Mr. Tasker's Gods (20 page)

I
N the cosy bar parlour at the Maidenbridge ‘Rod and Lion,’ some farmers sat at their ease, partaking of a few last drinks, and discussing, in the style of the local paper, their hard times. They had been damning a certain small strike of farm labourers in one of the eastern counties. Mr. Dane of Shelton had been treating the
company
to a discourse upon wages, and, as he was known to be the worst payer in the district, he was looked up to as an authority by the others. Seeing how interested they all were, he went on to tell them, after another pull at his glass, that there was ‘up his way, a damn agitator, brother to the parson at Shelton, and living with that murdering whore woman on the heath.’ Parson Turnbull, a good Christian man, had told the farmer himself that he wished his brother was in Canada.

‘And what do ’ee think happened yesterday? You do know me cowman Bill?’

They all nodded.

‘He asks I for a shilling rise! That’s what we get by letting them damn agitators in. Shoot ’un! I say, shoot ’un!’

The farmer, seeing how important the subject was, raised his voice, that was by nature loud enough. Even the bottle and jug department hushed their clamour in order to hear, hoping that a row, a row with blood in it, was going to happen amongst the gentry.

‘I’d pay a man to kick ’un! Setting up Bill against I!’ yelled the farmer, ‘Damnation!’ The glasses on the table shook as he brought down his fist.

In the lower bar a tall bearded tramp was drinking out of a quart mug with a man called, by local custom, ‘Tim the Cheat.’ This man was a mender of kettles, but he often made off and sold the kettles for old iron. He was now treating the tramp, to whom he owed a small favour. Hearing the rage of the farmer in the other room, they both stopped certain polite remarks they had been making about a servant girl, and listened. After a few quiet words with the tramp, the head of the tinker presented itself respectfully through the doorway of the upper bar, and without the body following the head, explained, ‘how his friend Tasker was quite willing to deal with any bloody agitator in the world.’ ‘Tim the Cheat’ slowly retired, and
returned
with the tramp, whom the farmer welcomed by name.

‘You be Mr. Tasker’s father, bain’t ’ee?’

It was then arranged that Mr. Tasker’s father should attend a little meeting of friends at the Shelton public-house the next evening, to talk over the best way to manage the wicked agitator, Henry Turnbull. The farmer treated the tinker to a drink, and gave Mr. Tasker’s father a shilling.

On the heath Henry’s life was beginning to take a new turn. He did not always look down,
as Rose had begun to do, for he now had Alice to look at. These two were going to take a small holding in the spring, somewhere on the heath where there were gooseberries, so that they could pick them together as they used to in the vicarage garden. They were to be married, and the big Malden had blessed them.

In the beginning of November when the leaves were falling, Alice and Henry journeyed to Tadnoll, and from there to Maidenbridge, to buy the ring. A few hundred yards away from the cottage Henry remembered that Molly had asked him to purchase one or two little things for her. He had forgotten what they were, and returned to ask. Alice waited for him, sitting under a bank.

‘Bad luck for us, your having to go back,’ she called, seeing Henry coming.

On their way to the station they saw a strange thing, an adder out in the road basking in the November sun. It raised its head and hissed. Henry had never seen one out so late in the year.

A ragged group of heath ponies, startled by something that they saw near a distant clump of trees, galloped toward them. What had
frightened
the ponies the lovers could not tell. The train was late, and Henry and Alice watched three men loading great fir logs from a wagon into a truck. One of the logs fell on a man’s hand and crushed it. They saw the blood as the man was led away to the station inn.

‘These be all mortal bad signs. Don’t ’ee buy the ring to-day, Henry, my dear,’ said Alice.

But Henry only laughed at her, and suggested that they should return home by the last train from Maidenbridge.

In the South Street at Maidenbridge a tramp passed them. Alice felt sure that he had turned and followed them close behind for some yards up the street. She clung tightly to Henry’s arm. They wandered together in the walks of the town. Passing through the gardens, they turned down North Street and found a shop, where they ate cakes and drank tea. After their tea they visited the museum.

