Mr. Tasker's Gods

by T. F. Powys

  And there was John, sitting in his father’s chair, his look serious, even rather worried, like a father’s when he wants to say an unpleasant thing without giving offence. John was talking about work, and was quite concerned to see how Henry would take it.

  Henry had now strayed out on to the heath. He wandered along the path that led out into the wilds. All at once he was conscious of a light burning by the roadside. Henry found himself near a garden gate. He leaned over it and watched the light.

  Henry unlatched the gate and went into the little garden and knocked at the cottage door. Molly opened it to him. Seeing a lost wanderer standing there, soaked with rain, she brought him in.

  Henry sank on to the cottage sofa. He could not explain how he came to be there.

  CHAPTER XXX

  A GIRL’S DESPAIR

  MRS. ALLEN, the mother of Alice, lived three miles from Maidenbridge in one of a block of three cottages, near the high road that breaks the heath in two.

  Before Alice, much to her mother’s dismay, was conceived, another girl belonging to Mrs. Allen was already in the world. This other girl, whose name was Hester, was married very young, and none too soon, to a sailor. This sister was not best pleased that Alice had come home, and therefore spent the time teasing her about her holiday at Portstown. This teasing made Alice pay a visit to her friend Annie. It was when out walking with Annie on the day of the Visitation that the two girls had met the Rev. Edward Lester. He had asked Annie to meet him, if possible with a girl friend—a new member for the Church Girls’ Club.

  Alice, who always called a man in black garments ‘sir,’ fell into this second trap because of the gentleman, as easily as she had fallen into the first because of the man. Alice believed in God and in gentlemen. What they did with their lips and feet, was, when they did anything to her, just like their reading the Bible or ordering a lobster tea at ‘The Pink Arms.’ Her Portstown visit had been so hurried and dreadful, like a nightmare, that she wished to try something better.

  There were stories printed that fed her daydreams, penny stories; she had to hold her eyes very near the fine print to read them. There was all that nice part about the girl who wedded her mill-owner. Nearly every tale in the Weekly Joy Ride was set to this tune. There was a half-page picture of the servant, in cap and apron, scrubbing the floor, and a lean, snake-like clergyman in a long garment watching eagerly from behind. The picture was a very personal temptation to Alice. She too had been in that very same knees-to-the-floor attitude, and had known—how girls do know things!—that she was being watched. It happened that her friend Annie came to her senses just too late to save Alice, who had already been taken out a good many times by Mr. Lester in his motor to see old churches.

  The shock of the climax of her trip to Portstown had caused Annie to change her ways. She began to think that an unmarried, odd-shaped tradesman who kept the Penny Shop looked at her in church; he certainly followed her about in his shop. Annie loved the shop, and would have taken the forked oddity that belonged to it if he had offered himself.

  The morning of the day wherein Henry Turnbull burst his bonds, found the heath garmented in the whiteness of a windless winter’s morn that promised a boisterous ending to the day. Seawards, upon the higher uplands, the light came first, while the sleepy mist still hung over the valley, deadening even the sound of a sheep’s bell.

  Mrs. Allen had, at the back of her cottage, a shed where stood a copper. It was in that copper that the water was boiled for washing. The dread of washing-day hangs over a cottage woman almost as heavily as the burden hung upon the back of Christian. And, as if to mock the poor creature, every new soap pretends to lighten her task with vain promises, and every old soap has a pretty picture in each morning’s paper, saying, almost like God, ‘I can do it all.’ The woman may try to procrastinate by pushing the clothes into a dirty cupboard or up the stairs, but in this world the end of all clean things is always in sight.

  Life had been easy of late to Mrs. Allen. She had cast her burden of the wash at the feet of Alice. Besides washing and helping in the house, Alice had been paying for her lodging with part of the money given her by the drover. Much of that money had gone, by the advice of her friend, the Rev. Edward Lester, to fit Alice out in a dainty costume and hat so that she might be a proper person to walk with in the gardens. Because of this, and certain other expenses, the drover’s money had now been quite exhausted, the last shilling having gone on a wedding ring. For a fortnight Alice had paid her mother nothing.

