Mr. Tasker's Gods (15 page)

W
ITHIN a tiny cottage on Meerly Heath, about three miles from Shelton and one mile from any other house, Molly Neville was making tea for herself and for Henry Turnbull, who had that afternoon called upon her.

Soon after her brother’s death, she had collected all the little odds and ends of property that lay about in the vicarage, and, together with what was in the bank, bought an annuity, receiving therefrom the sum of sixty-five pounds a year. With this income of about one pound a week, she retired to the heath cottage. Henry giving her all the help he could, she soon got the cottage into liveable condition.

While with Molly, Henry’s troubles, that clung to him elsewhere, fled. She had about her a stilling atmosphere of absolute contentment. It was not by any means the contentment of one who has taken his neighbour’s ox, and, after shutting his own gate upon the beast, returns to his fire, stretching out his legs at ease. Molly’s was the contentment of one who saw a shining path to follow, and found within it more and more delight.

When near her, Henry felt other realities, other truths, other joys, than any that he had ever before beheld. There was about her a clearness of effect like the delicate curve of a snowdrift. The clear brightness of her pathway made it
impossible for her ever to lose the way. If the brute passions of men ever crossed her light, she looked right through them, and her light shone still.

Henry was delightfully at his ease with her, and loved her cheerful serenity. He knew that nothing in the world could ever make her different. He sat with her, enjoying every tick of the clock, with the background of the heath and the near approach of his lonely walk to enhance the
lamplight
and the warmth. Henry lingered with her and listened to the wind moaning about the cottage, and smoked cigarettes. He was as happy with her as he had been with her brother.

He was trying to prepare her for the inevitable rudeness of the people, a rudeness that might, at any moment, become persecution. She would most likely have to put up with it from the two villages. They had already begun to talk of her living in that cottage. She had felt a warning, too. She expected that those shadows round that table, those shadows whose questions she had answered, would encircle her again. She feared that they might surround Henry as well. She knew how the snarling dogs of public opinion could stretch their foul jaws to bite any who offended them. Unluckily Henry and she
belonged
to the type that do offend the people.

‘I’m going to live in this cottage. There always has been a witch here.’ Molly knew as well as Henry that she was putting herself into
a sort of danger, and that she would most likely be hooted at and even stoned by the ill-mannered, spoilt children of the two villages: these little amusements of the people not being as extinct as our gentle reformers seem to think them.

For the time being, the villagers had lost sight of Molly in the excitement of the change of vicars. She had, while the people were so absorbed, slipped into that little cottage on Meerly Heath, that so exactly suited her. How long she would be permitted to remain there with sound windows, she did not know. If the people thought she had come down in the world and was without friends, they would soon proceed, according to their well-established custom, to cast mud, and to hide sharp stones in the mud.

She felt them coming with their sly lying tongues, their almost impossible ignorance, and soon their open insults. She knew how they would delight to cast her at the feet of the new clergyman, an offering of human flesh to their god. She might then become his slave and help him in the righteous cause of keeping the people down. The people preferred things like that. They liked to know how hard the rich worked at keeping them down. It shows what fine fellows the rich are, and how brave!

Why should this lady stay alone and read, and not even once put her white ringless hand into their mud-pie? Let her come out and go round collecting for some charity: the people love that
kind of beggar. Why does not this lady do her proper work? What right has she to live alone on Meerly Heath with her money? Was it not her business in life to help the Church and to make clothes for their children?

‘Can you depend upon the lady who owns your cottage?’ Henry asked.

Molly replied that she did not know the owner of the cottage, she had made arrangements about going in by post. But she understood from the small heath farmer, who knew everything, that the owner of the house, Mrs. Netley, used formerly to come down there every summer from
Portstown
, but that Miss Rose had told him when she was last that way that she was much too busy to ever think of a holiday, and that was the reason, no doubt, why the cottage was to let. Molly gathered, she said, from the talk of the farmer that the mother and daughter were not the kind of people to listen to the complaints of the villagers even about a supposed murdress.

Henry had walked over to see Miss Neville on the afternoon after his father’s funeral. He was glad that his father was dead. After the funeral he could not help feeling a longing for clean air, so he had taken his stick and had gone out on to the heath.

A little later at Shelton vicarage, when the Will was read, the two elder brothers looked blank. The Rev. John had given much thought to this matter. What he had expected his father to
leave was, at the very least, Four Thousand Five Hundred Pounds. It turned out to be only Three Thousand Eight Hundred. His father had spent money. How had he spent money? He had dipped his hand into his capital and had taken out, once or twice, a big plum, and these plums had certainly not been handed to their mother to make jam of. Whom had he given all that money to? Not to the S.P.C.C.—surely it could not have been that? Was it worse than that? The Rev. John was aware that only a certain kind of curate could have a certain kind of pleasure without giving plums for it. Older gentlemen had of necessity to buy what they enjoyed.

