Mr. Tasker's Gods (10 page)

B
ECAUSE Alice was young, she slept a little. In her dreams she stroked the tree with her hand in a strange crazed way. The fatherly charity of Providence and the strange jesting of men had given to this child a bed under a tree.
Together
the divine under-force and the human upper hand had made her feel that she was a rather weakly girl—but entirely a child.

She shivered. Time had grown from a night with lamps into a grey day with smoke. Around her there were the fog and dumbness of early morning. She could just manage to move a little. She found that she had, all the time, held tightly clasped in her left hand a coin that the big sailor had put there. When she could open her stiff fingers, she found that it was a two-shilling piece.

She found her way slowly to the station. The first down train was nearly due. An aged porter was brushing out the waiting-room. When the ticket office opened, Alice timidly asked the price of a ticket to Maidenbridge. The clerk looked at her through the opening. He knew by sight the local users of this early train.

‘You had better go back to your friends, miss,’ he said, not unkindly.

The only friend she possessed in that town being a tree, Alice told the clerk that she lived near Maidenbridge, which indeed was true, though her only idea was to follow after her
lover. She asked how far she could book for two shillings and the clerk gave her a ticket for Tadnoll, a little wayside station that came just before Maidenbridge, and was about five miles from that pleasant market town.

Alice sank into the corner of an empty carriage. The train moved out of the station. She tried to watch the trees. Everywhere she saw unreal things move. A new gate-post looked to her like the bare neck of a sailor with protruding black veins. She thought of Tom Roude. They had started away from their lodgings together, and then he had sent her back to Mrs. Fancy’s to see if he had left his cigarette case under their bed. He had said he would hold her bag and wait for her by Johnson’s Stores. The train moved slowly, and smoky dust passed by the carriage window. Alice wondered what Mr. Roude had done with her clothes.

He had, as a matter of fact, left them in the carriage when he got out at Maidenbridge. He had thought—clever young man—that a girl of sixteen-and-a-half, with no belongings, would not travel very far that day. And he knew her fear of the police. Roude was a realist. He believed that if you pluck a flower and it fades and you cast it into the gutter, the fault is not yours if it dies.

The train travelled slowly and stopped at three stations before it came to Tadnoll. At each station there were the same things—a clatter of
milk-cans, wet dairymen trundling cans along the platforms, and a sleepy porter who looked at Alice and then came back and looked at her again. She read the name of the station, and climbed down from the train. She was the only passenger to leave.

A burly dairyman was rolling a churn up the platform when Alice alighted. He stopped at once when he saw her. She moved out of his way, and he proceeded to roll his churn deftly with one hand, explaining the presence of Alice to himself by two expressive words, ‘Them soldiers.’

The train moved on, and Alice, after giving up her ticket, asked a porter, who was filling a lamp, the nearest way to Maidenbridge. She had been to Tadnoll before, but she could not remember which road to take. The porter could not get the wick of the lamp to turn up, and, hardly looking at Alice, he told her the way and said it was six miles; then concentrated the whole of his attention upon the behaviour of the lamp.

There were three dairy carts outside the station, and as the girl walked on, they rattled past her loaded with empty milk-cans. Each driver looked back at her, but none offered her a ride. Perhaps they thought she looked too young and too ill to be respectable—and besides, what would their wives at home say? Each man remarked to himself, ‘T’ain’t no business of mine,’ and drove on.

Before Alice had gone three miles, she dropped like an overdriven calf by the side of the road and lay in the long, soaked grass. All she knew was that she just lay there on the grass, and she began to count the dead leaves that came floating down from a tree near. She had never before known how cooling wet grass was to a girl in trouble; she felt it through her frock, and she took some up and sucked the water from a leaf.

She had counted seventeen leaves, bright golden leaves, that fluttered down; then another one came, then no more. Alice turned a little and looked up the road. A man had just come round the corner, and he stopped suddenly in the middle of the road. Alice wondered why the man had stopped, and how long it would be before he would begin to walk again.

Drops fell from the tree above her, and one almost fell into her mouth. She opened her mouth and waited for the next. She looked at the man in the road. He was walking towards her now. He carried a knotted stick in his hand, and his face was more beast than human. How different he looked from one of the sailors—the one that had held her down. She saw this sailor again quite plainly, a good-looking boy. She had begged him to let her go. She remembered begging, crying, even biting—there had been blood on his arm, and he had held her with the laugh of a spoilt child.

The man with the stick stopped in front of
her and appeared to be lost in thought. His face in this condition looked so queer that Alice almost laughed. The man slowly unbuttoned his coat. What was he going to do? The others had done everything, nothing mattered to her now. A drop of water fell upon her nose, and she smiled. What was this strange man doing now? He had folded up his coat neatly, and now he laid it in the dry mud of the road; he was undoing a strap. Alice pinched her leg to see if it could still feel, and then shut her eyes.

