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Out in the wide places it is like a smile on a dead face, this snow hush, grateful that peace can be so utter. It is the silence of a broody God, and out of that frozen pause, in a house tucked up to the sills and down to the eaves, Sara Turkletaub was prematurely taken with the pangs of childbirth, and in the thin dawn, without even benefit of midwife, twin sons were born.
At first she firmly checked the broody instincts by shutting them callously under boxes despite pecks and loud protests. Later, when their mood refused to change, she loved to prepare them soft nests in boxes, and to imprison them there until they took kindly to their seclusion.
But he seemed to get a new idea about me; he came back to the steps again, and watched my brush for a while, as if he was thinking, in a broody sort of way, of throwing up his practice and going in for house-painting. Then he said, slowly and deliberately: "'If she the girl had lived, we might have tried to fix it up quietly. That's what I was hoping for.
In this way Clare persistently wooed her in undertones like that of the purling milk at the cow's side, at skimmings, at butter-makings, at cheese-makings, among broody poultry, and among farrowing pigs as no milkmaid was ever wooed before by such a man. Tess knew that she must break down.
At this hour London's droning voice has abated to a deep, hoarse snore; London has become a great, broody giant taking rest that is troubled by snatches of wakefulness; London's grimy, lined face shows new wrinkles of shadow; and new and unexpected clumping of colors in monotone and halftone appear.
"That's all right," she presently said. "He asked us, you know, but we can't. I hear that Vera Nugent is to be hostess. I rather liked her, though of course you can never tell how such copious conversation will wear. I don't think she stopped talking for a single moment. Laurence thought he was going mad. It makes him broody, you know, like a hen.
If you treat kids proper they mostly raise themselves, which is jest Natur'. Don't worry yourself, 'less they fall into a swill-barrel, or do some ridiculous stunt o' that natur' an' don't worry them. Ther' ain't no sense to anybody goin' around with notions they ken flap their wings, an' cluck like a broody hen; an' scratchin' worms is positive ridiculous.
You're as moody and broody a lad as never I set eyes on yet. I tried to assure him that I meant no harm; but he only said coldly, 'Maybe not, maybe not! There, get thy supper, get thy supper; and then thou canst sulk to thy heart's content again.
And there were his friends: the humorous, genial, deboshed, yet ever-kindly Phineas; dear old Mo Shendish, whose material feet were hankering after the vulgar pavement of Mare Street, Hackney, but whose spiritual tread rang on golden floors dimly imagined by the Seer of Patmos; Barrett, the D. C. M., the miniature Hercules, who, according to legend, though, modestly, he would never own to it, seized two Boches by the neck and knocked their heads together till they died, and who, musically inclined, would sit at his, Doggie's, feet while he played on his penny whistle all the sentimental tunes he had ever heard of; Sergeant Ballinghall, a tower of a man, a champion amateur heavy-weight boxer, with a voice compared with which a megaphone sounded like a maiden's prayer, and a Bardolphian nose and an eagle eye and the heart of a broody hen, who had not only given him boxing lessons, but had pulled him through difficult places innumerable ... and scores of others.
"Wheer 's his ticket to then?" "Why, it isn't Miller Lyddon's young maid, surely!" burst out the fisherman; "not Phoebe grown to woman!" A Devon accent marked the speech, suddenly dragged from him by surprise. "Ess, I be Phoebe Lyddon; but don't 'e fall 'pon each other again, for the Lard's sake," she said. "The boy 's as tetchy in temper as a broody hen.
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