  The fact that Alice’s store was come to an end led Mrs. Allen to tell the baker every time he called what an expense it was ‘’aving a great girl to keep at ’ome.’ She also pointed out to Alice the list in the local paper of ‘Servants Wanted.’ These and other hints made Alice bite her tongue but say nothing.

  The father of Alice was a detached person. He was one who never regarded any human happening as having anything to do with himself. He worked on a farm as a carter. He had a thin, careworn, inquisitive face, and smoked a clay pipe. His wife and daughters were of far less importance to him than the dirty loose matches that he always had at the bottom of his pockets. He came home to his dinner at two, and sat and ate, without a word, whatever was put before him. Then he would push back his plate, haul out of his pocket the clay pipe, strike a match on his boot, and shuffle off to the stable to bait the horses. It was his habit to look at his family as if they were ten miles away from him. He would have been just as likely to touch the moon or the stars as his wife or daughters.

  In one way he possessed an extremely sharp instinct for gain, and that was in the matter of getting odds and ends of clothing from the farmers for whom he worked. He watched the farmers’ clothes like a Jew, and knew the exact moment when an extra patch was considered one too many for them. It was then that Mr. Allen, slowly and cautiously, brought out the oft-recurring request for an old pair of trousers. Yet he never wore any but his own old garments. There were fourteen old suits, that various farmers had given him, huddled together in a wooden chest at the back of his bedroom. No one dared touch them. On Christmas day he sometimes looked them over.

  Mrs. Allen was a believer in chance. She let everything slide. She let things that she cooked burn, then she got into a rage, and ended up with a good cry. Her washing-days were blank despair. But now that Alice did the washing, Mrs. Allen went into her neighbour’s for a short respite from the world’s cares, a respite that generally lasted the whole day.

  The washing-day now come was no exception. Seeing Alice with her arms bare and the tub full, Mrs. Allen just stepped up to her neighbour’s door to borrow a morsel of tea, a commodity that she was always forgetting to buy. After nearly four hours, during which the other neighbour, the proud one, had been pulled and torn, and at last cast into a drunkard’s grave, Mrs. Allen saw Alice knocking at the window and heard her calling:

  ‘Our mother must come at once!’

  ‘Our mother,’ hoping that something had happened, flustered out into the garden and found Alice under the clothes-line with a large basket full of washed clothes all ready and waiting to be hung upon the line, with the pegs in a small basket near by.

  Around the sullen weariness of the winter’s afternoon there moved the signs of a coming storm. Airy messengers, dark, scraggy clouds, followed each other, rat-like, over the sky; and gusty, dissatisfied rushes of wind brought, even so far inland, the smell of seaweed.

  Alice and her mother turned to watch a country gentleman strolling by on the road from the manor-house. He was something for them to watch, like a shadow on the side of the world. He took off his hat to a lady riding a bicycle, and called his dogs to heel as the lady free-wheeled past. He had only glanced casually into the garden. Poor women do stand in their gardens. He too passed on, and the women turned back to each other.

  Alice told her mother that she could not reach the line, though the line was just the same as it had been on other washing-days. She asked her mother to hang up the clothe
s. Mrs. Allen, with the bells of scandal, hatred, and malice still ringing in her ears, began to take the things out of the basket and to hang them on the line. Turning to pick up a sheet, she saw that Alice was not helping.

  ‘Bain’t thee goin’ to do nothink?’

  ‘You can hang out to-day mother; I be tired,’ the girl said.

  There was something in the feeling of the garden, maybe a grin from the mould, that made Mrs. Allen stare hard at her daughter.

