Part 24

Punch/, conduc/tor, punch/with care, A green/trip-slip/for a two/cent fare, A pink/trip-slip/for a three/cent fare, Punch/, punch/, punch with care ...

and so on relentlessly.

If these are not the exact horrid words, this is the way they come back to me, giving a lilt to vindictive spud work.

At another time, the apparent futility of all efforts to come even with the task at hand will evoke some such iterative lines as Cyrano’s dying vision of eternally resurging enemies:

Je sais/bien qu’à/la fin/vous me/mettrez/à bas N’impor/te, je/me bats/, je me/bats, je/me bats!

This sort of absolutely incongruous haunting is an instance of what Hoffmann would have fondly called the Zusammeverhängniss der Dinge or “fatally-concatenated-mutual-interdependency” of things! Mythological images rising vaguely from the clouds of school memories; the lilt of that Walrus and Carpenter verse parodied a thousand times; an American jingle never recalled since it was first casually read and dismissed on a railway journey; and the magniloquent panache lines of Rostand—all dropping in irrelevantly from some distant and forgotten corner of the past into this garden, all à propos of spud work and linking itself with it!

For instance, to-day ‹one of the three longest in the year, for, in the coming morn, about five o’clock, our summer solstice will have taken place›, as I spudded away at the fern, thirstily and perspiringly, my haunting iteration was alternately of images wide as the poles asunder. One was of those puzzling lines, in Boileau’s heroicomic poem Le Lutrin, anent the barber who

... d’une main legère Tient un verre de vin qui rit dans la fougère.

The other was of Gadshill boast: “We steal as in a castle, cock-sure: we have the receipt of fern-seed”—which irresistibly, by concatenation, brought in the image of my dear if disreputable old friend Falstaff and how he would have “larded the lean earth” as he spudded along. Now it occurs to me that if the receipt of fern-seed as handed down by tradition is in any way correct, this is the last day when this fern massacre can be of any use, as far as Villino Loki is concerned, to prevent its propagation for this year. Is not to-morrow St. John’s Eve; and is not that the date upon which the invisible seed—which once successfully gathered will confer upon the gatherer the power of invisibility—drops upon the soil?

The harvest, it seems, must be made “in the dark of the moon,” at the exact turning of midnight, and received in a pewter plate; without regard to the beguiling pranks of fairy or goblin, who, naturally enough, are jealous of the acquisition by mere mortals of this essential attribute of their order. The receipt does not state how the pewter-harvested seed, being invisible, is to be bottled up or otherwise preserved for use when required.

This, by the way, is a fairly typical instance of the manner in which our mediæval superstitions were shrouded in cryptic conditions, the failure of any one of which in the smallest particular would plausibly explain away the failure of the whole charm.—We can easily understand the paucity of invisible mortals at all times.

Well, I for one have no desire for such a charm. The temptation to use it would be distracting. And conceive the endless trouble, picture to yourself the misconceptions, you would raise into your own mind if you possessed the power at any moment of prying, invisible, into the innermost life of your best friends, or your enemies ... and of hearing what they might happen to say about you!

No. Yet I would some power gave me the gift to gather all the invisible seed at Villino Loki: I would burn it once and for all.

One cannot help wondering that so little use should be made of all this vegetable wealth. There it is, covering square leagues of common land, to be harvested by whosoever list. In former days, indeed, it was gathered in and burnt for “potashes”—chiefly for glass-making. And therein lies the explanation of the wine “laughing in the fougère”; ash of fougère, or Bracken, had in the “grand Roy’s” days become synonymous with glass itself. Again, in its dry condition, Brake was once extensively used for thatching and for litter; in some parts of the country the young plant was given as fodder to cattle and horses. Now, however, county councils forbid the building of thatch, our up-to-date cattle and horses are too fastidious as to litter and fodder, and we import our potashes. Meanwhile, Bracken threatens everywhere to stifle the Heather on our moors.

If I remember right, in some parts of France the poorer people make use of young Brake as food. And this reminds me that, some years ago, I heard the last Japanese Ambassador remark at dinner—à propos of the Asparagus that was just going round—that he wondered we should not make use in the kitchen of the Bracken he had noticed growing in such enormous and neglected quantities in England. In his country, he assured us, they eat the young shoots, when still in their folded “crozier” stage, precisely as we over here eat Asparagus, and consider them not only as delicacies, but as particularly wholesome and nutritious.

The recipe for cooking them is simple. The croziers, cut just short of the roots, are to be parboiled in strongly salted water; the first water, which extracts some unpleasantly bitter principle, is to be quickly poured off; then the shoots, thoroughly drained of this first water, are boiled in a large quantity of fresh water, drained again carefully and served with oil or butter, very much like our Sprue.

I must some day make the experiment. I wonder if the joy, now, of eating tender young Bracken would be like that of the savage devouring his declared enemy?

Meanwhile, for the sake of the desired grass, the hecatomb must be repeated daily.

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XXV

This July, not remarkable for anything but rain and dark skies, has produced a perfect outbreak of wickedness in the village. Our black sheep have turned into tigers without even the excuse of torrid weather to inflame their passions. But, indeed, the public house is always ready to supply the stimulant necessary for driving average humanity into brutal and insane crime.

Caliban, whom the reader may remember as having once worked in our Fortunate Island, and always looking as if he had just risen from all-fours, has, in our recent absence, thrown away all pretence at humanity once and for all. Though, indeed, why should the poor beasts, who generally make excellent fathers and husbands, be compared to the type of man that deliberately ruins his home? To batter your wife, terrorize your children, to squander your substance for an indulgence which ultimately destroys your health, is a mystery of perversity reserved for the superior being.

Anyway, Caliban, having drifted from place to place, and lost his last chance of employment in this district by killing a whole hot-house full of Tomatoes through drunken neglect “on” the local market gardener, as we should say in Ireland, finally locked his wife and children out of the little cottage, and shut himself in with his drunkenness in company with his aged but not less drunken parent. The power of thought having returned in the morning, the precious pair put their boosy heads together and sold the furniture, possessed themselves of every available valuable, even of Mrs. Caliban’s solitary trinket, and decamped together from the district!

Mrs. Caliban, with an infant in arms and two little girls at her skirts, has now set to work to earn enough for all. She is a valiant woman; and no doubt when she has succeeded fairly well, Caliban will return to repeat the process. She is very anxious for a separation, but cannot accomplish this, as the whereabouts of her lord and master are unknown.

* * * * *

She is less fortunate than the wife of Black Sheep No. 2. Last Saturday we were peacefully entertaining a couple of week-end visitors, when poor Mrs. Mutton crawled into our garden to “see the young lady.” The water-butt myth was cast to the winds. She had a black eye and a dislocated thumb, and informed us that Mutton had threatened to “do for her,” and that she was going in fear of her life. “When not drunk,” she remarked with the apathy of despair, “I think he’s mad!”

Mutton is well known in the district for his playful ways, and no one would consent to house his wife but an enterprising barber: on the condition, however, that Mutton did not come after her. The poor thing shivered and shook, and avowed that she could not return and pass another hour in such terrors. When she heard his step, she told us, a trembling would seize her.

“You ladies,” she said, rolling her hopeless eyes from one sympathetic listener to another, “can have no idea of the kind of life poor women like us lead!”