Mr. Tasker's Gods (5 page)

When at his country home, he patronized his younger brother, the idiot, and gave him
cigarettes
, a cheaper kind than he gave to tramps, and he talked to him in quite a friendly tone as he did to the gardener. He had now come home to tell his parents that he was engaged to a dear girl, who had Two Thousand Pounds a year. She was the daughter of a manufacturer of glass bottles, and her name was Ruby. He told his mother what a dear girl she was, and how much they loved each other. He spoke of this at dinner while Alice waited at table. Alice was neat and pretty; she meant to be pretty that day, and succeeded. The curate told her that she had grown to be quite a woman. She thought so too. She believed in the curate, and she said to Edith afterwards ‘that she would do anything he asked her to’; she said this in a tone of abandonment. He was just the gentleman for her: his clothes, his way of taking up a book,
his cheerful cocksureness, his polite manner, all held within a proper gentlemanly decorum she loved. The Rev. John was attracted to Alice: he liked a pretty servant and Alice liked a nice kind gentleman.

A
UGUST, the month of holidays, had come to Shelton vicarage. It was the time for delightful family meetings, and the third brother, George the doctor, joined the Turnbull party.

In his profession George worked very hard, and he was not as gay as his brother the priest. He was married because he thought that a doctor ought to be married. Dr. George Turnbull possessed, besides his wife, one little girl of twelve years. This young lady and her mother were left behind to take care of the gentleman who mixed the drugs and saw the patients while the doctor was away. Dr. George had come to Shelton because he wanted a holiday and because August was the proper time to take one.

Dr. George’s life was wisely settled. His practice was large and gave him constant
employment
. He passed over miles of rude country roads in his grey car, visiting the people who sent for him. He knew a great deal about medicine: he knew what drugs to avoid—the expensive ones—when he filled and corked the bottles. His little girl was pale and sickly owing to the fact that he thought more about leaving her rich than about keeping her well.

Mrs. George Turnbull was made into a proper lady by her marriage. Before that date she had only been a governess. Once married, Dr. George consoled himself with saying that a doctor
ought to have a wife, and he made the best of it by turning her into a maid-of-all-work: the real servant, a plump cheerful cook, being very much more the lady.

Dr. George was a man of habit. What he did one year he did the next. Only in his savings did he desire to see a change: he liked that side of events to show a progressive balance, and it was to that balance that the grand trunk line of his thoughts ran.

The first happy day when this family party were all together ended at half-past ten, that being the proper hour in the country for bed. Henry took his candle and walked along the passage to his end room. He was thinking how kind his brothers were to him: they had praised the way he worked in the garden. The two elder brothers found the place quiet. When at home, they were wont to converse and rest upon the garden seat under the great elm, from which they could generally hear the click of Henry’s hoe in the kitchen garden.

The day after the arrival of the doctor the two brothers were sitting watching the flower beds and talking about incomes. Then it occurred to them both at the same time that a walk might be the proper Christian preparation for the next meal, and John thought, in his nice way, that it would be kind to take Henry if he had finished picking the currants for his mother’s jam. Henry had finished and was delighted to come. They
even went with him along the road through the village without a word about his old hat and his beard, and John, with brotherly affection, took his arm.

Mr. Tasker, passing them on his way to the farm, touched his hat, a kind of salute that churchwardens do not generally make a practice of using. The three went along the chalk lane that led up the hill, by which Mr. Tasker had descended in the night, and by which young Henry had watched the arrival of the carrier’s cart. Dr. George saluted the lane side with prods of his stick. He was looking for herbs that, he explained to his brothers, were used for medicine.

John, the eldest, was likewise the tallest, and he could gaze over the hedge. Over the hedge there was a pleasant meadow and a girl helping her uncle, the small farmer of the village, load up some late hay upon a wagon. The girl, whose name was Annie Brent, had come from the town to help her uncle with the hay. She was upon the top of the load and her uncle below. The girl was employing her youthful strength to trample down the hay; after taking it in her arms from the top of the fork, she in turn placed it in the middle or the corners of the wagon. Her uncle, whose movements were very slow owing to his having a deformed foot, gave her plenty of time to place the hay and to jump on it, after which she lay down and waited until
her uncle could persuade his foot to bring him to the wagon with some more. All this pressing of the warm hay brother John watched from the road. The pearl buttons that held the girl’s cotton frock behind had become undone, partly by reason of her jumping and partly because she was just over sixteen years of age.

