Mr. Tasker's Gods

by T. F. Powys

  ‘You ought to come and see the fish jump up in the river after the flies.’

  The vicar looked at his watch. Time had passed, but there was yet time for a little walk before the churchwardens’ dinner that he had promised to attend with Mr. Tasker.

  Human affairs vary. Our friend Mr. Turnbull, instead of, with a greedy hand, locking in his study drawer a fat dividend, was now wondering how he could prevail upon a young lady of nearly seventeen to accept a pound, so that she might buy a new Sunday hat. Near the little narrow gate beside the river, Mr. Turnbull decided that the best way was simply to give her the pound-note, saying while he gave it, in a fatherly way, that he expected she might like a new hat with a feather of Saxe blue—the only colour that his fatherly mind could think of just then.

  They watched the river a little longer, while a fat trout rose and gobbled up a little brown fly.

  In the largest commercial room of the best hotel in the town, the churchwardens gathered for their annual dinner. They sat like gate-posts, painted black, very still and very silent, except that one farmer remarked to his neighbour:

  ‘Going to rain, bain’t it?’

  And the other replied:

  ‘No rain to-night, Master Williams.’

  The old lawyer, that master mind who understood not Lord Bullman alone, but his daughters and his tenants, perceived one clergyman amongst the gathering. Raising himself a little above his chair, he invited Mr. Turnbull to say the grace.

  Mr. Turnbull did not, for a moment, obey. Somehow or other, after the excitement of the afternoon, the proper and suitable grace escaped his memory. He could only remember the most simple form: ‘For what we are about to receive——’

  The dinner proceeded, the light of gratified sensation shining in the eyes of the eaters. Each farmer, working his jaws so well, carried with him the heaviness, the density, and the hungry greed of his fields. They were peasants, but peasants with the greed and cunning of the tradesmen. They bore the head of the shopkeeper, and the body and legs and belly of a field labourer.

  Some of the sly ones, the long-heads and greybeards, with shifty bloodshot eyes, were more shopkeeper than rustic, and these were even bold enough to hold a kind of conversation with the old lawyer, who beamed upon them all.

  ‘I lost sight of you, sir, up the town,’ said Mr. Tasker to his vicar.

  The proceedings of the day ended with this dinner. All the clergy, except Mr. Turnbull, had long before returned to their homes, where a kindly tea awaited them, and a drawing-room, and a meekly dressed lady perhaps doing her weekly accounts.

  Mr. Tasker and his vicar, the last of the black-coated ones, drove away from the town. During the drive home they had not much to say to one another. The vicar of Shelton spent the time in thought. Going down the hills, he remembered; going up the hills, he feared for his salvation. As the horse walked up one long hill, Mr. Turnbull carefully premeditated a reply with which to meet her question—an answer to her natural request as to how he had spent his day.

  Sitting at last in his own chair—he always used the one with the low back—and helping himself to a shining onion, just taken out of the pure malt vinegar with a spiked fork, he said to the expectant Mrs. Turnbull:

  ‘It has been a tiring day to me, my dear. I’m sorry to say the fees were higher, owing to a new extra payment. For some years it has been dropped, and now it is—woe to a poor clergyman of sixty!—now it is insisted upon again. I was obliged this time to pay a pound more.’ Mr. Turnbull looked down at the half onion left upon his fork. He then glared at Henry.

  ‘I am afraid I must deduct that pound from your allowance.’ And the vicar of Shelton crunched the other half of the onion.

  He had begun to give Henry one pound a quarter, because Henry rang the church bell, read the lessons, taught the Sunday school, cut the churchyard grass, weeded the paths, and read the Bible every day to a dumb imbecile.

  CHAPTER XIX

  THE DYING MAN

  NEVILLE desired very much to see his sister before he died. It was the thought of seeing her that kept him alive. He also longed to explain to Henry what he felt about the world he was leaving so soon.

  ‘Upon the world,’ he said one day to Henry, ‘thought has written the word “man” in blood.’

