Below The Mill Dam
by
“Book–Book–Domesday Book!” They were letting in the water for the evening stint at Robert’s Mill, and the wooden Wheel where lived the Spirit of the Mill settled to its nine hundred year old song: “Here Azor, a freeman, held one rod, but it never paid geld. Nun-nun-nunquam geldavit. Here Reinbert has one villein and four cottars with one plough–and wood for six hogs and two fisheries of sixpence and a mill of ten shillings–unum molinum–one mill. Reinbert’s mill–Robert’s Mill. Then and afterwards and now–tunc et post et modo–Robert’s Mill. Book–Book–Domesday Book!”
“I confess,” said the Black Rat on the crossbeam, luxuriously trimming his whiskers–“I confess I am not above appreciating my position and all it means.” He was a genuine old English black rat, a breed which, report says, is rapidly diminishing before the incursions of the brown variety.
“Appreciation is the surest sign of inadequacy,” said the Grey Cat, coiled up on a piece of sacking.
“But I know what you mean,” she added. “To sit by right at the heart of things–eh?”
“Yes,” said the Black Rat, as the old mill shook and the heavy stones thuttered on the grist. “To possess–er–all this environment as an integral part of one’s daily life must insensibly of course … You see?”
“I feel,” said the Grey Cat. “Indeed, if we are not saturated with the spirit of the Mill, who should be?”
“Book–Book–Domesday Book!” the Wheel, set to his work, was running off the tenure of the whole rape, for he knew Domesday Book backwards and forwards: “In Ferle tenuit Abbatia de Wiltuna unam hidam et unam virgam et dimidiam. Nunquam geldavit. And Agemond, a freeman, has half a hide and one rod. I remember Agemond well. Charmin’ fellow–friend of mine. He married a Norman girl in the days when we rather looked down on the Normans as upstarts. An’ Agemond’s dead? So he is. Eh, dearie me! dearie me! I remember the wolves howling outside his door in the big frost of Ten Fifty-Nine…. Essewelde hundredum nunquam geldum reddidit. Book! Book! Domesday Book!”
“After all,” the Grey Cat continued, “atmospere is life. It is the influences under which we live that count in the long run. Now, outside”– she cocked one ear towards the half-opened door–“there is an absurd convention that rats and cats are, I won’t go so far as to say natural enemies, but opposed forces. Some such ruling may be crudely effective–I don’t for a minute presume to set up my standards as final–among the ditches; but from the larger point of view that one gains by living at the heart of things, it seems for a rule of life a little overstrained. Why, because some of your associates have, shall I say, liberal views on the ultimate destination of a sack of–er–middlings don’t they call them—-“
“Something of that sort,” said the Black Rat, a most sharp and sweet- toothed judge of everything ground in the mill for the last three years.
“Thanks–middlings be it. Why, as I was saying, must I disarrange my fur and my digestion to chase you round the dusty arena whenever we happen to meet?”
“As little reason,” said the Black Rat, “as there is for me, who, I trust, am a person of ordinarily decent instincts, to wait till you have gone on a round of calls, and then to assassinate your very charming children.”
“Exactly! It has its humorous side though.” The Grey Cat yawned. “The miller seems afflicted by it. He shouted large and vague threats to my address, last night at tea, that he wasn’t going to keep cats who ‘caught no mice.’ Those were his words. I remember the grammar sticking in my throat like a herring-bone.”
“And what did you do?”
“What does one do when a barbarian utters? One ceases to utter and removes. I removed–towards his pantry. It was a riposte he might appreciate.”
“Really those people grow absolutely insufferable,” said the Black Rat. “There is a local ruffian who answers to the name of Mangles–a builder– who has taken possession of the outhouses on the far side of the Wheel for the last fortnight. He has constructed cubical horrors in red brick where those deliciously picturesque pigstyes used to stand. Have you noticed?”