第46章 THE MELANCHOLY HUSSAR OF THE GERMAN LEGION(8)

He was a woman's man,they said,--supremely so--externally little else.To men be was not attractive;perhaps a little repulsive at times.Musician,dandy,and company-man in practice;veterinary surgeon in theory,he lodged awhile in Mellstock village,coming from nobody knew where;though some said his first appearance in this neighbourhood had been as fiddle-player in a show at Greenhill Fair.

Many a worthy villager envied him his power over unsophisticated maidenhood--a power which seemed sometimes to have a touch of the weird and wizardly in it.Personally he was not ill-favoured,though rather un-English,his complexion being a rich olive,his rank hair dark and rather clammy--made still clammier by secret ointments,which,when he came fresh to a party,caused him to smell like 'boys'-love'(southernwood)steeped in lamp-oil.On occasion he wore curls--a double row--running almost horizontally around his head.

But as these were sometimes noticeably absent,it was concluded that they were not altogether of Nature's making.By girls whose love for him had turned to hatred he had been nicknamed 'Mop,'from this abundance of hair,which was long enough to rest upon his shoulders;as time passed the name more and more prevailed.

His fiddling possibly had the most to do with the fascination he exercised,for,to speak fairly,it could claim for itself a most peculiar and personal quality,like that in a moving preacher.There were tones in it which bred the immediate conviction that indolence and averseness to systematic application were all that lay between 'Mop'and the career of a second Paganini.

While playing he invariably closed his eyes;using no notes,and,as it were,allowing the violin to wander on at will into the most plaintive passages ever heard by rustic man.There was a certain lingual character in the supplicatory expressions he produced,which would well nigh have drawn an ache from the heart of a gate-post.He could make any child in the parish,who was at all sensitive to music,burst into tears in a few minutes by simply fiddling one of the old dance-tunes he almost entirely affected--country jigs,reels,and 'Favourite Quick Steps'of the last century--some mutilated remains of which even now reappear as nameless phantoms in new quadrilles and gallops,where they are recognized only by the curious,or by such old-fashioned and far-between people as have been thrown with men like Wat Ollamoor in their early life.

His date was a little later than that of the old Mellstock quire-band which comprised the Dewys,Mail,and the rest--in fact,he did not rise above the horizon thereabout till those well-known musicians were disbanded as ecclesiastical functionaries.In their honest love of thoroughness they despised the new man's style.Theophilus Dewy (Reuben the tranter's younger brother)used to say there was no 'plumness'in it--no bowing,no solidity--it was all fantastical.

And probably this was true.Anyhow,Mop had,very obviously,never bowed a note of church-music from his birth;he never once sat in the gallery of Mellstock church where the others had tuned their venerable psalmody so many hundreds of times;had never,in all likelihood,entered a church at all.All were devil's tunes in his repertory.'He could no more play the Wold Hundredth to his true time than he could play the brazen serpent,'the tranter would say.

(The brazen serpent was supposed in Mellstock to be a musical instrument particularly hard to blow.)Occasionally Mop could produce the aforesaid moving effect upon the souls of grown-up persons,especially young women of fragile and responsive organization.Such an one was Car'line Aspent.Though she was already engaged to be married before she met him,Car'line,of them all,was the most influenced by Mop Ollamoor's heart-stealing melodies,to her discomfort,nay,positive pain and ultimate injury.

She was a pretty,invocating,weak-mouthed girl,whose chief defect as a companion with her sex was a tendency to peevishness now and then.At this time she was not a resident in Mellstock parish where Mop lodged,but lived some miles off at Stickleford,farther down the river.

How and where she first made acquaintance with him and his fiddling is not truly known,but the story was that it either began or was developed on one spring evening,when,in passing through Lower Mellstock,she chanced to pause on the bridge near his house to rest herself,and languidly leaned over the parapet.Mop was standing on his door-step,as was his custom,spinning the insidious thread of semi-and demi-semi-quavers from the E string of his fiddle for the benefit of passers-by,and laughing as the tears rolled down the cheeks of the little children hanging around him.Car'line pretended to be engrossed with the rippling of the stream under the arches,but in reality she was listening,as he knew.Presently the aching of the heart seized her simultaneously with a wild desire to glide airily in the mazes of an infinite dance.To shake off the fascination she resolved to go on,although it would be necessary to pass him as he played.On stealthily glancing ahead at the performer,she found to her relief that his eyes were closed in abandonment to instrumentation,and she strode on boldly.But when closer her step grew timid,her tread convulsed itself more and more accordantly with the time of the melody,till she very nearly danced along.Gaining another glance at him when immediately opposite,she saw that ONE of his eyes was open,quizzing her as he smiled at her emotional state.Her gait could not divest itself of its compelled capers till she had gone a long way past the house;and Car'line was unable to shake off the strange infatuation for hours.