Mr. Tasker's Gods (6 page)

T
HE Rev. John Turnbull complimented Mr. Tasker upon the care he must have taken with the sow, and the dairyman explained that all the well-being of a pig depended upon its having proper food when it was young.

‘You must never,' he said, ‘let pigs run about in the fields unless they have plenty of barley meal at home.—Pigs want attention!' he kept on saying.

Henry had been looking at the bottom hinge of the sty gate with a rather fixed stare. He had not been taking any part in the conversation. He was thinking about men and their real selves and was wondering what the eyes of God made of a man's heart. Henry believed in God and he was sorry for God. He felt that God must see some very horrible things.

The dairyman was now talking in the usual rather absent-minded way that he used with gentlemen of the Church, and with the auctioneer who sold his pigs.

Henry had discovered something queer: that this harmless, quiet churchwarden, this
vestry-meeting
Mr. Tasker, was not really Mr. Tasker at all, but a sort of mask that was worn by a brute beast of the most foul nature. Henry had heard the shout. It had come from somewhere that is below humanity and from something of which man is but the surface. Looking at Mr. Tasker's
face, Henry had a momentary glimpse of this thing, and a sudden impulse overcame him to strike at it—he saw blood. A moment later he was himself again, staring as before at the rusty hinge of the sty gate.

His brother, the curate, expressed himself as very interested in the weight of the fat pigs, that were the next exhibit, and that were shortly to be killed. He talked to the dairyman about the different ways of curing bacon in order to make it a fit and proper article for a gentleman's
breakfast
table.

The pigs in the sties were finishing the remainder of their afternoon tea. They had some of their feet still in the trough, and they squealed and sucked and stamped in the dung.

And to Mr. Tasker they were—pigs. No word to him was more sacred.

By this time John considered that he had been polite enough to his father's churchwarden, and, thanking him very much for letting them look at such very fine pigs, the brothers departed. As soon as they had left the yard, the pigs and Mr. Tasker were lost to John's mind, while other little problems presented their petitions.

The visit in Henry's case quite outweighed the cares and troubles or the joys of the garden that he had to think of. He could not forget the heavy-laden, overworked, dreary look, and the eyes dragged open fixed upon a great bucket of swill. And he could not forget the ugly thing
out of which that human shout had come. His spirit, so light hitherto, had received a weight upon it, a weight that had begun to make him feel what man is, a weight harder to bear than the cross. He could not understand his brother, who at once began to speak of something else. The something else was the interest that bankers charge upon lent money. Henry, for the first time in his life, did not even hear his brother.

On their way to the dairy Henry had walked lightly and had picked some white clover, but now he even forgot to open the gate for his brother, who, however, by standing back,
reminded
him of his duty.

During the afternoon Alice had tidied and dusted the best rooms, and had read, to her great contentment, a letter that she had found upon the floor of the room occupied by the Rev. John. A letter that came from an address that Alice knew well enough was not ‘the dear girl's.' It was time for her to lay the cloth for tea when she entered Henry's room. Henry never left his things about, and the room was arranged like a monk's cell. Alice did not mean to waste her time there, so she gave a flick with her duster at the bookcase. Her blow, directed with a maidenly violence, dislodged a volume, that fell down and lay open upon the floor. Alice left it there. ‘Those dry books had best lie upon the floor,' was her comment.

When the two brothers returned from their
visit to the dairy they found the doctor reading an article called ‘Money' in the
Hampton
Magazine.
Henry did not wait for the meal that was called supper; he went up to his own room, and nobody missed him. One of the brothers said in answer to the mother, ‘Oh yes, Henry is home, he has gone to bed,' and there they all left him.

In Mr. Turnbull's mind's eye there was the sobbing form of the new teacher. The Rev. John was thinking of the old power that the barons used to exercise over the maidens in the villages. He had read English history at Oxford. Dr. George was wondering whether a certain patient would pay his bill, and Mrs. Turnbull was thinking of her jam, and they talked about the new expedition to the South Pole.

Henry had gone to his room in order to go to bed, and it was then that he saw the book that Alice had knocked out of the shelf. It lay there open upon the floor, but the dying twilight was too far gone to show what was written upon the open page. Henry, like all souls who breathe quietly, was profoundly superstitious. He recognized the book as Milton. He had taken it into his keeping together with Jeremy Taylor's
Holy
Living
and
Dying
some weeks before. It was an old volume of a dull brown colour and contained, he knew, a poem called ‘Paradise Lost,' that others besides Alice have called ‘dry.'

