The Blood-Feud of Toad-Water

by H.H. Munro (SAKI)

　　

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The Cricks lived at Toad-Water; and in the same lonely upland spotFate had pitched the home of the Saunderses, and for miles aroundthese two dwellings there was never a neighbour or a chimney or evena burying-ground to bring a sense of cheerful communion or socialintercourse. Nothing but fields and spinneys and barns, lanes andwaste-lands. Such was Toad-Water; and, even so, Toad-Water had itshistory.Thrust away in the benighted hinterland of a scattered marketdistrict, it might have been supposed that these two detached itemsof the Great Human Family would have leaned towards one another in afellowship begotten of kindred circumstances and a common isolationfrom the outer world. And perhaps it had been so once, but the wayof things had brought it otherwise. Indeed, otherwise. Fate, whichhad linked the two families in such unavoidable association ofhabitat, had ordained that the Crick household should nourish andmaintain among its earthly possessions sundry head of domesticfowls, while to the Saunderses was given a disposition towards thecultivation of garden crops. Herein lay the material, ready tohand, for the coming of feud and ill-blood. For the grudge betweenthe man of herbs and the man of live stock is no new thing; you willfind traces of it in the fourth chapter of Genesis. And one sunnyafternoon in late spring-time the feud came--came, as such thingsmostly do come, with seeming aimlessness and triviality. One of theCrick hens, in obedience to the nomadic instincts of her kind,wearied of her legitimate scatching-ground, and flew over the lowwall that divided the holdings of the neighbours. And there, on theyonder side, with a hurried consciousness that her time andopportunities might be limited, the misguided bird scratched andscraped and beaked and delved in the soft yielding bed that had beenprepared for the solace and well-being of a colony of seedlingonions. Little showers of earth-mould and root-fibres went sprayingbefore the hen and behind her, and every minute the area of heroperations widened. The onions suffered considerably. Mrs.Saunders, sauntering at this luckless moment down the garden path,in order to fill her soul with reproaches at the iniquity of theweeds, which grew faster than she or her good man cared to removethem, stopped in mute discomfiture before the presence of a moremagnificent grievance. And then, in the hour of her calamity, sheturned instinctively to the Great Mother, and gathered in hercapacious hands large clods of the hard brown soil that lay at herfeet. With a terrible sincerity of purpose, though with acontemptible inadequacy of aim, she rained her earth bolts at themarauder, and the bursting pellets called forth a flood of cacklingprotest and panic from the hastily departing fowl. Calmness undermisfortune is not an attribute of either hen-folk or womenkind, andwhile Mrs. Saunders declaimed over her onion bed such portions ofthe slang dictionary as are permitted by the Nonconformistconscience to be said or sung, the Vasco da Gama fowl was waking theechoes of Toad-Water with crescendo bursts of throat music whichcompelled attention to her griefs. Mrs. Crick had a long family,and was therefore licensed, in the eyes of her world, to have ashort temper, and when some of her ubiquitous offspring had informedher, with the authority of eye-witnesses, that her neighbour had sofar forgotten herself as to heave stones at her hen--her best hen,the best layer in the countryside--her thoughts clothed themselvesin language "unbecoming to a Christian woman"--so at least said Mrs.Saunders, to whom most of the language was applied. Nor was she, onher part, surprised at Mrs. Crick's conduct in letting her hensstray into other body's gardens, and then abusing of them, seeing ashow she remembered things against Mrs. Crick--and the lattersimultaneously had recollections of lurking episodes in the past ofSusan Saunders that were nothing to her credit. "Fond memory, whenall things fade we fly to thee," and in the paling light of an Aprilafternoon the two women confronted each other from their respectivesides of the party wall, recalling with shuddering breath the blotsand blemishes of their neighbour's family record. There was thataunt of Mrs. Crick's who had died a pauper in Exeter workhouse--every one knew that Mrs. Saunders' uncle on her mother's side drankhimself to death--then there was that Bristol cousin of Mrs.Crick's! From the shrill triumph with which his name was draggedin, his crime must have been pilfering from a cathedral at least,but as both remembrancers were speaking at once it was difficult todistinguish his infamy from the scandal which beclouded the memoryof Mrs. Saunders' brother's wife's mother--who may have been aregicide, and was certainly not a nice person as Mrs. Crick paintedher. And then, with an air of accumulating and irresistibleconviction, each belligerent informed the other that she was nolady--after which they withdrew in a great silence, feeling thatnothing further remained to be said. The chaffinches clinked in theapple trees and the bees droned round the berberis bushes, and thewaning sunlight slanted pleasantly across the garden plots, butbetween the neighbour households had sprung up a barrier of hate,permeating and permanent.The male heads of the families were necessarily drawn into thequarrel, and the children on either side were forbidden to haveanything to do with the unhallowed offspring of the other party. Asthey had to travel a good three miles along the same road to schoolevery day, this was awkward, but such things have to be. Thus allcommunication between the households was sundered. Except the cats.Much as Mrs. Saunders might deplore it, rumour persistently pointedto the Crick he-cat as the presumable father of sundry kittens ofwhich the Saunders she-cat was indisputably the mother. Mrs.Saunders drowned the kittens, but the disgrace remained.Summer succeeded spring, and winter summer, but the feud outlastedthe waning seasons. Once, indeed, it seemed as though the healinginfluences of religion might restore to Toad-Water its erstwhilepeace; the hostile families found themselves side by side in thesoul-kindling atmosphere of a Revival Tea, where hymns were blendedwith a beverage that came of tea-leaves and hot water and took afterthe latter parent, and where ghostly counsel was tempered bygarnishings of solidly fashioned buns--and here, wrought up by theenvironment of festive piety, Mrs. Saunders so far unbent as toremark guardedly to Mrs. Crick that the evening had been a fine one.Mrs. Crick, under the influence of her ninth cup of tea and herfourth hymn, ventured on the hope that it might continue fine, but amaladroit allusion on the part of the Saunders good man to thebackwardness of garden crops brought the Feud stalking forth fromits corner with all its old bitterness. Mrs. Saunders joinedheartily in the singing of the final hymn, which told of peace andjoy and archangels and golden glories; but her thoughts weredwelling on the pauper aunt of Exeter.Years have rolled away, and some of the actors in this wayside dramahave passed into the Unknown; other onions have arisen, haveflourished, have gone their way, and the offending hen has longsince expiated her misdeeds and lain with trussed feet and a look ofineffable peace under the arched roof of Barnstaple market.But the Blood-feud of Toad-Water survives to this day.

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