After glancing at the spear-heads, they came all at once upon a skull that grinned at them from a case. Alice did not like to look at the thing. She went on a little farther and examined the skin of a snake. Henry lingered by the skull. Just above one of its eyes there was a piece broken out. Henry wondered whether the blow of a flint axe had killed the man. It certainly grinned as he turned away to join Alice. The caretaker showed them a mantrap that had once held a man all night in a wood near the town. In the morning the man had been found dead.

Outside in the street there were now lights. Alice suggested that they might go to the pictures before they bought her ring. They took their seats. A few chairs in front of them there was a dark young man and a pretty servant girl with
a round smiling face and a plump white neck. She always bent her head forward when she laughed. The dark young man looked
sometimes
at her and sometimes at the pictures. She was excited and glad to be there. He looked rather bored.

Alice knew at once who the dark young man was. So far Henry had not noticed him. She longed to get away, but she could not move just then. At last—it had seemed an age to Alice—Henry thought that they had better go to buy the ring. In the street some tradesmen were already closing their shops. The book shop was shut and the chemist’s. They had forgotten about the shops closing so soon. When they reached the jeweller’s it too was closed. There was no gold ring for Alice that night.

Again they wandered, this time by a side street. They were walking beside a great building with high windows and lights. Near the great
building
, they knew it was the hospital, there was a narrow shed. A window looked toward the road and showed a light. Alice, for fun, peeped. She saw that it was the place where the dead were taken. A woman had just been carried in, a weeping nurse bent over her. The woman had died of cancer, the nurse was her daughter. Alice knew them both.

The dead woman’s daughter raised the sheet and Alice saw the face. The nurse wept and kissed the forehead of her mother. Henry
called to Alice to come on. She did not tell him what she had seen.

The most important passenger, waiting like themselves for the train, was a convict covered all over with broad arrows. He was in charge of three policemen. He was being taken away by night for some reason that the police alone knew. He stood handcuffed, waiting for the train.

Henry led Alice into the waiting-room. It was filled with dust. A surly porter had begun to sweep it out so that he might have less work to do the next day.

T
HE main road from Maidenbridge to
Ports-town
sank at times into the valleys, and then rose again, winding like a white snake over the hills. It passed through two or three hamlets before it reached the narrow lane that led to Shelton, the largest village on the way being the one in whose principal inn Mr. Tasker had bought his dog. Travellers moving along this southern roadway passed each other, or dropped behind, according to the different pace of their legs, or their beasts or their machines.

Along this road Mr. Tasker’s father slowly moved. His feet were tied up in rags, through which his toes broke away to the mud. One foot dragged, the other shuffled, so that behind him there were two grooved lines in the silt by the wayside, as though an old woman had dragged along a heavy forked clump of wood. This was the tramp’s peculiar way of walking that he had cultivated ever since he had taken to the road, so that his feet never left the ground.

Rounding a bend in the road, where lay a heap of flints ready to be broken, the tramp heard in front of him certain noises. From occasional calls and rough shouts, and from the sound of feet with sometimes a low or a bellow, the tramp judged that cattle were being driven ahead of him. For a mile or two Mr. Tasker’s father heard the same sounds, until he arrived at a point
where he could see, a hundred yards or so ahead, a drover with a rough ash stick struggling to keep his charges free of the traffic; which was no easy task considering the number of high-speed cars that passed. Every time one of these went by the drover had to hustle his beasts into the hedge.

There was something about the look of the drover’s back that made the tramp’s shuffle more than ever drag up the sand of the roadside. He allowed the two hundred yards that separated him from the cattle to become half a mile. There was no reason for him to be tossed by a cow or beaten with an ash stick, he wisely reasoned.

