by T. F. Powys
THE morning after the midnight return of Mr. Tasker was dark for July, owing to great lumbering thunder-clouds that hung like distorted giants’ heads over the church tower. These heads every now and again gave out a muttered growl.
Inside the church tower the owl and her brood were shortly to be awakened by the one solitary bell. They had remained, except for the choir practice, very contentedly for six days, breathing in their loud way, making a noise like the snores of an old watchman. For six days no one had disturbed them, and in their owl minds, that shrewdly think through centuries, they supposed that the happy times of peace in the church tower, that they remembered in the reign of King John, had come again. However, no such rare owl days of church silence had returned, and the old male owl, blinking through a crack in the tower, saw the clergyman’s gardener, a tired, drooping sort of man that they called ‘Funeral’ in the village, slowly ascending the path in order to unlock the church door and enter the vestry, and pull at the solitary bell-rope that had hung for six days on a brass hook near the clergyman’s looking-glass.
This lonely bell had informed the village of the same fact on every seventh day for a great number of years, and now came the little hitch that so often upsets the wise doings of mankind.
The vicarage servants, whose duty it was to serve the vicar with hot water in order that he might serve the gardener, his own son, and one old woman, with bread and wine in the church, were late. Their sacrament of rising and of lighting the fire was delayed by the fact that they were both fast asleep. This condition of theirs was brought to the mind of Mrs. Turnbull by the association of ideas when she heard the feet of the Sunday postman crunching the gravel of the drive. There seemed to her half-awake senses to be something wrong in this event happening when the vicar was in bed by her side, since it happened on other Sundays when the vicar was in church. Thus the startling thought came to her that there must be something the matter with the servants.
The postman’s knock had likewise awakened Edith, Alice being, as she always was when in bed, wholly under the clothes. Edith hardly knew what had happened; so frightful an event as the coming of the postman while they were in bed had never been known before. She endured the torment of a general when the enemy has crept round the camp, overpowered the guard, and begun to cut the throats of the sleeping soldiers.
‘The postman’s come!…’
Alice only replied by sleepy grunts to this outcry of terror.
When Edith saw her mistress and took all the blame, Alice was still at the looking-glass doing her hair. Edith had lit the fire before her fellow-servant slowly and crossly came down the back stairs. It was Alice who a few minutes after this served Mr. Turnbull with hot water. But it was not till the evening that the girls found out what had been the matter with Mr. Tasker.
The feeling of something having happened remained with them and gave them a pleasurable excitement all the day. The heavens were also disturbed: the gloomy giants’ heads concluded their growling by perfect torrents of straight rain, and the vicarage servants could not go out for their afternoon. Instead of going out they sat very thoughtfully over the kitchen table, Edith turning over the pages of a ‘Timothy & Co.’ sale catalogue, and Alice writing a letter to her mother.
For his Sunday’s supper Mr. Turnbull ate cold beef and pickles, and also talked very seriously with Mrs. Turnbull and their son, a poor simple fellow who was obliged to stay with his parents because no financier could extract one ounce of real work out of his mind or body.
Mrs. Turnbull and her son waited and listened, looking at the table. Would the conversation follow the lead of the onions, the beef, the sermon, or the Lord? The vicar’s thoughts passed by the Lord, stayed a little with the onions, and last of all fixed upon Mr. Tasker. The vicar always prefaced his remarks by looking first at Mrs. Turnbull and then at his son, as if to give them due warning that he was going to speak and that it would be best for them to keep quiet. He looked at them, coughed, and said:
‘Mr. Tasker spoke to me in the vestry after we had counted the money.’ To the vicar ‘money’ was a word as important as ‘church’ or ‘Lord.’ He pronounced it slowly, and when he came to the ‘y’ he gave a sharp click with his tongue as if he locked his safe. Having with his usual care delivered himself of ‘money,’ he went on with Mr. Tasker.
‘He told me he had met his father.’
‘How very terrible,’ said the foolish son.
