The Hurly Burly and Other Stories by A.E. Coppard

Author:A.E. Coppard
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ecco
Published: 2021-02-02T00:00:00+00:00

Ring the Bells of Heaven

To every man his proper gift

Dame Nature gives complete.

I

The sun was glaring over a Suffolk heath that spread on either side of a sandy road thick with dust. The heath had two prevailing colours—the hue of its bracken green and tall, the tint of its flowering ling. These colours were clearly denoted and merged in isolated tracts, as though in the comity of vegetation one had commanded: thus far the purple, and the other: thus far the green. At the edge of the green ferns, haunt of heath fleas and lady-birds, some brown skeletons of last year’s foliage, blown there by mournful airs, lay clinging to their youthful offspring as if to say: “Dream not, but mourn for us.” On this July afternoon the blue of the sky was swart and clear although some stray clouds, trussed like the wool on a sheep’s back, soared over a few odd groups of pine and a white windmill turning on a knoll.

And along the road came padding a small black pony swishing its tail; wisps of dust puffed up from its hoofs, and bareback upon the pony sat a small uncomely boy about ten years old, carrying on his arm a bright tin bucket half full of red currants. The boy, who had the queer name of Blandford Febery, though he commonly answered to the call of “Cheery,” was off to meet his father, who had gone to market. The pony pranced along the heath road for a mile or so until they came to the town and so into the market. Mr. Febery was sitting at a table in the cool courtyard of the Tumble Down Dick inn with a group of men clad in cutaway coats and gaiters. He got up, took the bucket of currants from his son, and set it down by the table. “That’s my Cheery boy!” he cried gaily, lifting his son from the pony. “Now you jest slip along to Mrs. Farringay’s and leave her those currants from me while I put pony in stall, and I’ll wait here for you.”

“They be large currants, Albert,” said George Sands, as Blandford carried them away.

“A fairish sample, George,” shouted Mr. Febery, leading the pony off; “but my stomach can’t never abide such traffic, it turns on ’em, it do. And all our family be the same.”

“Has he got a large family?” asked Henry Ottershaw, a man with a big rosy face and a black patch over one eye.

“He’s got two boys,” replied George; “two boys and a gal. That one’s the oldest.”

“He’s the very image of his father, whether or no.”

“Oh, ay,” George answered; “Albert might have spit ’e out of his blessed mouth.”

This was only externally true. Albert Febery was a small yeoman farmer of cheerful disposition, for in those days—the 1880’s—farming was still a pretty business, and farmers, like his friends bluff George Sands and Henry Ottershaw, were spruce men whose wants were modest and their cares few. But his son was morose, and his wants were not modest.

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