Mr. Tasker's Gods (4 page)

H
ENRY NEVILLE had around him always the hatred of nature and of man. Nature scorned him because he was helpless to dig and to weed and to plant, and because he was always catching cold. He had drawn to himself the malice of man because he had tried and failed to defend the victim against the exploiter. All kinds of difficulties and worries lay about his path like nettles and stung him whenever he moved. Naturally his health was not benefited by this treatment, and he was developing a tendency to cough in the mornings. By reason of all this unkindness Mr. Neville’s appearance was certainly very different from the Rev. Hector Turnbull’s, and Mr. Neville’s smile was not in the least like the smile with which Mr. Tasker greeted his black sow at five o’clock in the morning. There was nothing so different in the world as the smiles of these men.

By the merry means of the hatred of the people Mr. Neville’s mind had been brought to the proper state for the mind of a priest. He had seen himself so long despised and loathed of men, that he had even before our history opens begun to look towards a certain welcome release that would one day come; meanwhile he felt there was no running away at present for him, he must drink the cup that was prepared for him to drink.

The dislike of the people towards him kept him a great deal indoors, and if ever he ventured out into the cornfields he took care to walk apart from the eyes and jeers of the labourers and the coarse jests, always referring to his housekeeper, of the farmers.

Mr. Neville had left town because he had committed an offence. He had been for some years working in the East End of London, but one unlucky evening on his way to church, meeting a girl—he never knew who she was—in a ragged pink frock, he caught her and kissed her. It was the first time he had ever kissed a girl, and it was the last. The people stoned him out of the street and then broke the windows of his mission. His rector and the bishop were filled with amazement at the conduct of this unthinking curate and requested him to remove, because of the anger of the people, to the country. That is how Mr. Neville came to be in the gloomy vicarage of South Egdon.

When he first came down into the country he tried very hard to battle with the place; he tried to cut his own grass, he tried to make his own hay, but he did not succeed any better than Henry Turnbull succeeded with the fir tree. And so he held up his hands and surrendered to the enemy and learned to admire in his prison the beauty of long grass. His polite neighbours saw the long grass, or tried to open the heavy gate, and drove quickly away without calling,
poverty in England being regarded as something more vile than the plague.

The bishop of that part of the country, a worthy man whose face resembled a monkey’s, shook his head over Mr. Neville and sighed out with a typical frown, ‘Poor fellow!’ and went on dictating a letter to his lady secretary.

It was part of Mr. Neville’s nature never to retaliate: when the nettle overgrew his garden he let it grow, when his housekeeper robbed him he let her do it, and when this woman told tales in the village about his immorality he never answered them. He knew quite well the kind of men who escape scandal, and he was sure he could never be like them. The people of the village were his warders, the vicarage was his gaol; and to be delivered therefrom, an angel, the dark one, must come to unlock the gate. He attended to his spiritual duties with great care, though he did not visit unless he was invited first, because so many of his parishioners had shut their doors upon him. This pleasant pastime of shutting the door in the clergyman’s face provided the people with many a good story, explaining with what boldness the deed was done, and boasting about it in the same way that the village boys boasted that they had killed a cat with stones.

Mr. Neville was not a great scholar, but he understood the soul of an author and he knew what he liked in a book: and that was the kind
of deep note that Bunyan calls the ground of music, the bass note, that modern culture with its peculiar conceit always scoffs at. There was, besides this bass note, a certain flavour of style that he liked, a style that in no way danced in the air but preferred clay as a medium.

The first week he was at South Egdon he brought upon himself the extreme and very weighty dislike of the largest farmer, a man of much substance. Mr. Neville had been down to the village, and heard while at the shop two gun-shots at the farm fired one after the other. On coming out into the road he saw an unfortunate small black dog rolling and struggling along in the gutter, more than half killed, with blood and foam coming out of its mouth, mingled with unutterable howls of pain. The women came out of their doors to watch. ‘The dog,’ they said, ‘had been like that in the ditch for some minutes.’ The reason being, that the farmer, whose income was seventeen hundred pounds a year and who owned two or three farms besides the one he rented, would not expend another twopenny cartridge to destroy it properly. He had used two, and if the dog would not die it was its own affair: anyhow, that is how the farmer left it.

