The Four Swans

by Winston Graham

  ‘My friends,’ he said, ‘comrades and companions all. All you ’oove come today see me step off into a betterer world, know ye that I’ve made my peace with th’Almighty an’ go to this betterer world, askin’ mercy and forgiveness of all I’ve wronged in this yur life, and may the Lord ’ave mercy on my soul. But know ye, friends and comrades and companions all, that purty many as my sins may be, never, never, never did I lay ’ands on this yur Samuel Phillips, nor steal ’is wheat, nor nothin’ like un! I never seed ’im, not then nor any time before nor after, an’—’

  His voice was drowned in a roar from the crowd, who seemed half to sympathize with him, half to be amused. Clearly what he was saying was to the displeasure of the governor and of the chaplain – first because it claimed a miscarriage of justice, which was an extremely bad thought to implant in the minds of his listeners, and second because it implied that the chaplain had failed in his mission to get him to repent. Most prisoners at the last admitted their fault.

  But any attempt to stop him now would have produced a riot, so he was allowed his say. And he had it for nearly fifteen minutes, sometimes haranguing the crowd, sometimes turning to his mother and his wife. But half of what he said was lost as the crowd grew tired and inattentive. Some of the young children in the front were screaming, not out of fear or pity but as if they had caught some infection from the crowd about them. Sam wished he could get to the man, pray with and for him properly for a few quiet moments, for his manner of speaking suggested he had not really understood the nature of sin or how he must repent.

  But now it was too late. Too late. The speech was over and the purpose of the gathering had to begin. Hoskin stepped on to that centre piece of the platform, which had been carpentered so that it could be rapidly withdrawn. The hangman had thrown the rope over the gibbet and secured it, and he came to place the noose about the condemned man’s neck. Hoskin bent his head to take the noose and adjusted the knot under his ear where it would tighten more quickly. Then he looked up at the sky a moment before the hangman slipped the white cap over his head.

  Hoskin raised his hand for silence, and now the crowd fell instantly silent. He began to sing: ‘Jesus shall reign where e’er the sun’, in a voice that was noticeably unmusical but did not tremble or quaver. He sang three verses but that was as far as his memory went. He lowered his hand. The hangman pulled away the platform, and Hoskin jerked down a few inches and hung at the end of the rope.

  A great roar went up from the crowd, and the children screamed louder than ever. Then the body began to twitch, the bound hands clenched and unclenched and went up to the face as if to tear off the mask. The kicking became violent, and two friends of his who had broken through the cordon to ‘pull his leg’, as it was called, were unable to grasp them. Blood and froth stained the mask. Then as the struggling lessened, urine and black wet faeces began to drip from the figure on to the ground.

  Then the figure was still, like a doll on the end of a rope, like a bundle of dirty wet rags hung out to dry. The sun had gone behind a cloud but now it came out again, lighting up the scene. Some crows circled overhead.

  The crowd began to move, to stretch, to ease off their pressure to see what was no longer worth looking at. A few were quieted and upset, a few excited and talkative, a few jovial, but most were phlegmatic, and moved away having seen the spectacle they had come to see, their minds already turning to the business of the day. The children formed into lines to go to school. The pie-men began re-crying their wares.

  The body was lowered to the ground and the prison surgeon pronounced that life was extinct. The governor and the sheriff got into their coach, and four guards lifted the corpse on to the cart that had brought him. The well-dressed people began to move out of their stand chatting together. The hangman yawned and put on his coat and buttoned it. Half a dozen people inched forward to steal the rope, which was supposed to have magical properties, but they were driven off.

  Sam spat on the ground among the litter and the trampled heather, then drifted over to join the little group of family mourners who he knew were hoping to be allowed to take the body home for Christian burial.