The Rev. John Turnbull had a practical mind. He had found a rare girl—‘a dear girl,’ he called her—the proper prize of his hunting, and he decided that the time had come for him to turn another part of his attention to common girls. He did this whenever he had the chance, turning his eyes and his desires and his will-to-power in whatever direction the girl happened to be.

The other two brothers wandered on, leaving John looking over the hedge. They thought, no doubt, that he was watching a very rare bird, perhaps a green fly-catcher or a large
black-footed
shrike. George and Henry loitered along talking very seriously.

‘I hope you do what you can to help Father,’ George was remarking. ‘Poor Mother can never understand his feelings, they are really very deep,’—which was true; ‘her thoughts are of a lighter kind. I hope you always help them whenever you can and try to save them expense.’

It was one of the doctor’s plans to keep the family property intact. He kept on looking round the family property to see if there was any leakage, as if the stocks and shares were a large
pond. He feared that his younger brother, being half-witted, might forget to apply his heart to money or his understanding to its value, and thus he gave him a little advice. Dr. George had counted up all the gains he was likely to make himself, and all the capital his father ought to leave him as his share. He expected his father to live until he was eighty; he hoped his mother would, in the proper order of nature, die first, as she was six years the elder. After these two events, Dr. George expected to inherit about One Thousand Eight Hundred and Fifty-six Pounds, and his own savings he expected by that time would be about twice that amount. He feared that Henry might prove himself an expense by suddenly doing something ‘queer.’ And that is why he was always giving him good advice.

Henry was pleased to listen. His early travels had made him pleased with any quiet talk, and besides, had not the Church Fathers taught him to forget himself? He received his brother’s warnings very gratefully.

‘You are very kind to me,’ said Henry. ‘I have been spending the last three weeks in picking strawberries, raspberries, gooseberries, and black currants. I am the only one who can do this work. The gardener is always very busy, and he says that picking fruit makes him nervous. Alice began to help me, but she was always putting the currants into her mouth instead of
the basket, so that I sent her in, and now Mother has nearly all the pantry filled with jam.’

‘It saves the expense of buying,’ remarked Dr. George.

This pleasant walk, the genial employment of an English afternoon, came to an end as walks and afternoons will. The Rev. John Turnbull had been in the hay-field; he had found the gate, and his brothers called to him as they passed. He had been talking to the small farmer with the club foot and had at the same time begun to think of his tea.

The mother of the family, Mrs. Turnbull, had been well brought up. Her father, decently dead, was in his day a small county squire, his estate only being a farm or two better than a yeoman’s, so that he had never been made even a justice of the peace. He belonged to the old fashions, and used to wear in the summer time—he always talked about the summer time—a pair of white cord trousers and a soft brown hat, so that he appeared to the public to be somewhere between a bricklayer and a South African trader.

This good man had more than one daughter, wise, sensible girls, who helped in the dairy and fed the chickens. Jane, the eldest, married the Rev. Hector Turnbull, who came courting when the cherries were ripe and helped her to gather them, up a ladder, and to collect the eggs from the home farm, that was not more than a hundred paces from the squire’s house. One brown hen
hid her nest half-way up a hay-stack from which a slice of hay had been cut, and to this nest Jane climbed every day by a ladder. On the afternoon of the proposal Hector Turnbull climbed there too, and in his hurry and excitement to kiss her he sat down upon the new-laid egg, and Jane forgave him and married him.

When she married, she gave up her fortune to her husband and began to make home-made jam. At first she used to cover the jam-pots with paper bought on purpose and cut into rounds and dipped in a saucer of brandy. The rich odour of brandy was one of the delights of Henry’s childhood. As the years grew longer and the sun behind her life began to go down, she gave up the brandy, and, instead of special paper, she tied up her jam with cut pieces of the
Standard.

Mrs. Turnbull had very few thoughts of her own. She gave up what she owned in the way of ideas with her fortune to Mr. Turnbull. And after his arrival she could hardly call her prayers her own; even her religion belonged to her housekeeping, for when she knelt down she could not prevent herself praying that this year at least the rhubarb jam might not go bad.

Mrs. Turnbull was a woman who accepted her daily life just as she accepted her daily bread, prayed for, and presented to her by Mr. Turnbull upon the end of a long knife. It was her pleasure to sit at one end of the almost square table and
to watch Mr. Turnbull eating his tea. When she said her prayers she forgot Mr. Turnbull, but she remembered the jam. There was a motion in the act of kneeling that reminded her of tying up the pots.

