‘It was while I was still in that state that I got involved with Hettie Weston. She was the parlourmaid here. Pretty young thing, and the flighty type. She asked for trouble and she got it. If it hadn’t been me, it would have been the next feller who came along. I didn’t give a cuss for her, but she set her cap at me, and if ever a chap needed a warmblooded young woman to take him out of himself, I did. I bought it all right, and the next thing we knew was that the silly young bitch had let herself get in the family way.
‘Well, plenty of them do that in these country parts long before there’s been any talk of marriage. If the feller is willing they make a go of it and put up the banns. If he’s not, there are usually a few tears, but no harm done. The girl picks on another likely lad to go hedging and ditching with on her evenings off, and lands him with the kid. Second or third time lucky, and she usually gets some mug to the altar. That’s what would have happened in Hettie’s case if it hadn’t been for the old woman.
‘Hettie spilt the beans to the mistress and I was put on the mat. I suppose I could have told her to go take a running kick at herself. If I had, the worst that could have happened was that I’d have lost my job and had a maintenance order made against me for seven and six a week. But I didn’t. I was still in a state of not giving a damn what happened to me, and believing that I had no future worth making a struggle for. You must add to that several other factors, one of which I was certainly not aware of at the time.
‘To start with, there was the hereditary angle. Youngsters of my class had allowed themselves to be dictated to for countless generations by old women in Mrs Durnsford’s position, especially when it seemed that moral right was on their side. Next, as a person she was pretty formidable. When those beady black eyes of hers bored into you, it wasn’t easy to say “No”. Lastly, although I didn’t realise it then, she knew all about me. She knew both how ambitious I had been, and what it was that had caused my ambitions temporarily to take a line that had nothing to do with engineering. It wasn’t any high-falutin’ motive of wanting to see the right thing done by Hettie that made her row in as she did. It was the malice that was in her. From what she knew had gone before, she got a special kick out of getting me married to a parlour-maid and saddled with the sort of liabilities that make it near impossible for a young working man to rise above his station.
‘Anyhow, she bullied me into making an honest woman of Hettie and we settled down in the flat above the stables, where the Jutsons are now. It took a bit of time for me to realise what a muck I had made of my life; but in a young man ambition dies hard, and in me it started to stir again after the new experience of being married began to wear off. I somehow couldn’t find the energy to take up my correspondence courses again, but I was subconsciously seeking a way out. Then, three nights before Ellen was born, it seemed as if it had been thrust right at me.
‘I’d been out doing a bit of poaching, and returned late. The curtains of one of the drawing-room windows were not quite drawn, and through the chink I caught sight of a flicker that might have meant the place was on fire. I took a peep in, and what d’you think I saw? The flicker I’d seen was fire all right, as the room was lit only by a pile of logs blazing on the hearth. But all the furniture had been pushed back to the sides of the room, a lot of circles and figures had been drawn on the parquet, and in the middle of them stood my mistress and the Canon. Both of them were stark naked.
‘He must have been getting on for forty then, so he was already well past his youth and had a little pot. I found him comic rather than repulsive, but there was nothing the least funny about her. She was twenty years older and the scraggy kind. Her withered shanks and flabby, hanging breasts made her a horrible caricature of what a woman should be. You can imagine how weird they looked against the firelight, and how I stared. But after a minute it was not at them I was looking; it was at the thing that stood between them. I can only describe it as a sort of blacksmith’s anvil, and belly up on it they had tied a live cat.
‘The cat didn’t remain alive for long though. As I watched, the Canon produced a knife and slit its throat. Old Mother Durnsford caught the blood in the sort of chalice you see on the altar of a church. Of course, I know now that it must have been stolen from one; but at the time all this made no more sense than if I’d found myself at the Mad Hatter’s tea-party. Still, this was clearly no tea-party, as the next thing they did was to each drink some of the cat’s blood.