Mr. Turnbull had a contempt for this son, and he never took the slightest notice of any remark that his son made. ‘Mr. Tasker’s father is out of prison,’ he went on, which led to an ‘Oh!’ from Mrs. Turnbull.
Alice left the room with an empty plate.
The family at the vicarage lived very quietly: they began the day very quietly and they finished it in the same way. A person with a large inquiring mind upon the subject of gods, watching the life at the vicarage, would no doubt have been puzzled for a long time to find out exactly what god they did serve there. One thing the person would have noticed, that the God, whatever He was, whether fish, man, or ape, was a remarkably easy god to please. He would have seen, had he been a Hindoo or a Tibetan, had he been anything except an orthodox Christian, that no persons in the household ever put themselves out for the sake of their religion. The church service and the family prayers appeared to be a kind of form of instruction for the poor, the church service being a sort of roll-call to enable authority to retain a proper hold upon the people. The clergyman was there to satisfy the people that there was no god to be afraid of; he was put there by authority to prevent any uncertain wanderings in the direction of God. At the vicarage the clergyman showed, by his good example, that his smallest want was preferred before God Almighty.
The vicarage stood, or rather sat—for it was a large low house—in a pleasant valley. Sheep fed on the hills around, and cows lay or stood about in the lowland pastures following their accustomed regulations as ordained by man. The cows had their milk pulled from them, their calves taken away; they were fatted in stalls when old and struck down in pools of blood. However, in the fields round about the vicarage they always ate the grass and looked the picture of content, except for the manlike disturbance and leapings that at times and seasons produced uncertain conduct and doubtful rovings in the bull. In the summer the creatures fed quite contentedly, or else, in very hot weather, they ran about to try to rid themselves of the flies. In the winter they stood with their tails to the big hedges. In the spring they spread themselves over the fields showing their separate backs and colours. In the autumn they got into corners and became a herd instead of mere cows.
The peace and quiet of the village was plain to any observer. No one toiled very hard and there was never any real want. There were quite enough women to take the edge off the male desires and quite enough beer to sharpen at the wrong end the natural stupidity of the countryman. If your special cult led you to write of country matters or draw Egyptian symbols on the farm gate, you could do so any afternoon at your leisure. If you preferred to paint or tar—I think tar is the cheaper—‘Our Lord, He is the Lord’ on any village stile, there would be no one to prevent you. The village demon was permitted to go, within certain limits, in any direction occasion might demand or your bodily needs require. Every little act that you did was quite well known to every one else, and every one shared the personal glory of goodness or vice. Every wise gossip collected and told again the pages of the village novel. All the people lived in a world of fancy, and every item of news was exaggerated and made intensely human, just as fancy chose. News, dull or tame, was made interesting by the addition of a good end, or a bad beginning, or a needful middle. When the clergyman was angry they made him foam at the mouth, and when Mr. Tasker came home they reported him to have been very drunk indeed and gave him a black eye from his father.
The vicar of Shelton, the Rev. Mr. Turnbull, was a sensible man, and he understood a great many very important matters. He was well clad in the righteous armour of a thi
ck and scaly conscience that told him that everything he did was right. Mr. Turnbull was sometimes troubled with his teeth, but on the whole the days passed smoothly with him; the meals coming almost as quickly as the hours, gave him always something to do. Mr. Turnbull liked the world to run easily for him; he did not want jumps or jerks, nor cracks in the floor. Mr. Turnbull thought that he was quite safe in the world: he understood his way about the village and could always find the church or his own mouth when he wanted to. ‘He had a trouble at home,’ so he told the people, and they knew when he said that that he meant his son.
It was not Mr. Turnbull’s fault that his son was always there; the proper thing would have been for his son to have gone away as his other sons had done, one to the Church and one to medicine. The third son had never got beyond the third form of a rather poor preparatory school. And at sixteen, his ignorance being still in such evidence, the head master returned him to his father as quite unsaleable, and suggested farming and America as a cure for a hopelessly muddled education.