The clergyman had no stick in his hand with which to kill the creature, and the farm-house being near by, he hurried there and knocked loudly at the door. No one came. He waited,
and the dog howled and snarled more despairingly down the road; it was furiously biting its own leg. The priest knocked again, and at last Miss Bigland, the farmer’s plump daughter, came to the door and smiled, and while she arranged a pink ribbon, she replied to the clergyman’s hasty request for her father.

‘Oh yes, isn’t it a nice afternoon? You’ve come about that nasty dog. Father has just shot at it. It would go after my chickens. How silly of it not to die!’ and the young lady smilingly explained to the clergyman the trouble the little black dog called ‘Dick’ had given them, the yells of agony continuing only a little way down the road. Just then the father, coming out from the barn, saw the clergyman, and his smiling daughter told him that Mr. Neville had come about ‘that bad dog.’ The farmer, without saying anything, but in his heart cursing the priest for interfering and the dog for not dying, went out with a great stick and beat the dog to death in the road. The girl, composed and plump and smiling, watched this event from her front door. The priest strode away, and meeting the farmer, who carried the dead dog by one leg, walked past him without speaking a word, to his own house.

The farmer, to revenge himself against the clergyman for taking the side of the dog, presented to the village a carefully prepared report that Mr. Neville had a wife and ten children in
Whitechapel
,
and that every night at the vicarage he drank brandy with his housekeeper, out of
tea-cups
. The village imagination enlarged and magnified and distorted these tales until they were believed by every one, and a fine time they had of it, these village story-tellers, rounding off their little inventions when any new item of vicarage fiction came their way.

It was easy for the people of the village to hate Mr. Neville, and they hated most of all the vicar’s face. Perhaps because he looked at them gently and forgivingly, as if he forgave them their sins. They did not like his kind of
forgiveness
; they much preferred a brutal scolding, they asked for the whip. The children very soon learned to call out rude words at him as he went by, their favourite yell being a doggerel rhyme about the Lord’s Prayer, that began:

This they shouted out as loud as they could when they saw their priest in the road.

Only that foolish fellow, Henry Turnbull, loved him. And the two friends sat together that July afternoon, and smoked cheap cigarettes, regarding with wakeful interest the great trees and the long grass.

Henry had really been very much shocked that day, and he wanted to see his friend shocked too. Henry had not understood what he had
seen. It was to him an isolated incident of terror in the homely life of the village, and he wanted it explained away. Its horror had made a very distinct impression upon his mind; he had never been told before so plainly that all was not right with the world. The girl’s kiss had been
wonderful
. He always remembered that. And the failure at cutting down the fir tree was only a failure. And his hardships abroad, like a trying campaign, had given him a lasting contentment at home. But now this new thing had appeared, and he wanted his friend to tell him what it meant. He opened the subject by talking about his father’s churchwarden.

‘He is a very hard-working man. He goes to church every Sunday and gives milk to the school tea. He is really a great help to my father. He sits amongst the boys at the back and prevents them spitting at each other, and turns them out sometimes. Father likes him very much, and praises the way he makes his little girls work. Father says there would be no idleness nor want in England if every one were like Mr. Tasker. Only, how can he drag dead skinned horses into his yard to be devoured by pigs?’

Mr. Neville watched the trees as he answered. He said quietly:

‘You must expect men like that to act rather crudely. Mr. Tasker would tell you that he must pay his rent; he would say that, like the
Jehovah of old, his pigs cry out for blood and his children for bread. Mr. Tasker wants to get on, to rent a larger dairy, a farm perhaps, or even after a time to buy land, and his pigs are his greatest help. The fault is not Mr. Tasker’s, the fault is in the way the world is made. Mr. Tasker worships his pigs because they are the gods that help him to get on. The symbol of his religion is not a cross but a tusk. Mr. Tasker fulfils his nature. Nothing can prevent your nature fulfilling itself. Every one must act in his own way. No one knows what he may be brought to do. We can enjoy ourselves here and smoke cigarettes, but at any moment we may do something as ugly as he. It is horrible, it always will be horrible, but it is also divine, because the Son of Man suffers here too. Not iron nails alone, but tusks and teeth are red with his blood.