An oak tree marked the turn from the main road into the Shelton lane where grass grew between the chalk. Seeing the oak the tramp quickened his steps. He hoped that the cows and the drover had gone along the big road towards the great dairy pastures of the valley. The tramp gladly turned up the lane. But before him, where the line of the down touched the sky, he saw the form of a man following a cow and he heard a call. There was no mistaking the voice, he had heard it all along the road from
Maiden-bridge
.

Half an hour later Mr. Tasker’s father was snugly settled in the bar of the Shelton inn within two hundred yards of his son’s dairy. The
landlord
drew him some beer. At seven o’clock the men, the usual nightly customers, began to come in. They sat around, staring at the hanging
lamp, their looks empty and drugged with toil. Amongst them came in the drover, who had safely delivered his cattle. He sat on the farther side of the room to that chosen by the tramp, with his head slightly bent forward, and he uttered no remark at all. No one noticed whether he drank or not.

When Farmer Dane made his way amongst the men they received him with a respectful ‘Good evening, sir.’ He was followed, oddly enough, by Mr. Tasker himself. This unusual visit to the inn on Mr. Tasker’s part occurred because he had been to Mr. Dane’s farm to pay his quarter’s rent for the dairy, and the farmer, having business at the inn, carried Mr. Tasker with him, so that he might partake of the usual drink that was due on the payment of a bill.

Mr. Tasker looked round the room and saw his father. There was no chance for him to retreat. He could not allow the farmer to gain the price of that drink. He felt that it would not be polite to the landlord if he turned away. By the irony of fate, the only vacant seat in the crowded bar was the one next to his father, who sat next to the door; for even a labourer feared to sit too close to him. In this vacant seat Mr. Tasker placed his own long frame and looked, as the others had done, at the lamp. Thus it happened that Mr. Tasker and his father sat side by side on one settle, ready, if need be, to drink together out of one mug.

Farmer Dane began at once to talk about the hard times, telling the company the enormous price the merchants asked for linseed cake.

‘In these hard times,’ he said, ‘one has to look about in order to live at all.’

One of the men, a tall, gaunt, twisted creature, a carter, who after every puff of tobacco spat on the floor, told of a visit he had once received from Henry, who had come to him to buy some seed peas. Henry had been, as he always was, very polite and friendly over the purchase, and had praised the man’s garden. This lowly manner of his was, in itself, quite reason enough for the man to denounce him. This he now did, using the common expressions of the English working man towards any one who happens to have the popular public-house opinion against him.

The other men loudly applauded. Then, curiously enough, they all, at that moment, looked at Mr. Tasker’s father.

The innkeeper, who hardly ever gave a bone to his own dog, when in drink would sometimes throw things away. He had heard a tale told that the dwellers in the heath cottage did not admire his ethics. Besides this, he had against Henry a most pertinent and simple grudge, a grudge that made Henry his eternal and hated enemy, so that he would have had him, with great pleasure, kicked to death. This grudge was that Henry never treated the landlord when he came to the inn for cigarettes.

No one of the company had noticed the momentary absence of the landlord, but they all looked at him when he returned, because he held in his hand what they could see was not a pot of beer. The innkeeper placed in the middle of the table a pair of boots, heavily toed with iron, and studded on the bottom with huge hobs. When the boots had been enough admired, the innkeeper handed the pair to Mr. Tasker’s father.

It was then that the genius of Mr. Tasker saw in those boots his escape, and the chance of his father getting to prison again. ‘Kick ’un!’ the son said, ‘Kick ’un!’ Mr. Tasker, as he said it, looked up at the ceiling and smiled. ‘Would his favourite black sow farrow that night?’ he wondered, ‘and would the Maidenbridge
auctioneer
notice in his books that he had only charged him for six little pigs when the number that Mr. Tasker had brought home the day before from the market was seven?’

The carter whose daughter had been carried to the churchyard a few days before, finished his mug, spat on the floor and laughed.