Mrs. Turnbull was a large woman with
something
of the Central Empire about her, with a round and homely face. It was only when she chanced to look up from her mending that she disclosed a doubt. This doubt was the only thing not quite right about her, the one beat out of place in her normal pulse. It was a look of doubt that waited for something. It was in her eyes when she raised them from her
needlework
and let them rest upon the one dark corner of the drawing-room. In that look of a moment one read the strange news that all was not right even in her sheltered world.

Was that the look whence the idiot had come?

Mrs. Turnbull was fond of one chair, and she generally sat in the same room. She was one of the easiest people in the world to find if she was wanted, because she was a lady who never went out.

T
HE Rev. Hector Turnbull sat down to tea with his sons and his wife, and Alice, dressed daintily for the occasion, brought in the toast. Mr. Turnbull was in a good humour that
afternoon
. He had been scolding a new school teacher because she wore a blouse too gay for the national school. He told her ‘she must dress more plainly,' and explained to her that a teacher's duty is to guide others ‘in the paths of virtue and decorum.'

‘In my school, in the school of our church,' and he looked at the roof, ‘we expect our assistants to be plain.'

Mr. Turnbull saw with secret pleasure what was coming, and so did the other watchers who were there to learn their lessons. And it came. Not the least important part of the poor girl, her feelings, were outraged, and she bent over a desk and sobbed, holding both hands, girl-like, over her eyes.

The clergyman noted the white skin of her neck—the blouse was certainly too low for a teacher—and then he put his hand on her hair and said, ‘Don't cry,' and leaving the girl and the school, he walked to the vicarage. And his thoughts were the thoughts of a male hyena.

Mrs. Turnbull watched him eat his tea and received from him a piece of bread at the end of a knife. The meal over, she retired into the
drawing-room followed by her son John, who felt it would be kind to talk to his mother a little. Her elder sons did what they liked with her: they smoothed her down, they flattered her, they pinched her cheeks,—John even sat with his arm around her waist and breathed the smoke of his cigarette into her ear. She always smiled and appeared never to mind what they did. He now told her about the dear girl and her charming ways. He said she owned a maid and beautiful dresses—‘frocks,' he called them. And he said with a kind of playful laugh, ‘that she wished to be married very soon.'

‘If we have a baby, a little girl, we will call her after you,' he said to his mother; and the mother answered, ‘Just as you like, dear.' ‘And, Mother,' he said, ‘it is heavenly the way we love one another.'

The Rev. John Turnbull might be called ‘clever.' He was able to talk about one thing and think about another. He talked to his mother about ‘the dear girl,' and he thought about a little bit of torn lace—at a penny-
three-farthings
a yard, bought at Maidenbridge—that he had seen when a certain female creature, young and warm with hay-making, was slipping down from a wagon on to the white clover. And then his inner vision was able to change again, even with his arm round his mother's waist. He damned to the very deepest hell his bankers, who had refused him an overdraft of Fifty Pounds,
even though he had told them all about ‘the dear girl,' just out of pure love for her, as he had told his mother. The banker said ‘that they would be very glad'—the second manager rubbed his hands as he said,—‘very glad indeed to see him again when things were more settled'; and then they wished their customer ‘all happiness.'

John Turnbull had inherited from some distant Turnbull a character very different from his brother George. He was fond of spending money. There were a great many expensive pleasures that John liked, and his London rector, even though the Rev. John had a loud rich voice, only gave him the paltry salary of Two Hundred and Fifty Pounds a year. ‘Twice as much as a pig of a dissenter gets,' so the rector told him, whose habit it was to allude to Low-Church curates as ‘pigs' and ‘dissenters.'

John's London rector was a rich man of bold opinions. He had been a great sportsman in his time, and owned a large house in Wales. When he was down there he strode over the hills with an alpenstock and taught his three servants, nice town girls, to play golf. There was a wife, who remained somewhere, dressed in black, behind the girls.

With his arm round his mother, the Rev. John turned over one or two more pages of thought matter not quite proper to be printed, and then he remembered that he had promised Mr. Tasker
that he would go down that evening and look at his pigs. Dr. George was writing letters, and John, who liked to have a companion, decided that it would be a Christian act to again take his brother Henry out, and he sent Alice into the garden to find him. He watched her stepping down the bank.