Henry had listened to his friend with great eagerness. But it was now time for him to go, and his friend of South Egdon conducted him by a new way to the road round the low garden wall, that shut out a field of corn and harboured under its shade a large kind of nettle. When they came opposite the road they found the wily postman’s gap, and there they said farewell rather after the fashion of schoolboys.

H
ENRY TURNBULL wandered homeward, but he did not return through the meads. A desire had come to him to see the sun before it finally set. In order to do this it was necessary to climb the hill behind which the sun was hiding. Henry proceeded very much at his ease to climb a grassy lane that led to the top of the rise. He was contented to be alone, and needed quiet. ‘Perhaps it was a good thing,’ he thought, ‘that he had seen the way the dairyman fed his pigs.’ He did not wish to hide from himself anything human or anything that it was well for him to see, his nature was inquisitive enough to wish to know the worst and the best.

Once upon the top of the ridge, he was met by the fresh sweetness of the sea wind. The ridge of down overlooked the village of Shelton, his own village, that spread itself out in a desultory fashion between the downs. Upon the other side, the side of the inner world, the outer world being the way to the sea, the scene was grander and stretched with more varied colour. Towards the north were spread out acres of green woods, the remnants of an ancient forest much loved by King John, who came down there, no doubt, to relieve himself of his spleen against the barons. Farther away still there were, all along the
skyline
, blue hills over which the sun was loitering, very loath to leave the summer day. Occupying
all the middle of the valley was the wild expanse of heathland. The mid region was entirely dominated by the heath, that only allowed a few green fields and fewer ash trees to poach upon its domain. In three or four places the
wilderness
, with its grey fingers, even crept up and touched the main road to the town.

While Henry stood there watching the last of the sun a carrier’s van, that had been slowly coming down the main road, stopped beside the white lane that led to the village and was marked by one oak tree. It stopped there because the horse was unable to climb the hill. The small farmer who drove it was forced still to follow the big road in order to return by South Egdon, his customers, however, preferring to walk from this point over the hill to their homes. The van had no cover, and its human burden of country women, and one or two men, was plainly visible from the hill, and there were one or two splashes of red that denoted tiny girl children. Henry could easily see the women stepping out, and once he heard a child’s voice coming very clear out of the vale. Henry was aware that the people who were leaving the cart were bound for the village, and he preferred to stay where he was until they passed by. He knew that they were often met by other relatives, and he wished that evening to have the homeward way to himself. He lay down upon the short grass near a bunch of thyme to wait until the villagers, drawn on
by their homes, passed him. He watched the groups slowly appear round the bend of the road that had hid them for a while from his sight. The women carried parcels, paper bags, and each held one or two heavy baskets.

Henry soon recognized the first that moved round the corner as the innkeeper’s wife. She walked with her son, a child who ran in little darts this way and that across the road like a field mouse. After her came the gardener’s wife, a short, stout woman in a heavy black dress that made her look very toadlike in the lane. She was surrounded, almost eaten into, by three or four children,—Henry could not tell how many, as they were always getting behind her, ‘in order,’ so Henry thought, ‘to take sweets out of her basket without being seen by their mother,’ whose efforts to climb the hill were at that moment all she could manage.

Another party, a couple, came slowly along some way behind. These two laggards were strolling along even more slowly than the woman in front of them—and they betrayed themselves. They were a man and a maid, that ancient mystery that was even beyond the wisdom of Solomon to unravel. The man wore black, the symbol of a Sabbath, or of a holiday, in the town. His bowler hat was also proper for those delights, and he flicked, as a gentleman anywhere would flick, at the knapweed by the side of the road. The man—and Solomon wisely puts him first—
walked a little way ahead of his companion. She who followed at his heels was very much
overloaded
with parcels. She was dressed in her holiday white. Often she was so teased by the parcels—they would keep on slipping—that she placed one foot a little way up the bank and tried to rearrange them, letting them rest for a moment upon her knee. The man hardly ever took the trouble to look back at her—he had seen a girl before—but, with one hand in a pocket, he kept on flicking at the hedge. The narrow lane bore the burden of the mystery of these two.

