by T. F. Powys
In a very little while Henry’s somewhat stooping form came up the path from the kitchen garden.
‘I am sorry to trouble you, but please come to me—here. I wish you to take this note—at once—to Mr. Tasker.’ And the father looked at his son with that interesting paternal hatred that the human family so well know, the polite hatred that half closes its eyes over its victim, knowing that the victim is completely in its power.
The reason for these two appearances whose voices met in a garden was that Mr. Turnbull, after his afternoon sleep of an hour, had written a letter to Mr. Tasker about the new church lamp, and when the letter was written, appeared outside the door and uttered the command, and the voice in the kitchen garden replied.
Henry walked away with the note. There was no need for him to hurry. Outside the gate, he noticed a little garden of stones and flowers that two children were building. He watched them for a moment and then passed by and saw something else. At first he did not know what this something else was. ‘What it was’ was being dragged across the meadow towards the dairy.
Henry was quick to notice and ready to love almost everything that he saw. He could note without any disgust a rubbish heap with old tins and broken bottles; he could look with affection at pieces of bones that were always to be found in a corner of the churchyard. The simple and childish manners of men always pleased him, he never drove his eyes away from common sights. He allowed his mind to make the best it could of everything it saw, and so far he had seen nothing very disgusting.
He was now watching a new phenomenon. The thing in question was harnessed to a horse, and it flashed and sparkled in the sun like a splendid jewel. The noise it made was not as pleasing as its colour. There was a sort of slush and gurgle as it moved along at the heels of the horse, sounds that suggested to the mind the breaking out of foul drains.
Henry noted the colour and the noise, and then the appearance coming nearer, showed itself to be the skinned body of a horse.
As he watched the thing, Henry felt as though he held the skinned leg of the horse and was being dragged along too. Anyhow, it went his way, and he followed the track of the carcass towards the dairy-house. Sundry splashes of blood and torn pieces of flesh marked the route. At the yard gate the procession stopped and Henry waited. He wished to know what happened to dead skinned horses that were dragged across fields; he had a sort of foolish idea that they ought to be buried. Anyhow, he had to take his note to the dairy.
There was something wanting in the field as he went through. At first he could not think what he missed, and then he remembered Mr. Tasker’s gods. There was not one of them to be seen. However, a grunting and squealing from the yard showed that they were alive. All at once Mr. Tasker’s long form uprose by the gate, chastising his gods with one hand while he opened the gate with the other. And then the strange thing happened. The carcass of the skinned horse was dragged into the yard and the gods were at it.
Henry Turnbull wished to see what men do and what pigs eat. He walked up to the gate and delivered his note, and watched the feast with the other men.
The pigs, there were over a hundred of them, were at it. They covered the carcass and tore away and devoured pieces of flesh; they covered each other with blood, and fought like human creatures. The stench of the medley rose up in clouds, and was received as incense into the nostrils of Mr. Tasker. At last the horrible and disgusting feast ended, and the pigs were let out, all bloody, into the meadow, and a few forkfuls of rotting dung were thrown upon the bones of the horse.
Henry was beginning to learn a little about the human beings in whose world he dwelt. He had had hints before. But now there was no getting away from what he had witnessed. There had been no actual cruelty in the scene, but he knew quite well where the horror lay. It lay in the fact that the evil spirits of the men, Mr. Tasker’s in particular, had entered into the pigs and had torn and devoured the dead horse, and then again entered, all bloody and reeking, into the men.
It seemed to Henry that he needed a little change after the sight that he had just witnessed, and so he wandered off down the valley through the meads that led to the nearest village, that was only a mile from their own. He thought a cigarette with his friend, who was the priest there, would be the best way to end that afternoon.
This clergyman was not a popular man. He had the distinction of being disliked by the people; he was also avoided by Mr. Turnbull and his other well-to-do neighbours, and was treated with extreme rudeness by the farmers. He lived in a house sombre and silent as the grave. He possessed a housekeeper who did two things: she drank brandy and she told every one about the wickedness of her master.
There were great elm trees round the house, so that in summer only a little corner of the roof could be seen. The place was always in the shade and was always cold. It was one of those old church houses through which doubts and strange torments have crept and have stung men for generations, and where nameless fevers lie in wait for the little children. The place was built with the idea of driving men to despair or to God. Inside the house you felt the whole weight cover you. Outside, the trees, overfed with damp leaf-mould, chilled to the bone. A list of the vicars and their years of office, that was hung in a corner of the church, showed how quickly the evil influence of the house had dealt with them. In the time, or about the time of the Black Death, five different priests had been there in the space of one year, and since then there had been many changes; hardly any incumbent had stayed longer than five years. It was a house intended for a saint or for a devil. Young Henry often went there, though his father very much disapproved of his going, but he went all the same, and Mr. Turnbull never missed him at tea.
The fields were delightful and cool as Henry loitered along them. Summer, full of her divinity, lay stretched before him. No heart could move without beating fast; the life of the sun was lord and king. The sounds that Henry heard were full of summer. The July heat was in a dog’s bark. The colours of the clouds were July colours and the stream trembled over little stones, gaily singing a summer song. A kingfisher darted down from under the bridge, and Henry could hardly believe he had seen it, because it looked so lovely.
