Authors: T. F. Powys
M
R. TURNBULL’S legs, that bore without any weakness his sixty years—although their present after-luncheon inclination was to allow his body to recline—Mr. Turnbull’s legs
conveyed
him toward the Town Gardens. Here, as elsewhere, a certain assembly of drifting clergy had been blown by the winds of the Visitation. There were also within the spiked gates young ladies, little children, and nurse-maids,
Mr. Turnbull moved along one of the more sheltered walks of the gardens and shamelessly stumbled upon the Rev. Edward Lester, who was sitting upon a lonely seat, very much at his ease, between two girls.
Mr. Turnbull did not take off his hat. The look of the young ladies did not warrant such a proceeding. It was necessary, however, to do something.
‘Do sit down,’ Mr, Lester said mincingly. ‘These are two young people of my parish—one of the girls of our club and her friend,’ he added in a lower voice to the vicar.
Mr. Turnbull shook their hands, at the same time getting very red in the face, for he saw that one of the girls was Alice. However, being grave and kindly, he sat down beside the other. Who she was, he did not know, but he thought he had seen her before.
The girls sat perfectly silent, like two little
white mice disturbed at their play by an old barn owl.
Edward Lester, seeing things were not so bad as they might have been—after all, he had not been interrupted by a woman,—began to talk again, in not exactly his sermon manner, to his companion, this time Alice. She was quite recovered from her troubles, and was older, plumper, prettier, and dressed like a young lady.
Things always came to Mr. Turnbull slowly, but at that moment his mind jumped—it jumped to a sunny afternoon just before the Oxford ‘Commem.,’ forty years behind him. It landed him in one clear, daring swing of time on to the green lawns by the Cherwell, and it led him along by the river under newly budding trees, with his companion, young Rushbrook. They walked along beside the delightful river, and paused to watch two laughing girls playing catch with a penny ball near the bank. Sometimes one or other of them would throw too high, and the other would lean gracefully backwards to try to catch it that way. The girls’ skirts, under normal conditions when they were standing up, reached down to their ankles, but during the evolutions of the game of catch, a pleasant vision of a gracefully rounded leg, and even a sparkle of white, had sometimes appeared. The ball, having been thrown by an unlucky chance into the Cherwell, it was perfectly natural and right that Turnbull should fish it out again.
So far Mr. Turnbull had been danced by his thoughts, and at that tantalizing point they brought him back with a jump again to the present, and showed him his companion, whose serge skirt hardly reached her ankles.
The Rev. Edward Lester, having caught a glimpse of Mr. Turnbull’s mouth and knowing that look, suggested that they might go and view the roses at the other end of the gardens. There were two paths. It was quite a natural chance when they came to them that Mr. Lester and his companion should go one way, and Mr. Turnbull and his companion the other.
The Rev. Hector Turnbull looked down
sideways
at his companion. For all he cared, the roses might have bloomed in Gilgil, for Mr.
Turnbull
sat down upon the first empty seat that was hidden from the world. If he could have seen through two rather thick hedges of box, carefully trimmed by the corporation gardener, he would have beheld Mr. Lester taking his place upon a seat exactly resembling theirs, with Alice at his side.
Mr. Turnbull’s curiosity was the first of his needs that he always liked to satisfy, and, even upon this occasion, he began to ask questions. He set himself to find out all about the young girl who sat next to him, and who had started his mind travelling so far in the past. Her name was Annie, and besides being the niece of the small farmer at Shelton, she was the town
cousin of the vicar’s late maid, Alice, and it was with her that the latter was staying. Annie’s mother kept a fried-fish shop near the great bridge at the bottom of the town. And Annie remarked gaily:
‘You ought to come and see the fish jump up in the river after the flies.’
The vicar looked at his watch. Time had passed, but there was yet time for a little walk before the churchwardens’ dinner that he had promised to attend with Mr. Tasker.
Human affairs vary. Our friend Mr.
Turnbull
, instead of, with a greedy hand, locking in his study drawer a fat dividend, was now
wondering
how he could prevail upon a young lady of nearly seventeen to accept a pound, so that she might buy a new Sunday hat. Near the little narrow gate beside the river, Mr. Turnbull decided that the best way was simply to give her the pound-note, saying while he gave it, in a fatherly way, that he expected she might like a new hat with a feather of Saxe blue—the only colour that his fatherly mind could think of just then.
They watched the river a little longer, while a fat trout rose and gobbled up a little brown fly.
In the largest commercial room of the best hotel in the town, the churchwardens gathered for their annual dinner. They sat like gate-posts, painted black, very still and very silent, except that one farmer remarked to his neighbour:
‘Going to rain, bain’t it?’
And the other replied:
‘No rain to-night, Master Williams.’