  II

  Sawle Feast day dawned in thick fog, a not uncommon occurrence for the time of year when the weather was fine and warm. This was known as pilchard weather, but it would have been more welcome on another day. At nine in the morning you could not see half-way across the field where the games and tea and other festivities were to be held. At ten it lightened and seemed likely to clear. A mile inland, Jud Paynter said, the sun was as hot as dung. But by eleven, when the service at Sawle Church was due to begin, the fog was back worse than ever, clammy, drifting and chill. People moved through the churchyard like spectres.

  The church was full, and a few folk standing. It was always the busiest day of the year, and Ross had been persuaded to go, much against his will. Jeremy wanted to be there, as various of his young companions, such as Benjy Carter, were to be there, and Demelza thought she should go with him. Ross thought it particularly undesirable that he should encounter George again so soon, but Demelza, who knew they would both be watching the games this afternoon, said you could as easily avoid a man in a church as out of it.

  As soon as he sat down in his pew Ross regretted he had come, for he observed that the Reverend Clarence Odgers was to be assisted in the service by the Reverend Osborne Whitworth. His instinctive dislike of the heavy-legged young man was constantly aggravated when they met by Whitworth’s arrogant manners, and the further fact that George had twice outwitted him, Ross, by promoting Whitworth’s interests against, as it were, Ross’s own candidate. First, he had smartly married off this over-dressed and loud-mouthed cleric to Morwenna Chynoweth when Ross was just waking up to the fact that he might have brought her and Drake together. And second, he had contrived to have him presented with this living instead of the poverty-stricken but deserving Odgers.

  It was all provoking, made more provoking by a sense of shortcoming on Ross’s own part. In each case, had he been quicker to appreciate the situation and more active, he might, he felt, have gained the day. In each case the ungodly had flourished. And when the ungodly happened to be officiating in a Christian church in the habiliments of the godly it made him an offensive sight.

  They were all here, Ross thought sourly, as the service began, the tall dark-haired Morwenna beside the slighter blondeness of Elizabeth; George bull-necked and elegant in a brown spotted silk coat and breeches. Drake here too, at the back of the church, but no sign yet of Sam. Perhaps the young fool would miss his match and then the wager would be void. Ross felt his shoulder reminiscently. They had had a few falls together and, even though rusty, Sam was no novice at the game. A lot would depend on whether he kept his wits about him. Tom Harry was a bull of a man, very little going on behind the thick freckled bone of his forehead. But if Sam took time off to think about his next prayer meeting he would be finished. Perhaps he would remember to concentrate if he thought of the soul he had to gain . . .

  Mr Odgers was nervous about his prayers. The previous vicar had never been near, and it was a new and trying experience to have his superior sitting opposite him, listening to all that was being offered up, with a censorious expression on his well-fed face. Odgers knew already from short experience that some aspect of his conduct would be criticized; and today it was as if an extra sourness was fermenting in the vicar’s mind. Already there had been hard words spoken, about the bell-ringers, about the musical instruments in the choir, about the condition of the churchyard and about the cleanliness of the church. There was more to come. Mr Osborne Whitworth had only been interrupted in his string of angry comments by the arrival of the Warleggans and the need to begin.

  So the service was gone through, and Mr Whitworth rose to give the sermon. He climbed into the pulpit and cleared his throat and shook out his sheaf of notes.

  He chose as his text Job 26: 5–6 (UCP): ‘Dead things are formed from under the waters and the inhabit
ants thereof, Hell is naked before him, and destruction hath no covering.’

  It was as good as any for the sermon he was about to preach, but it hardly seemed suited to a saint’s day when the parish celebrated its conversion to Christianity by the Irish monk who had founded an oratory here eleven hundred years before. But Mr Odgers in his distress had not been mistaken in supposing that some special sourness was fermenting in Ossie’s nature. No hair shirt that St Sawle wore could have been more galling to the new incumbent than the discovery he had made a week ago.

  Rowella was not going to have a baby.

