The Howlands were not very favourably regarded in the village – a fact which didn’t greatly perturb either the publican or his wife, since theirs was the only licensed house within five miles of Thorley. Behind this lack of esteem there may have lain nothing more than the petty xenophobia characteristic of rural communities. Howland was a foreigner from somewhere in the Midlands, shoved into the job by the brewery company; his wife might almost have been a foreigner in the more authentic sense of the word, since she was dark and exotic-seeming like her son Dicky. So the villagers were no doubt prejudiced against them. But Mrs Alford, too, had not taken to the Howlands, and had once briefly remarked to her husband that they were ‘perhaps not wholly desirable’. All these circumstances were to have some bearing on Richard Howland’s history.
The Apperley Arms was not the kind of pub into which it would have occurred to any of the surrounding gentry to drop for a drink. The vicar, however, paid the Howlands an occasional visit, pastoral care being a duty which he discharged in a conscientious although untalented manner. Dr Ayliffe was a scholar, now of advanced age, and he had been presented to the living a long time ago by an Oxford contemporary, Sir Digby Apperley of Chesney Lodge, when it became apparent that a college Fellowship wasn’t coming his way. Dr Ayliffe, as the phrase is, ‘kept up his scholarship’, and was understood to contribute to theological journals of the learned sort. He had never quite got the feel of village life.
Mrs Howland was a complaining woman. She was this so preponderantly that a tone of grievance accompanied her speaking voice whether or not she was referring to any identifiable cause of discontent. On his visits to the Apperley Arms the vicar listened with much patience to the dismal woman. This was the more difficult of achievement in that he felt patience to be not enough; that he ought to be admonishing Mrs Howland to that resigned and even cheerful acceptance of daily trials and small adversities incumbent upon one who would lead the active Christian life. But in fact he shrank from this, compromising upon a resolve to work something of the kind into his sermon when Mrs Howland next came to church. She didn’t come very often.
Among the circumstances occasioning Mrs Howland’s vexation of spirit it sometimes appeared that there had to be numbered the mere existence of her son Dicky. Dr Ayliffe, although he wasn’t very sure that he liked the look of this particular juvenile parishioner, found the attitude peculiarly disheartening. He was a bachelor who kept a large photograph of his dead mother on his writing-table in the vicarage, and he judged it quite dreadful that a woman should ever speak other than in terms of warm affection of her son. So sometimes he simply didn’t listen to Mrs Howland when the shortcomings of Dicky were her theme. The boy often stayed out later than he should at his age. He’d even get up in the middle of the night at times, just to go fooling around with owls. He could hoot at owls so that owls would hoot back at him. Now, what was the use of that? The vicar reflected that it might get you into a poem by Wordsworth. But as this thought would not have conveyed much to Mrs Howland he held his peace, and perhaps a little removed his mind to other matters. Then one day he became aware of this tiresome female as complaining that Dicky was also far too fond of playing with matches. It was right dangerous, she said, and there might be a fatality – which was something you couldn’t afford in a licensed house.
Dr Ayliffe didn’t see that fatalities were to be less afforded in a public house than anywhere else. Nor did he quite understand what Mrs Howland was worried about. Dicky was at this moment on view through an open door, scowling over his homework at a table in the pub’s back parlour, and he was surely past the age when striking matches is commonly considered dangerous in the young. Not having heard from any of the Alfords about the little episode in the lambing hut, the vicar was unable to connect the behaviour complained of with any honourable ambition connected with Boy Scouts. It occurred to him that in some obscure way Mrs Howland was not being quite frank with him, and had some more substantial occasion for anxiety than she had avowed. The notion remained with him after he had left the Apperley Arms, and later that afternoon he retailed the incident to Miss Nott, the District Nurse. He knew that she frequently visited the pub in a professional way, the senior Howland being much afflicted with boils. She might keep an eye on the boy, and judge whether there was anything wrong with him.
Unfortunately Dr Ayliffe (who had a fine carrying voice) made this communication to Miss Nott upon running into her in the village post office – a signal instance of his innocence in face of the mores of rural society. In no time the news was all over the place that young Dicky Howland was a detected – or at least suspected – fire-bug.
Perhaps prompting the swift spread of this intelligence was a circumstance which in a vague way may have been in the vicar’s own head. Only in the next parish there had recently been several cases of petty incendiarism in farm buildings and the like. As setting a match to this or that item of another man’s property in requital of injuries actual or supposed is a fairly common feature of rustic life these sporadic incidents had occasioned no great remark, and rated only a brief paragraph in the local paper. Yet they did probably lend some impetus to the spread of this agreeable information, or misinformation, about the Howlands’ boy.