Henry partly closed the window, there was
almost a taste of autumn in the air, and he saw one figure carrying a basket of potatoes away from the allotment. He lit a candle and took up the open book so that it remained as it had fallen. Then he shut his eyes and passed his finger over the page until his finger stopped of itself,—he had done the same thing before,—and he read the lines that his fingers, guided mystically, had pointed out:

Henry knew quite well that the last line of the four was the one that was meant for him. In his voluntary lessons with the Old Fathers, he had learned to think a little for himself. The atmosphere of the Schoolmen was thought, and from the Schoolmen the Church Fathers had learned and in their turn begotten thought.

Henry had no doubt that God had created the heaven before the earth, because He dwelt there. Henry had also, that evening, learned a little about man, who is an important part of the earth. He had beheld the true nature of the best part of the new creation, and now he read:

There was in the tone of that line a blow for some one, and for whom? Even though the
words were uttered by Satan newly entered into the serpent, Henry could not set it aside as one of his lies: it was a question and not a lie. The truth of that fatal question was too plainly appalling; it had come out of the serious and long-suffering mind of John Milton. A
well-meaning
man might have thrown at Henry's head a thousand books written by German
freethinkers
, or English modern poets: Henry would have smiled, they could not have hurt him. The seed of doubt had this time been sown by a
different
hand, by a man who could not lie, and who uttered dread truth out of Satan's mouth.

Henry slowly undressed; he too was being turned out of the garden by a remorseless angel, and he had begun to take his first steps in that outside desert place. That night his sleep was broken: a dog howled continually somewhere in the dark, and he dreamt of a great snake that could speak living words.

T
HE morning of the first tea! This festival took place when the village school broke up for the summer holidays.

The Shelton National School was a dingy building built about the year 1835 by Squire Rundle. The back part of the school pushed its way among the tombs in the grave-plot, and the front jostled the village street, into which road from an open pipe the school drains fell. On the street side there was no window, the only window being on the side that looked out to the gravestones. Into this pleasant retreat, hung round with maps, the children of the village hurried every morning. It might be that half a dozen times a year their education was
interrupted
by a funeral or a wedding. On these occasions they were allowed for a few moments to look out of the window. A large brown stone, bent with age, leaned dubiously outside to mark the resting-place of Thomas Pitman, Esq., and his wife, Amelia, who died about the year 1812; the date was hardly legible.

The festival of the first tea had come, the tea of the summer. And the people of the village were invited. The poor were invited from the reading desk when Mr. Turnbull gave out his usual notices. The two maiden ladies, sisters of a retired grocer—Mr. Collis had passed away from a worldly life somewhat too
mixed up with brown sugar—enjoyed the privilege of a personal invitation from Mr. Turnbull. The farmers’ wives were invited by letter, and the blacksmith’s daughter, who used to play the piano, was asked to come by Edith, who was sent to see her the evening before. Any other people who wished to come just walked in as they wanted to, in time for the tug-of-war.

For Shelton this tea was the event of the summer. It was the day in which the mothers dressed their girls in Sunday frocks, each little girl easily persuading herself that she was a triumph over the others. During this day there awakened the great illusion of joy that had been a little inclined to fall asleep during the long days. All the people believed fine things would happen that would set their plain lives on fire. The vicarage field became the scented garden of Haroun al-Raschid, and racing for a packet of sweets was a thing to be remembered and talked of for years.

The good people went to the party clad in their best, chattering along the road like magpies. At the field they stood in groups and said, ‘Yes, miss,’ and ‘Yes, mam’ to the one or two farmers’ wives who spoke to them. And after they had done that it was nearly time to go home, and even then it would have been hard to persuade them that something wonderful had not happened.

The event that promised so much joy to the people meant almost nothing at all to the giver
of the feast. The life of the vicarage hardly disturbed itself. It was only Edith and Alice who were able to catch any of the fire flying in the air. If the Rev. John Turnbull happened to be at home on the day, he used to hand over his cigarette case to the blacksmith, who came with his daughter, and the blacksmith, after some little fumbling with awkward fingers, abstracted a cigarette. The Rev. John would then walk about with a smile and start a race for little boys and walk away before the race was finished, leaving the competitors somewhat
bewildered
. It was Mr. Turnbull’s habit on these occasions to take one or two turns in the field and then sit upon a chair, where he remained until the second part of the tug-of-war, and in his chair he consulted with ‘Funeral’ about the conduct of certain small girls who had crept through the laurels and were eating the currants in the kitchen garden.

