by John Moore
When he returned with the notes John had said seriously: “You may have saved the factory, Dad,” and then had laughed:
“You old miser You oughtn’t to keep so much money in the shop, with all these spivs and cosh-boys about. You ought to pay it into the Bank regularly.”
These words had mocked him for three days. You ought to pay it into the Bank regularly. For it was only a matter of time before somebody else said that—Mr. Tasker, or Noakes, or even the Mayor; and what then?
At one moment, yesterday, he had actually resolved to go to the Mayor and confess; and the resolution had lifted a cloud off his mind, until he realised that he could not do so without incriminating John. For who would believe that John had not known where the money came from? To confess would be to bring John’s precarious house-of-cards tumbling about him; and about his wife and two kids as well. It was unthinkable that he should ruin John.
So there was nothing for it; he must carry his shame about with him for a fortnight and hope, like all the wretched and foolish little men who ran away with the funds of slate clubs, that “something would turn up” before he was found out. For now he was of their fellowship. He thought and felt as they did. He made the same feeble excuses to himself: I wasn’t really dishonest, I meant to pay it back. He was blood-brother now to that poor weak creature Watkins who had spent the Christmas share-out money belonging to the Black Bear Goose Club and got six months in gaol. Watkins had meant to pay it back too, and perhaps he would have done so if the right dog had won on his last, desperate evening.
The Bloody Meadow formed an island in the loop of the two rivers and was joined to the town by an old stone bridge. It was a huge field, nearly a mile across, and it generally took Mr. Handiman two hours to walk all the way round it. But he walked more quickly to-day, because he spent less time talking to his friends on the bank, those easy-going fellows whom he secretly envied. He asked them the usual question: “Any luck?” but he hardly listened to their usual excuses, that the sun was too bright, the water too clear, the wind too strong, or the fish off the feed. In his own favourite fishing place, a cow-drink between two willows, he found Robin baiting his hook with something out of a jar which Mr. Handiman could have sworn was illicit salmon-roe; for Robin rarely indulged in any lawful form of angling. However, he hadn’t caught anything (or if he had he wouldn’t admit it) and was obviously disinclined to say what he was fishing for. Instead he asked: “How are the Festival bookings going? Is the money beginning to roll in?” at which Mr. Handiman’s heart gave a terrible bound, though he was able after a moment’s pause to answer quite calmly:
“Very slow, Mr. Robin, very slow indeed.”
He hurried away. This was another nightmare which he shared with the slate-club secretaries: the suspicion of being suspected. Even the most casual pleasantry—Is the money beginning to roll in?—took on a frightening significance.
Yesterday when Virginia had handed him her day’s takings—only five pounds seventeen and sixpence—she had said jokingly: “Don’t spend it all at once, Mr. Handiman,” and for a second he had imagined that she knew and was trying to tell him so. When he realised that she couldn’t know—for he had the only key to the safe—he had felt the damp cold sweat on his forehead, and heard the surging in his ears, just the same as that time after a bout of ’flu when he had fainted in chapel and was coming to afterwards.
Such experiences, thought Mr. Handiman wretchedly, were part of his punishment. And it was part of his punishment too that even his beloved river gave him no joy this afternoon. The beauty was tarnished, the magic gone, he took no pleasure in the gobbling ducks and the tight, bright buds of the brandy-bottles. All along the bank, spaced out at intervals of about ten yards, were new wooden pegs, consecutively numbered; and these displeased him, for they were a reminder that on Saturday week, for ten miles upstream and five miles down, the river would be lined with thousands of anglers from Birmingham and the Black Country, taking part in the first big angling competition of the year. Mr. Handiman, because he had fished there since boyhood, felt that he had a proprietary right to the banks of the Bloody Meadow, and he disapproved of these spectacular fishing matches to which the contestants came in noisy charabancs, bringing with them their wives and girls. There were umpires every mile or so along the pitch, who started the match with pistol shots as if it were a race, and bookies, even, ran along the banks taking bets, on the result. The women sometimes put on. paper hats, which they seemed to think were necessary to the enjoyment of a day in the country, and when they had gone they left behind them a distasteful debris of stout and pop bottles, cigarette packets, newspapers and partly-nibbled sandwiches. The whole thing shocked Mr. Handiman profoundly, and he looked upon it as an almost blasphemous parody of his cherished sport; it pained him as it would pain a member of the M.C.C. to see the cricketers at Lord’s going out to field in comic hats and false noses. For “Study to be quiet,” Izaak Walton had said; and he had recommended his innocent recreation especially to contemplative men. What would he have thought of the screeching wenches in paper hats and the drinking that went on in the pubs afterwards— he who had declared, “I had rather be a civil, well-governed, well-grounded temperate poor angler than a drunken lord; but I hope there is none such”? What would he have thought of the bookies, and the betting, and the elaborate precautions against cheating, who hardly ever failed to speak in the same breath of “anglers, honest men”?