Henry’s mind had regained its balance, and he could now drink of the cup that the summer held out to him. He breathed the sweet air and saw that the sun painted the upper part of every green leaf with shining silver. The July dust lay thick like a carpet along the road to the vicarage.
Henry pushed by the heavy gate. It could only open enough to let him pass: the lower hinge was off and the gate was heavy to move like a great log. The postman, who knew how to go about, had made a private gap through the hedge. In the way up to the house there was silence: the tall trees kept out all the wind, and the grass path appeared scarcely trodden.
A grassy way to an English home is a sign of decay and want. In the middle-class drives, clergymen’s or doctors’, a very long time is spent by the gardener every summer in digging out with a knife the seedling grasses that grow between the gravel, and farmers’ daughters are seen, in their shorter drives, performing the same office, kneeling on a mat, not praying to God but grubbing for the wicked trespassers that bring calamity to the household.
Henry’s feelings were not of the ordinary kind; once inside the gate he only felt the very rare human delight of being welcomed, welcomed, do what he might. He knew that if he were to die there of the plague, the hands of his friend would carry him into the house and lay him upon his own bed. He could not possibly have come at an unwelcome hour; no other guest could be there who would prevent the master receiving him with pleasure; there was no business so pressing as his business, that of friendship.
Henry walked up to the house. There was one low window wide open, a window that opened out into and touched the long grass. Henry went up the slightly trodden path towards this window. Mr. Neville, the vicar, was within, reading; his head was bent a little over his book. Had an artist seen him, an artist like William Blake, he would have thought at onc
e of that romantic prophet, Amos the herdsman. The face was more strong than clever; it had indeed none of those hard, ugly lines, those examination lines, that mark the educated of the world. His beard and hair were grey, and his heart, could it have been seen, was greyer still; and no wonder, for he had found out what human unkindness was.
He had, unluckily for himself, broken down the illusions that the healing habit of custom wraps around men, and especially around the clergy. To tear off this vesture, to arrive at nakedness, was to open, perhaps, a way for heavenly voices, but certainly a way for the little taunts and gibes of the world, the flesh and the devil.
In casting off the garments of the world, this priest had not, like his comrades of the cloth, provided himself with a well-fitting black coat made in Oxford. On the other hand, it was easy for him to stay in the Church. He had no desire to make a show of himself or to set himself up in any kind of opposition to his religion, he was too good a catholic to allow any personal trend to undermine the larger movement. He held himself very tenderly and at the same time very closely to the altar, not from any sense of human duty, but because he knew the want of a divine Master.
Henry Neville, for they were two Henrys, these friends, shut the book he was reading and jumped up hastily. A pile of books and papers beside his chair was overturned; he put out his hand to prevent them, and then, seeing that they fell safely, allowed them to lie on the floor, while he, stepping through the window, went out to meet his visitor. They both returned to the study and sat down in cane chairs before the window.
The housekeeper, Mrs. Lefevre, a stout creature, old and unpleasantly human, knocked at the door, and without waiting for an answer, came in and produced a soiled table-cloth, and retired again for cups and plates, leaving the door wide open.
CHAPTER IV
HENRY NEVILLE
HENRY NEVILLE had around him always the hatred of nature and of man. Nature scorned him because he was helpless to dig and to weed and to plant, and because he was always catching cold. He had drawn to himself the malice of man because he had tried and failed to defend the victim against the exploiter. All kinds of difficulties and worries lay about his path like nettles and stung him whenever he moved. Naturally his health was not benefited by this treatment, and he was developing a tendency to cough in the mornings. By reason of all this unkindness Mr. Neville’s appearance was certainly very different from the Rev. Hector Turnbull’s, and Mr. Neville’s smile was not in the least like the smile with which Mr. Tasker greeted his black sow at five o’clock in the morning. There was nothing so different in the world as the smiles of these men.
By the merry means of the hatred of the people Mr. Neville’s mind had been brought to the proper state for the mind of a priest. He had seen himself so long despised and loathed of men, that he had even before our history opens begun to look towards a certain welcome release that would one day come; meanwhile he felt there was no running away at present for him, he must drink the cup that was prepared for him to drink.
The dislike of the people towards him kept him a great deal indoors, and if ever he ventured out into the cornfields he took care to walk apart from the eyes and jeers of the labourers and the coarse jests, always referring to his housekeeper, of the farmers.
Mr. Neville had left town because he had committed an offence. He had been for some years working in the East End of London, but one unlucky evening on his way to church, meeting a girl—he never knew who she was—in a ragged pink frock, he caught her and kissed her. It was the first time he had ever kissed a girl, and it was the last. The people stoned him out of the street and then broke the windows of his mission. His rector and the bishop were filled with amazement at the conduct of this unthinking curate and requested him to remove, because of the anger of the people, to the country. That is how Mr. Neville came to be in the gloomy vicarage of South Egdon.