  A motor whirred by in the road. Neither the girl nor the woman this time turned to look round. There was another movement in the wind for them. Alice, with her hands by her side, meekly looked up at a shirt of her father’s. She remembered a patch of dirt near the collar that she had not been able to rub out, and there was the dark patch, still showing, on the line. She wondered why that dirt had hurt her so, for when she had soaped it and rubbed it, a sharp pain had passed like a burning bullet through her body. She had felt faint and had nearly fallen.

  ‘Oh, bother the dirt!’ she had said when she felt better. ‘Let it blow out on the line!’

  She was still a girl.

  In the shed, after that faint feeling had passed, she wrung out the water from the shirt and tossed it into the basket. With her hands limp beside her, she looked at the shirt. The wind blew it well, but the patch of dirt was still there.

  Mrs. Allen looked at Alice. Around the two in the garden there still lurked that creeping grin. Mrs. Allen understood. She threw down the clothes, and grabbed Alice by the arm, dragging her indoors.

  ‘Now I’ll talk to ’ee!’ she said, as a country mother would say it.

  Mrs. Allen gave her daughter the plain sermon of the poor, the girl having betrayed her condition by her refusal to hang up the clothes. All the morning, Mrs. Allen and her neighbour had been gloating over and enjoying the excitement of ‘a case’ in the next block of houses by the heath. Besides this case, their conversation about their neighbour had been what Mrs. Allen would have called ‘tasty.’ Had not the baker said next door, ‘that he would have the money she owed, or else …’? That was something for them to have overheard! This news and the case by the heath really had lightened for them the heavy January day, with a ticklish sense of trouble coming for another. And now here was ‘our Alice’ in the same way, more far on perhaps. This time other mothers would lap from her dish of country cream, and put a stop to her conversations.

  Once before she had been in just such a fury with Alice, and that was when she first felt her move in her womb; for was not the other brat tumbling and screaming, and making a mess of the floor? Instead of walking nicely down to the inn she had to get its clothes off and put it upstairs to bed. This bother was enough for her without any inside movement. On that occasion, the last that her man had touched her, her first anger subsiding, she had to take what would come; but what good it was going to do to any one, she did not know. And so Alice had taken her turn at falling about and screaming.

  A country woman passed by in the road carrying a string bag. She glanced, or rather, her eyes hung inquisitively about the Allen garden. It was empty except for the few things that Mrs. Allen had pinned up on the line; most of Alice’s work was still in the basket. The passing woman looked up at the dim sky. ‘It was going to rain,’ she thought; ‘Mrs. Allen would never dry her clothes.’ The woman’s steps quickened with joy.

  Indoors, her mother used towards Alice all the established word-clawings that come so naturally to the peasant in a case of this kind. She began with the usual:

  ‘And me was a farmer’s daughter! I gets this, seein’ to you so good. I’ll put ’ee in road, little ’arlot. Slut! Bringing this insultin’ talk upon your poor parents. Damn ’ee, little whorin’ toad! That’s what swung ’eeself ’ere for. I knowed thik money came from they men. Get out of ’ouse! Father can’t abide kids.’

  While this gentle mother was rebuking her, Alice cried. When her mother had quieted a little, Alice left the couch where she had sunk down, and without replying, she went out of the door that led to the road. At the same time her mother went out of the back door, meaning to visit her neighbour. She found her neighbour very close indeed, being just outside Mrs. Allen’s own door, where she had only that moment taken her ear away from the keyhole. She had come there with the pinch of tea.

  As Alice walked out into the road the sharp pain came over her again. This time no faintness followed, because her mind burned with the thought of what she was going to do.

  Returning from the walk that was needed to prepare his appetite for his afternoon tea, was the country gentleman. One little long-haired dog had been giving him some trouble. It had had the shameless audacity to follow, barking, a motor car almost twenty yards down the road. The gentleman was tying on to its collar the strap that he carried in his pocket for that purpose. In front of him there was a girl—Alice: he noticed that she was there. It was her business and not his to know what she was there for.