  ‘Thought and pain,’ he said at another time, ‘are the two terrible wheels of the world.’

  Less and less, during his last week, did Neville cling to his old thoughts: they broke away from him like withered leaves.

  ‘I have been too much of a mystic,’ he said. ‘I would like to throw myself upon a splendid hill and lie and bleach in the sun. I have lived behind the curtain of the Church. In there the light of Christ was dimmed. I would even now laugh, and catch joy and throw it into the sun. I would like to get again the joy of reaching down over the bank of a river to pick a purple flower.’

  Neville talked strangely at times as the days passed, and the fever drew his life away.

  ‘Perhaps, after all,’ he said one day, smiling, ‘Jesus may have been only a flower of light, a purple flower growing by the side of the river of life and loved by a tiny boy. Perhaps the boy who loved the flower was hated by the other children. They saw him one day stroking the leaves of the Christ-plant by the water’s edge, and together they rushed out and trampled down the plant with their heavy boots, and they spat upon the little lonely boy and chased him to his home. And in his own home his mother beat him for bringing riverside mud into the cottage.’

  Then Neville slept, and Henry walked home thinking of what he had said.

  Nearly two months passed, and the ragged grey coat of autumn, rough and wet, covered the land. For almost three weeks Henry did not ‘slack down,’ as his father called it, to South Egdon. The reason being that Edith and the new servant, a sturdy maiden of thirty winters from the village, had both caught influenza and were too ill to leave the servants’ bed. Instead of waiting upon others they themselves had to be tended, and the doctor had a chance to tell his wife about the old-fashioned furniture in the servants’ bedroom.

  To act as nurse to the two servants and as a help in the house, Mrs. Turnbull had opened her doors to a large woman whose duty in private life was to sweep out the National School, and whose pleasure was to break, out of the vicarage hedge, sticks with which to boil her tea-kettle. Besides nursing the maids, there were other household duties to be done. Therefore it was needful, for the proper well-being of the house, that Henry should give his help.

  He began at six o’clock by lighting the kitchen fire. After doing this he swept out the study, drawing-room, and breakfast-room, lit two more fires, laid the plates for breakfast, got in the coals, sifted the cinders, cleaned the knives and boots, helped to make the beds and looked after the lamps, and then he went into the garden to fetch the vegetables, and the large woman cooked the dinner. In the afternoons and evenings another long array of tasks was set before him, and he, with a quiet aptitude, performed them.

  While he was busy, his thoughts were with his friend, and when, at last, the servants were better—it was almost December—Henry, fearing that he might be too late, hurried down the Egdon road. Upon turning the corner near Neville’s trees, he almost ran into a lady, a lady who—he could hardly believe his own eyes—was mending the vicarage front gate. She had already, in a business-like way, fastened into the post two hinges to hang the gate upon. The trouble with the gate had all been because the hinges had broken away from the post. The lady had hammered them in again in a new place, and all things were ready for lifting the gate into position. Henry came forward, took hold of the heavy end and helped to set the gate up, and had the satisfaction of seeing it swing wide open and then shut again without let or hindrance.

  Henry’s first impression of the lady was that he had never before seen any one look so clean in his life. She seemed to him like a mountain pool, clear and deep, showing a pure stratum of shining rock, above which the water lay serene and deep—and alone. The lady was pale; she
looked neither old nor young, and had, Henry felt, been always like that. Around her, and part of her, was the deep wisdom of hidden pools.

  Henry had guessed who she was, and the two walked along a new-trodden narrow path to the house. She told him that her brother was in great pain, and that the end was not far off. In the house she settled herself upon a chair with six cushions, and took up a little dark-red book while Henry went to see his friend. As soon as Henry was gone, the little book sank upon Molly Neville’s lap. Deep within her she was feeling, touching, and loving the mystery of death.

  Henry found Neville far worse than he had expected. He found him in torment. But he was still nobly aware that he lived. Pain, fearful grinding pain, was with him. He lay with his eyes closed, he could only move his hand to meet Henry’s. For a while the two sat silent. Then Neville, with an effort, told Henry that his sister had been there three days. He had one trouble.

