JUDKIN OF THE PARCELS
A figure in an indefinite tweed suit, carrying brown-paper
parcels. That is what we met suddenly, at the bend of a
muddy Dorsetshire lane, and the roan mare stared and
obviously thought of a curtsy. The mare is road-shy, with
intervals of stolidity, and there is no telling what she
will pass and what she won't. We call her Redford. That
was my first meeting with Judkin, and the next time the
circumstances were the same; the same muddy lane, the same
rather apologetic figure in the tweed suit, the same—or
very similar—parcels. Only this time the roan looked
straight in front of her.
Whether I asked the groom or whether he advanced the
information, I forget; but someway I gradually reconstructed
the life-history of this trudger of the lanes. It was much
the same, no doubt, as that of many
others who are from time
to time pointed out to one as having been aforetime in crack
cavalry regiments and noted performers in the saddle; men
who have breathed into their lungs the wonder of the East,
have romped through life as through a cotillon, have had a
thrust perhaps at the Viceroy's Cup, and done fantastic
horsefleshy things around the Gulf of Aden. And then a
golden stream has dried up, the sunlight has faded suddenly
out of things, and the gods have nodded "Go." And they
have not gone. They have turned instead to the muddy lanes
and cheap villas and the marked-down ills of life, to watch
pear trees growing and to encourage hens for their eggs.
And Judkin was even as these others; the wine had been
suddenly spilt from his cup of life, and he had stayed to
suck at the dregs which the wise throw away. In the days of
his scorn for most things he would have stared the roan mare
and her turn-out out of all pretension to smartness, as he
would have frozen a cheap claret behind its cork, or a plain
woman behind her veil; and now he was walking stoically
through the mud, in a tweed suit that would eventually go on
to the gardener's boy, and would perhaps fit him. The dear
gods, who know the end before the beginning, were perhaps
growing a gardener's boy somewhere to fit the garments, and
Judkin was only a caretaker, inhabiting a portion of them.
That is what I like to think, and I am probably wrong. And
Judkin, whose clothes had been to him once more than a
religion, scarcely less sacred than a family quarrel, would
carry those parcels back to his villa and to the wife who
awaited him and them—a wife who may, for all we know to
the contrary, have had a figure once, and perhaps has yet a
heart of gold—of nine-carat gold, let us say at the
least—but assuredly a soul of tape. And he that has
fetched and carried will explain how it had fared with him
in his dealings, and if he has brought the wrong sort of
sugar or thread he will wheedle away the displeasure from
that leaden face as a pastrycook girl will drive bluebottles
off a stale bun. And that man has known what it was to coax
the fret of a thoroughbred, to soothe its toss and sweat as
it danced beneath him in the glee and chafe of its pulses
and the glory of its thews. He has been in the raw places
of the earth, where the desert beasts have whimpered their
unthinkable psalmody, and their eyes
have shone back the
reflex of the midnight stars—and he can immerse himself in
the tending of an incubator. It is horrible and wrong, and
yet when I have met him in the lanes his face has worn a
look of tedious cheerfulness that might pass for happiness.
Has Judkin of the Parcels found something in the lees of
life that I have missed in going to and fro over many
waters? Is there more wisdom in his perverseness than in the
madness of the wise? The dear gods know.
I don't think I saw Judkin more than three times all told,
and always the lane was our point of contact; but as the
roan mare was taking me to the station one heavy,
cloud-smeared day, I passed a dull-looking villa that the
groom, or instinct, told me was Judkin's home. From beyond
a hedge of ragged elder-bushes could be heard the thud, thud
of a spade, with an occasional clink and pause, as if some
one had picked out a stone and thrown it to a distance, and
I knew that he was doing nameless things to the roots of a
pear tree. Near by him, I felt sure, would be lying a large
and late vegetable marrow, and its largeness and lateness
would be a theme of conversation at luncheon. It would be
suggested that it should grace
the harvest thanksgiving
service; the harvest having been so generally
unsatisfactory, it would be unfair to let the farmers supply
all the material for rejoicing.
And while I was speeding townwards along the rails Judkin
would be plodding his way to the vicarage bearing a
vegetable marrow and a basketful of dahlias. The basket to
be returned.