After the tea and games were finished there was always a tug-of-war and a prayer for the King. The tug-of-war was pulled first by male and then by female warriors. The male tug was of the nature of a preface to the real thing, it was a sign that the great event of the day was near; one just glanced casually at the men who, in shirt sleeves and black trousers, pulled at one another, and very little notice was taken when one of the sides collapsed or was drawn over the line. After the men had retired people became interested, and
there was a general movement towards the rope where the fray between the married and the single of the village ladies was to be fought.

On the day of this particular tea, event had followed event, under a blue sky. The village had assembled at the gate, had been admitted by Henry, had eaten cake and had run races for sweets. Mr. Turnbull had already looked six times at his watch, and the Rev. John had handed to the blacksmith two gold-tipped cigarettes and had talked with a pale individual who had once in his life bought a labour paper.

Henry had been fetching and carrying, and was the only one who tried to make the thing a success. All the unpleasant tasks were left to him. He was the proper one to be called when anything very heavy required to be moved. He was commanded by the sultan in the chair to catch and chastise certain little boys who had crept in from the next village through a hole in the road hedge. He was expected to carry heavy cans of hot water from the house, and to find the only cricket-ball that some youthful giant had hit into the allotments, and, in the middle of the afternoon when Henry was most busy, his brother George sent him to the village to post a letter to the wicked patient who would persist in not paying.

Girls laughed and pushed one another as the detached groups assembled in the middle of the field. To go out and pull a rope in public
required a naughty daring that needed some little preparation and holding back. It was almost as bad as running upstairs before a man. The married women, headed by one lean, scraggy figure, the ancient Rahab of the village, were the first to take up the rope, and after a little persuading—in this the Rev. John distinguished himself—the younger girls assembled at the other end. The heaviest, a farmer’s daughter whose mother smoked her own bacon, was, by the law of custom, placed at the end, and
somehow
Alice found herself facing the woman from the shop, next the line.

The battle began and the married women pulled with great vigour, taking their task in a serious matronly way. The unmarried girls pulled in jerks, except the two old maids, who found the whole affair rather tiring. Alice, who was nearest the line, threw her head back with a reckless toss and sent her hat flying, her hatpins having been all too hastily adjusted. Pulling so manfully, she could feel hooks and buttons bursting all round her frock with a sound like the cracking of ripe gorse pods in the sun. Alice did not care: she pulled well at her work like a girl hero, and wanted, above all things, to see the woman of the shop move towards her.

Somewhere or another it is written, in perhaps some holy book, that it is better to let one’s eyes encounter Mother Earth than to let them rove over the form of a maid. The pose of the
servant-girl Alice provided an instance of the unwisdom of allowing a man’s eye to
overshadow
a girl, a girl with head thrown back and buttons bursting and a panting bosom—a girl wearing a cotton frock that was bought when the wearer was not so well grown.

The vicar of Shelton, the Rev. Hector Turnbull, stood about two or three yards away from Alice; he was standing there to see who was pulled over the line, and as Alice was the nearest to the line he watched her. On the other side of Alice there was also a male eye watching, so that she was caught between two fires. This other watcher was the young man from the town, the gardener’s son: the same young man who had flicked at the knapweed when he walked in front of Alice from the van to the village. He was just as disdainful as he watched the game. This young man looked at Alice casually, disdainfully, but meaningly. He looked at Alice as a hawk would at a lark that sang below him, and he looked at her with all the cruelty of heart of the young.

On the other side of the line Mr. Turnbull went on overshadowing her with his eyes, for the attitude of her tugging was beginning to get itself a place in his mind. There was no help for it; the work was being done by a mightier than he, even by that photographer who takes his designed snapshots with zeal, more carefully than wisely.

The married women of the village proved to
be the stronger, and Alice was at last pulled over the line. Three cheers were given for Mr. Turnbull and his family, and the family were forced to eat a rather late supper. The tug-
of-war
had been fought and won, but Mr. Turnbull had forgotten the cheers for the King.

There was under the bookcase in Henry’s room a narrow table that he had arranged rather like an altar, and there—he was a queer fellow with his things—he had set up a Christmas-card in which a round-faced child dressed in a dainty red petticoat was holding out a rose to a silver cross. It was an old-fashioned card, with
cornflowers
and roses in the corners and a golden halo over the cross, while the child’s white legs stood upon the blue ground.

When Henry entered his room that Saturday night after the village tea, he put the child’s face to his and kissed her.