The Saliva Tree Page 3

“Yes, Mother.”

  The baker's shop was in the next street. Gregory and Nancy walked there in silence. Gregory shut Daisy in the stable and they went together into the parlor through the back door. At this time of day, Mr. Fenn was resting upstairs and his wife looking after the shop, so the little room was empty.

  Nancy sat upright in a chair and said, “Well, Gregory, what's all this about? Fancy dragging me off from my mother like that in the middle of town!”

  “Nancy, don't be cross. I had to see you.”

  She pouted. “You come out to the old farm often enough and don't show any particular wish to see me there.”

  “That's nonsense. I always come to see youlately in particular. Besides, you're more interested in Bert Neckland, aren't you?”

  “Bert Neckland, indeed! Why should I be interested in him? Not that it's any of your business if I am.”

  “It is my business, Nancy. I love you, Nancy!”

  He had not meant to blurt it out in quite that fashion, but now it was out, it was out, and he pressed home bis disadvantage by crossing the room, kneeling at her feet, and taking her hands in his. “Nancy, darling Nancy, say that you like me just a little. Encourage me somewhat.”

  “You are a very fine gentleman, Gregory, and I feel very kind towards you, to be sure, but . . .”

  “But?”

  She gave him the benefit of her downcast eyes again.

  “Your station in life is very different from mine, and besideswell, you don't do anything.”

  He was shocked into silence. With the natural egotism of youth, he had not seriously thought that she could have any firm objection to him; but in her words he suddenly saw the truth of his position, at least as it was revealed to her.

  “Nancy1well, it's true I do not seem to you to be working at present. But I do a lot of reading and studying here, and I write to several important people in the world. And all the time I am coming to a great decision about what my career will be. I do assure you I am no loafer, if that's what you think.”

  "No. I don't think that. But Bert says you often spend a convivial evening in that there 'Wayfarer.' "

  “Oh, he does, does he? And what business is it of his if I door of yours, come to that? What damned cheek!”

  She stood up. “If you have nothing left to say but a lot of swearing, I'll be off to join my mother, if you don't mind.”

  “Oh, by Jove, I'm making a mess of this!” He caught her wrist. “Listen, my sweet thing. I ask you only this, that you try and look on me favorably. And also that you let me say a word about the farm. Some strange things are happening there, and I seriously don't like to think of you being there at night. All these young things being born, all these little pigsit's uncanny!”

  “I don't see what's uncanny no more than my father does. I know how hard he works, and he's done a good job rearing his animals, that's all. He's the best farmer round Cottersall by a long chalk.”

  “Oh, certainly. He's a wonderful man. But he didn't put seven or eight eggs into a hedge sparrow's nest, did he? He didn't fill the pond with tadpoles and newts till it looks like a broth, did he? Something strange is happening on your farm this year, Nancy, and I want to protect you if I can.”

  The earnestness with which he spoke, coupled perhaps with his proximity and the ardent way he pressed her hand, went a good way towards mollifying Nancy.

  “Dear Gregory, you don't know anything about farm life, I don't reckon, for all your books. But you're very sweet to be concerned.”

  “I shall always be concerned about you, Nancy, you beautiful creature.”

  “You'll make me blush!”

  “Please do, for then you look even lovelier than usual!” He put an arm around her. When she looked up at him, he caught her up close to his chest and kissed her fervently.

  She gasped and broke away, but not with too great haste.

  “Oh, Gregory! Oh, Gregory! I must go to Mother now!”

  “Another kiss first! I can't let you go until I get another.”

  He took it, and stood by the door trembling with excitement as she left. “Come and see us again soon,” she whispered.

  “With dearest pleasure,” he said. But the next visit held more dread than pleasure.

  The big cart was standing in the yard full of squealing piglets when Gregory arrived. The farmer and Neckland were bustling about it. The former greeted Gregory cheerfully.

  “I've a chance to make a good quick profit on these little chaps. Old sows can't feed them, but sucking pig fetches its price in Norwich, so Bert and me are going to drive over to Heigham and put them on the train.”

