Mockery Gap Read Online Free PDF Page B

for the lion roars in them …’
    Mr. Gulliver was an easy-tempered and lovable countryman, who believed everything; and now, after being told that something might come up out of the sea at any moment, or else a lion might roar in the lane, he looked at Mary as though she were the magnet that could draw out of holes in the earth and the deep places in the sea horrid naked monsters.
    Mary, whose mind was as simple as her father’s, when she heard that, wished to find Simon Cheney and to tell him about the lion; or else, if he wasn’t ready to go to the hill with her, she might first find Rebecca Pring or Dinah Pottle and tell them. ‘It’s a nice and a dreadful thing,’ thought Mary, ‘that there are beasts that go about in the earth and sea that can hurt a girl.’
    Mr. Pattimore held up his hand and looked at Mary. ‘Remember,’ he said, ‘don’t stray.’
    Mr. Gulliver’s farmhouse, the lesser one in Mockery village, was but a cottage drooping and crestfallen, next to which was a stable that the farmer’s old horses found suited to their winter need, and a cow stall that pleased the cows in a like manner. These abodes of wood and mud built so long ago and still remaining as a shelter to man and to cattle most surely proved that it’s the spirit of man that holdsup the house, and that all home-made things last the longest when left to themselves. Whenever one walks in any new place, entering perhaps with Mr. James Tarr and his friends, it is proper to greet each wayside post, each Mrs. Pottle and Mrs. Pring, each Dean and attic bed, as we come to them, in exact sequence. For events fierce or simple should lead us, rather than we them; for if we wish to know what our neighbours are doing, their little dogs, or the sound of their carpets being beaten, can tell us, if we are but willing to wait a moment or two, all the news.
    Sometimes a village—and this, a week after the visit of the field club, appeared to be true about Mockery—entirely hides its inhabitants. The rude children who usually rushed the lanes in pursuit of all naughtiness were hidden in school, and the March sun, a fine, splendid thing in its early glory, noticed only that Mary Gulliver was abroad.
    Mary indeed felt herself, as she always did, as prettily clothed; but as no one looked upon her as she came out of her door and gazed inquisitively about, she felt in that sudden solitude—for even Mrs. Pring wasn’t beside her gate—a sense of the danger that Mr. Pattimore predicted would lie in wait for her after her mother died.
    â€˜Something be about,’ thought Mary, ‘and that I do know.’
    She stood uncertainly upon the green, hoping to see a friendly figure or two moving or loitering, but no one was there.
    Mary hesitated; should she go and wake her father, who was asleep in his chair after his morning ploughing, and tell him that ‘there must be something else about if there wasn’t no people’?
    The mysterious presence of some hidden danger, that the intuitive feeling of a girl recognises ‘as being about,’ has a way of adding excitedly to her interest in herself—an interest that can only come by means of fear.
    Mary Gulliver’s interest in herself—she felt it first in her toes until it crept all over her body—began, not as one would have thought with young Simon Cheney’s discoveries, but with the visit of Mr. Pattimore after her mother’s funeral. Mary began to think then of herself as something, a collection of all sorts of wishes and hopes, that shouldn’t be looked at all over. And so, when she went to bed at night or rose in the morning out of the heavy sleep that her bedroom gave her with its tightly-closed windows, she would cleverly manage that one garment at least always covered her. When Mary washed she did it by halves, for it was always the whole of her, and not as Lear in the play saw the