W
ALKING along to the church, before that hour of reckoning, the Rev. John had had certain fears. In the merry cage of the Rev. John’s mind there were divers little whistling robins that led him sometimes a pretty dance. But their antics were his own affair, whereas in the matter of fathers, the Rev. John’s ideas were very pronounced. He allowed them, these fathers, a certain latitude at Oxford. They could, in those old days, if it pleased them, loiter for an hour or two on their way to college from a lecture, and they might sometimes be permitted in the Lent term to visit queer addresses in the town. One visit, with the expenditure of five shillings, should provide them with at least a dozen different stories to boast about in
smoking-rooms
afterwards. But when they had children of their own it was the proper time, the Rev. John thought, to give up all that, and instead, quietly, peacefully, and surely, to round in the belly before the ever-recurring roast joint, and to learn, from long sitting at it, to eat home-made jam.

‘Capital,’ the Rev. John believed, should come next in the celebrated Thirty-nine Articles to the one about God, and should be looked upon and learned by heart with all the proper reverence of a good-humoured sinner. And what, after all, had fathers to do with anything else?

And then came his fears.

Was that short holiday after his Christmas duties, during which he met the girl Annie, the only trip of the kind his father had taken since the Rev. John had last seen him safe at home? As he thought about it, the funeral procession had turned the corner by Mr. Hodge’s house. He was a retired dealer in cattle. The blinds were down. Mrs. Hodge liked to show a proper respect. The Rev. John caught a passing glimpse of the head of the general servant peeping round the corner of one of the blinds.

Since his marriage the Rev. John was
compelled
to be occupied, rather too much occupied, with ‘the dear girl’ and her affairs. He had not had the time to notice the doings of his father. He did remember hearing, however, that his father had been to London two or three times about his teeth. He had felt at the time that his father was involving himself in needless expense, and that his old false teeth ought to have lasted out his day—which, due praise being given to the dentist at Maidenbridge, they really had done.

The moving of the procession took time, and the Rev. John could recall certain things. He remembered once, while walking through Maidenbridge with his father, he had noticed, with a certain surprise not unmixed with
apprehension
, and a kind of ‘what will happen if he does it again?’ feeling, that his father’s glance had gone upward to a window out of which leaned a servant-maid, to catch, no doubt, poor,
hard-worked girl, a whiff of afternoon air. Seeing Mr. Turnbull looking up at her, she actually had had the cheek to smile. There was nothing in her smile. It might have been a prime minister’s. His only suspicion was, that his respected father might, before then, some time or other in his already quite long life, have looked above the ground-floor level for smiles! The son knew the danger of looking at windows. Why had not his father directed his gaze
somewhere
else in the street?

The Rev. John had not suspected any very heinous crime about the money. He knew his father’s habit was always to keep a balance of Forty-five Pounds in the bank. Even if the teeth had been rather a trouble—but why a London dentist?—it would only mean that, written in a neat, bank clerk’s hand, a balance of Thirty-five Pounds would be set at the top of a page in his father’s bank-book.

Passing the village shop—the blinds were down there too—the Rev. John decided that the holiday at Portstown might have been an isolated instance of his father’s flight to sin. Virtuous John bethought him of arguments concerning abandoned young girls, old in sin, who waylay nice old clean-shaven gentlemen, and pull them along by their coat-tails into some neighbouring night-club, and there, in the full bright light of electricity, wickedly rob them of their characters and their gold watches.

The Rev. John was not a sorrowful figure even then. If it were only a matter of just a few pounds, no more than a slight difference on the wrong side in the usual bank balance, the
good-natured
John would forgive the rest. He felt, himself, the possibility that home-made jam might, in some seasons of the year, taste a little sour. It was, then, only just this one doubt, this one hint at Portstown, that was all the trouble. Why then, by all means, let the matter drop.

The Rev. John’s mind had hinged itself, during that homely walk, rather too long upon the topic, whether or not his father had done it more than once. It was the kind of subject that he could not very well dismiss from his thoughts, and naturally, during that walk there was nothing to interrupt the decent regular flow of his reasons, that threw light, as their custom was, on one side and then on the other side of his doubt. The Rev. John wanted to leave it at that, at the window, or better still, at the dentist’s. It must all come out when the amount of money that he had left was known. If the money was any less than John knew it ought to be, that simple fact would prove that the servant girl had been a true sign, a sign that he who knew the world ought to have heeded at the time. If, on the other hand, the money was all there except a pound or two, it would show that his father had only looked up, perhaps, because he wished to sneeze.

Before being called in to take up their load the bearers had stood in a row, very meek and harmless, against the vicarage wall. They were dark-clothed, nervously afflicted men, standing ceremoniously with their backs almost rubbing the stone wall. The people of the village watched them, to see, no doubt, as though any one could not guess, what was to be their next move. A whisper came from a little child:

‘They be the bearers.’

