competition. Let us all put our backs into it and work agreeably and consistently. Those are the two main springs of good human conduct—consistency and agreeability. The consistent man will always attain his legitimate ends, always. I remember a man in my last parish, Tom Turkem, known and loved throughout the county; he was not only the best cricketer in our village, he was the best for miles around. He revelled in cricket, and cricket only; he played cricket and lived for cricket. The years went on and he got old, but he never dreamed of giving up cricket. His bowling average got larger every year and his batting average got smaller, but he still went on, consistent as ever. His order of going in dropped down to No. 6 and he seldom bowled; then he got down to No. 8 and never bowled. For a season or two the once famous Tom Turkem was really the last man in! After that he became umpire, then scorer, and then he died. He had got a little money, very little, just enough to live comfortably on. No, he never married. He was a very happy, hearty, hale old man. So you see? Now there is a cricket club at Buzzlebury, and one at Trinkel. Why not a cricket club at Thasper? Shall we do that?... Good!”
 
The parson went on outlining his projects, and261 although it was plain to Dan that the Rev. Scroope had very little, if any, compassion for the weaknesses natural to mortal flesh, and attached an extravagant value to the virtues of decency, sobriety, consistency, and, above all, loyalty to all sorts of incomprehensible notions, yet his intentions were undeniably agreeable and the Guild was consistently grateful.
 
“One thing, Pavey,” said Scroope when the meeting had dispersed, “one thing I will not tolerate in this parish, and that is gambling.”
 
“Gambling? I have never gambled in my life, sir. I couldn’t tell you hardly the difference between spades and clubs.”
 
“I am speaking of horse-racing, Pavey.”
 
“Now that’s a thing I never see in my life, Mr. Scroope.”
 
“Ah, you need not go to the races to bet on horses; the slips of paper and money can be collected by men who are agents for racing bookmakers. And that is going on all round the six hamlets, and the man who does the collecting, even if he does not bet himself, is a social and moral danger, he is a criminal, he is against the law. Whoever he is,” said the vicar, moderating his voice, but confidently beaming and patting Dan’s shoulder, “I shall stamp him out mercilessly. Good-night, Pavey.”
 
Dan went away with murder in his heart. Timid strangers here and there had fancied that a man with such a misshapen face would be capable of committing a crime, not a mere peccadillo—you wouldn’t take notice of that, of course—but a solid substantial misdemeanour like murder. And it was true, he was262 capable of murder—just as everybody else is, or ought to be. But he was also capable of curbing that distressing tendency in the usual way, and in point of fact he never did commit a murder.
 
These rectorial denunciations troubled the air but momentarily, and he still sang gaily and beautifully on his daily ride from Cobbs Mill along the little roads to Trinkel and Nuncton. The hanging richness of the long woods yellowing on the fringe of autumn, the long solemn hills themselves, cold sunlight, coloured berries in briary loops, the brown small leaves of hawthorn that had begun to drop from the hedge and flutter in the road like dying moths, teams of horses sturdily ploughing, sheepfolds already thatched into little nooks where the ewes could lie—Dan said—as warm as a pudding: these things filled him with tiny ecstasies too incoherent for him to transcribe—he could only sing.
 
On Bonfire Night the lads of the village lit a great fire on the space opposite “The White Hart.” Snow was falling; it was not freezing weather, but the snow lay in a soft thin mat upon the road. Dan was returning on his bicycle from a long journey and the light from the bonfire was cheering. It lit up the courtyard of the inn genially and curiously, for the recumbent hart upon the balcony had a pad of snow upon its wooden nose, which somehow made it look like a camel, in spite of the huddled snow on its back which gave it the resemblance of a sheep. A few boys stood with bemused wrinkled faces before the roaring warmth. Dan dismounted very carefully opposite the blaze, for a tiny boy rode on the back263 of the bicycle, wrapped up and tied to the frame by a long scarf; very small, very silent, about five years old. A red wool wrap was bound round his head and ears and chin, and a green scarf encircled his neck and waist, almost hiding his jacket; gaiters of grey wool were drawn up over his knickerbockers. Dan lifted him down and stood him in the road, but he was so cumbered with clothing that he could scarcely walk. He was shy; he may have thought it ridiculous; he moved a few paces and turned to stare at his footmarks in the snow.
 
“Cold?” asked Dan.
 
The child shook its head solemnly at him and then put one hand in Dan’s and gazed at the fire that was bringing a brightness into the longlashed dark eyes and tenderly flushing the pale face.
 
“Hungry?”
 
The child did not reply. It only silently smiled when the boys brought him a lighted stick from the faggots. Dan caught him up into his arms and pushed the cycle across the way into his own home.
 
Plump Meg had just shredded up two or three red cabbages and rammed them into a crock with a shower of peppercorns and some terrible knots of ginger. There was a bright fire and a sharp odour of vinegar—always some strange pleasant smell in Meg Pavey’s home—she had covered the top of the crock with a shield of brown paper, pinioned that with string, licked a label: “Cabege Novenbr 5t,” and smoothed it on the crock, when the latch lifted and Dan carried in his little tiny boy.
 
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“Here he is, mother.”
 
Where Dan stood him, there the child remained; he did not seem to see Mother Pavey, his glance had happened to fall on the big crock with the white label—and he kept it there.
 
“Whoever’s that?” asked the astonished Meg with her arms akimbo as Dan began to unwrap the child.
 
“That’s mine,” said her son, brushing a few flakes of snow from the curls on its forehead.
 
“Yours! How long have it been yours?”
 