Another leaf came down and then another—they were very heavy; they all fell into her lap—and clinked. She opened her eyes. They were not leaves at all but golden coins that this strange man poured into her lap. She could only smile and wonder what was going to happen next.

It was then that the man spoke. Was she a little maid again, late for school? And was he going to tell her the bell had rung?

‘’Tis all yours—ye be in trouble.
She
give it thee—let I tie it up for ’e, poor maid.’ The man spoke in a queer way as though he feared she might refuse to take the money.

Alice, still smiling, took her handkerchief from her pocket and gave it to her odd companion, and he, placing it on the grass, collected the gold again and tied it up in her handkerchief, and carefully put it into the very bottom of her pocket. He had kneeled down beside her to do this, and when he was sure that she had the gold safe, he
got on his legs and turned a very ugly face
upwards
to the sky and shook his fist.

‘Now let she out if thee dare!’ he shouted; and added as an afterthought, ‘Damn theeself to hell!’

The strange man began to walk away, but he soon turned and came back to Alice. He had remembered that a calf, when it is down, has to be carried. He took Alice up from the grass as he would have taken up a calf, and carried her along the road.

A farmer, driving a light trap, passed them, walking his horse up the hill that they were going down. This farmer knew the drover by sight, though he never employed him, and was for that reason his enemy.

‘Hallo—got a ’oman with ’e—when did pick up she?’ shouted the farmer, who liked a joke on market days.

‘Drown theeself in thees bloody horse-pond!’ growled the drover, and passed on.

By the side of the road were three cottages. The drover knocked at the door of the first. A woman with red arms opened it, but shut it at once in the face of the two wayfarers. The next cottage gave them a word or two, but refused to take in the girl. These two replies had sharpened the drover’s wits, and before his third knock he sat Alice down with her back against the gate, where she lay white as a ghost and with her eyes closed.

‘Young lady,’ he said, ‘found she in road—better take she in, ’er parents be rich.’

While he said this the woman was looking at Alice with surprised interest; then going up to her, she cried out:

‘Why, ’tis our Alice! How came she like this?—Lord, bain’t the maid bad!’

And in this way was Alice brought back to her mother’s house.

The drover, leaving the cottage, closed the gate carefully behind him. He knew what a bother open gates were to him and his cows. Sometimes he even went out of his way to close gates. As he walked along the heath road to Maidenbridge, he thought of a nice word or two should he meet the farmer out of his light gig.

C
ERTAIN weeks passed, and on the seventh of October, at 7.30
A.M
., just fifteen minutes earlier than his usual time, the Rev. Hector Turnbull chose his best razor. He possessed three, and he generally took one of them to the shop in the town once a fortnight to be sharpened. After leaving the razor, as a general rule he paid a visit to the bank. He now stropped the razor very slowly and carefully.

He shaved with even greater care than usual, going cautiously round a little red pimple on his right cheek. He didn’t want to make this pimple bleed as it had done the day before. Mr. Turnbull felt like a man who had something to do that day, and he put a sort of fussy diligence into all his motions. Every minute or two he looked out of the window at the clouds. He felt his own bigness, his importance rose up within him, his chest expanded, and his
deportment
expressed wisely directed vigour.

Mrs. Turnbull had laid out ready for him, on the family bed, the clothes that he wore when he paid a visit to the bank. She had also placed a clean clerical collar, of the ‘town and curate’ cut, upon the dressing-table. Mr. Turnbull dressed, put on his carpet slippers, and came
downstairs
.

The great event of the day was the
Archdeacon’
s Visitation, which was to take place at
Maidenbridge. This important ceremony, as a rule, happened in the spring of the year. But in the spring of this particular year, the
Archdeacon
had, without any proper warrant or leave, betaken himself to the sunny lakes of Italy—he wanted to see the fire-flies. Besides, this year there was another person to be consulted about dates. Every third year the Bishop descended with the Archdeacon upon the assembly of Shepherds. This was the year of his advent, and what with confirming tittering girls and owlish boys, and sitting in lawn sleeves in his own choir, the Bishop could not arrange for his visit earlier than the month of October.

Certain tersely worded letters had passed between the Archdeacon and the Shepherd-
in-Chief
, and after some polite and dignified
reminders
, rather like the letters in the
Times,
to one another, they had decided that the seventh of October would be the best day to call up the ‘blind mouths’ and their dogs, the dogs being the churchwardens, that in most cases attended the Shepherds.

