Chapter 19. I-Spy-Hi!

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_ CHAPTER XIX. I-SPY-HI!

At certain decent and regular intervals of time (we need not indicate them more precisely) Mrs Polsue was accustomed to order in from the Three Pilchards a firkin of ale. A firkin, as the reader probably knows, is the least compromising of casks, and Mr Latter regularly attended in person to "spile" it. Mrs Polsue as regularly took care to watch the operation.

"The newspaper tells me," said she, "that this is likely to be a teetotal War."

"Tell me another, ma'am!" answered Mr Latter in his unconventional way.

"It would be an excellent thing for our troops in the field: and, if you ask my opinion, a little mortifying of the spirit would do the working classes of this country a deal of good. I take a glass of ale myself, under medical advice, because cold water disagrees with me, and I've never yet had the aerated drink recommended that wasn't followed by flatulence."

"There's neither mirth nor music in 'em" agreed Mr Latter.

"I do not seek either mirth or music in the little I make use of," Mrs Polsue corrected him; "and on general grounds I agree with total abstinence."

[In this the lady said no more than the truth. She had lamented, scores of times, an infirmity of the flesh which, forbidding her to chastise the indulgence of moderate drinking, protected a truly enormous class of fellow-creatures from her missionary disapproval. Often and often she had envied Charity Oliver, who could consume tea with hot sausages and even ham rashers. "To have the stomach of an ostrich must be a privilege indeed," she had once assured her friend; "though to be sure it tells on the complexion, forcing the blood to the face; so that (from a worldly point of view) at a distance a different construction might be put on it."]

"Tea with sausages, for instance!"

"The same here--Poison!" Mr Latter agreed, delicately indicating where "here" lay for him.

"My father ever kept a generous table, which he was in a position to afford." Mrs Polsue sighed, and added with resignation, "I suppose we must say that the fathers have eaten sour grapes and the children's teeth are set on edge."

"I wouldn' put it just like that, ma'am-not from what I've heard of the old gentleman's knowledge o' liquor."

"It will bear hardly on you, Latter, if the King and Parliament should put the country under Prohibition?"

["Drabbet the old cat!" murmured Mr Latter to himself. "She's fishing to get at my banking account, and a lot she'd interfere if 'twas the workhouse with me to-morrow."]

Aloud he said, rubbing his thumb on the edge of the augur and preparing to make incision upon the cask, "Well, ma'am, I reckon as the Lord will provide mortification enough for us before we're out o' this business, without our troublin' to get in ahead. The way I looks at it is, 'Let's be cheerful.' In my experience o' life there's no bank like cheerfulness for a man to draw upon, to keep hisself fit and industrious. What's more--if I may say it--'most every staid man, afore he gets to forty, has pretty well come to terms with his innards. He knows--if you'll excuse the figger o' speech, ma'am-- what's the pressure 'pon the boiler, an' how to stoke it. There's folks," said Mr Latter delicately, "as can't stoke hot tea upon sossiges: an' likewise there's folks as'll put forth their best on three goes o' whisky. So why not live an' let live?"

"They say," answered Mrs Polsue, "that the Czar has been advised to prohibit the sale of vodka throughout his vast dominion."

"What's the beverage, ma'am? I don't seem to know it."

"Vodka."

"Oh, well: very likely he has his reasons. . . . It sounds a long way off."

"But that," Mrs Polsue persisted, reproducing what she had assimilated from her newspaper,--"_that_ is what folks in Polpier cannot be made to understand. At this moment the Germans are nearer than we are to London, as the crow flies; and here are our working classes living on honey and roses, like a City of the Plain. What are our young men thinking about?"

"Why, ma'am," said Mr Latter, by this time busy with the cask, "they're takin' it slow, I'll own, an' they don't say much. To begin with, 'tis their natur'; an' next, 'tis a bit more they risk than you or me, if I may make bold to say so. Then there's the mothers an' sweethearts pullin' 'em back."

"Tut! If _I_ had a sweetheart--"

"Oh, certainly, ma'am!" agreed Mr Latter. "That if wars there had been, you'd have driven him to the nearest, I make no doubt at all; though your departed--if I may make so bold--was never the sort to hurt a fly. . . . Though, by God," wound up Mr Latter in an inaudible murmur as he blew the sawdust from the vent-hole, "the man must have had pluck, too, in his way!"