  “They've grown since I last saw them!”

  “Ah, they put on over two pounds a day. Bert, we'd better get a net and spread over this lot, or they'll be diving out. They're that lively!”

  The two men made their way over to the barn, clomping through the mud. Mud squelched behind Gregory. He turned.

  In the muck between the stables and the cart, footprints ap– peared, two parallel tracks. They seemed to imprint themselves with no agency but their own. A cold flow of acute super– natural terror overcame Gregory, so that he could not move. The scene seemed to go gray and palsied as he watched the tracks come towards him.

  The carthorse neighed uneasily, the prints reached the cart, the cart creaked, as if something had climbed aboard. The piglets squealed with terror. One dived clear over the wooden sides. Then aterrible silence fell.

  Gregory still could not move. He heard an unaccountable sucking noise in the cart, but his eyes remained rooted on the muddy tracks. Those impressions were of something other than a man: something with dragging feet that were in outline something like a seal's flippers. Suddenly he found his voice. “Mr. Grendon!” he cried.

  Only as the farmer and Bert came running from the barn with the net did Gregory dare look into the cart.

  One last piglet, even as he looked, seemed to be deflating rapidly, like a rubber balloon collapsing. It went limp and lay silent a,mong the other little empty bags of pig skin. The cart creaked. Something splashed heavily off across the farmyard in the direction of the pond.

  Grendon did not see. He had run to the cart and was staring like Gregory in dismay at the deflated corpses. Neckland stared too, and was the first to find his voice.

  “Some sort of disease got 'em all, just like that! Must be one of them there new diseases from the Continent of Europe!”

  “It's no disease,” Gregory said. He could hardly speak, for his mind had just registered the fact that there were no bones left in or amid the deflated pig bodies. “It's no diseaselook, the pig that got away is still alive.”

  He pointed to the animal that had jumped from the cart. It had injured its leg in the process, and now lay in the ditch some feet away, panting. The farmer went over to it and lifted it out.

  “It escaped the disease by jumping out,” Neckland said. “Master, we better go and see how the rest of them is down in the sties.”

  “Ah, that we had,” Grendon said. He handed the pig over to Gregory, his face set. “No good taking one alone to market. 111 get Grubby to unharness the horse. Meanwhile, perhaps you'd be good enough to take this little chap in to Marjorie. At least we can all eat a bit of roast pig for dinner tomorrow.”

  “Mr. Grendon, this is no disease. Have the veterinarian over from Heigham and let him examine these bodies.”

  “Don't you tell me how to run my farm, young man. I've got trouble enough.”

  Despite this rebuff, Gregory could not keep away. He had to see Nancy, and he had to see what occurred at the farm. The morning after the horrible thing happened to the pigs, he received a letter from his most admired correspondent, Mr. H. G. Wells, one paragraph of which read: "At bottom, I think I am neither optimist nor pessimist. I tend to believe both that we stand on the threshold of an epoch of magnificent progresscertainly such an epoch is within our graspand that we may have reached the 'fin du globe' prophesied by our gloomier fin de siecle proph
ets. I am not at all surprised to hear that such a vast issue may be resolving itself on a remote farm near Cottersall, Norfolkall unknown to anyone but the two of us. Do not think that I am in other than a state of terror, even when I cannot help exclaiming "What a lark!' "

  Too preoccupied to be as excited over such a letter as he would ordinarily have been, Gregory tucked it away in his jacket pocket and went to saddle up Daisy.

  Before lunch, he stole a kiss from Nancy, and planted another on her over-heated left cheek as she stood by the vast range in the kitchen. Apart from that, there was little pleasure in the day. Grendon was reassured to find that none of the other piglets had fallen ill of the strange shrinking disease, but he remained alert against the possibility of it striking again. Meanwhile, another miracle had occurred. In the lower pasture, in a tumbledown shed, he had a cow that had given birth to four calves during the night. He did not expect the animal to live, but the calves were well enough, and being fed from a bottle by Nancy.

  The farmer's face was dull, for he had been up all night with the laboring cow, and he sat down thankfully at the head of the table as the roast pig arrived on its platter.

