The Story of Jael/Chapter V

morning, when Jael entered the kitchen, she found that Mrs Bagg had prepared breakfast and was at table with her father. Jael had spread a mattress in the corner of her room and cast herself on it, holding her hands to her ears to shut out the scolding of the widow, and had fallen asleep without taking off her clothes. She had slept heavily and long, and did not awake till Mrs Bagg had risen and been down for an hour and a half. As she entered the kitchen she heard her say to her father, ‘Now mind, Master Tapp, to whatever I say, mind you say “Amen.”’

Jael was a little ashamed of herself for having overslept herself and neglected her duties so that Mrs Bagg had been enabled to step into her place without a struggle or protest. Mrs Bagg had lighted the fire, boiled the kettle, spread the table, put the bread and butter on the table, and done the rasher of bacon. Not only so, but Mrs Bagg had done all better than she—Jael—had been accustomed to do things. The table had a cloth on it—Jael had never considered it worth while putting one on for breakfast—and the four corners of the cloth hung evenly about the table.

‘There,’ said Mrs Bagg, ‘take your place, child; we have kept a rasher for you.’

Jael’s anger swelled up in her heart again. This woman was exercising authority over her, as mistress of the house, and mother by right divine.

She looked at her father, but he bowed his head over his plate and did not raise his eyes to meet hers.

‘I don’t want anything,’ said Jael, roughly; ‘if I am hungry presently, I shall take what I want.’

‘Sit down, anyhow, in your place,’ said her father, still without looking at her.

She obeyed. Her face was like a landscape across which shadows and flashes of light sweep alternately, when a gale is blowing aloft and driving clouds athwart the sun. At one moment it lowered, dark with sullen wrath, and then there came a gleam of tire into her eyes and cheeks, as her anger mounted and threatened an outbreak.

‘Is it only barnacles as grows on to the bridge?’ asked Mrs Bagg, looking from Mr Tapp to his daughter.

‘And tangles,’ responded Shamgar.

‘Tangles it is,’ said Mrs Bagg, and pretty tangles they be. The sea-tangles have bubbles in ’em filled with a jelly, and the tangles I’ve noticed on the bridge hasn’t got no more than jelly in the bubble it calls its head. Tangles, indeed!’ She poured herself out another cup of tea. ‘Pretty tangles they be, with a pair of legs and two arms, and a tongue, a reg’lar intangling tangle it is.’

Shamgar looked up at the woman, then at his daughter.

‘I’ve heard,’ said Mrs Bagg, ‘of living tangles, a sort of fish with two great eyes and a lot of long arms, and its head and stomach all in one. And I’ve heard,’ she continued, looking hard at Jael, ‘that when that same creature gets its arms about a human being, then it’s a bad look-out for that same. And I know that there be human octopuses too, that likes to throw their arms round girl’s necks, and then I pity the girl, that’s all. And from what I saw and judged last night, I suppose that there has been a human octopus and a human tangle about this house, and has been a longing and a trying to devour a certain person not a hundred miles off, nay—with only a table and a rasher of bacon between us.’

Jael stood up, and flushed a dark red. She knew to what the widow alluded.

‘I’m not surprised,’ said Mrs Bagg, ‘that this poor dear man here’—she waved her spoon towards Mr Tapp—‘has been vexed and worried out of his life, by having to deal with idiots as can’t keep out of the way of octopuses. Any one with a grain of sense would steer clear of them brutes, but some run into their arms and offer themselves to be swallowed. Jonah didn’t go and chuck himself into the whale’s belly, he was chucked in by heathens and papists, as were in the boat with him. I’m not surprised that Master Tapp has asked me to come and circumvent and supervise his house, when there are such goings on, and such creatures in it to be brought into order and obedience. Am I wrong, Master Tapp?’

‘No, Mistress Bagg, not at all.’

‘Now don’t you go and turn your back on me whilst I’m talking,’ pursued the widow, ‘especially when your hair is hanging down behind, all in a rummage, not properly pinned up, and when there’s an end of your staylace poking out through the joints of your gown where it isn’t fastened, nor can be because of the bursting of an eye, or the coming away of a hook. I’m not surprised at your father calling me over the coals for not a-smothering you when you were born.’

Jael turned sharply round, and looked at Mr Tapp, whose eyes fell.