Oh, dear, there I go again, thought poor Mr. Handiman, wishing that The Compleat Angler hadn’t laid such emphasis upon honesty. Stephen Tasker had once shown him a copy with Walton’s own handwriting on the fly-leaf (it was one of the very few rare books Stephen had ever had in his shop) and the inscription so plainly written in faded brown ink was simply, “For my friend Honest Will lies, Iz. WA” How right and proper, he had thought at the time; for surely all Izaak’s good friends must have been as honest as the day. He had felt absurdly proud, as he handled the book reverently, that the man who wrote it had been an ironmonger like himself.
Then there was the famous recipe for cooking pike: “This dish of meat is too good for any but anglers, or very honest men; and I trust you will prove both.” Alas, he had forfeited his claim for ever. He was no more of that honourable brotherhood. He was—with shame and horror he forced himself to formulate the word—an embezzler. No better than that.
In his distress, Mr. Handiman no longer paid much attention to where he was going; and straying off the tow-path he found himself among long mowing-grass full of moondaisies in which there lay—right at his feet, for he had nearly tripped over them—a couple hotly embracing. The spectacle filled Mr. Handiman with embarrassment and dismay; for though he turned away at once with a mumbled apology he couldn’t fail to be aware that the young man was Mr. Lance the Vicar’s son and the girl was that Edna Shirley from the balloon factory. Moreover, although his glance before he averted it had fallen only for a second upon the girl’s bright head and Lance’s dark one, upon a confusion of limbs, a preposterous heap which he refrained from anatomising in his mind, he had seen something else which had embarrassed him much more than the embracing couple. For as in common decency he had looked the other way, his attention had become fixed upon a bright patch in the grass, and he realised now that this had been a dress —in fact, he could even remember the pattern, which was one of yellow flowers. Worse still, the dress had been neatly folded, and this fact deeply troubled his unwilling imagination. For it was clear that the girl had taken it off, you might say, with malice aforethought. Such an action was altogether outside Mr. Handiman’s experience, and it seemed to him to be very wicked indeed.
He had known Mr. Lance since he was a schoolboy in shorts, coming to the shop for fish-hooks on tick.
“What’s the right size to catch a roach, Mr. Handiman?”
“You’ll want a Number Twelve for him, Mr. Lance; very small mouth a roach has got”—and somehow that seemed to make it worse that he should have taken a factory girl, even though
she was a Beauty Queen, for his lie-beside. That was a bad word which they used in the alleys; but it could hardly be too bad for a young woman who would take off her dress in an open field, even though the mowing-grass was very long, and tidily, providently, fold it. … What in the world would the old Vicar say if he knew?
Down what dangerous paths, thought Mr. Handiman, is this Festival leading us, with its play-acting and Beauty Queens, its jealousies and its quarrels? But even as he shook his head in disapproval, the recollection of his own wickedness came flooding back. Who was he to cast stones, while that empty paying-in book lay in his shop safe? Who indeed?
He put his hand in his pocket and felt for the key. Then he remembered that he had left it in the drawer where he kept his private papers, and he had a moment’s unreasoning panic, for it suddenly seemed important that he should have the key in his own possession always. Unconsciously he began to hurry; and he didn’t notice the fishermen any more nor ask them if they had had any luck, he had no eyes for the loosestrife which stained the banks like dark arterial blood, no ears for the larks which poured down their sweet trickles of song all about him. He went so fast, on his short legs, that he was almost running; and his guilt ran beside him, beneath the accusing sky.
