Mockery Gap by T. F. Powys Read Free Book Online

haven’t seen anything to-day, have you,’ she asked even more timorously, ‘coming up out of the sea?’
    â€˜Yes, there be something about,’ replied Mary, ‘for fisherman’s chimney do smoke where there bain’t no one.’
    Miss Pink looked towards the sea. A column of white smoke rose up into the still evening air from the deserted cottage.

Chapter 6
G OD S IMON
    O FTEN in the country a young farmer’s son, whose parents are rich, is so fattened and reddened by praise and good living that he becomes a sort of man-god, spruce and verdant, and worshipped by all.
    Young Simon Cheney, though possessed of quite a large share of unpleasant maxims and manners, was certainly set up in Mockery—his red, youthful face puffed and plumed with gross conceit, his light-coloured hair brushed and curled by his hard-worked mother, who continued even when the boy was twenty to tend him at bedtime—as a fine Phallic symbol for the young ladies to admire and for Mr. Caddy to talk about.
    Such a god, whose business was pleasure, and whose pleasure was a girl, had waited for Mary upon the hill; and now, when she had let the horse go and went mildly to Simon, he, who had waited a little impatiently for her, having watched her loitering in the lane, at once threw her down upon the grass near to the green mound all amongst the Roddites.
    Had Mr. Roddy been watching he would indeed have been sadly disturbed at such a shameless despising of his grand discovery. But Mary not being Mr. Roddy, had only one fear in her mind, and that was that she mightsee the nakedness of the sky; otherwise she was pleasantly smiling and was never more happy. She shut her eyes, for this garment of darkness can at any moment—and Mary had used it before—become a shield safe against all the elemental nakedness of sea, sky, or man.
    ‘Oh,’ gasped Mary, when she was a little recovered from her excitement because of having been thrown down so rudely amongst the Roddites—‘Oh, ’tis well the sun be sunk down, for ’e do stare so in daytime.’
    God Simon rose lazily from the grass and threw a white chalk stone at the horse who was feeding near by and taking, which was wise of him, no notice of the grassy happenings.
    Mary sat up and looked down upon Mockery; she saw all nature—after a little shaking of herself and brushing that she hurriedly completed with fast, ready fingers—there below her now as completely clothed.
    It wasn’t our pretty god’s habit to loiter beside a girl after having amused himself with her, as more ordinary folk would do, leading this aftermath of maidenhood with whispered promises home to her cottage. But Simon, when he had entertained himself for a few moments with stoning the horse, left Mary and strode home along the lane thinking of Dinah Pottle.
    Mary didn’t mind his going, she was usedto that; and she hung up Dick’s halter upon the gate, and looked up at the sky with less timidity now because a decent small cloud in shape like a loin-cloth had crept over it.
    Mary, who was blushing and happy, followed Simon Cheney down the lane and watched him enter the large gate and go towards his father’s house that stood up finely, beside the large trees that looked sombre and mighty under the darkening sky.
    As the milk-cans behind her cottage were nicely garnished and set in a row, Mary Gulliver supposed that her father was resting in his armchair looking, as he always did now of an evening , at the map of the world that had been given to him by Mr. James Tarr.
    Mr. Gulliver’s ideas of virtue, and the awfulness of any outbreak into nakedness or naked happenings, such as a child that is born to the unmarried, were certainly as strong as his daughter Mary’s.
    ‘If anything ever happened,’ he would tell her, ‘if thee ever did do any of they wicked things that parson did tell we of, ’tis best to drown thee self.’
    But though he had such ideas, Mr. Gulliver was born of the softest kind