The sun had just departed, leaving behind it a painted cloud to show where it had once been. The road, when it reached the top, ran for a few yards upon the brow of the hill as though to give the traveller a chance to look at the village below him before he descended.

Near this high level of road Henry was resting. When these two last from the van came by, Henry saw that the girl was his mother’s
housemaid
, Alice. She had seen him too and whispered his name to her companion, who turned his head disdainfully and for just a moment glanced at Henry. Henry knew him to be the son of Mr. Turnbull’s gardener, so wisely named ‘Funeral’ by the village.

‘Funeral’ had been married twice. His first wife he had buried, digging her grave himself. Alice’s companion from the town, an infant then, had been the cause of her death.

Henry’s father had employed ‘Funeral’s’ son for a time in the garden, but after his own son’s return he found him a place as under-clerk in a coal merchant’s office in the town, where he took to himself all the airs of a young man who knows things. Just then this young man’s knowledge took the form of annoyance that he was seen by a clergyman’s son walking with a servant.

Henry waited until the form of Alice, the last of the evening’s travellers, had left his vision, and then he followed the same road, descended into the village and joined his father and mother at supper, it being the habit in this clergyman’s family to devour the remains of a liberal early dinner at nine o’clock in the evening.

The following morning Henry was awakened by a rough wind. For a moment he thought he was lying again in the log hut, until he heard the rude, sharp knock of Miss Alice against his door and a water-can merrily hitting the floor just outside. Henry’s blind had not been pulled down—it never was,—and he watched the angry summer clouds, like mad black sheep, racing each other across the heavens, and he noted the tortured movements of the green leaves of the elm tree that resented being beaten by the wind. Henry was soon downstairs waiting for his father, his mother being already in the dining-room.

That morning Mr. Turnbull came in to read prayers in a friendly mood. He even smiled at
his son, who sat looking out into the garden as his habit was. Mrs. Turnbull was finding her place in the Bible. Mr. Turnbull had received that morning a dividend, larger than usual, the reason of its extra value being that in the town where the works were—and in the works was a portion of Mr. Turnbull’s money—there had been much distress amongst the poor, and the factory could hire female labour at a very low price. The babes in the town died in vast numbers of a preventible disease, the most
preventible
disease of all, simply starvation. The out-of-work men stood about and talked of the ‘to-day’s bride.’ They stood at street corners and said ‘bloody’ a great many times, this particular word denoting a mighty flight of imagination like the sudden bursting of a sewer. The ‘to-day’s bride’ in the picture paper was the niece of a duke. Some of the men thought her very pretty. One of the men, who was especially taken with the innocent look of the young bride—she owned all the poor part of the town—returned to his ‘home,’ the bride’s house too, and found in there a gaunt, haggard woman who was not his wife leaning over a bundle of dirty rags upon which lay his little son, starved, stark, and dead.

Mr. Turnbull’s dividend carefully placed in the study drawer, he sat down to his breakfast with a ‘Thank God for this beautiful morning’ upon his lips. The eggs were good, Mrs.
Turnbull 
very pleased and patient, the idiot son very thoughtful and silent.

Mr. Turnbull began to speak about the poor in his parish. He gave to the poor certain shillings sometimes out of the communion offerings, and twice a year he gave the children a tea. Just as he broke his egg he remembered, or rather his thoughts ran back, and fell down to worship the large dividend. He decided that the extra amount would more than pay the cost of the two teas, and that none of the few extra shillings that did get out of his pocket into the hands of the poor would have the chance to do so this year. Mr. Turnbull was glad. He looked around him, at the room, easy-chair, food, silent wife, silent son; he looked at the garden, at the little black clouds. He was satisfied; all this was very good, and after breakfast he went to the study to lock the dividend inside the safe. Mr. Turnbull then sat down by his table; he was content, he was ready to do what was right—to try to do what was right. He was making a sermon: it was his business to make the people understand sin. He felt serious when he thought of sin, and he also felt hungry.