  ‘It hurts her so,’ he said, ‘to see me like this, in pain.’

  Henry bent over the white hand of his friend and cooled its burning heat with his tears.

  On his way downstairs he met the housekeeper. She was dressed a little better than usual, but looked as though she had lost something. Henry opened the study door where he had left Molly. She was lying just as he had left her upon her store of cushions, fast asleep. Henry saw that her forehead was white and noble like her brother’s. He quietly left the house, and, overcome by sorrow, walked back to his home.

  Two days after this visit, at fifteen minutes past one, the vicarage hour for dinner, the gong reverberated, round, under, and about the hall chairs, certain overcoats, and an old silver dish for callers’ cards. And yet Mr. Turnbull did not appear. For ten minutes the leg of roast sheep remained under its leaden cover, and Mrs. Turnbull and Henry sat in silence and waited. The warning click of the gate prepared them for the coming of the master of the house.

  Mr. Turnbull’s manner of walking up the drive showed the state of his feelings. If the news was a death in the village he crunched the gravel slowly and warily so that the whole of his foot, beginning at the heel, pressed the ground. When, at the village shop, the story that Alice had gone off came to his ears, he returned home putting little jumps and half leaps into his walk, rather like a young raw soldier changing his step. If Mr. Turnbull happened to have heard of the birth of a love-child in the village, the reverend gentleman’s heels hardly touched the ground, although his stride shortened into the walk of an ordinary person.

  After hearing the gate click, Henry watched his father coming round the curve of the drive. Mr. Turnbull held his umbrella by the middle, and tapped the gravel rather than crunched it as he walked. His overcoat was loosely buttoned and swayed behind him, and his knees, in his black trousers, preceded his feet. The same kind of a step carried Mr. Turnbull upstairs and then brought him down again, and placed him in the chair before the covered carrion. He looked at his son from under his eyelids, and cut out slices of flesh from the sheep’s leg.

  ‘Edith, some more potatoes for the master.’

  It was just then that the news came out. The father looked at the son and said:

  ‘I have seen Chaffin, and he told me that Mr. Neville has destroyed himself.’

  Henry continued quietly to eat his dinner. Somehow or other this news took away, rather than increased, his sorrow at the death he knew would have to be.

  Mr. Turnbull helped himself to the potatoes, and having a shrewd idea from the steam that they were hot, he expanded his story.

  ‘Chaffin has seen the housekeeper. The woman thinks that his own sister bought the poison. Mr. Neville’s mind was clear—he was sane. The doctor believes that he might have lived for months. A terrible disgrace for the Church.’

  The potatoes were cooler now.

  The figure about which Mr. Turnbull had spoken lay very still. Death was with him.

  CHAPTER XX

  GENTLEMEN

  THE policeman of South Egdon was a man wisely servile to a magistrate, familiar with the clergy and large farmers, rather inclined to be surly with smallholders, and a bully to the labourers. He had ridden down to the local station upon his wife’s bicycle in order to take the first train to Maidenbridge, so that the coroner might have time to arrange for the inquest the next day.

  That superior officer was a retired doctor who carried with him a bold look to the world and to dead bodies, and a modest fear of his two daughters. These young ladies regarded their father as a kind of black-beetle killer, and they always opened the windows when he came into the room. His pay from the town for his labours was Forty Pounds a year—and certain legal fees,—making up in all rather more than Fifty Pounds. This sum went annually to his two daughters as their allowance.

  His daughters did not object to the source of the money, as long as they received it. Corpses cut down from bedposts, corpses fished up from backwaters, dead infants taken from sewers, shepherds from barns, girls from rivers, and old gentlemen from under trains, all generously helped to provide these young ladies with new hats. So, from their point of view, killing oneself or getting murdered became a deed of Christian charity. And an extra decayed corpse or two in the year gave them a chance to buy a king’s box of milk-chocolate or a motor veil.