This child’s private knowledge very properly gave her the right to know what they were. She had seen her father, a poor widowed man with a black drooping moustache, amongst them, and she had felt the household trouble that her sister, who was lame, had had that morning to contend with, in going from house to house to borrow his clothes, having to take a coat here and a pair of trousers there, and a hat much too big from old Jonner. If she failed to collect the proper broadcloth, in what other way could her father earn three shillings and sixpence, the price of an adult bearer? And how could he without that three shillings and sixpence pay off the debt that he owed to the landlord for beer?

The people and the bearers had been looking at each other for about an hour when a black figure, in a high hat, arrived at the vicarage gate. The row of men shuffled shamefacedly along the drive to commence the walk that was to give the Rev. John such beautiful thoughts.

In a country village the proper pace to walk at a funeral is set by the bearers, A hearse is almost unknown. The distance being two or three hundred yards from the vicarage to the church, the bearers intended to take their time over it. There was, indeed, no need for them to hurry. Their pay for that day, at least, was assured to them, and after all was said and done, Mr. Turnbull was not so heavy a weight as a sack of beans that any one of them could carry up the eight steps of Farmer Dane’s granary stairs. The bearers saw that their duty to their God and their duty to themselves were in perfect harmony. They could, at the same time, please religion and take their walk easily,
enjoying
themselves, while they gave the simple people of Shelton a longer treat than they had expected.

The last bearer on the left-hand side of the dead, just in front of the Rev. John, had taken the precaution, since his coat was his own, to run his thumb over the bottom of the coffin as it rested upon the two hall chairs, so that he might prove to himself that the varnish did not come off. He had been caught like that once and had never forgotten it. Had it been any other of the bearers who dared to test in this rude way the workmanship of the undertaker, who had himself given this elegant piece of furniture its coat of varnish, he would have been, more than likely, sent about his business. But no one
could remember a Shelton funeral without this particular bearer being present. Unless he were ready with his strong right shoulder, it almost seemed that Death himself would not have dared to enter the village.

This man’s name was ‘Duggs.’ He worked as a labourer upon one of the large farms, but his fancies led him to other tasks as well. He was the best man in the village at skinning a horse. And in all the country-side no one, except Mr. Tasker, understood pigs, their manners, and customs, and life history, better than he did. When an old blind cow was lugged out of a ditch by the neck, Duggs was there to help. And when the cow was cleverly strangled in the process, it was Duggs who cut its head off, to bleed it, with his own pocket-knife.

‘It must have been only once,’ the Rev. John thought at that moment. And from a dull depression his mind glided imperceptibly into gladness. His pace unthinkingly increased. He was beguiled by his pleasant conclusion into looking, not at the back of Duggs, but at the sky. Unwittingly, the Rev. John dragged his mother too near the procession. She, poor lady, saw nothing. Then he realized, his wits returning to him, that he had kicked something with the toe of his boot. What he had kicked, was Duggs. Walking all at once faster than he had any business to do, faster than any proper mourner would have done, he had kicked the right ankle bone of
Mr. Duggs with a sharp tap, and the Rev. John’s boot was none of the smallest.

This unforeseen incident was one of those rude little hits that life gives when we least expect them, turning us from calm, quiet, steady Christians into outrageous and blood-thirsty Turks! It was just the kind of untoward incident that ought not to have happened at that moment when the strained gravity of man was performing wonders. That kick ought to have found a more proper home in the world. It ought to have been born and bred and delivered in New York or Bombay. Anywhere except just outside Shelton churchyard.

Mr. Duggs could not tell who had kicked him. It was quite impossible for him just then to look round. Mr. Duggs was not used to that kind of treatment at his funerals, and all Shelton funerals were his. He would have as soon expected to be kicked by a skinned horse.

‘Why, they might have upset,’ so Mr. Duggs, in his black coat, expressed it at the inn that evening, ‘the whole box of tricks.’

One impossible act brings forth another. Never before in the local history of funerals had the bearers dared to make the smallest sound, but with the pain of that kick still ringing in his ankle, Mr. Duggs emitted a grunt, a gruff, ugly, unmistakable grunt, the meaning and sentiment of which was clear to all, the sound coming, as it well might, from the very bottom of his boots,
where the evil deed had been done. In his mouth it became a distinctly uttered ‘Damn!’

Even though the hidden rumblings of his rage crushed the word a little, the immortal English ‘damn’ was quite a fact to everybody near. ‘What,’ the people wondered, ‘could be the matter with Mr. Duggs that he should grunt out, within ten steps of the church porch, and within ten paces of two clergymen, one inside and one outside a coffin, the word “damn”?’