The orchard which gives Codlin Croft Farm its name is a long rambling strip of ground, with old bent pear trees and apple trees that bear ripe little summer pears in August and sweet codlin apples in September. At the end nearest to the buildings there are clothes-props, hen-coops, tubs, troughs, old oddments; and pig-styes that adjoin the calf hulls [21] and cow byres. The back windows of the farmhouse look out nearly level with the orchard grass; little back windows of diamond panes not made to open. The far end of the orchard is a neglected pretty wilderness, with mossy old trees, elder bushes, and long grass; handy for a pet lamb or two in spring, and for the calves in summer.
At this time of year, a north country April, the pear blossom was out and the early apple blossom was budding. The snowdrops that had been a sheet of white – white as the linen sheets bleaching on the drying green – had passed; and now there were daffodils in hundreds. Not the big bunchy tame ones that we call “Butter-and-eggs,” but the little wild daffodillies that dance in the wind. Through the broken gate at top of Codlin Croft orchard came Pony Billy with the caravan. He drew it up comfortably in shelter of Farmer Hodgson’s haystack, which stood, four-square and prosperous, half in the orchard and half in the field. “Only, Jenny Ferret, if I put the caravan here you must promise not to light a fire. We must not burn Farmer Hodgson’s hay for him.” “And how will I boil the kettle without a fire? Take us further down the orchard near the well, behind the bour-tree [03] bushes.” “All right,” agreed Pony Billy, pulling into the collar again; “perhaps it would be safer. I can come up to the stack by myself for a bite.”
“Cluck-cur-cuck-cuck!” said Charles, “I recommend that flat place between the pig-stye and the middenstead.” [31] “Yes, indeed, cluck, cluck! there are lots of worms if you scratch up the manure,” clucked Selina Pickacorn. “Are they going to put up a tent?” asked the calves. “Oh, yes, lots of nice red worms,” clucked Tappie-tourie and Chucky-partlet. “What’s that funny old woman they call Jenny Ferret? she has got whiskers?” asked an inquisitive cat, sitting on the roof of the pig-stye. “Quack, quack! stretch your long neck and peep in at the window, Dilly Duckling.” “I cannot see; quack quack; I cannot see anything through the curtains.” “Gobble-gobble-gobble!” shouted the turkey cock, strutting after Charles. Sandy curled his tail tightly; “Go further down beyond the bour-tree bushes, Pony William, further away from the farmyard.” When the caravan had been drawn into position, it became necessary for Sandy to do a large loud determined barking all round, in order to disperse the poultry.
After pitching camp in the orchard Pony Billy and Sandy held an anxious consultation, “Did you notice anything while we were coming through the wood?” “Yes. Pig’s trotter marks.” “How many times did we go round and round that hill, Pony William?” “We would be going round it yet, if I had not gone widdershins.” [59] “What shall we do about Paddy Pig?” “I am going back to fetch him.” “What! into Pringle Wood?” “Yes,” said Pony Billy; “but first I want a saddle and bridle. And look whether my packet of fern seed is safe; for I shall have to go amongst the Big Folk in broad daylight.”
ROY, BOBS, AND MATT WERE LYING LAZILY IN THE SUN.
Pony Billy borrowed several things, by permission of the farm dogs, Roy, Bobs, and Matt, who were lying lazily in the sun before the stable door. He asked for the loan of a nosebag containing chopped hay, and straw, and uveco [56]; also for two pounds of potatoes; and a saddle and bridle, and for the chest-strap with brass ornaments belonging to the cart harness. There were four brass lockets on the strap; a swan, a galloping horse, a catherine wheel, and a crescent. The last named is a charm that has been worn by English horses since the days of the crusaders. The strap was too long; it swung between his knees; but Pony Billy felt fortified and valiant. “Do you think you will be chased?” asked the dogs. “I shall not. I am going to the smithy to have my shoes turned back to front.” “Our mare Maggret is at the smithy,” said Bobs. “You will have to go past the back door and the wash-house if you want potatoes,” said Matt. “Nobody can see me,” said Pony Billy. He clattered across the flags, bold in possession of fern seed and invisibility. Mrs. Hodgson, inside the house, called to her maid-servant, “Look out at the door, Grace; is that the master I hear coming home with the mare?” “I hear summat, but I see nought,” answered Grace, perplexed.
“I AM GOING TO THE SMITHY”
Pony Billy started on his quest. The farm dogs went to sleep again in the sun.
Sandy with his tail uncurled trailed back disconsolately to the orchard camp. The ducks and calves had wandered away; but Charles and his inquisitive hens were still in close attendance, and conversing endlessly.
The conversation was about losing things. Xarifa’s scissors were missing. Jenny Ferret as usual suspected Iky Shepster, the starling. He was not present to deny the charge; he had flown off foraging with the sparrows.