Mrs Bagg felt she had gained an advantage, so she pursued the subject. ‘The poor dear man came up to me at Fingrinhoe, wringing of his hands, and saying, “Oh, why, my dear, dear Jemima”—which is my Christian name——’

‘I did not call you Jemima,’ corrected Shamgar.

‘Was it Bagg, you said?’ asked the widow. ‘Bagg it shall be; it was the expression of your face as you said it, and the tenderness in your voice, and the general affection that pervaded you made me think it was Jemima you said, but it was Bagg, maybe, so softened and honeyed, and spiced, that it sounded like Jemima.’

‘Did my father wish I had been smothered?’ asked Jael.

‘He did. He was that cross with me for not having put the pillow over your mouth and made an end of you when you were born, that I’d the greatest difficulty to pacify him; and to make amends for not having done so, I said I’d come here and see what I could do with you now. Of course now, Jael, smothering is out of the question, but—’

‘Father,’ said Jael, ‘is this true?’

‘Ay!’ he said loudly and angrily, to cover his confusion. ‘Of course it is. Have not you been a plague and a vexation to me ever since you were born? Ain’t you now a harassing of me, as if you were going over me with a garden rake? I do—I do say, that Mrs Bagg was very much to blame that she didn’t consider my feelings and smother you right off on end when you were born.’

‘I suppose you’d just as soon I were smothered now,’ said Jael in a tone of mingled bitterness and distress.

‘If the law would allow of it, I would,’ answered Tapp in a loud tone to disguise his real uneasiness, and under the impression that he must back up Mrs Bagg, and carry out the arrangement made with her. ‘It would be an end of worry to me, and I could mind the bridge with nothing else in my thoughts to vex me.’

‘I am sorry for it—that I am such a trouble to you. I will vex you no more,’ said Jael, hardly controlling herself, and she went out of the door.

Mr Tapp thought he had gone too far, spoken too strongly, and he half rose from his seat.

‘You let her alone,’ said Mrs Bagg.

‘Hard words break no bones. You’ve given her a pill that will set her to rights. I understand female nature. Haven’t I got it myself? If a person has it and has had it these forty—I mean thirty-five years, experiencing of it and experimentalising on it day and night, winter and summer, one must be a fool not to understand it. It will do her good. Trust me. I know what does for such constitutions as hers. Why, when I was a girl, myself, ’tother day, I was as skittish as she—not that I ever runned into the arms of octopuses. I let the octopuses run after me, and I kicked and struggled before I let them throw their arms about me.’

‘How you must have changed since then,’ said Shamgar grimly. He was uneasy in his mind. ‘Now you’ve come across the mouth of the Colne, left your own cottage for the chance of getting me. It is a chance. Mind you, unless you manage that girl properly, I’ll have nothing to say to you more. Bagg you was, and Bagg you shall be, and Bagg shall stand on your tombstone. Yes,’ he said testily, ‘the Bagg shall find her mate, I’ll give her the sack.’

Jael did not appear throughout the day. Mr Tapp was not greatly concerned at this, Mrs Bagg not at all.

‘It is wonderful how it tames wild creatures to be with out their victuals,’ said the father.

Evening arrived, and still she had not returned.

In fact, Jael was rambling about the country, on the marsh, in the copse-woods. She kept out of sight of her father’s house; there was a fire in her veins which made her restless, but in the afternoon she fell asleep in a nut-wood.

When she awoke the evening had closed in. She was hungry, but she would not go home. The sun had set, and there was summer-lightning flashing in the sky, fitful, as the pulses in her own heart. She could not remain in the nut-wood. There is an Essex saying that if you go nutting on a certain day, and the sun sets ere you leave, you will meet the Evil One, also nutting, but the nut he will want is your soul. He will put his hand to you, just as you put yours to a hazel tree, and grope, and all at once lay hold of your heart, and give it a twist, exactly as you twist the nut off the bough, and in a moment it will be in his hand. Then he will put your heart to his teeth, and crack—in a moment he will have gulped your soul down, just as you eat the kernel of your nut.

Jael remembered this superstition, though she could not recall in what night it was that the Evil One went nutting, or whether he did not go every night, always seeking for those nuts. The idea of meeting him frightened her, and she emerged from the wood, and in the dusk stole nearer home. She had vainly sought nuts in the copse, nuts that is with formed kernels. All were empty, the time for the swelled and pleasant fruit was not come. She broke the shells and found they contained nothing edible, nothing but a sort of white cottony fibre

The horizon was flushing, and it was hard to say where the lightning really was, for the original flashes repeated themselves over the whole sky with such vividness that the reflections seemed to be themselves electric discharges. No thunder could be heard. The storm that raged elsewhere was raging at a distance, but a haze of black vapour began to spread over the southern arc of sky, and thence, if the storm came, it would come to the Colne estuary.