  The policeman was shown into the coroner’s office and explained his case. It was a serious case. One witness whom he knew very well, the clergyman’s housekeeper, had told him that same morning that Miss Neville had poisoned her brother, to get his money. The policeman said he had searched the room and found no less than four little bottles of morphia tablets, one empty. He had taken them into the safe custody of his own pocket. He had seen the doctor, who had told him, in confidence of course, that he had not ordered morphia, but had recommended massage.

  The coroner looked grave.

  ‘Be careful in the choice of your jury, officer. You must get educated men, men who can understand what I say. In a case like this the common labourer will not do—it may be murder. Will you kindly tell me—I hope I am not detaining you, officer——?’

  ‘Oh no, sir!’

  ‘—Will you kindly tell me, has this sister, this Miss Neville, a good character—is she known amongst the families in the neighbourhood?’

  ‘From India, sir,’ said the policeman, and having written his orders in a book, he departed.

  The following morning, at ten o’clock, twelve men in their Sunday clothes were hanging about in or near the vicarage drive. They were all ‘honourable men,’ and they were there to view the body. Although they had a laugh or two at its expense, they were, in their bellies if no higher up, rather ill at ease. In a road beside a homely hedge of red berries, a man may have his jest about a corpse, but going right up to one, as they by law were forced to do, was another matter.

  The jests of these men, under the trees and by the drive gate, were taken from the housekeeper’s stories about her master. They were the kind of stories that the gentlemen of the jury liked, and they were passed to and fro by the tongues, and were pleasantly chewed by the foul mental teeth of the innkeeper, two dairymen, one coal merchant, a thatcher, a doctor’s son who knew about horses, two farm bailiffs, and four farmers. They could all write their own names except the thatcher, and he could set a drunken cross by the name of Sir Hugh Winterbottom at the elections.

  The memories of these gentlemen threw out, each from its own cesspool, many a droll tale of the housekeeper’s. Their laughter was loud enough for Molly Neville to hear as she lay in her brother’s study looking upon the pages of a book. She knew quite well that they were laughing about her brother.

  She rested there, gathering up what strength she could out of the deep places of her soul, wherein there was no mud, to prevent her thoughts from sinking. Her eyes were strangely deep and luminous.

  The merry jurors continued to walk amongst the trees in the garden, and to jest about the long grass and the nettles. Earlier in the day the doctor had been with the body. The sudden arrival of the coroner trans
formed all the merry jurors into servile rustics. Even the farmers and the merchant touched their caps as the grand official drove up in his motor.

  The policeman opened the proceedings with a legal prayer to Pluto, the jury were sworn, and the largest farmer, the one who had killed the dog, was created foreman. The gentlemen trooped upstairs, and each one passed by the dead body. The face was uncovered. They looked and retired, much preferring the journey downstairs. With a sigh of relief, for the worst was over, each juror sat down by the long table.

  The doctor from the town was the first witness. Sometimes he played golf with the coroner, and now he was in a great hurry to get away, being busy with influenza amongst his customers. The coroner understood the feelings of his fellow-tradesman and brought his questions to a point at once.

  ‘You opened him, and what did you find?’

  ‘His lungs were, of course, very bad,’ gossiped the doctor, ‘but the morphia finished him—heart.’

  The two gentlemen smiled at one another. The gentlemen of the jury smiled too.

  ‘Did you order morphia?’

  ‘Oh no!’

  ‘Do you know who gave it to him?’

  ‘Dear me, no!’

  ‘Do you consider that Mr. Neville was in his right mind at the time of his death?’

  ‘Quite right—yes, certainly, no mental trouble.’

  ‘I will not keep you any longer, doctor; you are busy, I know—the time of year—influenza——’

  The coroner wrote out the medical man’s cheque, and the doctor’s motor hooted away from the village.

  ‘Call Miss Neville.’ The coroner’s voice was changed.

  The kindly jurymen who expected a scene, or at least tears of repentance, were very grievously disappointed. Miss Neville appeared quietly in the room. To her the men around the table were shadows. She wondered what they all had to do with her brother.