Mr. Tasker's Gods (7 page)

T
HE Rev. Henry Neville had the care of a little village as well as his own large one. This small and innocent offspring of South Egdon bloomed and blossomed and shed its leaves among low meadows by the river-side. It was pure in its poverty, and it owned a tiny church, but no inn, one or two small farmers, and a dairy. The church, with its one bell, lay curled up like a mouse asleep. It had been built by a very pious gentleman who had lived ages ago in the Hall, that was now the dairy-house; the stones that made the church were brought from his own quarry, and he had imported three wise
stone-masons
through the woods from Old Sarum. One ancient man who lived there had told Mr. Neville that he quite well remembered the church being built: so easily do memories pass from father to son that they appear in the seventh generation quite as clear as when they were recorded by the first.

Mr. Neville’s home Sabbath duties occupied the morning and the evening of the God-blessed day, and in the afternoon he visited the little village, the name of which was West Heath. He always enjoyed the walk and much preferred the little village to the big one, partly by reason of its primitive habits and partly because down there the river mists were able to melt a little the ice of the human heart, so that the people
were not so aggressively cruel as at South Egdon.

At West Heath they lived on river mist and white cheese made from skim milk, and their thoughts hardly ever got beyond their little flower-beds and meadow gates. No young woman ever wandered there in the paths of sin, they got up too early in the morning for that. If ever the maidens had a desire to see life, they chose to go to service in a seaside town with a clean white beach and new villas. Sometimes they returned to the village and married a peaceful cowman and sent presents of mushrooms to their late mistresses, receiving in return little shoes for the baby.

The Sunday morning following the village tea disclosed a state of unrest in the vicarage of Shelton, the abode of the Turnbulls. Henry’s brothers did not remember to offer him a cigarette, and they talked about trains. A creature with horns had got hold of a kind of bell-rope
somewhere
at the bottom of Mr. Turnbull the elder, and, climbing up into his heart, whispered to him that Mrs. Turnbull was too easy and too near to satisfy him now and that his happiness was a something farther off. For a moment or two Henry had thought about a cigarette, and then he thought of his friend, and after the early dinner, for which the sermon gave an appetite, Henry went out to find the priest. He planned to himself to walk with Mr. Neville to
West Heath, and he hoped he would be in time to catch him before he left his house.

A short way down the road towards the next village there was a gate near to a tiny copse of nut bushes, and upon the upper part of this gate some fierce inventor of Bible texts had put in flaming letters of red paint the words, ‘Repent or be Damned.’ Other lesser drawings, symbols, and descriptions, more human perhaps, and certainly not more immoral, were inscribed in pencil upon the posts.

When Henry passed he found this gate occupied by Alice and the niece of the small farmer; they were there in their Sunday frocks talking to two young men, one of whom was the dark young man from the town. Alice was almost doubled up with laughter as Henry went by. Henry smiled and remarked about the pleasant weather, and the young man replied with a nod. He knew an idiot when he saw one. And again Alice laughed, and blushed shyly.

Henry found his friend Neville just climbing over his worn hedge into the road; ‘In the same manner,’ so he said, ‘did the robber in the
Pilgrim’s
Progress
get into the way.’

The two, for a while, walked along the dusty high road, and then turned down the lane that led to the hamlet of innocence.

The two friends wandered down the lane and entered the tiny church with its seats of plain unvarnished wood, and altar table that just
suited the plain wooden cross. Though he could not mend his own gate, Neville had made that cross. Three young girls with brown hair brushed out were already seated as quiet as mice. They were the choir. And one out-
of-work
cowman sat with two small and neat boys near the door. In another corner, the sexton, a peaceful old ditch-cleaner in black, pulled the bell. When he thought the priest was ready he stopped pulling, and, brushing his trousers, went to his seat and knelt down and closed his eyes. There was a softly smiling silence in the little church as though the air were only breathed by children, and when the service began the voices were children’s voices.

Henry Neville understood the primitive feeling in his church, and he told the children, the
cowman
, and the sexton a fairy story about a mother who had once lived in the bottom of the sea and had left her children, ‘little maids and little boys,’ he said, and had taken away their
happiness
, a tiny kitten, in an amber casket; and that the children pined away and nearly died for the want of that kitten at the bottom of the sea. At the mention of the kitten the children in the church smiled, which was just what the priest meant them to do, for that was why he told the story. Henry too was pleased; there was nothing ugly or gross there, only a poor priest telling a story about a little cat. And he smiled too, and thought that no doubt
the priest really meant that the kitten was our Lord.