Then, on the very next day, occurred the incident of the school’s waste-paper basket. It was a very large basket, full of inky English compositions and grossly erroneous arithmetical calculations, and it was put out in the yard to be emptied perhaps a couple of times a week. On this occasion, and just before afternoon school, it was found to be blazing, and the schoolmistress had been so alarmed that she employed a fire extinguisher to deal with it. Perhaps because conscious that this had been to over-react, and that a bucket of water would have served equally well, she then took somewhat precipitate action. She might have reflected that it had been Mr Elcox’s morning (Mr Elcox came to conduct Swedish drill on one morning a week) and that Mr Elcox was known to be careless with his cigarette butts. Instead of this, and with the previous day’s news filling her head, she roundly accused Richard Howland of the deed. Dicky, at once scared and sullen, said he knew nothing about it, he didn’t. At this the schoolmistress, who didn’t like Dicky anyway, declared that he had yet further darkened his atrocious deed by telling a very very wicked lie. She then whipped Dicky – not only on the bottom but also, and equally painfully, on the calves as well. At the end of this performance Dicky managed to suspend his howling and blubbering for sufficiently long to spit at the schoolmistress copiously and with entire accuracy of aim. Whereupon afternoon school broke up in confusion. All the children ran home (in great glee about the spitting, which made Dicky something of a hero) and piously told their parents that a very bad boy had got the stick for trying to burn down the school.
The schoolmistress, who knew that she ought not to have beaten Richard Howland on the mere strength of an arbitrary suspicion, reported the incident to nobody, and even went into the local market town and bought a new waste-paper basket with her own money. So the children’s lurid version of Dicky’s delinquency passed uncontradicted into history. General Alford heard it, and retailed it to his schoolfellow Sir Charles Apperley, at that time a vigorous and youngish landowner like himself. Neither of the gentlemen judged it a very probable story, and they agreed that if that hideous little Victorian school-house had been burnt down it would have been a capital thing. The General however did tell his friend about Dicky’s activity in the lambing hut.
Even the stoutest proponent of corporal punishment could not have maintained that young Richard Howland’s flogging had done him any good. He swaggered among the other children in a new way, and was at times inclined to adopt the pose of a very wicked fellow indeed.
He treated the schoolmistress with thinly masked contempt and ridicule, intuitively aware that, for some time at least, she would be frightened to wallop him again. Whether justifiably or not, he resented what had been done to him, and it might have been said that the hurt to his pride was lasting longe
r by a good way than the hurt to his backside. One wouldn’t, somehow, have expected a son of Mr and Mrs Howland to be a sensitive plant. But he was certainly touchy. He hadn’t liked being called a little duffer by the General, even in a genial way. Still less had he liked being reduced to squealing and blubbering by an old woman with a cane. An uncharitable observer might have declared him to be the sort of person who is determined to get his own back one day, perhaps by some random outrage against society at large. But this would only have been a guess, and it was possible that Dicky’s resentments didn’t go deep. Nobody really knew much about him. Nobody had bothered to find out.
A few weeks after this something much more substantial than a school waste-paper basket went up in flames at Thorley. But on this occasion the school was again at least in the picture, or not far off it. Its playground lay next to the rick-yard of the home farm, and it was there that a large haystack was suddenly seen to be on fire round about eleven o’clock in the morning. There was quite a strong wind blowing; wisps of burning hay were floating all over the place in no time; the schoolmistress, perhaps rendered particularly nervous by her recent experience, judged it wise to evacuate the school until the fire-engine arrived. The only result of this precaution was to put her charges at some risk as they tumbled into the rick-yard to view the conflagration. There was naturally a good deal of excitement – more than there had been since a small and rather mangy travelling menagerie had set up in a neighbouring field a couple of years before. The children pranced around, shouting and singing, much as they might have done on Guy Fawkes night. Dicky Howland was of course among them, but few could honestly have maintained that he was more excited than many of his companions, much less that he had in any way been hinting that this was in some peculiar degree his show. But by this time Dicky was a marked man – or a marked small boy, and by that evening it was widely believed that he was a dire menace to the King’s lieges in their lawful beds. Dr Ayliffe was extremely perturbed – so much so that he thought it well to call both General Alford and Sir Charles Apperley into conference. They were magistrates – Sir Charles, indeed, had recently become chairman of the local bench – and might find some means of obviating painful court proceedings.
‘This is all nonsense,’ Sir Charles said at once. ‘So far, I mean, as the lad Howland is concerned. The police ought to be hunting for the fellow who had been up to these games over at Little Treby.’
‘Quite right, Charles.’ General Alford nodded vigorously. ‘I’ve spoken to Miss Powney.’ Miss Powney was the schoolmistress. ‘She’s most upset by this talk about the lad. She feels she set it going with that hullabaloo over the waste-paper basket. Made the kid tip an arse, you know, in a most unwarranted manner. However, she’s a decent woman enough, and anxious to get this quite clear. The boy hadn’t been out of her sight since the school clocked in after breakfast. Hadn’t so much as asked to be excused – which it seems is what they say when they want to go out and pee. So he could have had nothing to do with it.’
‘I devoutly hope it may be so.’ The vicar spoke on a desponding note. ‘But if the boy eluded Miss Powney’s notice for five minutes it would have been enough. Or he may have employed some ingenious device. Some sort of slow-burning fuse.’
‘Good Lord, padre!’ Sir Charles exclaimed. He was at times an impatient man, and could even forget what was owing to one whose cloth had, so to speak, been draped on him by his, Sir Charles’s, own grandfather. ‘What notions you learned fellows can get in your heads. This lad isn’t a professional anarchist, you know. Consider his years.’