"There's worse bein' done by Polpier women than holding the men back. _I_ call it worse, at any rate, to send your wedded husband off to fight for his country and then pick up with another man for protection."

"Can such goin's-on go on in our midst, ma'am, and nothing about in the shape o' fire and brimstone?"

"I am not retailing gossip, Mr Latter. I tell you no more than was openly said to me, and brazenly, before witnesses, by one of the parties involved. As one of the Relief Committee appointed to see that none of our reservists' families are suffering want, I called the other day upon Samuel Penhaligon's wife. From the first the woman showed no sense of our respective positions; and after a question or two she became so violent that it drew quite a small crowd around the door. In the midst of her tirading out steps her partner--"

"What? Sam?"

"How should it be Samuel Penhaligon, when you know as well as I do that he's gone to the War? No: the man, I regret to say, was Nicholas Nanjivell."

"Nicky-Nan? . . . Oh, come, ma'am, I say! Why, what capers could _he_ been cuttin'?"

"I feel justified in speaking of him as her partner, seeing that he avowed as much. She was living under his protection, he said, and he would see that she didn't come to want. He had even the effrontery to assure me that he had made an arrangement with Penhaligon. But that, I feel sure, was a shameless lie, and my ears tingle to hear myself repeating it. 'Twas hard enough to keep one's temper with the man standing there and talking big as my lord, when the Almighty knows if for these two years he's seen the colour of a sovereign. . . . Eh? What ails you?" she demanded, as Mr Latter, who had been testing the point of the auger with his thumb, gave a sudden and violent start.

"Thank 'ee, ma'am--there's no blood drawn, as it happens," said Mr Latter, "but 'twas nibby-jibby,[1] the way you outed with it, and took me of a heap. If you'd ever happened now to stand up to a man and him gettin' his fist full on your wind--no, you _wouldn't_, o' course. But 'twas a knock-out. . . . 'Nicky-Nan,' says you, 'an'not a sovereign to bless hisself'--Why the man's fairly _leakin_ sovereigns!--sheddin' 'em about like fish-scales!"

"Mr Latter--are you _intoxicated?_"

"I wish I was, ma'am. 'Twould be some kind of an explanation, though mebbe not the most satisfactory. . . . When I tell you that the man walked into my bar, three days since, an' scattered sovereigns all over my floor! When I tell you he couldn' pull out a han'kerchief to blow his nose but he _sneezed_ sovereigns!"

Mrs Polsue gasped.

"--When I tell you," Mr Latter pursued, flourishing his auger and rapping it on the flat of his palm, "that one o' these soldiers--a Corporal too, and named Sandercock--was talkin' in my bar not two hours ago, an' says he, 'You've a man called Nanjivell lives here by the bridge.' 'Ay,' says I. 'Bit of an eccentric?' says he. 'How?' says I. 'The way he drops his gold about,' says the Corporal. 'Ho?' says I, prickin' up my ears, but not choosin' to be talkative with a stranger. 'So folks have been tellin' you that story already?' says I. '_Tellin_ me?' says he. 'Why, I see'd it with my own eyes!' 'Come,' thinks I to myself, 'this fellow's a bra' bit of a liar, wherever he hails from.' 'With my own eyes,' he repeats. 'I see'd 'en drop a sovereign in gold, up by that 'taty-patch of his where the Company's runnin' a trench: an' later on, as I started clearin' his crop, I came on two more in the soil, just where he'd been standin'. 'Hullo!' thinks I, 'this ben't the same story, but another one altogether.' I didn't say that aloud, though. What I said aloud was, 'You mustn't take notice of everything you see Nicky-Nan do. 'Tis only his tricks.' 'Tricks?' says the Corporal. 'If a man behaved like that down to Penryn we should call 'en an eccentric.' That's the tale, ma'am: an' the best part o' last night, what with puttin' two an' two together an' makin' neither head nor tail of it, I scarce closed an eye in my head."

"I saw the man,"--Mrs Polsue, after a sharp intake of breath, said it slowly in a hushed tone of surmise. "On Sunday, on my way home from service, I saw him hand the money over. I wasn't near enough to catch all that passed in the way of conversation. But the soldiers were delivering a quantity of potatoes they had dug up in the man's patch, and I concluded that Government, in its wasteful way, was paying him some sort of compensation over and above saving his crop for him. I remember saying to Miss Oliver that somebody ought to write to the War Office about it. . . . A man that already takes the taxpayers' money for pretending to be a Reservist, and then, when war breaks out, prefers to skulk at home in open sin or next door to it!"