The old lawyer, that master mind who
understood
not Lord Bullman alone, but his daughters and his tenants, perceived one clergyman amongst the gathering. Raising himself a little above his chair, he invited Mr. Turnbull to say the grace.
Mr. Turnbull did not, for a moment, obey. Somehow or other, after the excitement of the afternoon, the proper and suitable grace escaped his memory. He could only remember the most simple form: ‘For what we are about to receive——’
The dinner proceeded, the light of gratified sensation shining in the eyes of the eaters. Each farmer, working his jaws so well, carried with him the heaviness, the density, and the hungry greed of his fields. They were peasants, but peasants with the greed and cunning of the tradesmen. They bore the head of the
shopkeeper
, and the body and legs and belly of a field labourer.
Some of the sly ones, the long-heads and
greybeards
, with shifty bloodshot eyes, were more shopkeeper than rustic, and these were even bold enough to hold a kind of conversation with the old lawyer, who beamed upon them all.
‘I lost sight of you, sir, up the town,’ said Mr. Tasker to his vicar.
The proceedings of the day ended with this dinner. All the clergy, except Mr. Turnbull, had long before returned to their homes, where a kindly tea awaited them, and a drawing-room, and a meekly dressed lady perhaps doing her weekly accounts.
Mr. Tasker and his vicar, the last of the
black-coated
ones, drove away from the town. During the drive home they had not much to say to one another. The vicar of Shelton spent the time in thought. Going down the hills, he
remembered
; going up the hills, he feared for his salvation. As the horse walked up one long hill, Mr. Turnbull carefully premeditated a reply with which to meet her question—an answer to her natural request as to how he had spent his day.
Sitting at last in his own chair—he always used the one with the low back—and helping himself to a shining onion, just taken out of the pure malt vinegar with a spiked fork, he said to the expectant Mrs. Turnbull:
‘It has been a tiring day to me, my dear. I’m sorry to say the fees were higher, owing to a new extra payment. For some years it has been dropped, and now it is—woe to a poor clergyman of sixty!—now it is insisted upon again. I was obliged this time to pay a pound more.’ Mr. Turnbull looked down at the half onion left upon his fork. He then glared at Henry.
‘I am afraid I must deduct that pound from
your allowance.’ And the vicar of Shelton crunched the other half of the onion.
He had begun to give Henry one pound a quarter, because Henry rang the church bell, read the lessons, taught the Sunday school, cut the churchyard grass, weeded the paths, and read the Bible every day to a dumb imbecile.
N
EVILLE desired very much to see his sister before he died. It was the thought of seeing her that kept him alive. He also longed to explain to Henry what he felt about the world he was leaving so soon.
‘Upon the world,’ he said one day to Henry, ‘thought has written the word “man” in blood.’
‘Thought and pain,’ he said at another time, ‘are the two terrible wheels of the world.’
Less and less, during his last week, did Neville cling to his old thoughts: they broke away from him like withered leaves.
‘I have been too much of a mystic,’ he said. ‘I would like to throw myself upon a splendid hill and lie and bleach in the sun. I have lived behind the curtain of the Church. In there the light of Christ was dimmed. I would even now laugh, and catch joy and throw it into the sun. I would like to get again the joy of reaching down over the bank of a river to pick a purple flower.’
Neville talked strangely at times as the days passed, and the fever drew his life away.
‘Perhaps, after all,’ he said one day, smiling, ‘Jesus may have been only a flower of light, a purple flower growing by the side of the river of life and loved by a tiny boy. Perhaps the boy who loved the flower was hated by the other children. They saw him one day stroking the leaves of the Christ-plant by the water’s edge, and
together they rushed out and trampled down the plant with their heavy boots, and they spat upon the little lonely boy and chased him to his home. And in his own home his mother beat him for bringing riverside mud into the cottage.’
Then Neville slept, and Henry walked home thinking of what he had said.
Nearly two months passed, and the ragged grey coat of autumn, rough and wet, covered the land. For almost three weeks Henry did not ‘slack down,’ as his father called it, to South Egdon. The reason being that Edith and the new servant, a sturdy maiden of thirty winters from the village, had both caught influenza and were too ill to leave the servants’ bed. Instead of waiting upon others they themselves had to be tended, and the doctor had a chance to tell his wife about the old-fashioned furniture in the servants’ bedroom.
To act as nurse to the two servants and as a help in the house, Mrs. Turnbull had opened her doors to a large woman whose duty in private life was to sweep out the National School, and whose pleasure was to break, out of the vicarage hedge, sticks with which to boil her tea-kettle. Besides nursing the maids, there were other household duties to be done. Therefore it was needful, for the proper well-being of the house, that Henry should give his help.