‘The sight turned my stomach, so for a bit I missed seeing what they got up to after that. When I looked again they both had some clothes on. She was rubbing the chalk-marks off the floor and he was pushing the furniture back into place. Knowing her reputation as a witch, I suppose I ought to have put two and two together, but somehow I didn’t. It was catching them naked that was uppermost in my mind. I thought then that he was a proper clergyman, and that the business with the cat was some sort of sexual perversion, or that drinking cat’s blood might be a way of making old people feel young again.
‘Anyhow, as far as I was concerned one thing stuck out a mile. Here was my opportunity to break out of the dead end in which I had landed myself. Setting up house with Hettie had cost me the hundred or so I had put by. Since we had been married I’d had little chance to start saving again, and I knew that once the baby arrived I’d have even less. By then I was twenty-seven. Ten years had slipped by without my getting very far—ten of the best years of my life—and I didn’t want to remain a chauffeur all my natural. Here was my chance to make a brand-new start.
‘We may as well call a spade a spade. My mind instantly turned to blackmail. I reckoned that the Canon and the old woman were good for five hundred smackers between them, and that they’d pay that to keep my mouth shut. For a pound a week I could park Hettie and the baby back on her parents. Then I’d go to London. Four hundred, eked out by taking night jobs in garages now and then, would see me through two years as a full-time student at a technical college. Before I was thirty I’d emerge as a qualified engineer, capable of earning good money. It didn’t take me long to work that out, or how to set about it.
‘They had to dispose of the body of the cat. I reckoned they wouldn’t risk the stench that would fill the house if they burnt it on the drawing-room fire; so all the odds were that the Canon would take it out to the furnace. I nipped round there and hid behind the boiler. Sure enough, a few minutes later in he comes, opens the furnace door, rakes up the coke a bit and in goes the dead cat. The moment he had gone I fished the animal out. Its fur was a little singed, which showed that an attempt had been made to burn it, and its throat was slit from ear to ear; so it provided the evidence I needed to turn the heat on him.
‘Next morning I put it in an oyster-barrel filled with brine, to preserve it, and hid the barrel in the loft. Then in the evening I cycled over to The Priory to have a little talk with the Canon. But I was told that he had gone to London and was not expected back for about a week. Two days later Hettie had her baby. As it happened I didn’t have to call on the Canon after all, as the day he got back he came to see the old woman. Having seen him go into the house, I lay in wait for him in the garden until he came out. As he turned a corner of the shrubbery we came face to face. Nice as pie, he congratulates me on becoming a father and asks me what I would like for the child as a christening present.
‘I say, “Five hundred pounds in pound notes to be delivered before the end of the week at a place and time chosen by me.”
‘At that he gave a rather twisted grin, thinking it just a cheeky sort of joke. But when I told him what I knew, and how I meant to make the neighbourhood too hot to hold him unless he paid up, his grin became even more twisted.
‘Of course he tried bluster, and said that no one would believe me. Even when I told him I had got the body of the cat, he still maintained that proved nothing, as anyone might have killed and partially burnt it. But I was ready for that one. I told him that I had taken the furnace-rake to a friend of mine who was a sergeant in the C
olchester police, and asked him, just as a matter of interest, to see if he could get any fingerprints from it. The prints were there all right and we had photographed them. So if I had to tell my story about the goings on at The Grange and he sued me for defamation of character, he would have to explain how his fingerprints had got on the furnace-rake in somebody else’s back premises on the night in question.
‘I was lying about having a friend in the police; but he couldn’t know that, and it sank him. He agreed to find the money in exchange for the body of the cat, and he asked me to come to his house that night to arrange when and where the exchange was to be made. I suspected a trap, but he pointed out that as long as I had the cat and the furnace-rake, I had the whip hand of him; so I agreed to go.