"I wouldn't go so far as all that, ma'am," said Mr Latter. "In fact, I b'lieve you're under some mistake about Mrs Penhaligon, who is reckoned as vartuous a woman as any in the parish; while 'tis known that no doctor'd pass Nanjivell for service. But if you ask me, I've a great idea the man has come into a legacy, or else struck a store of gold--"

The landlord checked his tongue abruptly. Some phrase about a 'taty-patch floated across his memory. Had the phrase been his own, or Nicky-Nan's? He must give himself time to think this out, for it might well be the clue. The Corporal had spoken of finding two of the three sovereigns under the soil. . . . While Mr Latter's brain worked, he cast a quick glance at Mrs Polsue, in fear that he had gone too far.

But, although she had heard him, it happened that Mrs Polsue's mind was working on a widely divergent scent. She also was preoccupied with something that haunted her memory: a paragraph in that morning's newspaper. She, too, had no present intention of unveiling her surmise.

"Nonsense!" she said. "Folks don't happen on buried treasure in Polpier; and you can't have a legacy without its getting into the papers."

Mr Latter had no sooner departed than she put on her bonnet and paid a call on her friend Miss Charity Oliver.

"If Mr Pamphlett were only a magistrate--" said Mrs Polsue, after telling her story. "He was as good as promised it before the Unionists went out of office, as his services to the party well deserved. _This_ Government appoints none but its own creatures. . . . And Squire Tresawna living three miles away--with the chance, when you get there, of finding he's not at home--"

"You might send him a letter," suggested Miss Oliver.

"One has to be very careful what one puts down on paper," said Mrs Polsue. "I don't want to compromise myself unnecessarily, even for the sake of my country. A personal interview is always more advisable . . . But, apart from the distance, I don't fancy the idea of consulting the Squire. He dislikes hearing ill of anybody. Oh, I quite agree!--If he takes that line, he has no business on the Bench. What else is a magistrate _for?_"

"Well, dear, I don't know much about the law. But I've heard it laid down as a rule that every man is supposed to be innocent until you prove that he's guilty--"

"And I never could understand why," Mrs Polsue interjected; "seeing that five out of every six persons charged are found guilty. To my mind the law would be more sensible if it learnt by experience and took some account of the odds."

"There's a good deal to be said for that, no doubt," Miss Oliver agreed. "But the Squire--or any other magistrate, for that matter-- will look on the law as it stands; and if you are going to lay information against Nicholas Nanjivell--"

"Who said I wanted to lay information? Why should any private person undertake such unpleasantness, when it's the plain duty of the police, and in fact what they're paid for."

"Then why not leave it to Rat-it-all?"

"I believe I will, after giving him a hint. . . . But you don't seem to _see_, Charity Oliver!" her friend exploded. "What you are arguing may do well enough for ordinary times. These are not ordinary times. With all the newspapers declaring that our country is riddled with German spies--positively riddled--"

"I don't believe the man's capable of it, even if he had the will."

"Then, perhaps, if you're so clever, you'll suggest a likelier explanation?"

"He may have won the money in a lottery," Miss Oliver suggested brightly. "One of those Hamburg affairs--if you insist that the money's German."

"I don't insist on anything," snapped Mrs Polsue. "I only say, first, there's a mystery here, and you can't deny it. Secondly, we're at war,--you'll agree to that, I hope? That being so, it's everybody's business to take precautions and inform the authorities of _anything_ that looks suspicious. The more it turns out to be smoke without fire, the more obliged the man ought to be to us for giving him the chance to clear his character."

"Well, I hope you won't start obliging _me_ in that way," Miss Oliver was ever slow at following logic. "Because I never put a shilling into a lottery in my life, though I've more than once been in two minds. But in those days Germany always seemed so far off, and their way of counting money in what they call Marks always struck me as so unnatural. Marks was what you used to get at school--like sherbet and such things."

"Charity Oliver--may the Lord forgive me, but sometimes I'm tempted to think you no better than a fool!"

"The Vicar doesn't think so," responded Miss Oliver complacently. "He called this morning to ask me if I'd add to my public duties by allowing him to nominate me on the Relief Committee, which wants strengthening."