VII
It was Noakes, the old fool, who had insisted on folksongs. “Consider the visit to our town of Mary Tudor,” he had said. “The King’s daughter. What more natural than that the simple country people of those days should seek to entertain her with their simple folk-songs?”
Lance thought it highly improbable; but Noakes was determined.
“Have a hunt round for something suitable, there’s a good chap. Go over to the Public Library and ask the Librarian to help you. There are sure to be plenty of the right period—I can so well imagine the scene, the King’s daughter sitting entranced in her barge while the yokels chant their pretty songs in her honour, clear and sweet as the blackbird, pure as the morning! Much better, if I may say so,” added Noakes nastily, “than some of this meaningless modern stuff.”
Very well, you shall have your folk-songs, thought Lance mischievously. But he had no desire whatever to spend a fine summer day in a frowsty old library, and he therefore proposed to write them himself. This he was now doing, with considerable enjoyment, as he leaned back in the garden-chair which he had placed in a spot well suited to inspire pastoral poetry, being half-way between a bower of honeysuckle and a bed of white tobacco plants which were just beginning to shed their sweetness on the waning air.
He wrote swiftly:
When I was a youngster on Midsummer Day
I tumbled the wenches about in the hay,
With a heigh-ho frolicsome—
“Lance!” he heard his father calling. The old man had just come out of evensong and was ambitious, Lance knew, to fix up his newly-arrived anemometer before it was too dark. There was no point in doing this, for the air was quite still, but the Vicar was like a child with an exciting toy and he wanted to play with it immediately.
“Lance!”
“Coming.”
But I must get this chorus finished first, he thought; it’s going to be rather authentic.
With a heigh-ho frolicsome,
Goosegogs and sillabubs,
Puffballs and pillikins,
Kecksies and crazies and
Codlins and cream!
That would teach Master Noakes a lesson. (“Meaningless modern poetry!” thought Lance.)
He had as little difficulty with verse two.
The birds they were singing in Merry-come-sorrow,
“ Come Michaelmastide you pay back what you borrow, ”
With a heigh-ho frolicsome,
Goosegogs and sillabubs,
Puffballs and pillikins,
Kecksies and crazies and
Codlins and cream!
Just the thing to sing to Bloody Mary in the Bloody Meadow!
“Lance!” His father sounded very petulant indeed. “I’m stuck on the ladder. Do come.”
Lance put away the notebook in his pocket. His father, he found, with reckless enthusiasm had put up a rickety ladder against the old dovecote which he had long ago selected as the ideal site for his anemometer; his weight had broken two rungs of the ladder and he now hung on by his arms alone while his feet clove the air where the rungs should have been. Lance went up the ladder, seized his legs, and guided him down. The Vicar’s wife, meanwhile, hearing his cries, put her head out of a bedroom window, and called:
“You’ll break your old neck if you aren’t careful. I said you’d be punished for doing it on Sunday.”
“God is very tolerant of an old man’s foibles,” said the Vicar mildly. “Be a kind chap, Lance, and fetch another ladder from the coach-house—the big fruit-picking one if you can manage it.”
Lance did so, while couplets of delightful nonsense rhymed themselves in his head.
The cobwebs were hanging upon the bright thorn,
(Come tiddly, come toddly, come Michaelmas morn!)
With a heigh-ho frolicsome—
By the time he returned with the big ladder the Vicar had the instrument out of its wooden packing-case and was assembling it.
“This is the recording device, and these are the connecting tubes. And this, of course, is the vane which keeps the tube facing the wind. What a miracle of ingenuity! And yet, on what a simple principle it works! We’ve certainly advanced a long way since Dr. Thomas Rory Robinson invented the first of these machines at Armagh Observatory in, let me see, 1846. Now all we need to do, Lance, is to secure the anemometer to the platform I built on top of the dovecote and plug in the connection. Then I can read off the velocity and pressure of the wind on this dial which I propose to place at eye-level upon one of the supports of the dovecote. If you like to carry the instrument up the ladder, you’ll find that I’ve put the screws and screwdriver on the platform all ready.”
