The Rebels

III

III

D

uring

these years we saw few people from the outside world of the street and the town, except occasional relatives or friends of our parents, or the scrubbing-women, and these last were usually either too downtrodden by life to open their mouths in friendly talk, or, contrarily, too forward and blasphemous for us children to be allowed access to them as they worked. I remember one of them, an old Irishwoman who always came to us keening in a black shawl and smelling of ale, a blackened clay stump between her fangs and her filthy toes showing through the holes in her patched canvas shoes. When she appeared on alternate Fridays mother always found me a job winding wool or unpicking old table-cloths in another room.

But there was one visitor to our fortress, an old scissors grinder, whose advent sent me hobbling to greet him whatever the weather and whose flow of coloured tales kept me at his knees, spellbound, my head full of words that would ring in my ears for a month until he came again.

I must have known this old man for three years and more, yet I never learned his name. To me he was always simply the Scissors-man and he would smile agreeably whenever I addressed him so.

Not all the time I knew him did he dress differently; always the same faded red worsted cap with the little tail sticking up from the top tantalisingly, the old black silk muffler and the greasy waistcoat with the deep bulging pockets, the rough untanned hide leggings about his thin bowed legs. His eyes always watered freely, pools of tears within their pink rims, but his merry wizened little red smile belied this apparent sorrow.

The Scissors-man would trundle his grinding-wheel through our green gates and up the path, to prop it against the pigsty wall. Then he would walk up to the kitchen, where the carving-knives and scissors would be laid out ready for him in a cloth on the window-sill.

I would wait until his wheel was spinning round well, then I would stroll down the path and sit on the wall beside him. After a while he would say, without even glancing at me, “Did I ever tell you about the fight I had off Cape Horn?”, or, “Did ye ever hear about the wild horse I rode through the River Trent?”

Then, without waiting for my yea or nay, he would begin. I truly believe that this old man made up these tales especially for my benefit; and what is more I do not think that he had the ghost of an idea what he would say next—until he had said it! Yet such was my childish thirst for adventure and information that I never once doubted his veracity, nor did I ever stop to consider the plausibility or otherwise of the incredible yarns he spun to me!

One of the most exciting and certainly the last tale I ever heard from his lips was about an old barn he had once slept in.

“Aye,” he said, his damp eyes set along a sparking scissors blade, “and a rare old barn it were, set down in the bottom of a deep old dell. A lonely old barn and a draughty old barn, but a barn full of hay, so a barn full o’ sleep. An’ I’d go to that barn when I passed that way and I’d open the door and I’d lie me down. Oh, many a night did I sleep in that barn, and the wee mice knew me and the grey rats knew me and the wobbling bats that fly in the night squeaked when they heard my hand opening the door!”

When he had got so far, he half-turned and glanced at me to make sure that this preamble had indeed caught my interest. Perhaps he smiled in his crafty old poet’s heart at my wide-open eyes and my sagging mouth! At any rate, anxious not to let the atmosphere, which he had been at such pains to create, evaporate, he went on at an excited gallop:

“But there was one night, lassie, a dark unfriendly bluster of a night, with the black clouds hanging over the dell as though they’d smother all in it, and a thin bleak wind coming on from the faraway Wall of China. I hurried to the barn and pushed my precious wheel inside. Then I ate my bit of snap, my bread-and-cheese, you understand, in the thick furry dark, and then snuggled my old bones a-down in the middle of the hay. And then the wind blew loud and the wet rain splashed down, beating like the rat-tat-tat of Satan’s skeleton on the thin rattling roof—but devil a bit did I care in that hay!

“Then at last from my first sleep I awoke and I listened, for another strange sound came from close by my side. Now, it wasn’t a groan and it wasn’t a snore; it was summat o’ both, in that dark, dark place. I lay still and listened and it came back again—and again, and again, and some more then again . . . So I thought, ‘That’s a man just like me, come in,’ I thought, ‘to keep his poor bones from the wind and the rain.’

“And I turned on my side for this stranger man smelled, not a smell that I knew, or a smell that I liked. So I turned on my side to get out o’ the smell and I went off to sleep, but a troubled old sleep. Then . . . God have mercy on me!”

And I nearly fell over the pigsty wall with fright at this sudden change in his voice!

“Do you know, the dawn broke in and I turned in my waking and stretched out my hand . . . But this man had no jacket. He hadn’t a shirt. And the hair on his face grew right over his ears! And he gave a great snuffle and then gave a snort and rolled up against me and stroked my cold chest. But he hadn’t any hands, and he hadn’t any thumbs, and he hadn’t any fingers—He’d got great long claws!

“Then he sat up in bed and he looked down at me, and the dawn came through and I looked up at him! Then I got up and ran and I left my wheel, and I ran and I ran to the top of the dell!

“Till a little dark man, with a red sash on, came out of the barn and he called me back! For ’twas only a bear, and a dancing-bear, that was bedded in hay of this old barn with me! A great Russian bear, the man said it was, that’d not hurt a fly, let alone a poor man! But I didn’t go back, I was shaking too much, so I pushed out my wheel and away I went!”

Then he looked up at me smiling and patted my arm, for my eyes must have been starting out of my head with anxiety and terror. And that night I screamed out in my sleep that the bear was chasing me and the old Scissors-man trying to trip me up so that the bear could catch me!

The next morning Phyllis, whose room was below mine, told mother all about it and I was forbidden to talk to the old man when he came again. Instead I had to sit in the garden when I heard his wheel come trundling up the path. He never seemed to understand why I left him alone like this, for he would often call out that he had new tales for me and although I was dying to hear them, I never heard another one after that tale of the bear in the barn. He must have thought I was rude, for I had to ignore him completely, Phyllis said, or I should not even be allowed to remain in the garden when he came but would have to go inside, into the gloomy house.