‘That night he received me in his study, and after giving me a drink, asked me what I meant to do with the money when I had it. I saw no reason to conceal my plans; so I told him. When he had heard me out, he said, “You don’t mind being separated from your wife and child, then?” and I replied, “Why should I? Hettie was forced on me against my will, and the child means nothing to me.”
‘He asked me, then, into what church I intended having the child baptised. The question seemed natural enough coming from a parson, as at that time I took him to be. I had been brought up C. of E. myself, but Hettie was Chapel; and in spite of her flightiness as a single girl she thought a great deal of standing well with her own Chapel folk; so we’d been married at Chapel and I took it for granted she’d want her brat christened there. I told the Canon how matters stood and he went on to talk about religion for a bit. Then he said: “You know, Mr Beddows, the little scene that you chanced to witness last week had nothing to do with sex. It was a religious ritual—a sacrifice to a God far older than Christ, and one who was universally worshipped when the world was a much happier place than it is today. He still exists, of course, since Gods cannot die; and he is still worshipped in secret by a few of us who understand his mysteries.”
‘At that, the local gossip about old Mother Durnsford being the daughter of a witch, and a witch herself, came back to me. It all fitted in, so I said, “I suppose you are talking about the Devil?”
‘He nodded; and as I’ve a first-class memory for statements made to me, I can still recall pretty well word for word his reply, which was, “That is a name that was bestowed upon him in fear and opprobrium by the early ascetics, when they were still striving to win the nations over to the worship of the Jewish tyrant God, Jehovah; but he is more fittingly called the Lord of this World. In any case, while the God of the Christians offers nothing to His followers but the meagre possibilities of an austere heaven in a life to come, the God whom I serve rewards those who honour him with wealth and happiness here and now. There may or may not be a hereafter; but everything in this life is his to give. Even the Christian Church admits that; and it is only superstitious fear that prevents people from returning to the old faith. You should give it a trial, Mr Beddows, for at little cost to yourself you could make an offering to my Master which would ensure his behaving most generously towards you.”
‘Naturally I didn’t get what he was driving at, then; neither could I make up my mind if he was really in earnest about this old religion. His saying that the cat had been a sacrifice certainly had the ring of truth, and he didn’t sound as if he was goofy; but all that about getting riches in this life was a bit too much to swallow. More to see what replies he would make than anything else, I began to question him about it. His answers seemed logical enough, but even so I couldn’t bring myself to believe him. Then he asked me if I would like him to reveal my future.
‘Well, everyone likes having their fortune told, and I saw no harm in that. When I’d agreed, he took me through to the old part of The Priory and down into the crypt. It had evidently been used as a chapel at some time, but he had turned it into a sort of laboratory. There, he made me sit in front of a mirror. It wasn’t made of glass, but of some highly polished metal, and it was pitted round the edges as though it was very old. He gave me a big brass bowl to hold in my lap and put some cones of incense in it. When he had lit them he said to me as follows: “Within certain limits all men have free will; therefore their futures are not irrevocably fixed, but depend upon the decisions they take at certain major crossroads in their lives. I am about to give you an idea what your future will be, should you decide to rely upon my guidance and become the servant of Prince Lucifer. Keep your eyes fixed on the mirror and through the smoke you will see pictures form upon it.” Then he began to chant in a sing-song voice behind me, and I seemed to become a little drowsy.
‘You will remember what it says in the Bible about Satan taking our … our … taking J.C. up on to the mountain and showing Him the kingdoms of the Earth. Well, me being just a chauffeur saddled with an unwanted wife and kid, it wasn’t far off that. There were quite a number of pictures and afterwards they became a bit confused in my mind. The general impression was of myself, a little older, but not much, dressed in expensive clothes, wining and dining with other rich men, and having necking parties with lovely women in the luxury suites of big hotels. But a few of the scenes I saw remained clear cut. There was one of me walking through a great machine-shop where hundreds of people were working, and from the respectful way they all looked up at me as I passed it was clear that I was the boss of the whole outfit. Another confirmed that: it was the outside of my plant near Colchester pretty much as it stands today; and blazoned across its front in letters six feet high were the words “BEDDOWS AGRICULTURAL TRACTORS”. The one that really got me, though, was myself in a check suit, standing in front of a long, low grey car. That car had something that no car in the time of which I am talking had got. Its rake was completely different. It was quite unlike anything that had so far been made and obviously an advance in design. It was something slap out of the future, and I knew that whatever else Copely-Syle might have faked up to gull me he couldn’t have faked up that.
