A figure in an indefinite tweed suit, carrying brown-paperparcels. That is what we met suddenly, at the bend of a muddyDorsetshire lane, and the roan mare stared and obviously thought ofa curtsey. The mare is road-shy, with intervals of stolidity, andthere is no telling what she will pass and what she won't. We callher Redford. That was my first meeting with Judkin, and the nexttime the circumstances were the same; the same muddy lane, the samerather apologetic figure in the tweed suit, the same--or verysimilar-- parcels. Only this time the roan looked straight in frontof her. Whether I asked the groom or whether he advanced theinformation, I forget; but someway I gradually reconstructed thelife-history of this trudger of the lanes. It was much the same, nodoubt, as that of many others who are from time to time pointed outto one as having been aforetime in crack cavalry regiments andnoted performers in the saddle; men who have breathed into theirlungs the wonder of the East, have romped through life as through acotillon, have had a thrust perhaps at the Viceroy's Cup, and donefantastic horsefleshy things around the Gulf of Aden. And then agolden stream has dried up, the sunlight has faded suddenly out ofthings, and the gods have nodded "Go." And they have not gone. Theyhave turned instead to the muddy lanes and cheap villas and themarked- down ills of life, to watch pear trees growing and toencourage hens for their eggs. And Judkin was even as these others;the wine had been suddenly spilt from his cup of life, and he hadstayed to suck at the dregs which the wise throw away. In the daysof his scorn for most things he would have stared the roan mare andher turn-out out of all pretension to smartness, as he would havefrozen a cheap claret behind its cork, or a plain woman behind herveil; and now he was walking stoically through the mud, in a tweedsuit that would eventually go on to the gardener's boy, and wouldperhaps fit him. The dear gods, who know the end before thebeginning, were perhaps growing a gardener's boy somewhere to fitthe garments, and Judkin was only a caretaker, inhabiting a portionof them. That is what I like to think, and I am probably wrong. AndJudkin, whose clothes had been to him once more than a religion,scarcely less sacred than a family quarrel, would carry thoseparcels back to his villa and to the wife who awaited him andthem--a wife who may, for all we know to the contrary, have had afigure once, and perhaps has yet a heart of gold--of nine-caratgold, let us say at the least-but assuredly a soul of tape. And hethat has fetched and carried will explain how it has fared with himin his dealings, and if he has brought the wrong sort of sugar orthread he will wheedle away the displeasure from that leaden faceas a pastrycook girl will drive bluebottles off a stale bun. Andthat man has known what it was to coax the fret of a thoroughbred,to soothe its toss and sweat as it danced beneath him in the gleeand chafe of its pulses and the glory of its thews. He has been inthe raw places of the earth, where the desert beasts have whimperedtheir unthinkable psalmody, and their eyes have shone back thereflex of the midnight stars--and he can immerse himself in thetending of an incubator. It is horrible and wrong, and yet when Ihave met him in the lanes his face has worn a look of tediouscheerfulness that might pass for happiness. Has Judkin of theParcels found something in the lees of life that I have missed ingoing to and fro over many waters? Is there more wisdom in hisperverseness than in the madness of the wise? The dear godsknow. I don't think I saw Judkin more than three times all told, andalways the lane was our point of contact; but as the roan mare wastaking me to the station one heavy, cloud-smeared day, I passed adull-looking villa that the groom, or instinct, told me wasJudkin's home. From beyond a hedge of ragged elder-bushes could beheard the thud, thud of a spade, with an occasional clink
andpause, as if some one had picked out a stone and thrown it to adistance, and I knew that HE was doing nameless things to the rootsof a pear tree. Near by him, I felt sure, would be lying a largeand late vegetable marrow, and its largeness and lateness would bea theme of conversation at luncheon. It would be suggested that itshould grace the harvest thanksgiving service; the harvest havingbeen so generally unsatisfactory, it would be unfair to let thefarmers supply all the material for rejoicing. And while I was speeding townwards along the rails Judkin wouldbe plodding his way to the vicarage bearing a vegetable marrow anda basketful of dahlias. The basket to be returned.