"Did he say _that?_" Mrs Polsue sat bolt erect.

"Well, I won't swear to the words. . . . Let me see. No, his actual words were that it wanted a little new blood to give it tact. I will say that Mr Steele has a very happy way of putting things. . . . So you really _are_ going to lay information, Mary-Martha? If you see your duty so clear, I can't think why you troubled to consult me."

"I shall do my duty," declared Mrs Polsue. "Without taking further responsibility, I shall certainly put Rat-it-all on the look-out."

That same evening, a little before sunset, Nicky-Nan took a stroll along the cliff-path towards his devastated holding, to see what progress the military had made with their excavations. The trench, though approaching his boundary fence, had not yet reached it. Somewhat to his surprise he found Mr Latter there, in the very middle of his patch, examining the turned earth to right and left.

"Hullo!" cried Nicky-Nan, unsuspecting. "_You_ caught the war-fever too? I never met 'ee so far afield afore. What with your sedentary figure an' the contempt I've heard 'ee use about soldiers--"

Mr Latter, as he straightened himself up, appeared to be confused. He was also red in the face, and breathed heavily. Nicky-Nan noted, but innocently misread, these symptoms.

"Good friable soil you got here," said Mr Latter, recovering a measure of self-possession. "Pretty profitable little patch, unless I'm mistaken."

"It was," answered Nicky. "But though, from your habits, you're about the last man I'd have counted on findin' hereabouts, I'm main glad, as it happens. A superstitious person might go so far as to say you'd dropped from heaven."

"Why so?"

Nicky-Nan cast a glance over his shoulder. "We're neighbours here?"

"Certainly," agreed Mr Latter, puzzled, and on his defence.

"Noticed anything strange about Rat-it-all, of late?"

"Rat-it-all?"

"You wish friendly to him, eh? . . . I ask because, as between the police and licensed victuallers--" Nicky-Nan hesitated.

"You may make your mind easy," Mr Latter assured him. "Rat-it-all wouldn't look over a blind. I've no complaint to make of Rat-it-all, and never had. But what's happened to him?"

"I wish I knew," answered Nicky-Nan. "I glimpsed him followin' me, back along the path; an' when I turned about for a chat, he dodged behind a furze-bush like as if he was pouncin' on some valuable butterfly. 'That's odd,' I thought: for I'd never heard of his collectin' such things. But he's often told me how lonely a constable feels, an' I thought he might have picked up wi' the habit to amuse himself. So on I walked, waitin' for him to catch me up; an' by-an'-by turned about to look for en. There he was, on the path, an' be damned if he didn' dodge behind another bush! I wonder if 'tis sunstroke? It always seemed to me those helmets must be a tryin' wear."

"I dunno. . . . But here he is! Let's ask him," said Mr Latter as Policeman Rat-it-all appeared on the ridge with body bent and using the gait of a sleuth-hound Indian. [There is no such thing as a sleuth-hound Indian, but none the less Rat-it-all was copying him.]

"Hullo, Rat-it-all!"

The constable straightened himself up and approached with an affected air of jauntiness.

"Why, whoever would ha' thought to happen on _you_ two here?" he exclaimed, and laughed uneasily.

"Sure enough the man's manner isn't natural," said Mr Latter to Nicky-Nan. "Speakin' as a publican, too," he confided, "I'd be sorry if anything happened to the chap an' we got a stranger in his place."

"What's the matter with 'ee, Rat-it-all?" asked Nicky-Nan sympathetically. "By the way you've been behavin' all up the hill--"

"You noticed it?"

"_Noticed_ it!"

"Rat it all!--I mean, I was hopin' you wouldn't. I begin to see as it will take more practice than I allowed." He cast a glance back at the ridge as he seated himself on the turf. "Either of you got a pinch o' baccy?"

"Then you _are_n't afflicted in any way?" exclaimed Nicky-Nan with relief. "But what was the matter with 'ee, just now, that you kept behavin' so comical?"

"Got such a thing as a match? . . . Well, I didn' believe it from the first. You must make allowance," said he as he puffed, "that a constable has communications in these times, of a certain nature, calculated to get on his Nerves. For my part, I hate all this mistrustfulness that's goin'. 'Confidence'--that's my motto-- 'as betwix' man an' man.'"

[1] A close shave. _

Read next: Chapter 20. Miss Oliver Proffers Assistance

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