DOI Artikel:
Dowie, Ménie Muriel: My Note-Book in the Weald
DOI Seite / Zitierlink:https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.25498#0055
By Menie Muriel Dowie 51
the fermented liquors they are given ; they are fat and stupid with
beer. They must be, or they wouldn’t pull the loads they do ! ”
Like most brewers, Quarpitt is rather a fine-looking person,
and I fell into conversation with him with some pleasure ; his great
bass rolled and rumbled like his own waggon, and as he stood, he
seemed to be trying to look as much like a vat as possible.
“ Oh, yes,” he said, “ don’t come every day, b’long way ; an’
there’s fine doin’s forward to-night. I’m ’ere to take four eigh-
teens ” (he pronounced it four-ray-teens), “ down to the cricket
field to-night, to be give away by ”—he waved a large freckled
arm and hand towards the Inn door—“ the good gentleman as has
now left us.”
“Four eighteens !” I repeated with an air of amazement, not
knowing in the least what that was, but judging that when the
Brewer assumed the manner popular at his Harmony Club and
fell unwittingly into the phrase of a funeral oration, something
important must be toward.
I knew more later.
No sooner was my simple tea begun than the boys, who earlier
on had adorned the lych-gate, came to lean upon the wood rail
that surrounds the cellar opening before my window, to crack
nuts thoughtfully upon the flags, and to keep up a tapping of a
maddening intermittence upon the wooden cellar-flap. I gathered
from their conversation that the band was expected.
Very soon a gentleman strolled up, the pocket of whose black coat
bulged suggestive of a cornet and, indeed, when he turned, the
nozzle of the instrument disclosed itself, nestling in the groove
worn by a week-day foot-rule, which had disappeared with the
rest of a joiner’s trappings for the nonce.
I was buried in the unsatisfactory tannin of a second cup,
when a sound so horrid and inexplicable that fear alone prevented
The Yellow Book—Vol. XII. d my
the fermented liquors they are given ; they are fat and stupid with
beer. They must be, or they wouldn’t pull the loads they do ! ”
Like most brewers, Quarpitt is rather a fine-looking person,
and I fell into conversation with him with some pleasure ; his great
bass rolled and rumbled like his own waggon, and as he stood, he
seemed to be trying to look as much like a vat as possible.
“ Oh, yes,” he said, “ don’t come every day, b’long way ; an’
there’s fine doin’s forward to-night. I’m ’ere to take four eigh-
teens ” (he pronounced it four-ray-teens), “ down to the cricket
field to-night, to be give away by ”—he waved a large freckled
arm and hand towards the Inn door—“ the good gentleman as has
now left us.”
“Four eighteens !” I repeated with an air of amazement, not
knowing in the least what that was, but judging that when the
Brewer assumed the manner popular at his Harmony Club and
fell unwittingly into the phrase of a funeral oration, something
important must be toward.
I knew more later.
No sooner was my simple tea begun than the boys, who earlier
on had adorned the lych-gate, came to lean upon the wood rail
that surrounds the cellar opening before my window, to crack
nuts thoughtfully upon the flags, and to keep up a tapping of a
maddening intermittence upon the wooden cellar-flap. I gathered
from their conversation that the band was expected.
Very soon a gentleman strolled up, the pocket of whose black coat
bulged suggestive of a cornet and, indeed, when he turned, the
nozzle of the instrument disclosed itself, nestling in the groove
worn by a week-day foot-rule, which had disappeared with the
rest of a joiner’s trappings for the nonce.
I was buried in the unsatisfactory tannin of a second cup,
when a sound so horrid and inexplicable that fear alone prevented
The Yellow Book—Vol. XII. d my