He began at six o’clock by lighting the kitchen fire. After doing this he swept out the study,
drawing-room, and breakfast-room, lit two more fires, laid the plates for breakfast, got in the coals, sifted the cinders, cleaned the knives and boots, helped to make the beds and looked after the lamps, and then he went into the garden to fetch the vegetables, and the large woman cooked the dinner. In the afternoons and evenings another long array of tasks was set before him, and he, with a quiet aptitude, performed them.
While he was busy, his thoughts were with his friend, and when, at last, the servants were better—it was almost December—Henry, fearing that he might be too late, hurried down the Egdon road. Upon turning the corner near Neville’s trees, he almost ran into a lady, a lady who—he could hardly believe his own eyes—was mending the vicarage front gate. She had already, in a business-like way, fastened into the post two hinges to hang the gate upon. The trouble with the gate had all been because the hinges had broken away from the post. The lady had hammered them in again in a new place, and all things were ready for lifting the gate into position. Henry came forward, took hold of the heavy end and helped to set the gate up, and had the satisfaction of seeing it swing wide open and then shut again without let or hindrance.
Henry’s first impression of the lady was that he had never before seen any one look so clean in his life. She seemed to him like a mountain pool, clear and deep, showing a pure stratum of
shining rock, above which the water lay serene and deep—and alone. The lady was pale; she looked neither old nor young, and had, Henry felt, been always like that. Around her, and part of her, was the deep wisdom of hidden pools.
Henry had guessed who she was, and the two walked along a new-trodden narrow path to the house. She told him that her brother was in great pain, and that the end was not far off. In the house she settled herself upon a chair with six cushions, and took up a little dark-red book while Henry went to see his friend. As soon as Henry was gone, the little book sank upon Molly Neville’s lap. Deep within her she was feeling, touching, and loving the mystery of death.
Henry found Neville far worse than he had expected. He found him in torment. But he was still nobly aware that he lived. Pain, fearful grinding pain, was with him. He lay with his eyes closed, he could only move his hand to meet Henry’s. For a while the two sat silent. Then Neville, with an effort, told Henry that his sister had been there three days. He had one trouble.
‘It hurts her so,’ he said, ‘to see me like this, in pain.’
Henry bent over the white hand of his friend and cooled its burning heat with his tears.
On his way downstairs he met the
housekeeper
. She was dressed a little better than usual, but looked as though she had lost
something
.
Henry opened the study door where he had left Molly. She was lying just as he had left her upon her store of cushions, fast asleep. Henry saw that her forehead was white and noble like her brother’s. He quietly left the house, and, overcome by sorrow, walked back to his home.
Two days after this visit, at fifteen minutes past one, the vicarage hour for dinner, the gong reverberated, round, under, and about the hall chairs, certain overcoats, and an old silver dish for callers’ cards. And yet Mr. Turnbull did not appear. For ten minutes the leg of roast sheep remained under its leaden cover, and Mrs. Turnbull and Henry sat in silence and waited. The warning click of the gate prepared them for the coming of the master of the house.
Mr. Turnbull’s manner of walking up the drive showed the state of his feelings. If the news was a death in the village he crunched the gravel slowly and warily so that the whole of his foot, beginning at the heel, pressed the ground. When, at the village shop, the story that Alice had gone off came to his ears, he returned home putting little jumps and half leaps into his walk, rather like a young raw soldier changing his step. If Mr. Turnbull happened to have heard of the birth of a love-child in the village, the reverend gentleman’s heels hardly touched the ground, although his stride shortened into the walk of an ordinary person.
After hearing the gate click, Henry watched
his father coming round the curve of the drive. Mr. Turnbull held his umbrella by the middle, and tapped the gravel rather than crunched it as he walked. His overcoat was loosely buttoned and swayed behind him, and his knees, in his black trousers, preceded his feet. The same kind of a step carried Mr. Turnbull upstairs and then brought him down again, and placed him in the chair before the covered carrion. He looked at his son from under his eyelids, and cut out slices of flesh from the sheep’s leg.
‘Edith, some more potatoes for the master.’
It was just then that the news came out. The father looked at the son and said:
‘I have seen Chaffin, and he told me that Mr. Neville has destroyed himself.’
Henry continued quietly to eat his dinner. Somehow or other this news took away, rather than increased, his sorrow at the death he knew would have to be.
Mr. Turnbull helped himself to the potatoes, and having a shrewd idea from the steam that they were hot, he expanded his story.
‘Chaffin has seen the housekeeper. The woman thinks that his own sister bought the poison. Mr. Neville’s mind was clear—he was sane. The doctor believes that he might have lived for months. A terrible disgrace for the Church.’
The potatoes were cooler now.
The figure about which Mr. Turnbull had spoken lay very still. Death was with him.