When he first came down into the country he tried very hard to battle with the place; he tried to cut his own grass, he tried to make his own hay, but he did not succeed any better than Henry Turnbull succeeded with the fir tree. And so he held up his hands and surrendered to the enemy and learned to admire in his prison the beauty of long grass. His polite neighbours saw the long grass, or tried to open the heavy gate, and drove quickly away without calling, poverty in England being regarded as something more vile than the plague.
The bishop of that part of the country, a worthy man whose face resembled a monkey’s, shook his head over Mr. Neville and sighed out with a typical frown, ‘Poor fellow!’ and went on dictating a letter to his lady secretary.
It was part of Mr. Neville’s nature never to retaliate: when the nettle overgrew his garden he let it grow, when his housekeeper robbed him he let her do it, and when this woman told tales in the village about his immorality he never answered them. He knew quite well the kind of men who escape scandal, and he was sure he could never be like them. The people of the village were his warders, the vicarage was his gaol; and to be delivered therefrom, an angel, the dark one, must come to unlock the gate. He attended to his spiritual duties with great care, though he did not visit unless he was invited first, because so many of his parishioners had shut their doors upon him. This pleasant pastime of shutting the door in the clergyman’s face provided the people with many a good story, explaining with what boldness the deed was done, and boasting about it in the same way that the village boys boasted that they had killed a cat with stones.
Mr. Neville was not a great scholar, but he understood the soul of an author and he knew what he liked in a book: and that was the kind of deep note that Bunyan calls the ground of music, the bass note, that modern culture with its peculiar conceit always scoffs at. There was, besides this bass note, a certain flavour of style that he liked, a style that in no way danced in the air but preferred clay as a medium.
The first week he was at South Egdon he brought upon himself the extreme and very weighty dislike of the largest farmer, a man of much substance. Mr. Neville had been down to the village, and heard while at the shop two gun-shots at the farm fired one after the other. On coming out into the road he saw an unfortunate small black dog rolling and struggling along in the gutter, more than half killed, with blood and foam coming out of its mouth, mingled with unutterable howls of pain. The women came out of their doors to watch. ‘The dog,’ they said, ‘had been like that in the ditch for some minutes.’ The reason being, that the farmer, whose income was seventeen hundred pounds a year and who owned two or three farms besides the one he rented, would not expend another twopenny cartridge to destroy it properly. He had used two, and if the dog would not die it was its own affair: anyhow, that is how the farmer left it.
The clergyman had no stick in his hand with which to kill the creature, and the farm-house being near by, he hurried there and knocked loudly at the door. No one came. He waited, and the dog howled and snarled more despairingly down the road; it was furiously biting its own leg. The priest knocked again, and at last Miss Bigland, the farmer’s plump daughter, came to the door and smiled, and while she arranged a pink ribbon, she replied to the clergyman’s hasty request for her father.
‘Oh yes, isn’t it a nice afternoon? You’ve come about that nasty dog. Father has just shot at it. It would go after my chickens. How silly of it not to die!’ and the young lady smilingly explained to the clergyman the trouble the little black dog called ‘Dick’ had given them, the yells of agony continuing only a little way down the road. Just then the father, coming out from the barn, saw the clergyman, and his smiling daughter told him that Mr. Neville had come about ‘that bad dog.’ The farmer, without saying anything, but in his heart cursing the priest for interfering and the dog for not dying, went out with a great stick and beat the dog to death in the road. The girl, composed and plump and smiling, watched this event from her front door. The priest strode away, and meeting the farmer, who carried the dead dog by one leg, walked past him without speaking a word, to his own house.
The farmer, to r
evenge himself against the clergyman for taking the side of the dog, presented to the village a carefully prepared report that Mr. Neville had a wife and ten children in Whitechapel, and that every night at the vicarage he drank brandy with his housekeeper, out of tea-cups. The village imagination enlarged and magnified and distorted these tales until they were believed by every one, and a fine time they had of it, these village story-tellers, rounding off their little inventions when any new item of vicarage fiction came their way.
It was easy for the people of the village to hate Mr. Neville, and they hated most of all the vicar’s face. Perhaps because he looked at them gently and forgivingly, as if he forgave them their sins. They did not like his kind of forgiveness; they much preferred a brutal scolding, they asked for the whip. The children very soon learned to call out rude words at him as he went by, their favourite yell being a doggerel rhyme about the Lord’s Prayer, that began:
‘Our Father which art in Heaven,
Went up two steps and came down seven….’
This they shouted out as loud as they could when they saw their priest in the road.
Only that foolish fellow, Henry Turnbull, loved him. And the two friends sat together that July afternoon, and smoked cheap cigarettes, regarding with wakeful interest the great trees and the long grass.
Henry had really been very much shocked that day, and he wanted to see his friend shocked too. Henry had not understood what he had seen. It was to him an isolated incident of terror in the homely life of the village, and he wanted it explained away. Its horror had made a very distinct impression upon his mind; he had never been told before so plainly that all was not right with the world. The girl’s kiss had been wonderful. He always remembered that. And the failure at cutting down the fir tree was only a failure. And his hardships abroad, like a trying campaign, had given him a lasting contentment at home. But now this new thing had appeared, and he wanted his friend to tell him what it meant. He opened the subject by talking about his father’s churchwarden.
