Mockery Gap Read Free Page B

simply.
    Mr. Roddy shook his head and came down; he saw the vital necessity, if Miss Ogle continued to come to their meetings, of impressing her with the real seriousness of these occasions.
    The most simple way to do this appeared to Mr. Roddy to be to make himself look grand in her eyes.
    In order to do so in the way that he thought to be most telling, Mr. Roddy picked up from the grass a handful of little white shells.
    These little shells he showed to Miss Ogle. ‘They are called by my name‚’ he said; ‘they are Roddites, and I am the discoverer of them.’
    Miss Ogle looked at the shells carelessly. ‘Pretty Roddites‚’ she said, and then without a word to the discoverer of them she called out, ‘And now I’ve seen the Roddites I want Mr. James Tarr to tell me about that little church in the valley.’
    Mr. Tarr sprang to the top of the mound again in three leaps.
    ‘Mockery Church‚’ he said, taking out some notes, though written ones, as Mr. Roddy had done, and pointing down into the valley with them, ‘is a cruciform edifice of stone; it possesses an embattled tower that contains only one bell, while the church itself affords one hundred and eighty-two sittings.
    ‘The word Mockery is derived, of course, from Monksbury, and that word explains itself.’
    ‘It doesn’t explain itself to me.’ interrupted Miss Ogle, who was the only listener who had really listened to Mr. Tarr.
    Mr. Tarr stepped down; to be interruptedat all was more than he could usually bear, but to be interrupted by a lady who had only joined the club a week before, and didn’t belong to any county family, was no petty rudeness but a high aggravation.
    And now something occurred that went near to breaking up the party, out of sheer horror at the incident; for Miss Ogle mounted the tumulus in the place of Mr. Tarr, and said, excitingly waving her walking-stick, that she wanted to speak too.
    When he saw that she really meant to address them, Mr. Roddy began collecting the Roddites again, and making a little heap of them that he intended to carry home with him later; while Mr. James Tarr, whose temper was of another colour, said boldly to those near to him that ‘he would throw Miss Ogle into the sea, if the sea had only the decency to flow up to the tumulus as it once did one hundred million years ago.’
    When Miss Ogle had reached a point in her discourse and was talking about the edible octopus, a fish that a poor fisherman of Mockery, Mr. Dobbin, had once offered her—when trying to sell his catch in the town—for a shilling, she happened to look below her and saw that the hill was deserted.

Chapter 3
T HE N ELLIE-BIRD
    T HE Assyrian, when he came down ‘like a wolf,’ so the poet says, could never have shown such a spying audacity as our learned society when it strayed about, each member going his or her own way, in the little village called Mockery Gap.
    They found the country people, as Miss Ogle said during the drive home, ‘so nice to talk to, and so ready‚’ the lady added, ‘to show you the way to the church.’
    Having never been visited before so wholeheartedly by the learned, the people of Mockery had lived for generations most patiently, and, when the passions from on high or from below allowed them time, both mildly and contentedly . But now, alas! all—at least for a few months—would be different, the old order giving place to new error, and merely because it wasn’t in Mr. James Tarr’s habit of life to leave well alone.
    Mr. James Tarr was the last gentleman in the world, with the exception perhaps of one other, to allow any earthly paradise, where wild roses scent the air in June, to remain without ambitions as every real paradise should.
    Mr. Tarr liked to be remembered as one who carried with him, and handed it free and gratis to those he met, a fine zeal in the matterof discoveries. And not discoveries alone, for Mr. Tarr, when he sniffed the air of a new village, would delight to darkly