It was almost dark as Henry Turnbull walked up the lane that joined the two villages. A little in front of him was a couple, a girl in white and the dark figure of a man. They separated in the middle of the village, the girl taking the way to the vicarage and opening and shutting the gate just before Henry. Henry knew that the slim, shining figure was Alice, who had begun to walk out with the young man from the town.

‘Other people,’ Henry thought, ‘were trying to get something.’ He had never tried to get anything unless it was the fall of that tree.

With the melancholy of his friend upon him, Henry went into his father’s dining-room, the room of many meals, to supper. His two brothers sprawled on chairs. They were both fleshy men. His father was still eating; his sermon had made him hungry. He had preached about the Lord of the Vineyard. Together they talked of Mr. Neville.

‘Funny cheap!’ the curate called him.

And the father remarked, ‘A disgrace to the Church!’ and cut a reeking onion in half and conveyed the largest portion into his mouth.

The vicarage dining-room was filled with odours, there was a smell of salad dressing and a smell of stout, and Mrs. Turnbull had eaten some of the new jam; on the side of her plate
there was a shining heap of sucked plum-stones. The family pushed back their chairs. They had eaten after the fashion of the English
middle-class
who always show by their looks when they have had good food. The family sauntered into the drawing-room, leaving the dining-room empty until Alice came in, rather flushed, to take away the plates.

The following morning was chosen by the Turnbull family to separate from one another. The two elder brothers went their different ways to the fields that they cultivated in the earth.

The doctor followed his usual custom,
departing
by an early train, and found time that same afternoon to take out his car and to see a few sick persons. The doctor’s well-ordered life was passed in a rural district, and with the help of the new Insurance Act he did very well there. His house was as proper as his life, and his wife and child made up, together with his savings, what he considered to be the right thing. He was the doctor for the rich farmers and poor clergy to send for, and as a rule they paid their bills. And a modest half-dozen of the poorer class were sure to cut their throats in his district in the year. He had trained his pliant mind to think of the guinea fee and not of the face of the death worshipper. The doctor quite understood what part he had to play in the game as a kind of upper servant of the rich. It was not likely that he would ever turn against his masters, and for a
very good reason—because he could afford a glass of wine, like the glebe farmer, on Sundays.

The Rev. John Turnbull, with plenty of cigarettes and picture papers, departed by the mid-day train to town, and the next morning he called on ‘the dear girl.’ He found her at home nursing two little white rats. She stroked them and made John stroke them—‘she loved them so—the dears!’
And then she tossed them one after another into a silver basket, where they lay upside, down, and asked John to tell her all about his dear mother; ‘they must go and stay there after they were married,’ she said.

H
UNG up in the window of No. 12 Mill Street in the gallant city of Portstown there was a notice telling passers-by that a bedroom and a sitting-room were to be let to a respectable couple. The house and the street were just like a million more in that beautiful brick country of English homes. The house had four windows and four pairs of dirty curtains, and a narrow back-yard; and Mrs. Fancy, who rented it, was one of the happiest women in the town.

A few weeks after the good vicar of Shelton had entertained the village at tea, one of his late guests, the gardener’s son, the dark young man from the town, knocked at the door of this very No. 12 Mill Street, while another of the clergyman’s late guests, without her servant’s box and with flushed cheeks and eyes like a frightened hare’s, waited a little nervously in the road.

Mrs. Fancy, the occupier of No. 12 Mill Street, had once been married to a local
rate-collector
, until the local rate-collector was eaten by a cancer, and dropped rudely—they really did let the coffin fall—into a hole in the
graveyard
, leaving Mrs. Fancy free. Mrs. Fancy had bravely borne the sight of his sufferings, and he had at least enjoyed the pleasure of being a trouble to Mrs. Fancy. During his last hour upon earth he damned her to hell once, twice,
and thrice, and then, with a hideous ape-like twist of his face, died.

Mrs. Fancy’s fortune amounted to four shillings and sixpence a week, and upon that she lived in ease and plenty. She obtained her rent from the letting of her rooms, and she obtained her life’s joy from watching the downfall of young girls. Her neighbours’ children she preferred, to any others, to see go down, and she liked to see them struggle a little before they were submerged. She had lived in that No. 12 for twenty years, and her husband Mr. Fancy had been dead for fifteen. In that period of time she had seen a good many of the kind of falls that delighted her heart.

She attended the chapel, a place where women sometimes preached, and once or twice she had prevailed upon a fallen girl to tell her story and return to God for the space of time that it took to sing a hymn. It was upon the girls that Mrs. Fancy always had her eyes. She did not care about the men. ‘They were all so openly wicked that she hated them’—so at least she told the grocer at the corner.