  It proved uneatable. In no time, they were all flinging down their implements in disgust. The flesh had a bitter taste for which Neckland was the first to account.

  “It's diseased!” he growled. “This here animal had the dis– ease all the time. We didn't ought to eat this here meat or we may all be dead ourselves inside of a week.”

  They were forced to make a snack on cold salted beef and cheese and pickled onions, none of which Mrs. Grendon could face in her condition. She retreated upstairs in tears at the thought of the failure of her carefully prepared dish, and Nancy ran after her to comfort her.

  After the dismal meal, Gregory spoke to Grendon.

  “I have decided I must go to Norwich tomorrow for a few days, Mr. Grendon,” he said. “You are in trouble here, I believe. Is there anything, any business I can transact for you in the city? Can I find you a veterinary surgeon there?”

  Grendon clapped his shoulder. “I know you mean well, and I thank 'ee for it, but you don't seem to realize that vetinaries cost a load of money and aren't always too helpful when they do come.”

  “Then let me do something for you, Joseph, in return for all your kindness to me. Let me bring a vet back from Norwich at my own expense, just to have a look round, nothing more.” “Blow me if you aren't stubborn as they come. I'm telling you, same as my dad used to say, if I finds any person on my land -I didn't ask here. I'm getting that there shotgun of mine down and I'm peppering him with buckshot, same as I did with them two old tramps last year. Fair enough?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “Then I must go and see to the cow. And stop worrying about what you don't understand.”

  The visit to Norwich (an uncle had a house in that city) took up the better part of Gregory's next week. Consequently, apprehension stirred in him when he again approached the Grendon farm along the rough road from Cottersall. He was surprised to see how the countryside had altered since he was last this way. New foliage gleamed everywhere, and even the heath looked a happier place. But as he came up to the farm, he saw how overgrown it was. Great ragged elder and towering cow parsley had shol up, so that at first they hid all the buildings. He fancied the farm had been spirited away until, spurring Daisy on, he saw the black mill emerge from behind a clump of nearby growth. The South Meadows were deep in rank grass. Even the elms seemed much shaggier than before and loomed threateningly over the house.

  As he clattered over the flat wooden bridge and through the open gate into the yard, Gregory noted huge hairy nettles craning out of the adjoining ditches. Birds fluttered every– where. Yet the impression he received was one of death rather than of life. A great quiet lay over the place, as if it were under a curse that eliminated noise and hope.

  He realized this effect was partly because Lardie, the young bitch collie who had taken the place of Cuff, was not running up barking as she generally did with visitors. The yard was deserted. Even the customary fowls had gone. As he led Daisy into the stables, he saw a heavy piebald in the first stall and recognized it as Dr. Crouchorn's. His anxieties took more definite shape.

  Since the stable was now full, he led his mare across to the stone trough by the pond and hitched her there before walking over to the house. The front door was open. Great ragged dandelions grew against the porch. The creeper, hitherto somewhat sparse, pressed into the lower windows. A movement in the rank grass caught his eye and he looked down, drawing back his riding boot. An enormous toad crouched under weed, the head of a still writhing grass snake in its mouth. The toad seemed to eye Gregory fixidly, as if trying to determine whether the man envied it its gluttony. Shuddering in disgust, he hurried into the house.

  Muffled sounds came from upstairs. "The stairs curled round the massive chimneypiece, and were shut from the lower rooms by a latched door. Gregory had never been invited upstairs, but he did .not hesitate. Throwing the door open, he started up the stairwell, and almost at once ran into a body.

  Its softness told him that this was Nancy; she stood in the dark weeping. Even as he caught her and breathed her name, she broke from his grasp and ran from him up the stairs. He could bear noises more clearly now, and the sound of cryingthough at the moment he was not listening. Nancy ran to a door on the landing nearest to the top of the stairs, burst into the room beyond, and closed it. When Gregory tried the latch, he heard the bolt slide to on the other side.

  “Nancy!” he called. “Don't hide from me! What is it? What's happening?”