‘When the show was over I told him at once that he had made a convert, and asked what I must do to become the me in the pictures I had seen. He replied, “There is nothing very difficult about it, if you are prepared to forswear the gloomy Christian God and all His works. Prepare yourself for that by reciting the Lord’s Prayer backwards every night from now on, and return here at the same hour a week from today.”
‘It wasn’t until he was showing me out of the front door, a few minutes later, that I remembered the reason I had come to see him; and with a sudden feeling that somehow he had made a monkey out of me, I said pretty sharply, “We haven’t settled anything about that five hundred pounds.”
‘“No,” he said, “and if you’ve any sense we shan’t need to. When you come here next week you’d better bring that dead cat with you as a first offering. If you don’t I will buy it off you later, as we arranged this morning. But don’t imagine that the money will do you any good. By taking it you will decree a very different future for yourself from the one I showed you. The choice is yours.”
‘During the week that followed I was torn first one way, then the other. After all, the five hundred smackers was as good as a bird in the hand, and I hated the idea of giving it up; yet I couldn’t get the image of that car of the future out of my mind, and as a sort of token payment towards it in advance I wrestled for half an hour each night with the tricky business of getting through the Lord’s Prayer said backwards. When the week ended I still hadn’t made any definite decision; but, all the same, when I called again at The Priory I took the dead cat with me.
‘That night Copely-Syle took me straight to the crypt, and the first thing he did was to shove the cat into the furnace there. Then he said to me, “Now I propose to call upon Prince Lucifer in order that you may make your bargain with him.”
‘“What bargain?” I asked, rather taken aback.
‘“Why, the usual one, of course,” he replied a little sharply. “As Lord of this World he will give you every reasonable success, pleasure
and gratification in it that you may desire; but for all that he naturally asks something in return. You must sign a pact making yourself over to him body and soul.”
‘I didn’t much like the idea of doing that, and I said so.
‘He laughed then, and gave me a pat on the back. “Don’t worry. You must sign it, and in your own blood; but you need never honour it. In your case it will merely be similar to a Life Insurance Policy lodged at a bank as security. You are lucky in having just had a little daughter. All you have to do is to have her baptised into the old faith, and undertake that should she reach the age of twenty-one you will produce her here in this crypt on her twenty-first birthday. In that way you may redeem your bond and it will be handed back to you.”’
John gave a low exclamation of horror at this frightful revelation, but C.B.—who had guessed what was coming from what had gone before—grabbed his arm and squeezed it sharply, to check him from bursting into angry words that might have put an abrupt end to Beddows’ story; while Beddows, now apparently almost self-hypnotised by the recital of his confession, ignored the interruption, and went straight on: ‘Although I didn’t give a damn for the brat, it did not seem right somehow; but what was I to do? By letting him burn the cat I had burnt my own boats. I no longer had anything on him. It had become a choice of my going through with the business and a prospect of getting everything I’d ever wanted, or of walking out of the house worse off than I had ever been before; because in him I would have made a powerful and unscrupulous enemy, who could have got me the sack and used his influence to chivvy me out of the district.
‘Well, I signed the pact, and afterwards he put me through a long ritual that I could not make head nor tail of, except that in symbolical submission to Lucifer he made me kiss his arse; but by that time I felt it was a case of in for a penny, in for a pound; so I made no bones about it. Then he gave me his instructions about the baptism of the child and sent me home.
To the Devil, a Daughter Page 30