Volumes
The Lighthouse on Shivering Sand
Novels
Perris of the Cherry Trees
Chapter I
Pippany Webster, handy-man and only labourer to Abel Perris, the small farmer who dragged a bare living out of Cherry-trees, the little holding at the top of the hill above Martinsthorpe, came lazily up the road from the village one May afternoon, leading a horse which seemed as fully inclined to laziness as Pippany himself. Perris had left home for a day or two, and had apportioned his man a certain fixed task to accomplish by the time of his return: Pippany, lid it so pleased him, might have laboured steadily at it until that event happened. And for the whole of the first day and half of the next he had kept himself to the work, but at noon on that second day it was borne in upon him that one of the two horses, which formed the entire stable of the establishment, required shoeing, and after eating his dinner, he had led it down the hill to the smithy near the cross-roads in Martinsthorpe. There, and in the kitchen of the Dancing Bear, close by, where there was ale and tobacco and gossip, he had contrived to spend the greater part of the afternoon. He would have stayed longer amidst such pleasant surroundings, but for the fact that supper-time was approaching.
It was difficult, looking at man and horse, to decide as to which most suggested helplessness and incompetence. The horse showed itself to be a poor man's beast in every line and aspect of its ill-shaped, badly-fed body, in the listless droop of its head, in its ungroomed, rough-haired coat, in the very indecision with which it set down its oversized, sprawling feet. It had a dull, listless eye, the eye of an equine outcast; there was an evident disposition in it to stop on any provocation, to crop the fresh green of the grass from the broad stretches of turf on the wayside, to nibble at the tender shoots of the hedgerows, to do anything that needed little effort. It breathed heavily as it breasted the hill, following the man who slouched in front, his head drooping from his bent shoulders, his lips, still moist and sticky from the ale he had drunk, sucking mechanically at a foul clay pipe. He was a little more fully attired than the scarecrows in the neighbouring fields, but there was all over him the aimlessness, the ineptitude, the purposelessness of the unfit. His old hat, shapeless and colourless, shaded a face which suggested nothing but dull stupidity, and was only relieved from utter vacancy by a certain slyness and craftiness of expression. He shambled in his walk, and his long arms, the finger-tips of which reached below his knees, wagged and waved in front of him as he forged ahead, as though they were set loose in their sockets, his small, pig-like eyes fixed on the few