“Since ’twas born. No, let him alone, I’ll undo him, he’s full up wi’ pins and hooks. I’ll undo him.”
 
Meg stood apart while Dan unravelled his offspring.
 
“But it is not your child, surely, Dan?”
 
“Ay, I’ve brought him home for keeps, mother. He can sleep wi’ me.”
 
“Who’s its mother?”
 
“’Tis no matter about that. Dan Cupid did it.”
 
“You’re making a mock of me. Who is his mother? Where is she? You’re fooling, Dan, you’re fooling!”
 
“I’m making no mock of anyone. There, there’s a bonny grandson for you!”
 
Meg gathered the child into her arms, peering into its face, perhaps to find some answer to the riddle, perhaps to divine a familiar likeness. But there was nothing in its soft smooth features that at all resembled her rugged Dan’s.
 
“Who are you? What’s your little name?”
 
The child whispered: “Martin.”
 
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“It’s a pretty, pretty thing, Dan.”
 
“Ah!” said her son, “that’s his mother. We were rare fond of each other—once. Now she’s wedd’n another chap and I’ve took the boy, for it’s best that way. He’s five year old. Don’t ask me about her, it’s our secret and always has been. It was a good secret and a grand secret, and it was well kept. That’s her ring.”
 
The child’s thumb had a ring upon it, a golden ring with a small green stone. The thumb was crooked, and he clasped the ring safely.
 
For a while Meg asked no more questions about the child. She pressed it tenderly to her bosom.
 
But the long-kept secret, as Dan soon discovered, began to bristle with complications. The boy was his, of course it was his—he seemed to rejoice in his paternity of the quiet, pretty, illegitimate creature. As if that brazen turpitude was not enough to confound him he was taken a week later in the act of receiving betting commissions and heavily fined in the police court, although it was quite true that he himself did not bet, and was merely a collecting agent for a bookmaker who remained discreetly in the background and who promptly paid his fine.
 
There was naturally a great racket in the vestry about these things—there is no more rhadamanthine formation than that which can mount the ornamental forehead of a deacon—and Dan was bidden to an interview at the “Scroopery.” After some hesitation he visited it.
 
“Ah, Pavey,” said the rector, not at all minatory but very subdued and unhappy. “So the blow has fallen, in spite of my warning. I am more sorry266 than I can express, for it means an end to a very long connection. It is very difficult and very disagreeable for me to deal with the situation, but there is no help for it now, you must understand that. I offer no judgment upon these unfortunate events, no judgment at all, but I can find no way of avoiding my clear duty. Your course of life is incompatible with your position in the choir, and I sadly fear it reveals not only a social misdemeanour but a religious one—it is a mockery, a mockery of God.”
 
The rector sat at a table with his head pressed on his hands. Pavey sat opposite him, and in his hands he dangled his bowler hat.
 
“You may be right enough in your way, sir, but I’ve never mocked God. For the betting, I grant you. It may be a dirty job, but I never ate the dirt myself, I never betted in my life. It’s a way of life, a poor man has but little chance of earning more than a bare living, and there’s many a dirty job there’s no prosecution for, leastways not in this world.”
 
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“Let me say, Pavey, that the betting counts less heavily with me than the question of this unfortunate little boy. I offer no judgment upon the matter, your acknowledgment of him is only right and proper. But the fact of his existence at all cannot be disregarded; that at least is flagrant, and as far as concerns your position in my church, it is a mockery of God.”
 
“You may be right, sir, as far as your judgment goes, or you may not be. I beg your pardon for that, but we can only measure other people by our own scales, and as we can never understand one another entirely, so we can’t ever judge them rightly, for they all differ from us and from each other in some special ways. But as for being a mocker of God, why it looks to me as if you was trying to teach the Almighty how to judge me.”
 
“Pavey,” said the rector with solemnity, “I pity you from the bottom of my heart. We won’t continue this painful discussion, we should both regret it. There was a man in the parish where I came from who was an atheist and mocked God. He subsequently became deaf. Was he convinced? No, he was not—because the punishment came a long time after his offence. He mocked God again, and became blind. Not at once: God has eternity to work in. Still he was not convinced. That,” said the rector ponderously, “is what the Church has to contend with; a failure to read the most obvious signs, and an indisposition even to remedy that failure. Klopstock was that poor man’s name. His sister—you know her well, Jane Klopstock—is now my cook.”
 
The rector then stood up and held out his hand. “God bless you, Pavey.”
 
“I thank you, sir,” said Dan. “I quite understand.”
 
He went home moodily reflecting. Nobody else in the village minded his misdeeds, they did not care a button, and none condemned him. On the contrary, indeed. But the blow had fallen, there was nothing that he could now do, the shock of it had been anticipated, but it was severe. And the pang would last, for he was deprived of his chief opportunity for singing, that art in which he excelled, in268 that perfect quiet setting he so loved. Rancour grew upon him, and on Saturday he had a roaring audacious evening at “The White Hart” where, to the tune of “The British Grenadiers,” he sung a doggerel:
 
Our parson loves his motor car
His garden and his mansion,
And he loves his beef for I’ve remarked
His belly’s brave expansion;
He loves all mortal mundane things
As he loved his beer at college,
And so he loves his housemaid (not
With Mrs. parson’s knowledge.)
Our parson lies both hot and strong,
It does not suit his station,
But still his reverend soul delights
In much dissimulation;
Both in and out and roundabout
He practises distortion,
And he lies with a public sinner when
Grass widowhood’s his portion.
All of which............