“Losses,” said Charles, sententiously, “losses occur in the best regulated establishments. Likewise finds; but finds are less frequent; and, therefore, more noteworthy. One afternoon I and my hens were promenading in the meadow. I heard Tappie-tourie – that bird with the rose comb [40] – clucking loudly in the ashpit. I inquired of Selina Pickacorn whether Tappie-tourie had laid an egg? Selina replied that it seemed improbable, as Tappie-tourie had already laid one that morning in the henhouse. But hens are fools enough to do anything; I ordered Selina to proceed to the ashpit, to ask Tappie-tourie whether she had laid a second egg or not. When one hen runs – all the other hens run too; being idiots; cluck-cur-cuck cuck cuck!” “Oh, Charles! Charles!” remonstrated Selina and Chucky-partlet coyly. “Aggravating idiots,” repeated Charles, who did not believe in encouraging pride amongst female poultry. “As the whole of my hens continued to cluck in the ashpit in total disregard of my commands to come out – I stalked across the field, and I looked in. I said, ‘What are you doing, Tappie-tourie? you are a perfect sweep. Selina Pickacorn, you are equally dirty. Chucky-doddie, you are even worse. Come out of the ashpit.’ They replied, all clucking together – ‘Oh, Charles! do look what a treasure we have found! But none of us know how to stick it on, because it has no safety-pin.’ They showed me Mrs. Hodgson’s big cairngorm [05] brooch that had been missing for a fortnight. They asked me if it was worth a hundred pounds. Cock-a-doodle-doo! A hundred pounds, indeed!” said Charles, swelling with scorn. “I told them it was absolutely worthless to us who wear no collars; not worth so much as one grain of wheat; cluck-cur-cuck cuck cuck! Hens always were noodles, and always will be. Ask them to tell you the tale of the demerara sugar.”
“That?” said Selina Pickacorn, quite unabashed, “oh, that happened long ago when we were inexperienced young pullets. Besides, it was all along of the parrot.” “Pray explain to us the responsibility of the parrot?”said Sandy. Five or six hens all commenced to cluck at once. Charles interjected cock-a-doodles. Consequently their explanation became somewhat mixed. Therefore it must be understood that this story – like the corn in their crops – is a digest.
CHAPTER XIV
Demerara Sugar
Upon fine days in spring the parrot’s cage was set out of doors upon top of the garden wall, opposite the farmhouse windows. In the intervals of biting its perch and swinging wrong-side up, the parrot addressed remarks to the poultry in the yard below. The words which it uttered most frequently in the hearing of those innocent birds were, “Demerara sugar! demerara sug! dem, dem, dem, Pretty Polly!” The chickens listened attentively.
When the chickens were feathered, they were taken to live in a wooden hut on wheels in the stubble field. They picked up the scattered grain; and grew into fine fat pullets. In autumn the farmer talked of taking the hen-hut home. But he was busy with other work; he delayed till winter.
In the night before Christmas Eve there came a fall of snow. When Tappie-tourie looked out next morning the ground was white. She drew back into the hut in consternation. Then Selina Pickacorn and Chucky-doddie looked out. None of them had ever seen snow before; they were April hatched pullets without a single experienced old hen to advise them.
“Is it a tablecloth?” asked Chucky-doddie. They knew all about tablecloths because they had been reared under a hen-coop on the drying green. They had been scolded for leaving dirty foot-marks on a clean tablecloth which was bleaching upon the grass.
The hens slid nervously down the hen ladder on to the snow. No; it was not a tablecloth. Said Tappie-tourie, “I’ll tell you what! I do believe it is the parrot’s demerara sugar!” (Now the parrot ought to have told them that demerara sugar is not white.) Selina Pickacorn tasted a beakful. “It is nothing extra special nice; he need not have talked so much about it.” “How horribly cold and wet it feels.” Just then the farmer came into the field with a horse and cart. He drove the hens back into the hut, fastened the door with a peg, and tied the hut behind his cart with a rope in order to drag it homewards through the snow.
The hen-hut did not run smoothly; it had a tiresome little waggling wheel at one end, that caught in ruts. It bumped along; and the pullets inside it cackled and fluttered. Before the procession had got clear of the field – the hut door flew open. Out bounced Tappie-tourie, Chucky-doddie, Selina Pickacorn, and five other hens. The farmer and his dog caught five of them, none too gently. But the three first-named birds flew back screaming to the spot where the hen-hut had stood originally, before it had been removed.
The farmer was obliged to leave them for the present.
Tappie-tourie, Chucky-doddie, and Selina wandered around in the snow; the field seemed very large and lost under its wide white covering. “The hut is gone,” said Tappie-tourie, with a brain wave. “That is so,”agreed Selina Pickacorn, “we fell out of the hut.” “What shall we do?”asked Chucky-doddie. “I see nothing for it but a Christmas picnic,” said Tappie-tourie; “here is sugar in plenty, but where is the tea and bread and butter?”