The instrument was not very heavy, and Lance soon had it firmly screwed in place. It was the work of a few minutes only to connect up the tubes which registered the pressure on the recorder, and to secure the recorder to one of the legs of the dovecote. The Vicar gazed at it lovingly.
“Not a zephyr,” he said.
And indeed it was the stillest, sofrest evening Lance could remember.
“The anticyclone has come to stay,” pronounced the Vicar, with a glance at the sky, which was empty save for a small cloud the size of a man’s hand just appearing over the horizon. Yet Lance fancied there was a thundery tendency in the air; for the utter stillness was almost unnatural, it was as if the whole world held its breath.
“My boy, we must celebrate this,” said the Vicar suddenly. “At long last, my anemometer! Let us go in and drink a glass of the Vicarage port.”
Nothing loath, Lance followed him into the house. The Vicarage port derived from the grocer’s, and was described as rich ruby, but Lance was not the fellow to look a gift horse in the mouth and he was glad to accept a second glass, and then a third. His mother came in to draw the curtains and switch on the light, and remarked that it had got dark very quickly; the sultry weather had given her a headache and after a few minutes she went up to bed. The Vicar settled himself comfortably in his armchair and lit his pipe. There was a long silence, during which a cockchafer or moth banged against the window-pane several times. Lance correctly conjectured that his father was about to reopen the vexed question of his own future.
“Er—how are those choruses coming along?” said the Vicar at last; and Lance recognised the gambit.
“Finished, Father. Ten days ago.” It was less than a fortnight till the Festival, and he was unable to temporise any longer.
“Ah! Then we shall have to begin—er—thinking again, shan’t we, my boy?”
“Yes, Father.”
Bang, bang went the cockchafer on the window-pane.
“Have you ever, for example, considered taking Holy Orders?”
“No, Father, I can’t say I have.”
“You may feel, of course, that you haven’t a call. Many young men experience such a natural diffidence. But often the sense of vocation comes later; and I can assure you that from the worldly point of view it’s a very pleasant life— not much money, of course, but a measure of security in an uncertain world and a modicum of leisure to pursue some pleasant pastime, such as my own hobby of the weather, to one’s heart’s content.”
Lance was thinking that his own pleasant pastime would perhaps be considered less suitable for a clergyman than meteorology, when the tap-tapping at the window started ago in.
“Upon my soul,” said the Vicar, “what a plague of those chafers there must be this summer!” He went to the window and drew apart the curtains. “Yet I can’t see any. I believe—well, what an extraordinary thing! Yes, I’m sure it’s the wistaria blowing against the glass. Quick, Lance, go and find a torch. We must go out and read the anemometer ! The Lord has brought the wind out of his treasuries! It’s really blowing!”
The Vicar gathered up his cassock about him and ran out through the front door. Following him with the torch, Lance was aware that the sky, which had been so blue half an hour ago, had assumed a lowering and atrabilious look. And the air, that had been so still, had set up a multitudinous sighing.
“Fifteen miles an hour,” called the Vicar. “A little more in the gusts. It works, Lance! The anemometer’s working!”
Some drops of rain were beginning to fall, sparse but enormous. The Vicar, however, did not heed them.
“Anemometer.” He breathed the word as a lover might utter it. “Derived as you well know from the Greek wind: the same root from which we get the beautiful word ‘Anemone,’ the wind-flower.”
The rain began to patter like galloping horses. The voices in the sky became more shrill and there was a long whoosh! among the churchyard chestnuts. Lance fancied that he could feel all about him a quickening elemental pulse.
“Has it ever occurred to you,” his father went on, “that the Latin Animus, meaning ’soul’—how odd that the soul less animals are so called!—comes from this identical Greek original—‘’ again? Wind is indeed an awe-inspiring thing; and it is no wonder that man has always associated it with the idea of the spirit. ‘The spirit moved upon the waters.’ ‘The spirit bloweth and is still.’ You remember at the Pentecost—”