  Since she left the house there had been no communication whatsoever between the vicarage and the cottage where Rowella and Arthur were making their life. Even Morwenna had made no move to establish contact with her erring sister. Whatever love she might have borne Rowella had been blighted by the events of last winter. It did not matter that she herself had no desire at all to resume a wifely relationship with her husband. It did not even seem to matter that Rowella’s – and his – misbehaviour had given her the armour she needed to protect herself against his rightful claims. The whole episode of their affair together so revolted her that she felt ill every time she thought of it. Knowing Ossie, it made her feel sick that a sister of hers should not have found his attentions offensive.

  So nothing whatever had passed between the two houses – if the Solways’ cottage could be dignified with the name – nothing had passed for five months, until Ossie, about his business at Kenwyn, had one day last week chanced to encounter Rowella, who had herself been on a visit to a new friend, and found her looking as unattractive, as enigmatic, as intellectually nervous, and as thin as ever; and when, fighting his way through a mass of restrictive prohibitions, he had made some stiff comment on her condition, she had looked very upset, her lower lip had trembled, and she had said: ‘Oh, Vicar, I am so very grieved about this! But it does not appear that I was with child after all. I was – was very young and I made a terrible mistake . . .’

  When she said this her eyes had filled with tears, but as he turned brusquely away his soul was blackened, scorched, charred with unholy fires; and with the conviction that he had been deliberately cheated, deliberately blackmailed by this chit of a girl for reasons of her own. Perhaps all the time she had been in love with Arthur Solway and had chosen this means of setting him up for life. Perhaps she had been in league with Morwenna to humiliate and frustrate him. Perhaps she had been sent by the Devil – indeed was a handmaiden of the Evil One himself – and her purpose had been to tempt and betray and destroy one of God’s ordained ministers.

  Whatever the truth, Ossie did not, would not, believe in her innocence. He had been deceived, lured, tricked, cheated, and finally bilked of nearly three years’ stipend from his recently acquired living of Sawle-with-Grambler; and his wife was permanently estranged and untouchable because of it. (He had tried twice more but to his indignation she had remained utterly contumelious and defiant and had repeated her threat to the safety of his son.)

  So it was against this background, with this poisoned thorn festering in his heart and in his pocket, that Mr Whitworth preached his sermon straight out of the darkest depths of the souls of the writers of the Old Testament, a sermon full of the wrath of God, of material punishment for spiritual misdeed, of thunderbolts and fiery furnaces, of the end of the house of Jeroboam, of the slaughter of the kings of Midian, of Rechabites, of Amalekites, of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah.

  This went on for forty minutes, by which time the congregation was getting restive and a little noisy. But this only caused Ossie to raise his resonant voice to a higher level as he returned to his original theme and launched into the sorrows of Job: ‘Let the day perish wherein I was born, and the night which said, A man-child is conceived.’ This continued for another fifteen minutes and then the speaker reached a splendid peroration and finished his address abruptly, like someone closing a shop. ‘Now to God the Father, God the Son and . . .’ Ross raised his chin from his chest and woke Clowance.

  George also stirred, glancing first at Morwenna, who did not look up, and then at Elizabeth, who smiled at him. He shrugged and half smiled back. Since their reconciliation at Easter the relationship had not always been an easy one. Since the emotional elation of that night when Elizabeth picked up the bible, his careful, business-like brain had gone over and over the words she had spoken, the words she had sworn, and, while his sense of fairness admitted that she had said all that was necessary, his sense of the appropriate suggested that she might have chosen better words. No doubt she had spoken in the heat and anguish of the moment, the first sentences that came to her mind. It was reasonable enough. But suspicion, once implanted in George’s heart by Aunt Agatha’s barb, died hard. Logically he was convinced that Elizabeth spoke the truth. Logically he was convinced that Valentine was his child. So it was all right. But every now and then the worm twisted to overturn logic.

  There was nothing more to be done; he realized that himself. To ask her to add some additional sentences, like a lawyer drawing up a contract for the formation of a joint stock company, would be inviting what it would certainly receive – the angriest of refusals and a final disintegration of their married life. He could expect – and would expect – no other.