Mr. Turnbull, who was a man of action in some things, thought the matter over and shipped Henry off to Canada. The good vicar was a little afraid of the girls in America. In a picture paper that he had secretly smuggled to his study he had once seen a procession of them, asking for votes, in white frocks and carrying flags in their hands. They were tall girls and looked as if they knew what kind of earth they were treading on, and what kind of helpmate they had in man. The vicar had never seen or heard of any of these white-frocked pests—so he believed them to be—carrying flags in Canada. He imagined that there the hard-worked settlers spent their time cutting down endless fir trees, while their gaunt wives, taken for the most part from the Hebrides, suckled tribes of infants outside the doors of wooden huts. Mr. Turnbull thought it over, and then he pronounced the word ‘money’ to Mrs. Turnbull after he had eaten his beef and pickles one wet Sunday evening in November.
Mr. Turnbull thought it over, and shipped his son steerage to Canada.
The steerage of a great ocean liner is not exactly the best place wherein to receive light. But Henry Turnbull was nearer heaven in that lower deck than he had ever been before. One evening, as he was standing in a kind of bypath between two evil smells, a girl from Ireland walked quickly up to him and drew his face to hers and kissed his mouth. Henry never saw the girl again, she had run away with a laugh and was gone. Henry did not understand running after girls; he simply remained where he was and allowed the kiss—kisses do not stop at the lips—to sink into him. It gave him strange new wild feelings and sank at last into that deep lake over which the poets fish for golden minnows.
Those days were the first in his life when he could use his own legs as he liked, and move where he wanted to go. Before that time his legs had not been his own property. At school they were forced to kick footballs, or else to run to the farther end of a cricket ground after a long hit; at home his legs were always used to carry messages, every one used them for that purpose. But now at last he could walk where he liked in the limits of the steerage; and after that manner did Henry Turnbull reach the promised land.
In that new country Henry found himself in a log hut by the side of a steep mountain surrounded by tall fir trees, so large that he could not put his arms round them. In his pocket he had a letter from his father telling him that his duty to God was from that moment to cut down those fir trees. His father might just as well have told him to cut down Mount Cotopaxi.
In the log hut there were twelve bottles of whisky, one empty, a barrel of flour, and his partner. His partner stayed there for twelve days, and at the end of that time there were twelve empty bottles of whisky instead of twelve full ones. His partner was always with the whisky in the log hut. This partner was a second cousin in whom Henry had invested all his capital, the money that his father had lent him. On the twelfth day this amiable partner walked away to the nearest town, a distance of about forty miles, in order, so he said, ‘… to buy a new axe.’ He never came back again. He had taken with him to the town what remained of Henry’s money, which, with the help of a merry negress, he soon spent.
Henry was now quite alone with twelve empty whisky bottles, a barrel of musty flour, and the odour of his late partner. He tried to do his best; he picked up sticks and cooked Indian cakes with the flour, and hacked with a very blunt axe at the immense fir trees, beginning with the smallest he could find. In two months the flour was all spent, and the fir still standing, for in one of his attempts to conquer the tree, the first of five or six hundred, Henry had given his foot a nasty blow, and the last month he spent in cooking the cakes he also spent in trying to walk.
A society for the protection of poor aliens helped Henry home again. This society helped Henry to work his passage to Liverpool, having received from him in return everything that his partner had not robbed him of. If a girl’s kiss had made the steerage heaven, the sailors succeeded in giving him on the way home a very true picture of hell.
All this experience of the world’s humour taught Henry to love the vicarage garden and to do exactly what he was told by every one. In the vicarage garden Henry lived the life of an industrious child. He learned to understand turning over the mould in quiet and peace. He had seen quite enough and felt quite enough to prevent his trying to assert himself in any way. The mysterious underground currents that rouse men to the vice of action were quite unable to carry him away. He longed to look at every little thing and quietly to consider its meaning, and he noted all the incidents that happened around him. So far he had seen nothing very horrible, and he was always ready to enjoy a joke.