‘I would be very willing to give him the benefit of every doubt, Apperley. But there is abundant testimony that fire holds a morbid fascination for him.’
‘Oh, come!’ the General said. ‘”Morbid” pitches it a bit high, you know. Say “unusually strong”. Anybody can get a bit excited by a fire. It’s one of those odd psychological things.’
‘I have hesitated to mention it, Alford. But there is one report that is really disturbing. Howland ran about shouting and so on like the other children. But then – if old Ritchings is to be believed, and you will both know him as a most respectable labouring man – the boy suddenly went quiet; withdrew, as he thought, from public observation; and then behaved in what I must term a sexually reprehensible manner.’
Neither of the landowners addressed ventured to betray amusement at this vocabulary; they probably reflected that the vicar belonged to a generation in which boys were taught that only instant insanity could succeed upon such behaviour as Dicky Howland had now been indicted of. But General Alford, at least, was a little shaken by what he had heard – and perhaps spoke out the more firmly as a result.
‘It may have been so, Ayliffe – although old men like Ritchings sometimes think they see something their minds have been running on. In any case, it would be no proof that it was this wretched boy who set the confounded rick on fire. More things can prompt to a bout of masturbation, you know, than the sight of a wench in her shift. It’s all part of our being fearfully and wonderfully made.’ The General had produced this thought of the psalmist by way of making amends for the perhaps too robust expressions that had preceded it. ‘But the practical question is: What can we do?’
‘I can preach a sermon against malicious gossip, I suppose.’ Dr Ayliffe, although a serious man, was by no means incapable of humour. ‘But if the boy is as innocent as I am anxious to believe – and I am quite as anxious as either of you – the fact won’t help once the village people have a down on him. He’ll be a black sheep – just as a matter of giving a dog a bad name.’ The vicar frowned, conscious that a certain confusion attended these images. ‘The lad would be better elsewhere.’
‘Aren’t those publicans shunted around by the breweries?’ Sir Charles asked. ‘It ought to be easy to find the top man in this particular concern. Likely enough we were at school with him—eh, Arthur? The place reeked of malt and hops, as I remember it. We could ask him – just as a favour to an old chum – to promote those unappealing Howlands. It shouldn’t be difficult. The Apperley Arms is a pretty miserable pot-house, if you ask me.’
‘Unworthy of the family name,’ the General said with a chuckle. ‘But it’s an idea, Charles, distinctly an idea.’
‘The boy could start again with a clean sheet,’ Dr Ayliffe said.
‘That’s the state of his sheet already, in my opinion. Call it just a fresh start.’
But benevolent plans of the kind these three gentlemen were perpending take time to mature. This one was overtaken by events.
The village school had shut down for the Christmas holidays, and the schoolmistress, who felt it had been a trying term, had gone off to spend the festive season in the household of a married sister in another part of the country. The children fooled around, hoping for snow and ice. There had been another fire, this time at Great Treby: it was much more serious than the last, since a church hall had been destroyed. This spectacular incendiarism was generously reported, and naturally kept arson well to the fore in Thorley heads. Nobody was made more aware of this than Dicky Howland, and its effect was to enhance in him that nocturnal habit deplored by his mother. It was no season for hooting-matches with owls at midnight, but when Dicky was not to be found in his bed it was presumably activities of that sort that he was up to. By day he either skulked or went about in an ostentatiously defiant manner. Had a psychiatrist been around (only in those days there probably wasn’t one within a hundred miles of Thorley) he might have declared that an identity crisis was confronting this boy; that in face of such group hostility – but also, perhaps, gratifying attention – he was uncertain what role to assume. The person who came closest to this perception about Dicky was Anne Alford, whose own holidays had begun. She was rapidly becoming an articulate girl, and she had the advantage of being very much Dicky’s age. When she heard of Sir Charles Apperley’s plan for promoting the innkeeper she didn’t at all approve of it, and she rebuked her father for lending countenanc
e to anything so unconsidered.
‘If those Howlands are sent away,’ she said, ‘even if it’s pretended they deserve a better pub, everybody will know that it’s because of Dicky that they’ve had to go. And the story will follow them, too. So there will have been a kind of confession of guilt where I just don’t believe there has been any guilt. And neither do you, Daddy. So I don’t know how you can have been led into such a plan by that stupid Sir Charles.’
‘Anne, dear, you must not call Charles Apperley stupid. He is a very old friend of mine, and if you wish to criticise his ideas – which I consider you have a right to do – it must be in terms of proper respect.’ If General Alford spoke thus severely, it may have been because he knew that his daughter was dead right. ‘Perhaps’—he added without sarcasm—’you have a better idea yourself.’
‘Of course I haven’t. I know I’m only an ignorant child.’ Anne had lately become fond of this irritating remark. ‘But I think they should catch the man who has been burning things down at Treby before he manages to roast some wretched old couple in their hovel. What’s more, I think he may have made Treby too hot to hold him.’ Anne didn’t pause to invite appreciation of this bizarre joke, although she hadn’t produced it inadvertently. ‘He has started casting around more widely – and that’s what explains our haystack.’
The Bridge at Arta Page 12