  CHAPTER XXXI

  THE DELIVERER

  THE same morning that Alice washed her clothes, the Rev. Edward Lester was lunching with Mr. and Miss Rudge at their house called ‘New Place,’ near Maidenbridge. He was asked to say grace before the meal commenced, and did so, looking meekly down at the table flowers.

  Alice’s steps followed the road, and then turned off by a little muddy lane that led to the heath. Her foot sank in the mud; taking it out, her shoe came off. She picked it out of the mud and tied it more securely. Around her and beyond her was bare heath. She looked up sometimes towards a black clump of firs about one mile away, just the kind of grove to suit her just then.

  Alice and her sister, when they were little, had gone one day in the spring to those very trees and had played near a deep pool at the bottom of the gravel quarry just across the road. She now passed along the track that the heath carts had made. The touch of the earth, the mild smell of the heath, tried to catch her attention; they would, these quiet things, have tried to call her back, so that she too might be found ready for another spring. In their many voices they whispered to her to wait.

  Going over from the trees to the quarry, Alice crossed a few yards of rough heath. A gorse bush made a last effort. It pricked her leg. She pulled at her skirt and rubbed, but she still went on. Climbing up a little heap of gravel near the quarry, the girl saw that she was not alone. A tramp was bending down and filling a can with water. As she stood there he turned round and saw her.

  The tramp stood and watched her. Was this girl alone? his look questioned. He lifted up his tin can to his mouth—a great bearded mouth,—drank, and spat into the pond.

  Alice sank down before him and became a mere patch of humanity upon the face of the heath, being to the eyes of the tramp a limp, trembling bit of carrion.

  The tramp was not behindhand in taking advantage of what he saw, his fears of the police being stifled under three quarts of beer. For was there not a female here and darkness coming? The place where Alice had sunk down was exposed to the view of the heath, the tramp was not too drunk to understand that. Taking her arms, he dragged her over the brow of the pit to a spot by the water where not even the clump of trees could see them. The trail of her dragged body was left in the sandy soil.

  While he dragged her the tramp had his back to the water; that was why he did not see a tired cow, come down to the pool to drink, upon the other side of the quarry. It was only when he got the girl there safe in his power that he looked round and saw the cow. The cow slowly lowered its head and drank. The tramp was content. This was the kind of pastoral picnic that he enjoyed, where he could take and eat at his leisure. Never had a sick ewe-lamb fallen so easily into the claws of a wolf as Alice had fallen into his hands. He might afterwards throw her, she was so near fainting now, into the pond; no one had seen them. The tramp rubbed his hands and cast a long look upon Alice.

  Above, in the darkening sky, ravening clouds passed racing each other. The girl lay with her head sunk down and with bits of gravel and heath in her h
air. She was entirely at his mercy. From the sky and the girl, Mr. Tasker’s father looked again at the cow that just then raised its head and stared at the tramp. And at last Mr. Tasker’s father did notice something queer about the cow.

  It was quite proper that the tramp should understand something about cows. He had been bred amongst them and had been laid to sleep on their warm dung while his mother milked. He knew very well the look of the thin, lean kine of the heath, and he knew that the last thing the heath kine would think of doing at this season of the year would be to go down to the pools to drink. And why had this beast a rope round its neck? The cow was now standing very still the other side of the pool, with its neck stretched out, looking with soft, strange, bewildered eyes at Mr. Tasker’s father. Mr. Tasker’s father turned to the girl. She lay just the same. He looked away from her, there was the cow still regarding him with her soft stare. Then he saw the dim form of a man climbing down towards the cow.

  Near by the lonely clump of trees, on the fast darkening heath, there had now come together three persons and a cow. The newcomer brought a new chance upon the scene, a possible change in the event contemplated by Mr. Tasker’s father. The newcomer did not look at his own thirsty cow—any one could see that it was there—but at the tramp and the girl. His was just as inquisitive, though not as harmless a gaze as that of the cow. After regarding the fallen girl and the man above her for a moment, out of the mouth of the third person came words: