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CHAPTER IX
THERE IS NO PLACE LIKE HOME
I can assure you, and tell no lie (as John Fry always
used to say, when telling his very largest), that I
scrambled back to the mouth of that pit as if the evil
one had been after me. And sorely I repented now of
all my boyish folly, or madness it might well be
termed, in venturing, with none to help, and nothing to
compel me, into that accursed valley. Once let me get
out, thinks I, and if ever I get in again, without
being cast in by neck and by crop, I will give our
new-born donkey leave to set up for my schoolmaster.
How I kept that resolution we shall see hereafter. It
is enough for me now to tell how I escaped from the den
that night. First I sat down in the little opening
which Lorna had pointed out to me, and wondered whether
she had meant, as bitterly occurred to me, that I
should run down into the pit, and be drowned, and give
no more trouble. But in less than half a minute I was
ashamed of that idea, and remembered how she was vexed
to think that even a loach should lose his life. And
then I said to myself, 'Now surely she would value me
more than a thousand loaches; and what she said must be
quite true about the way out of this horrible place.'
Therefore I began to search with the utmost care and
diligence, although my teeth were chattering, and all
my bones beginning to ache with the chilliness and the
wetness. Before very long the moon appeared, over the
edge of the mountain, and among the trees at the top of
it; and then I espied rough steps, and rocky, made as
if with a sledge-hammer, narrow, steep, and far
asunder, scooped here and there in the side of the
entrance, and then round a bulge of the cliff, like the
marks upon a great brown loaf, where a hungry child has
picked at it. And higher up, where the light of the
moon shone broader upon the precipice, there seemed to
be a rude broken track, like the shadow of a crooked
stick thrown upon a house-wall.
Herein was small encouragement; and at first I was
minded to lie down and die; but it seemed to come amiss
to me. God has His time for all of us; but He seems to
advertise us when He does not mean to do it. Moreover,
I saw a movement of lights at the head of the valley,
as if lanthorns were coming after me, and the
nimbleness given thereon to my heels was in front of
all meditation.
Straightway I set foot in the lowest stirrup (as I
might almost call it), and clung to the rock with my
nails, and worked to make a jump into the second
stirrup. And I compassed that too, with the aid of my
stick; although, to tell you the truth, I was not at
that time of life so agile as boys of smaller frame
are, for my size was growing beyond my years, and the
muscles not keeping time with it, and the joints of my
bones not closely hinged, with staring at one another.
But the third step-hole was the hardest of all, and the
rock swelled out on me over my breast, and there seemed
to be no attempting it, until I espied a good stout
rope hanging in a groove of shadow, and just managed to
reach the end of it.
How I clomb up, and across the clearing, and found my
way home through the Bagworthy forest, is more than I
can remember now, for I took all the rest of it then as
a dream, by reason of perfect weariness. And indeed it
was quite beyond my hopes to tell so much as I have
told, for at first beginning to set it down, it was all
like a mist before me. Nevertheless, some parts grew
clearer, as one by one I remembered them, having taken
a little soft cordial, because the memory frightens me.
For the toil of the water, and danger of labouring up
the long cascade or rapids, and then the surprise of
the fair young maid, and terror of the murderers, and
desperation of getting away--all these are much to me
even now, when I am a stout churchwarden, and sit by
the side of my fire, after going through many far worse
adventures, which I will tell, God willing. Only the
labour of writing is such (especially so as to
construe, and challenge a reader on parts of speech,
and hope to be even with him); that by this pipe which
I hold in my hand I ever expect to be beaten, as in the
days when old Doctor Twiggs, if I made a bad stroke in
my exercise, shouted aloud with a sour joy, 'John Ridd,
sirrah, down with your small-clothes!'
Let that be as it may, I deserved a good beating that
night, after making such a fool of myself, and grinding
good fustian to pieces. But when I got home, all the
supper was in, and the men sitting at the white table,
and mother and Annie and Lizzie near by, all eager, and
offering to begin (except, indeed, my mother, who was
looking out at the doorway), and by the fire was Betty
Muxworthy, scolding, and cooking, and tasting her work,
all in a breath, as a man would say. I looked through
the door from the dark by the wood-stack, and was half
of a mind to stay out like a dog, for fear of the
rating and reckoning; but the way my dear mother was
looking about and the browning of the sausages got the
better of me.
But nobody could get out of me where I had been all the
day and evening; although they worried me never so
much, and longed to shake me to pieces, especially
Betty Muxworthy, who never could learn to let well
alone. Not that they made me tell any lies, although
it would have served them right almost for intruding on
other people's business; but that I just held my
tongue, and ate my supper rarely, and let them try
their taunts and jibes, and drove them almost wild
after supper, by smiling exceeding knowingly. And
indeed I could have told them things, as I hinted once
or twice; and then poor Betty and our little Lizzie
were so mad with eagerness, that between them I went
into the fire, being thoroughly overcome with laughter
and my own importance.
Now what the working of my mind was (if, indeed it
worked at all, and did not rather follow suit of body)
it is not in my power to say; only that the result of
my adventure in the Doone Glen was to make me dream a
good deal of nights, which I had never done much
before, and to drive me, with tenfold zeal and purpose,
to the practice of bullet-shooting. Not that I ever
expected to shoot the Doone family, one by one, or even
desired to do so, for my nature is not revengeful; but
that it seemed to be somehow my business to understand
the gun, as a thing I must be at home with.
I could hit the barn-door now capitally well with the
Spanish match-lock, and even with John Fry's
blunderbuss, at ten good land-yards distance, without
any rest for my fusil. And what was very wrong of me,
though I did not see it then, I kept John Fry there, to
praise my shots, from dinner-time often until the grey
dusk, while he all the time should have been at work
spring-ploughing upon the farm. And for that matter
so should I have been, or at any rate driving the
horses; but John was by no means loath to be there,
instead of holding the plough-tail. And indeed, one of
our old sayings is,--
For pleasure's sake I would liefer wet,
Than ha' ten lumps of gold for each one of my sweat.
And again, which is not a bad proverb, though unthrifty
and unlike a Scotsman's,--
God makes the wheat grow greener,
While farmer be at his dinner.
And no Devonshire man, or Somerset either (and I belong
to both of them), ever thinks of working harder than
God likes to see him.
Nevertheless, I worked hard at the gun, and by the time
that I had sent all the church-roof gutters, so far as
I honestly could cut them, through the red pine-door, I
began to long for a better tool that would make less
noise and throw straighter. But the sheep-shearing
came and the hay-season next, and then the harvest of
small corn, and the digging of the root called 'batata'
(a new but good thing in our neighbourhood, which our
folk have made into 'taties'), and then the sweating of
the apples, and the turning of the cider-press, and the
stacking of the firewood, and netting of the woodcocks,
and the springles to be minded in the garden and by the
hedgerows, where blackbirds hop to the molehills in the
white October mornings, and grey birds come to look for
snails at the time when the sun is rising.
It is wonderful how time runs away, when all these
things and a great many others come in to load him down
the hill and prevent him from stopping to look about.
And I for my part can never conceive how people who
live in towns and cities, where neither lambs nor birds
are (except in some shop windows), nor growing corn,
nor meadow-grass, nor even so much as a stick to cut or
a stile to climb and sit down upon--how these poor folk
get through their lives without being utterly weary of
them, and dying from pure indolence, is a thing God
only knows, if His mercy allows Him to think of it.
How the year went by I know not, only that I was abroad
all day, shooting, or fishing, or minding the farm, or
riding after some stray beast, or away by the seaside
below Glenthorne, wondering at the great waters, and
resolving to go for a sailor. For in those days I had
a firm belief, as many other strong boys have, of being
born for a seaman. And indeed I had been in a boat
nearly twice; but the second time mother found it out,
and came and drew me back again; and after that she
cried so badly, that I was forced to give my word to
her to go no more without telling her.