Alice was delighted to obey this master. When she obeyed him she fancied that she was obeying some one else, a more mighty master. A master that sometimes tells his slaves to set out for Paris on a stormy night, or to hunt up a house with a queer side door in Chiswick, or to stand for two hours in an east wind by the side of the statue of George 111. of blessed memory at Westminster.

Henry was willing, he was even delighted, to go—how nice it is to be thought of. Alice had asked him rudely enough, and ended with an invention of her own that he ‘had better hurry up'; and he was quite willing to hurry up. Henry had been debating, whenever he saw his brother John, whether he ought to tell him about the disgraceful and horrible way Mr. Tasker was wont to feed his pigs. The appearance of the ugly thing that he had witnessed the afternoon when he had been there with the note kept very clear in his mind. He could see those pigs at it again whenever he shut his eyes.

He had told his friend, and was a little
disappointed
. His friend had not fired up against
the horror as he ought to have done. Somehow or another, Mr. Neville never blamed any one and never judged any one. Neville had explained that an incident like that was the natural
appearance
of a man's nature.

Henry had no doubt whatever that his brother John would take a more distinct view, and Henry was sure that his brother would express his view to Mr. Tasker and so prevent the recurrence of that disgusting feast. Henry did not find it very easy to begin. The subject was to him very important, and it was a nervous matter to him to tell any one. He did not like to tell tales, but he knew this tale ought to be told.

Henry looked at his brother, who was walking over the soft grass and the yellow hawkweed. He appeared silent and slightly bored, his thoughts being, perhaps, with his next sermon. He was allowed to preach sometimes on
weekdays
. Or maybe he was considering a proper quotation from Dr. Keble, or was he wondering about the manner of loading hay-carts?
Anyhow
, he was a little more serious than usual, and Henry felt that he ought to try to say what he wished to. He knew his heart was beating very fast—this matter meant so much to him—and his hand trembled as he walked. However, he did say it, as he unfastened a gate for his brother—opening the gate gave him the chance. He felt the tremble in his voice: ‘Do you know, John, Mr. Tasker feeds his pigs on dead horses?'

The horror once out, he left his brother to deal with it. His brother's face showed no signs of disturbance, and he replied in his most offhand way, as though he were asking for the marmalade: ‘I expect they do not like to waste anything here. Country people are so careful.'

Henry tried to explain. ‘They don't cut the horse up; the pigs ate it like vultures. They pull at the flesh and bite each other and squeal like wild beasts. They would eat a man—and Mr. Tasker watched them with pleasure——'

‘Oh, they will watch anything about here; they have nothing else to do.' The Rev. John's voice hung over the flowers a little wearily. ‘And for all we know, the meat on a dead horse may be very good for pigs. In town, dairy-fed bacon is considered the best. My landlady buys it for me.' The Rev. John looked at Henry and said rather more feelingly, ‘My dear boy, you must not be so squeamish about your daily bread. It is best to let these kind of men feed their pigs on what they like. It does not do to interfere too much with the liberty of the people. And besides, there is the S.P.C.A.; I believe their officers walk about the farms. And there are policemen; they are paid to see to these things. No doubt Mr. Tasker asked the policeman. He fed his pigs in the yard, away from the public road. A man may do what he likes in his own yard. I know this kind of thing makes one feel a little queer. Some rather odd things happen
in my parish. I often notice things. But it is wiser to forget them if you want to get on. It is better to pay no regard to the common people. They have their manners: we have ours.'

By this time they had reached Mr. Tasker's. This good man came out to meet them. His family, as was their custom, had reported the approach of visitors. Mr. Tasker had just been eating his tea, and as he came out of the door he wiped his mouth with the sleeve of his coat. He stepped out of the little front garden, and, shutting the gate carefully with a click, welcomed his guests, shaking the curate heartily by the hand and saying how pleased he was to see him amongst them again. And John replied that he was very glad to see Mr. Tasker looking so well, and that he very much wished to see the pigs. Mr. Tasker at once strode across to the sties at the back of the cow-yard.

To the unenlightened eye of the casual visitor, old farm buildings—and old dairy buildings are much the same—have a comfortable and homely look. The low thatched cow-sheds, the big barn, the rickyard wall, all denote rustic peace and security and gentle labours in Arcadia. They lie pleasantly amid the green fields and peaceful hills, the abode, no doubt, of the pretty
dairy-maid
and the quiet cow. The visitor, if he be wise, will keep, however pleasant the outlook, at a little distance from these abodes of joyful labour, because most pictures of man's making
are best admired a little way off. The old barn might speak, the rough local stones of which the cow-sheds were built might tell tales. And even the oak posts with their heavy feet rotting in the dung have a way of whispering of fair things sullied and deflowered by the two in one, beast and man.

