Читать книгу The South Country онлайн

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What dreams are there for that aged child who goes tottering and reeling up the lane at mid-day? He carries a basket of watercress on his back. He has sold two-pennyworth, and he is tipsy, grinning through the bruises of a tipsy fall, and shifting his cold pipe from one side of his mouth to the other. Though hardly sixty he is very old, worn and thin and wrinkled, and bent sideways and forward at the waist and the shoulders. Yet he is very young. He is just what he was forty years ago when the thatcher found him lying on his back in the sun instead of combing out the straw and sprinkling it with water for his use. He laid no plans as a youth; he had only a few transparent tricks and easy lies. Never has he thought of the day after to-morrow. For a few years in his prime he worked almost regularly for one or two masters, leaving them only now and then upon long errands of his own and known only to himself. It was then perhaps that he earned or received as a gift, along with a broken nose, his one name, which is Jackalone. For years he was the irresponsible jester to a smug townlet which was privately amused and publicly scandalized, and rewarded him in a gaol, where, unlike Tasso, he never complained. Since then he has lived by the sale of a chance rabbit or two, of watercress, of greens gathered when the frost is on them and nobody looking, by gifts of broken victuals, by driving a few bullocks to a fair, by casual shelter in barns, in roofless cottages, or under hedges.