by T. F. Powys
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.
CHAPTER VIII
TRUTH OUT OF SATAN’S MOUTH
THE 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:
‘O earth, how like to heav’n, if not preferr’d
More justly; seat worthier of gods, as built
With second thoughts, reforming what was old!
For what God after better worse would build?’
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:
‘For what God after better worse would build?’
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.
‘For what God after better worse would build?’
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.
CHAPTER IX
THE TUG-OF-WAR
THE 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.