Large flakes of snow commenced to fall. “Perhaps this is the bread and butter coming,” said Tappie-tourie, looking up hopefully at the darkening sky. “My feather petticoat is getting so wet,” grumbled Chucky-doddie; “let us try to walk along the top of that wall, towards the wood.” The wall had a thick white topping of snow; it proved to be a most uncomfortable walk, with frequent tumblings off. They crossed Wilfin Beck on a wooden rail. The water below ran dark and sullen between the white banks. By the time they had reached the wood it was dusk; for the last hundred yards the hens had been floundering through snowdrifts. “If this is a Christmas picnic – it is horrid! Let us get up into that spruce tree, and roost there till morning.” They managed to fly up. They perched in a row on a branch, fluffing out their feathers to warm their cold wet feet. They were one speckled hen and two white hens; only the white hens looked quite yellow against the whiter snow. “The picnic is a long time commencing,” said the speckled hen, Tappie-tourie. It was soon black as pitch amongst the spreading branches of the spruce.
Down below in the glen the waters of the stream tinkled through the ground ice. Now and then there was a soft rushing sound, as the wet snow slipped off the sapling trees that bent beneath its weight, and sprang upwards again, released. Far off in the woods, a branch snapped under its load, like the sound of a gun at night. The stream murmured, flowing darkly. Dead keshes, withered grass, and canes stood up through the snow on its banks, under a fringe of hazel bushes.
Between the stream and the tree where the hens were roosting, there was a white untrodden slope. Only one tree grew there, a very small spruce, a little Christmas tree some four foot high. As the night grew darker – the branches of this little tree became all tipped with light, and wreathed with icicles and chains of frost. Brighter and brighter it shone, until it seemed to bear a hundred fairy lights; not like the yellow gleam of candles, but a clear white incandescent light.
Small voices and music began to mingle with the sound of the water. Up by the snowy banks, from the wood and from the meadow beyond, tripped scores of little shadowy creatures, advancing from the darkness into the light. They trod a circle on the snow around the Christmas tree, dancing gaily hand-in-hand. Rabbits, moles, squirrels, and wood-mice – even the half blind mole, old Samson Velvet, danced hand-in-paw with a wood-mouse and a shrew – whilst a hedgehog played the bagpipes beneath the fairy spruce.
Tappie-tourie and her sisters craned forward on their branch. “Is the Christmas picnic commencing? May we fly down and share it? Shall we, too, join the dance?” They slid and sidled forward, shaking down a shower of melting snow and ice. “Cluck, cluck!” cackled the hens, as they clutched and fluttered amongst slippery boughs.
The lights on the Christmas tree quivered, and went out. All was darkness and silence. “I’m afraid the Christmas picnic was only a dream; we shall have to roost here till morning.” “Hush! sit still,”said Tappie-tourie, “it was not us that frightened them away. Something is stirring near the stream! What is it?” The moon shone out between the clouds, throwing long shadows on the snow; shadows of the hazels and tall keshes. A little figure, questing and snuffling, came out into the moonlight: a small brown figure in a buttoned-up long coat. He examined the footsteps on the snow round the Christmas tree. Then, horrible to relate! he came straight up the snowy slope and stood under the spruce; looking up at the hens. He was a disagreeable fusky musky person, called John Stoat Ferret. (At this point Charles thought it necessary to apologize to Jenny Ferret who was knitting on the caravan steps. She accepted the apology in good part, and said of course she was not answerable for disagreeable relations – a horrid fusky musky smelly relation, with short legs, and rather a bushy tail.) First he tried to climb the tree, but he could not do so. Then he cried, “Shoo! shoo!” and threw sticks at the hens. And then he butted against the tree, and tried to shake them down. They clung, cackling and terrified, in the boughs high over head.
Then John Stoat Ferret thought of another plan; he determined to make them dizzy. He set to work. He danced. It was not at all nice dancing. At first he circled slowly; very, very slowly; then gradually faster, faster, faster, until he was spinning like a top. And always a nasty fusky musky smell steamed upwards into the tree. Tappie-tourie, Chucky-doddie, and Selina Pickacorn, overhead, watched him. They had left off clucking; they watched him in fascinated terrified silence, craning over their branch. And still he spun round and round and round, and the fusky smell rose up into the spruce. Tappie-tourie twisted her head round, following his movements as he danced. And Chucky-doddie twisted her neck round. And Selina Pickacorn not only twisted her head, she began to turn round herself upon the branch. All the hens were growing giddy.
John Stoat Ferret danced and spun more furiously, the fusky musky smell rose higher. All three hens commenced to turn round dizzily. In another minute they would fall off. John Stoat Ferret capered and twirled. But all of a sudden he stopped. He sat up, motionless, listening. Voices were approaching up the cart road that skirts the wood.