An angry shout struck up to me just now from a side alley below the green, where some of the poorest and prettiest of the cottages are jumbled together. It is strange how far sounds carry on these still, rainy mornings. The shout was followed by the shrill tones of a woman, and the thud of something being hurled into the street. Presently, through the alley-mouth, appeared a man with a basket on his back. He came up the street through the rain, bent and lurching, his black beard wagging with imprecations he was at no pains to subdue. It was Darkie, the tramp, fern-seller, ne’er-do-well; a familiar figure in Windlecombe. As usual, he was pretty far gone in liquor. He took the middle of the way, addressing himself to all passers-by indiscriminately.
‘Wimmin,’ he cried, in his fine deep voice with the violoncello quality in it, ‘wimmin? ye may live ’til crack o’ Doom, sir, and then never larn how to take ’em! “I’ll ha’ two!” sez she, only laast Saddaday, ma’am, “an’ bring another brace, Darkie,” she sez, “when ye happens along agen,”—all as nice as nice could be, sir. An’ now, soon as ’a sot eyes o’ me, ’a hups wir futt, an’—’
He turned the corner of the house, and I heard no more.
I wonder, now, how Darkie fares this weather in his Downland eyrie. It has always been a mystery in Windlecombe as to where he passes his nights. At all times, winter or summer, he is to be met with, tramping up the lane towards the Downs; using the last light of day apparently in putting himself as far as may be from the chance of a night’s lodging; and, in the early mornings, you meet him trudging down again from the heights, his basket full of odd hedgeside garnerings for sale in the town. The mystery is a mystery to me no longer, although it was quite by chance I lit upon him in his secret nook.
Coming over the Downs one winter’s morning, I saw a thin blue spiral of smoke rising from the very centre of a great patch of gorse on a hill-side; and threading my way through the wilderness, bent on elucidating this phenomenon, I came at length upon a queer little scene. At the mouth of a sort of cave cut deep into the solid green heart of the gorse thicket, burned a little fire of sticks; and over it hung a pot that gave forth a savoury steam. Behind the fire lay Darkie on a snug couch of hay and old sacking, fast asleep, with a pipe in his mouth. Evidently he had dozed off in the midst of his preparations for a meal. I took one swift look round his castle, noting various old tins, old coats, and the like hanging over his head; several sugar-boxes filled with odd lumber behind him; and a shepherd’s folding-bar—a deadly weapon, twenty pounds or so of solid iron—lying conveniently to his hand; and then I crept away, as silently as I had come. Not that I feared any violence from him. In all the years we had been acquainted, I had never known him harm a mouse. But many was the time I had turned him away from my own door, unceremoniously enough; sometimes with hard words, once or twice, indeed, with threatenings of his natural enemy, the constable. And I feared now reprisals of a kind that would hurt almost as much as the folding-bar heftily wielded—I feared to see Darkie stagger to his feet and pull off to me one of my own long-discarded caps, hear him give me generous and courtly words of welcome, and a kind look out of his mastiff’s eyes, making me as free of his snug, green-roofed dwelling as I had so often made him free of the street.