Mr. Tasker led the brothers past the great cow-yard. It had recently been cleaned out, that is to say, the six feet of mingled dung and straw removed and placed in a heap in the fields. The great yard now appeared like a pond that had been dried up. About the bottom were bones, and the skull of a cow lay in the middle. Mr. Tasker led the way to the pigs.

In the first sties lay the largest of the gods, the sows; and farther on were the fat pigs, creatures that were destined shortly to receive by the hand of man a not too deep cut in the throat. At first the brothers were introduced to the contented sows, some of which lay on their sides while little pigs, politely named ‘suckers,' pulled at the many founts of milk most eagerly. Every little pig looked as though it was afraid of being robbed of its share by the others. Life, happy life, was to them a sow's teats, and they struggled for their joys manfully, like their masters. Some of the sows were expecting a litter. One of the largest was lying in the straw at the farther end of the sty, and although its lord and master tapped the trough with his ash stick, pointed at
the end, she would not come forth. She knew, her musical ear told her, that ‘wash' and ‘stick' strike a different note.

All at once, without any warning, Mr. Tasker held out his head like a barn-cock and shouted, ‘Bring … thick … pail … t'auld … pig!' This shout was so sudden and came with such volume out of Mr. Tasker, that both John and Henry stood back a little. They had been used to hear Mr. Tasker speak to them or to their father after church, but they had never before heard him speak to his own family. All the hatred and malice in the world, all the hatred of the man-master to the woman-slave, fought for the best place in that sound. It was uttered not by Mr. Tasker but by something that was joined to Mr. Tasker by mighty bonds. John, who was always a gentleman in his sounds, was startled and looked another way. Henry watched Mr. Tasker.

A small girl, with a very dirty face, appeared from the house in answer to the shouted command. She carried a very large and evil-smelling bucket, the weight of which dragged her slight form to the ground on the bucket side. Her pale face, distorted with her effort, looked down into the wash as though in that mass of filth she saw her destiny written, as indeed it was. Henry watched her coming and noted the way she leaned. His brother looked at the sow.

Of the two females, the one in the sty certainly
had the best of it. She was the master's favourite in every sense. She had brought him some splendid litters and had never been known to eat any of her children. Her master always spoke to her with consideration, even with a kind of love, in his tone. He saw her fed with the best wash, and made his own child kneel in the mud and slush to scratch her back with an old comb, while he, the master, with neck stretched out, listened to her contented grunts.

From getting up at 4.30
A.M
., from carrying huge pails of wash, from milking fifteen cows a day, from scrubbing the dairy every night, the child had become a stooping, undersized, badly fed, for ever tired slave of the swine. And although she was only thirteen, she could not be called a little girl. That dainty appellation would not do for her, she was not that kind of thing at all. Her form, surrounded by the foul smells of the yards, had become like them. Her kind parent had nearly turned her heart into dung.

Mr. Tasker took the pail from his girl into his own great hand, and burst out with, ‘Get … long … whome….' Then he tossed the stuff into the trough and stood with one hand on the sty gate, that was half open, making a noise in his throat—a beast's call to a beast—a call that only swine understand. The onlookers had not to wait very long before the favourite appeared. She proved to be a large black monster almost too huge to move.

Mr. Tasker looked at her with great
admiration
. She was to him the most beautiful work of art in the world: she was a work of art designed with special care to meet the wants of his
understanding
. He really did understand her points, her lines, her curves. He knew how carefully she had been made, he knew how she had been cared for and nourished. When, as a little sowlet, she had run about amongst the others, he had chosen her as a queen amongst his gods. He had set her apart and had made his own girl, even in those early days, her slave. When the time and season were ripe, he, with the help of Elsie, had driven the sow into the yard of Mr. Bigland at Egdon, who possessed a
purebred
boar. This was the only occasion all that summer that Elsie had any time to pick daisies. She made quite a long daisy-chain while she waited to help her father drive the sow home. Her father had not sent her away to the meadow, she had left the yard because she had no wish to stay. There was a farm-boy of her own age looking over the gate with her father at the boar. Elsie was neither interested in the boy nor the boar, and she loved daisies.