  Sometimes he felt like a man with a pain whose cause could be either a trivial indisposition or a dread disease. His imagination, working and active on it, could equally convince himself that he was about to die or that he had nothing at all wrong with him. In this case, for the most part, it was the latter. Elizabeth was a pure woman and Valentine his only son. If only that niggling pain would altogether go away . . .

  Before he married Elizabeth he had always wanted to possess her, and the wedding ceremony of Thursday 20 June 1793 had given him that absolute possession. But the quarrel of April 1797 had loosened those bonds. He had the good sense now to realize that Elizabeth would never desert him. She would be loyal and faithful to him and his interests, would keep his home and his family and be his companion and his wife in all good things. But she had stated her terms.

  At the back of the church Drake had been sitting with an absorbed air which disguised the fact that he had not been listening to the sermon at all. He had heard nothing or thought of nothing since Morwenna came in. As she passed him on her way to the front pew they had seen each other for the first time for more than two years. After the one startled glance of recognition she had lowered her gaze, but he had looked at her and continued to look at her as if mesmerized. He saw that she was terribly changed. She looked older, thinner, harder – there were lines round her mouth that he had never seen before. Her skin, which was always a little dark, had become sallow, her eyes narrowed; her fine carriage was not so fine, in a year or two she would stoop. Whatever the two years had brought to Drake, they had brought no less distress to her. More, thought Drake. More. He felt sick to look at her and at that loud-mouthed cleric standing in the pulpit describing the hosts of Midian.

  He would have left the church at some time during the service, glad to get away, glad to sick up his disappointment and distress against some slanting gravestone outside. It was really all over now, he told himself; he no longer cared for her, even; she was a vicar’s wife, a matron, a tired, experienced, commonplace young woman with lank dark hair and brown myopic eyes and a baby and a husband and a parish to look after; and the dream was gone. It had been there, existed between them for no longer than a rainbow arching between cloud and cloud; the sky pattern had moved and it was lost for ever.

  He would have left the church, but some need to stare at her kept him there. From where he was he could see her brown hat and one shoulder. She was of course sitting in the Poldark pew – that is to say the Trenwith pew – next to Mr Warleggan, with Mrs Warleggan on his other side. Ross and his family sat on the opposite side of the church and several rows back. Only three sat in the Trenwith pew. Geoffrey Charles was not there. It seemed likely that he had not come home.
Perhaps they were not having him home this summer.

  After Mr Odgers had intoned the final prayer the congregation began to file out. It was of course the custom to let the gentry leave first, so Drake was now trapped into remaining. As soon as the Warleggans began to move he lowered his eyes so that he need not embarrass Morwenna any more. Let her look at him if she wanted; he was too miserable to stare her out.

  But sometimes the best intentions give way before impulse, and just as he saw Elizabeth’s white skirt sweep past the end of the pew he raised his eyes again.

  She was looking at him. Morwenna was looking at him. It lasted about seven seconds, and in that time she just had time to smile. It began in her eyes, crinkling them up a little more; it spread to her lips; and then it seemed to break in an irradiation over her whole face. The lines disappeared, the colour of her face changed, the tightness of lips relaxed, the eyes were warm again. For a few heartbeats he was embraced by it; the sun came out, the rainbow shone again; then she was past.

  Sam Greet elbowed him to step into the aisle and follow the others into the fog outside.

  ‘Come ’long, my son,’ he said. ‘Reckon we’ve had ’nough of praying for one day.’

  Chapter Five

  I

  Sawle Feast did not begin properly until two o’clock. It was a holiday at Wheal Grace – the only mine working in the parish – but the custom of the day was that the miners spent the morning cleaning up, brushing out the sheds, whitewashing the inside of the changing-house, sweeping the dressing floors and making everything look its best. And anyway, farmers or those with animals to tend were never ready and free for anything much before noon.