Henry grew a beard and read curious, old-fashioned little brown books, books written by old forgotten Church Fathers who thought like angels. Henry was surprised to find that these old thinkers were very much like himself. He quite understood their reasons for loving and believing, and he quite understood their deep melancholy that was by no means like the boredom that is sad only because it wants something to play with. He liked the way that these good men spoke of religion—a way individual and restraining, a way beautiful and mysterious, that was more afraid of its own virtue than of the vice of a brother. He delighted in their manner. They spoke of religion rather as an aged housekeeper would have spoken, with great dignity and quiet and peace. Although they often lived in wild times, they seemed to be moving in old palace gardens amongst tall white lilies far from the world and ever contemplating the works of that divine Saviour artist, Jesus Christ.
There were two events, one human and one vegetable, that Henry always remembered of his travels. One was the kiss and the other was the hacked fir tree. Often at night he dreamt of both, of the tree cut through at last and falling upon him, and of the kiss whose influence over his life was not yet gone. There was not much chance of another kiss. The girls of the vicarage—the servants were the only girls there—did not like Master Henry. Alice did not like his beard, nor his quiet manner, and Edith supposed him to be secretly sold to the devil because he spoke in the same gentle manner to every one.
Alice understood quite well what she was meant to do in the world; she felt herself quite plainly budding into a woman, and was well content. This young person possessed a round merry face; bright eyes, rather too green perhaps; brown, rather dark brown, hair; and a dainty, though by no means thin, girl’s body. For a servant she was good enough, for herself she was quite the nicest thing she had known. Alice was conventional, even more so than the vicar himself. She liked a man in his Sunday clothes, and to her mind a coming together must begin in the right way; it did not matter so much how it ended, it must begin with a Sunday walk up the hill, a proper sign to the villagers to watch events.
Alice delighted in Mr. Turnbull’s elder son John, who was a curate, and who came to see them sometimes, dressed in wonderful clothes and mounted upon a snorting motor bicycle. The Rev. John had looked at her once or twice, or perhaps oftener, in the right way, his eyes roving over her frock and stopping for a moment about her mou
th and then slowly returning to her feet. The vicarage daily bread had given Alice her rounded form and one or two romantic ideas about John; it had given her the desire for more. She wanted very much to be a lady, and to bully—Mrs. Turnbull never did bully—a servant like herself.
The older girl, Edith, was nearly worked out, she had been at it so long. The vicarage house-cleanings and everlasting plate-wiping had washed all her youth away. She went to the village chapel whenever she could, and there she sang of her last hope—‘salvation.’
CHAPTER III
THE FEAST
ONE afternoon the vicarage was sleeping peacefully, all the leads of its roof basking in the sunshine. It was quite pleasant to witness the content of this English homestead. The different creepers that climbed about it gave the house the appearance of a friendly arbour, and if a young maiden wearing a white frock and a hat with red poppies had danced down the steps the scene would have been wholly delightful. The stone steps were warm, and the front door was open, and inside was a cool dimness. The vicarage looked at peace with the whole world, and appeared to be under the wing of a very drowsy and sun-loving Godhead.
Alas! the most sleepy content has at times a bad dream, and terrifies the dreamer by showing him an ugly thing.
The Rev. Hector Turnbull stood outside his own door; he was wearing an old straw hat, and held in his hand a note. He looked around him. He was looking for something, he was looking for his son.
And then he called, ‘Henry!’ The tone of his voice was sleek and moist, disclosing the fact, unknown to the doctors, that every man has poison glands under his tongue, and when he speaks most gently he is really making up his mind to use them.
‘Yes, father, here I am,’ came the answer from the garden.
The contrast between the voice of the son and the voice of the father was very striking. The voice of the son expressed a natural melancholy and a candour quite his own, as well as an utter obedience to the will of others.