A Maggot - John Fowles Read Free

broadened considerably. The track ran slightly
downhill across a long open meadow. In those days a single animal
dominated the agricultural economy of the West of England: the sheep
- and the needs of its pasturing. The huge hundred-acre sheep-run was
a much more frequent feature of cultivated landscapes than today's
densely hedged and enclosed patchwork of small fields. In the
distance could be seen the small town whose church tower they had
made out from the moorland above. Three or four flocks studded the
long meadow before them; and as many shepherds, monolithic figures in
cloaks of brown frieze, like primitive bishops with their crooks. One
had two children beside him. Their sheep, Exmoor Horns, were smaller
and scraggier than modern sheep, and tight-coated. To the travellers'
left, where the hillside came down to the valley bottom, was a
massive stone pen, and yet another further along.
    The younger gentleman reined in slightly and let the
older come beside him; and from then on they rode abreast, though
still without talking. The two shepherd children ran across the
closecropped turf to the side of the open track, ahead of the party,
and waited once they were there, with strangely intent eyes, watching
beings from fable, not reality, approach; and as if they imagined
themselves not seen in return. They made no greeting, this small
upstaring boy and his sister, both barefoot; and received none. The
younger gentleman ignored them completely, the elder gave them no
more than a casual glance. The manservant on the doubly laden horse
similarly ignored them, while the man in the scarlet coat seemed to
find himself, even before such a minute audience as this, put upon
dignity. He rode a little more erect, staring ahead, like a would-be
cavalry trooper. Only the young woman smiled, with her eyes, down at
the small girl.
    For three hundred yards the two children alternately
walked and trotted beside the travellers; but then the boy ran ahead,
for a first banked hedge and a gate now barred the road. He heaved it
off its latch, then pushed it wide back and open; and stood there,
staring at the ground, with a hand outstretched. The older gentleman
felt in his greatcoat pocket, and tossed a farthing down. The boy and
his sister both scrambled for it as it rolled on the ground, but the
boy had it first. Now once more they both stood, with outstretched
small arms, the palms upwards, heads bowed, as the rear of the
cavalcade passed. The young woman raised her left hand and took a
pinch of her spray of violets, then threw them at the small girl.
They fell across the child's arm, over her bent crown of no doubt
lice-ridden hair, then to the ground: where the child stared at them,
the arm dropped, nonplussed by this useless, incomprehensible gift.
    A quarter of an hour later the five came to the
outskirts of the small town of C-. It was town more by virtue of
being a few hundred inhabitants larger than any surrounding village
in this thinly populated area than in any modern sense of the term;
town also by virtue of an ancient charter, granted in palmier or more
hopeful days four hundred years before; and which still absurdly
permitted its somnolent mayor and tiny corporation to elect two
members to parliament. It boasted also a few tradesmen and craftsmen,
a weekly market, an inn beside its two or three ale- and ciderhouses,
and even an ancient grammar-school, if one can call school one aged
master, also parish clerk, and seven boys; but in all else it was a
village.
    Nothing, indeed, could have misled more than the
majestic high-pinnacled and battlemented tower of its medieval
church; it now dominated and surveyed a much less prosperous and
confident place than the one that had built it nearly three centuries
earlier, and stood far more relic than representative. No gentry
lived permanently there, though a manor house existed. The place was
too remote, and like all remote Britain then, without turnpike or
decent carriage-road. Above all