Mr. Turnbull took an interest in the young women of the village; he always called them ‘young women.’ He spoke to them at the evening service with fatherly prudence,
recommending
‘household duties’ in preference to summer evening walks in leafy lanes, and he
gave them solemn hints about the fate in store for backsliders. To this subject—about the leafy lanes—he appeared to be bound by a magic spell. He could never let it alone; the sight of a dainty white hat trimmed with a rosebud, in the back pew, was enough. He began, and somehow or other the word—not a very pretty word—‘uncleanness’ came in
at the end. It always did come in at the end, and the hat with the flowers often bent forward to hide the face beneath when this peculiarly unpleasant word was uttered.

To Henry it was quite a proper word, and he always applied it to a nasty heap of dirt that had found lodgment in a corner of the vicarage pew and naturally grew larger every Sunday because the church cleaner swept it there. ‘No doubt it was,’ he supposed, ‘against this heap of church dust that his father lifted up his voice in holy anger,’ and Henry wondered if this dust would ever rebel and try to get into his father’s eyes. The sermon was finished, the word ‘uncleanness’ being underlined, and the day passed as quite a usual vicarage day, a day of meals and lazy endurance, a day of slow kitchen labour.

There was, however, a slight activity shown by that stout good-humoured lady, Mrs. Turnbull, who gave sundry directions about the preparing of a bedroom for her eldest son, the Rev. John Turnbull, who was to come the next day.

The Rev. John Turnbull was, as we know, a
curate in the West End, and, while enjoying himself in the best possible manner, he had the very serious business of finding a wife with money always before him. He went forth every
afternoon
, like a hunter, and followed respectable rich families almost to their bankers’ doors. He was polite and genial, the sort of young man who gives cigarettes out of a silver case to tramps. He was very friendly to every one, and enjoyed a good reputation amongst the Church
well-wishers
because he once or twice a week strode up a side street, in a long black garment that touched his toes, smoking a cigarette and talking to any one he met, and all for the encouragement of the Church. His rector watched him with a kindly eye and a daughter. He was really a very hard-working young man, who could always sign his name quite clearly in red ink. He was indeed a good fellow in his own way and
understood
his mystery, and lived a very cheerful life in the kindly bosom of the Anglican Church.

His religion was to him a part of the game, a very good game. He could pass the bread and wine, smile condolingly at a drunkard, and sadly, a waywardly sad smile, at a girl of the streets. One hundred poor typists wrote to him every week, or more often, and he referred them to the parish magazine, in which was his photo. He spoke to a member of Parliament about the typists, and the member undertook to look into their long hours. The curate told them all about
the member and his kindness in the parish magazine.

The Rev. John began work in his church quite early in the morning, and was really tired when he left off for lunch. At that meal, except on Fridays, he indulged in a half bottle of
Burgundy
. After lunch he sometimes went to see an old man who was ruptured, so that he might have a little time to compose himself before continuing his hunt after rich girls. At the afternoon tea-table, his quarry having been run to earth, he talked of Socialism and about the way poor people are trodden down by the greedy rich. And if the quarry was touched at his account of the slums, he then went on to tell of the temptations to growing children, in those evil places. And then, if his hearers were not bored, he told them about his friend—he always called him his friend—who lived in a garret. He was the old man with the rupture. The Rev. John explained how his friend lived a beautiful life, spending his sad eternal bedtime in reading the Gospels, and that his friend was writing a book about St. Luke because his own name happened to be Luke.

This happy curate spent his evenings at the Workmen’s Club, and talked a great deal to a radical tailor, who did not go very far with the red flag because he had saved enough money to buy two houses. The young clergyman had a special kind of sickly smile that he brought out
for the good tailor. He likewise played billiards with a printer’s devil, holding at the same time a cigarette at the very outside of his lips in true Oxford fashion while he aimed at the balls.

His stroll home at night had been once or twice delayed for a few hours—there is always
something
a man must do—but generally speaking he arrived at his lodgings at twelve-thirty and read a paper volume of short stories for an hour and then went to bed, very pleased with himself and very pleased with the world, at half-past one.