But Betty Muxworthy spoke her mind quite in a different
way about it, the while she was wringing my hosen, and
clattering to the drying-horse.
'Zailor, ees fai! ay and zarve un raight. Her can't
kape out o' the watter here, whur a' must goo vor to
vaind un, zame as a gurt to-ad squalloping, and mux up
till I be wore out, I be, wi' the very saight of 's
braiches. How wil un ever baide aboard zhip, wi' the
watter zinging out under un, and comin' up splash when
the wind blow. Latt un goo, missus, latt un goo, zay I
for wan, and old Davy wash his clouts for un.'
And this discourse of Betty's tended more than my
mother's prayers, I fear, to keep me from going. For I
hated Betty in those days, as children always hate a
cross servant, and often get fond of a false one. But
Betty, like many active women, was false by her
crossness only; thinking it just for the moment
perhaps, and rushing away with a bucket; ready to stick
to it, like a clenched nail, if beaten the wrong way
with argument; but melting over it, if you left her, as
stinging soap, left along in a basin, spreads all
abroad without bubbling.
But all this is beyond the children, and beyond me too
for that matter, even now in ripe experience; for I
never did know what women mean, and never shall except
when they tell me, if that be in their power. Now let
that question pass. For although I am now in a place
of some authority, I have observed that no one ever
listens to me, when I attempt to lay down the law; but
all are waiting with open ears until I do enforce it.
And so methinks he who reads a history cares not much
for the wisdom or folly of the writer (knowing well
that the former is far less than his own, and the
latter vastly greater), but hurries to know what the
people did, and how they got on about it. And this I
can tell, if any one can, having been myself in the
thick of it.
The fright I had taken that night in Glen Doone
satisfied me for a long time thereafter; and I took
good care not to venture even in the fields and woods
of the outer farm, without John Fry for company. John
was greatly surprised and pleased at the value I now
set upon him; until, what betwixt the desire to vaunt
and the longing to talk things over, I gradually laid
bare to him nearly all that had befallen me; except,
indeed, about Lorna, whom a sort of shame kept me from
mentioning. Not that I did not think of her, and wish
very often to see her again; but of course I was only a
boy as yet, and therefore inclined to despise young
girls, as being unable to do anything, and only meant
to listen to orders. And when I got along with the
other boys, that was how we always spoke of them, if we
deigned to speak at all, as beings of a lower order,
only good enough to run errands for us, and to nurse
boy-babies.
And yet my sister Annie was in truth a great deal more
to me than all the boys of the parish, and of Brendon,
and Countisbury, put together; although at the time I
never dreamed it, and would have laughed if told so.
Annie was of a pleasing face, and very gentle manner,
almost like a lady some people said; but without any
airs whatever, only trying to give satisfaction. And
if she failed, she would go and weep, without letting
any one know it, believing the fault to be all her own,
when mostly it was of others. But if she succeeded in
pleasing you, it was beautiful to see her smile, and
stroke her soft chin in a way of her own, which she
always used when taking note how to do the right thing
again for you. And then her cheeks had a bright clear
pink, and her eyes were as blue as the sky in spring,
and she stood as upright as a young apple-tree, and no
one could help but smile at her, and pat her brown
curls approvingly; whereupon she always curtseyed. For
she never tried to look away when honest people gazed
at her; and even in the court-yard she would come and
help to take your saddle, and tell (without your asking
her) what there was for dinner.
And afterwards she grew up to be a very comely maiden,
tall, and with a well-built neck, and very fair white
shoulders, under a bright cloud of curling hair. Alas!
poor Annie, like most of the gentle maidens--but tush,
I am not come to that yet; and for the present she
seemed to me little to look at, after the beauty of
Lorna Doone.
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