Mr. Turnbull looked at his son. His son, according to the eyes of the father, had nothing to do that day. He was just—there, in the room, sitting with a book upon his knee, looking into the garden. What could such a son have to do? With the father, with himself, it was another matter. And he raised himself in his carpet slippers and left the table before the
breakfast 
was finished, even while Mrs. Turnbull was eating her jam. He crossed the hall with stately strides and went into his study to put on his boots. He chose the pair in which he generally creakingly celebrated the Holy Communion.

In another house in the village there were happenings. The usual time for awakening in this other house in the winter was 5
A.M.
On this particular morning, the master having to go out for the day, it was necessary for the household to bestir itself earlier. At 3.30 Mr. Tasker was awake, and, without wasting any precious time by dabbling in cold water, he pulled his clothes upon him in less than five minutes. Then he banged into the inner room to wake his girl.

The child slept with her two almost infant brothers. She whom the dog had bitten slept with her parents. With one hand Mr. Tasker took the bedclothes and tossed them to the other end of the room; then he laid hold of the girl by one arm and a thin leg and threw her after them. He then went softly out into the yard to let loose his dog and to prepare for the milking.

It added, in a village sort of way, somewhat to Mr. Tasker’s glory to be called a
churchwarden
. Yet he was not very pleased to lose a day from his pigs. He wondered how he had come to promise to drive the clergyman in his best light gig to Maidenbridge. It would look well—he felt this, as he tied up his favourite cow;—it would look very well to be sitting beside
the parson, but the flinty roads were sure to take so much good iron from his horse’s shoes, and it would be necessary to pay some greedy
hotelkeeper
threepence at least, even though he went to the worst inn, for allowing his horse to stand and eat the chaff that Mr. Tasker himself always carried.

He remembered, with a twinge of pain, while he milked, that it was the custom upon these occasions toward the close of the proceedings for the churchwardens to sit down round a festive board and partake in all friendliness and rustic love of a dinner, the lawyer of the diocese
presiding
. And for this dinner, without wine, the churchwardens were called upon to pay out of their own pockets the sum of three shillings and sixpence.

Mr. Tasker was a man who always kept his word, and at half-past nine, with a face shining after a recent shave, and black clothes shining in the morning sun, he drove up to the vicarage gate and coughed.

Henry, who had been set in the garden to watch for him, went in at once and called his father, whose feet moved with an ‘I-tell-you-
I-am
-important’ crunch upon the gravel. The vicar proceeded to mount into Mr. Tasker’s high trap and carefully adjusted the rug round his legs, while the dairyman with a click turned the horse’s head and drove down the road. Going along by the village green, they passed
old Sammy, the drunkard, who touched his hat respectfully to the clergyman, receiving, however, no acknowledgment of his salute.

On the road Mr. Turnbull talked to his
churchwarden
about the affairs of the nation, and the lack of God-fearing people in the world. And the dairyman replied from his own thoughts ‘that pigs were dearer.’

Mr. Tasker and his vicar were a little late, and the service that opened the proceedings had already begun in the big church. This service the churchwardens attended if they very much desired to do so, though they preferred as a rule a snack of bread and cheese at the ‘Rod and Lion,’ that was just round the corner near the harness shop and that sold the best beer in the town. It was there that Mr. Tasker retired to wait until the proper time for the reappearance of his vicar.

Mr. Turnbull entered the place of worship. The scene inside was curious. The front seats were filled with the clergy,—there were old dull Low-Church faces, young sharp Anglican, sickly priests dreaming of Rome, and hail-
fellow-well
-met Broad-Church beef-devourers of the middle school. It was a service that began with prayer. After that was over, the Archdeacon, an ancient fox-hunting ruffian, half-brother to Lord Bullman, began his address.

He explained, with a short cough, that ‘My Lord Bishop’ was there, and that it was meet and
right and the bounden duty of all the clergy there present to pay their fees. That this most
important
part of the proceedings had sometimes escaped their notice, and that often the old lawyer was encumbered with the duty of sending out certain bills, in cases where one or two of the clergy had left their purses behind in the top drawer of the study at home! He then called out the names of those who were present and excused those who were not. After he had read the names in the same voice in which he called his dogs, he gathered up the ends of his robes and returned to a chair near the choir.

My Lord Bishop, leaving his chair, approached the pulpit. ‘He had come to their town to meet them,’ he said, ‘six times, and he thanked God who had in His Almighty Goodness allowed him to come the seventh.’ He then proceeded to give, in a tired, far-away voice, a gentle lecture trying to explain to the clergy how to stem the current of the growing wickedness of the age. ‘He wished’—he lowered his voice—‘all to come together in love’; and ‘our dear dissenter friends, too,’ he added a little louder. ‘He prayed for unity in the Church and unity in the family life of the home. He would like them all to insist more on plain Bible teaching and to try by individual visitation to bring the people back to God.’

