Perris of the Cherry Trees
Chapter I
Pippany Webster, handy-man and only labourer to Abel Perris, the small farmer who dragged a bare living out of Cherry-trees, the little holding at the top of the hill above Martinsthorpe, came lazily up the road from the village one May afternoon, leading a horse which seemed as fully inclined to laziness as Pippany himself. Perris had left home for a day or two, and had apportioned his man a certain fixed task to accomplish by the time of his return: Pippany, lid it so pleased him, might have laboured steadily at it until that event happened. And for the whole of the first day and half of the next he had kept himself to the work, but at noon on that second day it was borne in upon him that one of the two horses, which formed the entire stable of the establishment, required shoeing, and after eating his dinner, he had led it down the hill to the smithy near the cross-roads in Martinsthorpe. There, and in the kitchen of the Dancing Bear, close by, where there was ale and tobacco and gossip, he had contrived to spend the greater part of the afternoon. He would have stayed longer amidst such pleasant surroundings, but for the fact that supper-time was approaching.
It was difficult, looking at man and horse, to decide as to which most suggested helplessness and incompetence. The horse showed itself to be a poor man's beast in every line and aspect of its ill-shaped, badly-fed body, in the listless droop of its head, in its ungroomed, rough-haired coat, in the very indecision with which it set down its oversized, sprawling feet. It had a dull, listless eye, the eye of an equine outcast; there was an evident disposition in it to stop on any provocation, to crop the fresh green of the grass from the broad stretches of turf on the wayside, to nibble at the tender shoots of the hedgerows, to do anything that needed little effort. It breathed heavily as it breasted the hill, following the man who slouched in front, his head drooping from his bent shoulders, his lips, still moist and sticky from the ale he had drunk, sucking mechanically at a foul clay pipe. He was a little more fully attired than the scarecrows in the neighbouring fields, but there was all over him the aimlessness, the ineptitude, the purposelessness of the unfit. His old hat, shapeless and colourless, shaded a face which suggested nothing but dull stupidity, and was only relieved from utter vacancy by a certain slyness and craftiness of expression. He shambled in his walk, and his long arms, the finger-tips of which reached below his knees, wagged and waved in front of him as he forged ahead, as though they were set loose in their sockets, his small, pig-like eyes fixed on the few inches of high-road which lay immediately before his toes. From the foot of the hill to its crest those eyes were never lifted.
And yet, the crest of the hill once gained, a landscape presented itself over which most folk would have gazed with pleasure and appreciation. On all sides the country stretched away in a great plateau, thickly wooded, and just then smiling in the clear light and fresh, unsullied tints and colours of spring-tide. The place to which the unkempt man was leading the unkempt horse was in itself a picture. It stood, a small but very old farmhouse, with a high sloping roof, dormer windows, and tall chimneys, in t he angle made by the meeting of two roads; before i t lay a flower-garden, in one corner of which rose an ancient cedar-tree; behind it stretched a wide-spreading orchard, filled, for the most part, with cherry-trees, just then in the full glory of pink and white blossom. I immediately in front of it, on the opposite side of the highway, rose a great grove of chestnut-trees; they, too, were in bloom, and the wax-like clusters made little pyramids of light against the, glossy green of the widespreading leaves. And over everything was the clear blue of the May sky, and in the hedgerows and the coppices were the first signs of the flowering of the hawthorn.
Pippany Webster saw nothing of all this. He shambled slowly round the corner of the high-road into the lane which led towards the woods, and made a boundary on that side to Perris's farmstead, into which he let himself by a ramshackle door that opened on a range of dilapidated buildings. These buildings stood between the old house and the cherry orchard; the lane ran at the back of them; a farm-fold lay in front of them, fenced off from the rear of the house by a low stone wall. Against this wall, on the fold side, was a stone trough; above it a leaden spout projected through the wall; on the other, the house side of the wall, was a pump, which communicated with the well below. The human animals in the house and the brute animals in the field both drank water from a spring thirty feet beneath them, into which the runnings of fold and byre and stable percolated in some indefinite degree about which neither ever speculated.
The range of buildings into which Pippany Webster dragged the newly-shod horse was characteristic of what is usually seen on a small holding when the holder is poor and more or less shiftless. Between it and the house stood a dilapidated Dutch barn, empty of aught but a mess and litter of straw on the earth flooring almost as empty was the range of buildings itself when