Jael sat on a bank watching the sky for long; she could see the light in her father’s cottage kindled, and the red signal lamps on the line. To the south the darkness was spreading, and the pulsation of light in it became more frequent, and once or twice she thought that she could hear a distant rumble.

The night would not be as clear as the last, even now a bank of vapour was forming over the north, like a repeated shadow there, as the lightning reflected itself there in flashes.

Presently Jael felt a drop on her hand, a warm large drop, like a tear fallen out of heaven—a tear of pity for her, hungry, forlorn, exposed to peril, homeless.

Then she went cautiously down to the railway bridge, looking about her, so as not to allow herself to be observed, and took refuge on the turf under the bridge where it made its first stride from the mainland. There she could stand, and if the rain came down would find shelter, so long as it was not driven by wind; and of wind, as yet, there was little, and what there was came in sighs at intervals.

She seated herself on a patch of thrift, and leaned her back against one of the huge balks of creosoted timber that held up the bridge. There were many of them. By night, looking away to the flashing horizon, through the crossing spars, she seemed like a fly caught in a great black spider-web.

She could hear now the patter of the rain in the mud of the Fleet, and its rustle on the coarse turf. Then far off she heard a mutter from the sea, and in another moment a puff of wind rushed through the bridge girders and supports, sighing, moaning, whistling, and aloft, above the roadway, playing on the telegraph wires as on an Æolian harp. Sometimes the distant lightning was white, sometimes red-dish-yellow; it became more intense, and the night became darker.

Peering forth at the sky she could see no stars, no entangled light from the north, only black, driving vapour, flashing and fading.

‘There!’ she exclaimed, as she saw a flash over the estuary as though the heavens were torn open, and in the white vista she perceived as it were a zigzag rent from top to bottom; and under that blaze the water was visible, as white as if run out of moonlight, and in its brilliancy she could trace the shape of a ship black as ink, and lines of breaking waves, vivid above the light of day on their crests, dark as deepest night in their laps.

‘There!’ she said again, as she heard the roar of thunder, still distant, but withal loud.

She was not conscious now of hunger, but of lassitude and faintness. She felt a sense of pleasure stir in her at the sight of the lightning and the sound of the approaching storm.

‘There!’ she exclaimed again, and drew in her feet, and contracted herself against the timber, as she saw a yellow speck of light travel along the sea-wall, and then approach where she was. As it approached, it widened and brightened.

‘It is father’s lantern,’ she said to herself in a whisper. She did not think of going to him. She considered only how she might conceal herself from him.

He drew nearer, and by the lightning and his lantern light she could make him out, could see the red tie about his throat. He was carrying a spade in one hand, and something under the other arm.

He came near to where she was, but he did not see her. The flashing of the lightning dazzled the eyes. He saw only what was within the radius of the light from his lantern. He stood still. There were three great balks rose out of the marsh to the roadway, serving as piers for the single line of rail, and these were braced and girded with other beams a very little way above the ground.

‘One—two,’ said Mr Shamgar Tapp.

Jael heard his words. The wind set inwards. She was hidden behind the third balk.

Then her father set down the lantern and turned up the turf with his spade.

Now Jael saw what he had been carrying under his arm. It was the preserved-ginger pot that contained the sovereigns that belonged to her mother, and were left to her.

Now, also, Jael knew what he was about. He was aware that the place where the pot had been hidden was known to her. He was afraid lest she should go to it, and take the money, so he was removing it and hiding it in a place where she would not find it.

Jael laughed bitterly, laughed loudly, but Shamgar did not hear, the wind carried her laugh away from him up the Fleet.

‘And now,’ said Mr Tapp, as he replaced the turf over the pot which he had buried, ‘now she can’t lay hand on it without my consent.’

Then he went away, swinging his lantern, with the spade over his shoulder, and a sudden, dazzling, blinding explosion of lightning showed him to her, mounting the sea-wall, with his back to her, going home.

Then again she laughed, and her laugh was like the cry of a gull—but it was blotted out by the boom and bolt and rattle of thunder that shook the bridge, and made the very ground on which she sat, and the balk against which she leaned, quiver as though the dissolution of all things was at hand.