THE BLOOD-FEUD OF TOAD-WATER
A WEST-COUNTRY EPIC
The Cricks lived at Toad-Water; and in the same lonely
upland spot Fate had pitched the home of the Saunderses, and
for miles around these two dwellings there was never a
neighbour or a chimney or even a burying-ground to bring a
sense of cheerful communion or social intercourse. Nothing
but fields and spinneys and barns, lanes and waste-lands.
Such was Toad-Water; and, even so, Toad-Water had its
history.
Thrust away in the benighted hinterland of a scattered
market district, it might have been supposed that these two
detached items of the Great Human Family would have leaned
towards one another in a fellowship begotten of kindred
circumstances and a common isolation from the outer world.
And perhaps it had been so once, but the way of things had
brought it otherwise. Indeed, otherwise. Fate, which had
linked the two families in such unavoidable association of
habitat, had ordained that the Crick household should
nourish and maintain among its earthly possessions sundry
head of domestic fowls, while to the Saunderses was given a
disposition towards the cultivation of garden crops. Herein
lay the material, ready to hand, for the coming of feud and
ill-blood. For the grudge between the man of herbs and the
man of live stock is no new thing; you will find traces of
it in the fourth chapter of Genesis. And one sunny
afternoon in late spring-time the feud came—came, as such
things mostly do come, with seeming aimlessness and
triviality. One of the Crick hens, in obedience to the
nomadic instincts of her kind, wearied of her legitimate
scratching-grounds, and flew over the low wall that divided
the holdings of the neighbours. And there, on the yonder
side, with a hurried consciousness that her time and
opportunities might be limited, the misguided bird scratched
and scraped and beaked and delved in the soft yielding bed
that had been prepared for the solace and well-being of a
colony of seedling
onions. Little showers of earth-mould
and root-fibres went spraying before the hen and behind her,
and every minute the area of her operations widened. The
onions suffered considerably. Mrs. Saunders, sauntering at
this luckless moment down the garden path, in order to fill
her soul with reproaches at the iniquity of the weeds, which
grew faster than she or her good man cared to remove them,
stopped in mute discomfiture before the presence of a more
magnificent grievance. And then, in the hour of her
calamity, she turned instinctively to the Great Mother, and
gathered in her capacious hands large clods of the hard
brown soil that lay at her feet. With a terrible sincerity
of purpose, though with a contemptible inadequacy of aim,
she rained her earth bolts at the marauder, and the bursting
pellets called forth a flood of cackling protest and panic
from the hastily departing fowl. Calmness under misfortune
is not an attribute of either menfolk or womenkind, and
while Mrs. Saunders declaimed over her onion bed such
portions of the slang dictionary as are permitted by the
Nonconformist conscience to be said or sung, the Vasco da
Gama fowl was waking the echoes of Toad-Water with crescendo
bursts
of throat music which compelled attention to her
griefs. Mrs. Crick had a long family, and was therefore
licensed, in the eyes of her world, to have a short temper,
and when some of her ubiquitous offspring had informed her,
with the authority of eye-witnesses, that her neighbour had
so far forgotten herself as to heave stones at her hen—her
best hen, the best layer in the countryside—her thoughts
clothed themselves in language "unbecoming to a Christian
woman"—so at least said Mrs. Saunders, to whom most of
the language was applied. Nor was she, on her part,
surprised at Mrs. Crick's conduct in letting her hens stray
into other body's gardens, and then abusing of them, seeing
as how she remembered things against Mrs. Crick—and the
latter simultaneously had recollections of lurking episodes
in the past of Susan Saunders that were nothing to her
credit. "Fond memory, when all things fade we fly to
thee," and in the paling light of an April afternoon the
two women confronted each other from their respective sides
of the party wall, recalling with shuddering breath the
blots and blemishes of their neighbour's family record.
There was that aunt of Mrs. Crick's who had died a pauper
in Exeter
workhouse—every one knew that Mrs. Saunders'
uncle on her mother's side drank himself to death —then
there was that Bristol cousin of Mrs. Crick's! From the
shrill triumph with which his name was dragged in, his crime
must have been pilfering from a cathedral at least, but as
both remembrancers were speaking at once it was difficult to
distinguish his infamy from the scandal which beclouded the
memory of Mrs. Saunders' brother's wife's mother—who may
have been a regicide, and was certainly not a nice person as
Mrs. Crick painted her. And then, with an air of
accumulating and irresistible conviction, each belligerent
informed the other that she was no lady—after which they
withdrew in a great silence, feeling that nothing further
remained to be said. The chaffinches clinked in the apple
trees and the bees droned round the berberis bushes, and the
waning sunlight slanted pleasantly across the garden plots,
but between the neighbour households had sprung up a barrier
of hate, permeating and permanent.
The male heads of the families were necessarily drawn into
the quarrel, and the children on either side were forbidden
to have anything to do with the unhallowed
offspring of the
other party. As they had to travel a good three miles along
the same road to school every day, this was awkward, but
such things have to be. Thus all communication between the
households was sundered. Except the cats. Much as Mrs.
Saunders might deplore it, rumour persistently pointed to
the Crick he-cat as the presumable father of sundry kittens
of which the Saunders she-cat was indisputably the mother.
Mrs. Saunders drowned the kittens, but the disgrace
remained.
Summer succeeded spring, and winter summer, but the feud
outlasted the waning seasons. Once, indeed, it seemed as
though the healing influences of religion might restore to
Toad-Water its erstwhile peace; the hostile families found
themselves side by side in the soul-kindling atmosphere of a
Revival Tea, where hymns were blended with a beverage that
came of tea-leaves and hot water and took after the latter
parent, and where ghostly counsel was tempered by
garnishings of solidly fashioned buns—and here, wrought up
by the environment of festive piety, Mrs. Saunders so far
unbent as to remark guardedly to Mrs. Crick that the evening
had been a fine one. Mrs. Crick,
under the influence of
her ninth cup of tea and her fourth hymn, ventured on the
hope that it might continue fine, but a maladroit allusion
on the part of the Saunders good man to the backwardness of
garden crops brought the Feud stalking forth from its comer
with all its old bitterness. Mrs. Saunders joined heartily
in the singing of the final hymn, which told of peace and
joy and archangels and golden glories; but her thoughts were
dwelling on the pauper aunt of Exeter.
Years have rolled away, and some of the actors in this
wayside drama have passed into the Unknown; other onions
have arisen, have flourished, have gone their way, and the
offending hen has long since expiated her misdeeds and lain
with trussed feet and look of ineffable peace under the
arched roof of Barnstaple market. But the Blood-feud of
Toad-Water survives to this day.