  She made no answer. As he stood there baffled against the door, the next door along the passage opened and Doctor Crouchorn emerged, clutching his little black bag. He was a tall, somber man, with deep lines on his face that inspired such fear into his patients that a remarkable percentage of them did as he bid and recovered. Even here, he wore the top hat that, simply by remaining constantly in position, contributed to the doctor's fame in the neighborhood.

  “What's the trouble. Doctor Crouchorn?” Gregory asked, as the medical man shut the door behind him and started down the stairs. “Has the plague struck this house, or something equally terrible?”

  “Plague, young man, plague? No, it is something much more unnatural than that.”

  He stared at Gregory unsmilingly, as if promising himself inwardly not to move a muscle again until Gregory asked the obvious.

  “What did you call for. Doctor?”

  “The hour of Mrs. Grendon's confinement struck during the night,” he said.

  A wave of relief swept over Gregory. He had forgotten Nancy's mother! “She had her baby? Was it a boy?”

  The doctor nodded in slow motion. “She bore two boys, young man.” He hesitated, and then a muscle in his face twitched and he said in a rush, “She also bore seven daughters. Nine children! And they allthey all live.”

  Gregory found Grendon round the corner of the house. The farmer had a pitchfork full of hay, which he was carrying over his shoulder into the cowsheds. Gregory stood in his way but he pushed past.

  “I want to speak to you, Joseph.”

  “There's work to be done. Pity you can't see that.”

  “I want to speak about your wife.”

  Grendon made no reply. He worked like a demon, tossing the hay down, turning for more. In any case, it was difficult to talk. The cows and calves, closely confined, seemed to set up a per– petual uneasy noise of lowing and uncow-like grunts. Gregory followed the farmer round to the hayrick, but the man walked like one possessed. His eyes seemed sunk into his head, his mouth was puckered until his lips were invisible. When Gregory laid a hand on his arm, he shook it off. Stabbing up another great load of hay, he swung back towards the sheds so violently that Gregory had to jump out of his way.

  Gregory lost his temper. Following Grendon back into the cowshed, he swung the bottom of the two-part door shut, and bolted it on the outside. When Grendon ca
me back, he did not budge.

  “Joseph, what's got into you? Why are you suddenly so heartless? Surely your wife needs you by her?”

  His eyes had a curious blind look as he turned them at Gregory. He held the pitchfork before him in both hands almost like a weapon as he said, “I been with her all night, bor, while she brought forth her increase.”

  “But now”

  “She got a nursing woman from Dereham Cottages with her now. I been with her all night. Now I got to see to the farm– things keep growing, you know.”

  “They're growing too much, Joseph. Stop and think”

  “I've no time for talking.” Dropping the pitchfork, he elbowed Gregory out of the way, unbolted the door, and flung it open. Grasping Gregory firmly by the biceps of one arm, he began to propel him along to the vegetable beds down by the South Meadows.

  The early lettuce were gigantic here. Everything bristled out of the ground. Recklessly, Grendon ran among the lines of new green, pulling up fistfuls of young radishes, carrots, spring onions, scattering them over his shoulder as fast as he plucked them from the ground.

  “See, Gregoryall bigger than you ever seen 'cm, and weeks early! The harvest is going to be a bumper. Look at the fields! Look at the orchard!” With wide gesture, he swept a hand towards the lines of trees, buried in the mounds of snow-and– pink of their blossom. “Whatever happens, we got to take advantage of it. It may not happen another year. Whyit's like a fairy story!”

  He said no more. Turning, he seemed already to have forgotten Gregory. Eyes down at the ground that had suddenly achieved such abundance, he marched back towards the sheds.

  Nancy was in the kitchen. Neckland had brought her in a stoup of fresh milk, and she was supping it wearily from a ladle.

  “Oh, Greg, I'm sorry I ran from you. I was so upset.” She came to him, still holding the ladle but dangling her arms over his shoulders in a familiar way she had not used before. “Poor Mother, I fear her mind is unhinged withwith bearing so many children. She's talking such strange stuff as I never heard before, and I do believe she fancies as she's a child again.”