Often Mrs. Fancy was to be seen out of doors at night, and she knew all about the young people who went to the pictures with the sailors, and about the houses that they sometimes went to afterwards. When a victim was in trouble, Mrs. Fancy rubbed her hands and was glad and talked about hell to her neighbours and about
the sailors to herself. Ah, Mrs. Fancy was a lady of morals.

‘Mr. and Mrs. Turnbull’: Alice had decided to take—not in vain this time—the name of her master. ‘Mr. and Mrs. Turnbull’ were admitted and were shown the two rooms. They were slightly cleaner than the other rooms in the same street. Mr. and Mrs. Turnbull told Mrs. Fancy they had just been married, and they explained that they were a respectable couple taking a holiday: they said they had saved some money in their other employment. Mrs. Fancy looked at Alice. Mrs. Fancy had her doubts, and doubts of this kind were the roses in her garden. She took—whatever her doubts were—a week’s money from her new lodgers.

At the beginning of the adventure the young man from the town had wisely asked Alice to give him her savings. The young people were left alone while Mrs. Fancy went out to buy something for their tea and to talk over her doubts with one or two neighbours. Her instinct told her that she had caught something this time. Mrs. Fancy had set her rooms as a trap for white mice, and she caught many a pretty little creature.

Alice had carried the little basket that she had brought with her upstairs to the bedroom, and she took therefrom—her hands shook rather—a new skirt and a blouse, and looked at them. She had sent away for the skirt, and had spent
many Sunday evenings, quiet Sunday evenings, with the kitchen clock creeping round, in deciding which to have, and last of all she had written out the order and sent the money.

Alice had got into the habit of always ‘cleaning herself,’ as she called it, in the afternoon, and as she had not had much time to wash on this particular day, she now looked round for some water. There was none. ‘Of course not,’ she said aloud, and it was not the first time that a frightened girl’s voice had been heard in that room. ‘Of course not! how could she expect it?’ She had always been the one to carry up water in her place, she must go for it now. She went down for it quietly, like a servant.

Alice was beginning to wish she had not listened to him. When he had suggested this little holiday she had in her thoughts only the dullness of the vicarage and a certain heavy hungry look from the eyes of the Rev. Hector. Day after day had passed there in the same stagnation, and then John Turnbull came and she knew how he looked at her, and she wished that she could go away with a gentleman.

This was the kind of wish that young Roude liked to find amongst the aspirations in a young girl’s mind. He waited for it, and when she said, ‘… how nice to go away with a
gentleman
,’ he made his little proposal that they should take a holiday together. ‘They would be very careful’—he knew, like his betters, all about
that. And she could easily find another place when they had spent her money. They chose her afternoon out and drove down to the station in the milk-cart, telling one or two easy lies, a simple thing for a servant to do. And Alice took with her all her savings, about eight pounds. The looks of three men—we leave out the good doctor—and the words of one had decided Alice, and she felt at her ease with Roude, who was one of her own class.

Once at Portstown, affairs were not quite so cheerful. She looked at Roude. He did not seem to feel that she was so near. Alice had heard stories, and now she thought of them. She remembered hearing that her young man had done this kind of thing before—not once or twice!—and that something had happened to one of his girls, something in a hospital.

She went downstairs. He was smoking a cigarette and reading
Dainty
Bits
by the window, and he looked as if this kind of honeymoon was not new to him. Neither was it. He had been put up to the idea by a commercial in the coal trade, over a glass of beer. At last the new Mr. Turnbull spoke, and not very politely.

‘When’s the blasted old woman coming back?’ he said.

Mrs. Fancy did come back, and the lodgers began their tea, the gardener’s son grabbing at the teapot himself and spitting the stones of the plum jam very neatly into the fireplace. Tea
over, the young man kicked about the room with a cheap cigarette in his mouth, and pulled the chairs from Mrs. Fancy’s favourite corners. Together they went out to the pictures. They saw a fat old man making love to a girl in a boat, and the girl’s real lover hooked the old man from a tree, and he toppled into the water. And then they saw the mighty doings of a masked burglar in a girl’s bedroom. And at last came the heads of five British generals.

After this was all done they returned to Mrs. Fancy’s, where they had supper of bottled ale and ham. By this time Alice’s head ached and she grew more and more nervous. She remarked that ‘she did not want to go to bed, she would stay downstairs all night; he could go if he liked.’ Her young man addressed her after the manner of his class, and, gripping her by the arm, forced her upstairs.

At Shelton vicarage the matter made very little noise. Young servants do run away
sometimes
. And Mrs. Turnbull had noticed
something
in her husband, and had decided—wise woman—to choose next time a less attractive handmaiden. Edith went on doing the work—the work still remained, like Mr. Turnbull’s appetite, whatever else ran away. The policeman of the village called to inquire if any of the spoons were missing.