A day or two after, lying upon his bed, the vicar of South Egdon read this address. He
said to young Henry that ‘his Lordship would have done better if he had advised his clergy to catch God and bring Him back to His people instead of whistling to the people to come back to God.’

The clergymen listened meekly, wrapped in the odour of gracious words. Then they all sang a hymn and were blessed, these kind Shepherds, with the pastoral blessing. They then adjourned to the town hall, the end of which was converted, by means of pen, paper, and a green table-cloth, into the office of the lawyer. Of the holy communion of fees the churchwardens partook; together with the vicars and rectors and rural and town curates, they presented tokens of a blessed understanding to the old lawyer and the Archdeacon.

The good Bishop, meanwhile, had retired to the drawing-room of his niece, a pretty dainty girl who nursed a pet lemur. She was the wife of the rich banker of the town. In a very easy chair the Bishop talked slyly and tenderly about his new motor car that he had put up in the King’s Hotel garage.

Inside the town hall, Lord Bullman’s brother handled the clergy as well as he did the foxes. He made them pay for their run, and he got through them much faster than the lawyer liked: the lawyer’s plan with a client being to blind his eyes with many sleek words, then turn him round and round ten times and ask him where the cat had run to.

In less than two hours the whole flock of
black-clothed
Shepherds were in turn lectured, robbed, and turned out into the street to hunt for some convenient place in which to provide a
hard-worked
belly with sustenance. They had left their breakfast tables and smoking hot coffee quite four hours before. It was not their custom to go so long between meals.

The faces of the clergy, tinged in diverse colours of ecclesiastic manners, swarmed like carnival masks about the town. They were to be seen, lean and civil, buying tobacco from the hairdresser. The latter welcomed the Visitation as a day of gains. His smile rounded with pleasure as his customers came in. On other days he saw them scattered here and there, one black coat and two black coats, one to have his hair cut, and one to buy four ounces of bird’s-eye tobacco. The good barber knew well the tired smile of the curate with the old-fashioned bicycle, and the oily mouth of his motor brother. On this day of days, instead of floating down like leaves in early September, they came in parcels, four at a time. The following morning when the boy brushed up the shop, very reverend hairs were found by the bushel.

The genial atmosphere of the barber’s shop exactly suited the curious make-up of the clerical mind. It could expand under the haircutter’s scissors, and show itself friendly to the world when within reach of a glass case of pipes. In
the eating-houses, matters went not so nicely. There the primeval instinct of caution
predominated
, necessitating thoughtful reverie and many mental changes between lamb with mint sauce and roast beef with potatoes. Besides, were not the waitresses rude, ungainly girls, so unlike the servants at home, and so very unlike the lady in her morning blouse who had poured out the coffee four hours ago—four hours of pained exposure to blows and fees.

The clergy in the eating-houses shuffled
painfully
in their seats. It was not easy to know exactly what one ought to do. Was it the proper thing to get up and say ‘How do you do?’ to a friend, or ought you to sit tight and eat your beef? You hear Mr. Freeman come in, sit down, cough, and order ‘cold ham, cold ham!’ And a two hundred pounds richer living than yours. And then you distinctly hear him send out for a bottle of bass. To the best of your remembrance Mr. Freeman was a temperance reformer. You wonder why you had ordered lemonade, why you hadn’t sent out for a bottle of bass—that address of the Bishop’s had made you feel so very young!

Even away from the main street there were clergymen, driven by the thought of the old lawyer’s fees into solitude, or the companionship of baker-boys and little girls with hoops. Here the clergy walked shyly along, wondering about the words of the Bishop, and whether the parcel
from the grocer had better be left at the
cloakroom
, or safely under the seat in the governess car at the ‘Rod and Lion’ inn. Among these last outcast wanderers was Mr. Turnbull.

After the service he had found Mr, Tasker and had been drawn with the dairyman into the net of the lawyer. When that was over the dairyman still clung to the vicar, hoping thereby to be provided with beef and potatoes. The vicar, however, shook him off at the hairdresser’s, knowing very well that the dairyman would not adventure himself into the sixpenny room even for the sake of a plate full of pure ox.

Mr. Tasker wandered down the street and waited for his clerical companion near the
fish-market
, where he watched for some minutes, with greedy eyes, a great cod. Mr. Turnbull took the other way, and arrived, unseen, at the ‘Amy’ restaurant with pink curtains and side tables. His affairs at the ‘Amy’ over, he strolled away, for it was necessary for him to await Mr. Tasker’s convenience before he could return home, and Mr. Tasker was bound by all the rules of the Visitation to attend the
churchwardens
’ dinner in the evening, to be held at six o’clock at the ‘Rod and Lion.’