Mr. Tasker’s father had thought out his plan. He would catch ‘thik bloody fellow’ that very night. He explained in the gentle English tongue as used by the people when they mean business, that he had seen ‘’e and a maid,’ and had heard them say that they were going to return by the last train from Maidenbridge to Tadnoll. He would ‘catch ’un’ and ‘kick ’un,’ as his son
had advised, ‘on the heath.’ Mr. Tasker’s father looked at the loud ticking clock above the fireplace. There was plenty of time.

The farmer called to the landlord to fill up the mugs. The settles were moved round the table, and the men leaned over so that their heads almost touched. Each one cursed Henry and drank to the farmer. Clouds of tobacco smoke surrounded the uncombed heads that were filled with the lust of hate. No one noticed that the drover sat behind with his head bent forward as though he listened to some one speaking to him from the darkness outside.

The reward that the farmer promised to give the tramp for teaching Henry a lesson was a bottle of whisky, to be handed out of the inn window if he returned victorious. Looking again at the clock, Mr. Tasker’s father slowly and carefully put on his new boots. He rose almost at the same time as his son, and they left the inn together. The father turned down the road to South Egdon in order to reach the heath that way. The son made off as fast as he could stride to the dairy. He went at once to his dog, loosed the chain from its collar, and entered the house.

The drover soon left the inn. A few of the nightly customers remained, knowing how sorry the landlord would be if they all left his inn a whole hour before the right time for turning out. The drover stood a few minutes by the gate that led to the dairy. He knew that he
could overtake the tramp, and he wished to hearken: perhaps ‘she’ might speak. Looking towards Mr. Tasker’s dairy, he remembered his dog. He would have liked to pat its head. He often felt sorry that he had let the beast go. Even with its evil temper he had liked it. Had it not been his companion in the days when he could enjoy himself, before he took up the burden of ‘she’?

He opened the gate into the dairy meadow. A light that had been burning in a bedroom at the dairy went out. Mr. Tasker had gone to bed. The drover crossed the meadow. He looked up and wondered at the stars. He walked up to the yard gate. The huge black sows lay like monstrous slugs just inside.

Towards the sea a meteor darted across the sky, leaving a trail of light.

A dark creature moved silently towards him, with a wolf-like tread, from behind the shelter of the wall. A rush, a muffled growl, and the drover felt the teeth of his old companion, who had not recognized the changed nature of his old master. The drover delivered no blow. His pain could not force him to strike because ‘she’ was very near just then. He bent over the fierce beast and stroked its head, speaking to it in a kind tone, the changed tone that he had used to Alice. The dog let go, shook itself, and slunk off under the shadow of the wall. The bitten drover limped down the road toward South Egdon.

The drover felt blood in his boot. It had run
down from the wound. He knew the length of his old dog’s teeth. Would the tramp escape him? He could not tell. What would ‘she’ say about this bitten state that he was in? ‘She’ seemed so very near. He heard her voice just by him. What was ‘she’ crying for now: who was hitting her? He would find her and see.

Near the church at South Egdon, the stars began to behave oddly, moving about in the sky till they danced. The horns of the bull romped round the Seven Sisters, and Castor and Pollux whirled up and around the man with the little goat. The sick drover thought that they were a great flock of sheep that he was driving. All the gates of the sky were open, the sheep were running into many heavenly gardens.

He turned wearily into the churchyard and found his way to the corner where Neville was buried. The boys had again broken a way over the fence. He felt with his hand for the mound. He could feel only nettles. He remembered the wooden cross that he had set there. And now he was lying just where he had put it. He could not see anything but stars. He looked longingly at the sky. Perhaps his cross was up there. Yes, there, sure enough it was, the cross of stars above him.

‘She’ was not crying now. ‘She’ was
singing
. The cross was falling out of the sky. It came down quite low. Each star burned with a wonderful light. He tried to move away so that the stars might fall and shine on the grave.