The Moor - Laurie R. King [64]
"Oh, that's quite all right, Mrs Holmes," she said cheerfully. "I'll have my boy run right down with it. However, I think Mr Holmes is still away as well. In London, you know."
It was news to me, but I was not about to admit it. I rang off, shaking my head at a bush telegraph system that surpassed anything I had ever met in rural Sussex.
I found a room in a pleasant old inn in Mary Tavy (not, incidentally, the same inn where Holmes and I had lunched following our encounter with the Scottish cattle) and fell into bed for three or four hours when I first arrived. I woke hungry and went down for some dinner and what proved to be a very interesting evening with the locals—interesting not for the information received, which was nil, but for the insight.
It took me a little while to realise, in the course of conversing about local politics and the fiends in Whitehall, that there were two very separate groups of men in the pub: those who lived in the village, and the men who lived up on the moor. Slowly, through glances and silences and the sorts of tiny smiles that may as well be winks, I came to see that as far as the moor men were concerned, the villagers were a separate and, regrettably, slightly inferior race.
My first inkling of this attitude came when, to my surprise, I was not greeted by name, or even with the stance of familiarity that had been characteristic of the last few days. At first, I assumed with pleasure that I had found a roomful of natives who had not heard of me; then I began to notice the covert glances and secret smiles of the quieter, more roughly dressed members of the drinking community. One by one these half dozen men would catch my eye, touch his hat brim briefly or raise his glass in my direction, and turn back to his conversation.
It was a very peculiar and strangely warming sensation, being part of a secret society. Somehow, the fact that my fellow conspirators were impoverished, unwashed, and possibly illiterate farmers and shepherds was more amusing than anything else. Certainly they seemed to find it so, judging by the twinkle in a number of eyes.
Halfway through my second pint, one of the young men I had been talking with reached into a pocket and stretched out his arm to set something on the table beside my glass: a tin whistle. I looked at it, and then looked up into his weathered young face with the secret smile in the back of his eyes.
"I heerd tell you play'n," he said.
I shook my head and moved the slim instrument back onto his side of the table.
"The noises I make with it couldn't be called playing, I'm afraid."
"Baint what us hears." He might as well have winked and nudged me in the ribs with his elbow, but I refused to blush at the memory of the evening in Two Bridges to which he was no doubt referring. He picked up his small flute, flipped it over and caught it, put it to his mouth, and started to play. When the first sprightly notes hit the smoke-filled air, the moor men glanced at one another, and then at the town dwellers, and one by one they cleared their throats and began to sing.
What I heard that night was a last vestige of the dying art of the Dartmoor songmen. They began with a cheerful tune and the story of a monstrously lazy young man whose father, a cutter of green broom, threatens to burn the house down around his son's ears if the lad doesn't go out and work. The young man hauls himself out to the woods, succeeds in cutting a respectable bundle of the broom, and on his way home is spotted by a wealthy widow. She is smitten, and instantly proposes marriage. He reluctantly agrees to sacrifice his career