Mr. Tasker's Gods

M
R
. T
ASKER
:
a
dairyman

M
R
. T
ASKER’S
F
ATHER
:
a
tramp

T
HE
R
EV
. H
ECTOR
T
URNBULL
:
a
country
clergyman

M
RS
. T
URNBULL
:
his
wife

T
HE
R
EV
. E
DWARD
L
ESTER
:
a
curate

A C
ATTLE
-
DROVER

M
RS
. F
ANCY
:
a
lodging-house
keeper

R
OSE
N
ETLEY
:
a
social
worker

M
R
. B
IGLAND
:
the
South
Egdon
farmer

M
R
. M
ALDEN
:
a
bank
clerk

M
R
. D
ANE
:
the
Shelton
farmer

T
HE
R
EV
. H
ENRY
N
EVILLE
:
a
clergyman

M
OLLY
N
EVILLE
:
his
sister

A
LICE
:
a
servant

E
DITH
:
a
servant

T
OM
R
OUDE
:
a
young
man

A
NNIE
B
RENT
:
a
girl

M
R
. D
UGGS
:
a
labourer

A M
OTHER
. L
ADIES
. C
OUNTRY
P
EOPLE
and
O
THERS

SCENE

Two
villages
, S
HELTON
and
S
OUTH
E
GDON
: T
HE
H
EATH
:
Two
towns
, P
ORTSTOWN
and
M
AIDENBRIDGE

T
HE servants at the vicarage had gone to bed. Edith had just locked the back door, and Alice had taken the master the hot milk that he drank every evening at ten o'clock. Just after ten the two servants had gone upstairs together.

Indoors there was law, order, harmony and quiet; out of doors there was nothing except the night and one owl.

The servants at the vicarage slept in a little room at the end of the back passage. They slept in one bed, and their tin boxes rested together upon the floor; there was also in the room an old discarded washing-stand. It must be
remembered
that servants like a room with scant furniture: it means less work and it reminds them of home. The servants at the vicarage did not pull down their blind, there was no need; they never thought that any one could possibly desire to watch them from the back garden. Beyond the back garden there were two large meadows and then the dairy-house.

The delight of being watched from outside, while one moves about a bedroom, is rare in country circles; these kinds of arts and fancies are generally only practised in cities, where the path of desire has taken many strange windings
and the imagination is more awake. As a matter of fact, these two girls were much too realistic to believe that any one could possibly stand in the dark and look at them undress. Not one of the young men that they knew would have stood outside their window for an instant, so the vicarage servants had not even the womanly pleasure of pulling down the blind.

They were both very tired; they had been cleaning the house, and they had been washing up the very large number of plates that the family—‘three in number,' so ran the
advertisement
—had that day soiled.

Tired girls do not go to bed, it is just the very thing that they won't do; they will prefer even to darn their stockings, or else they pull out all the little bits of blouse stuff hidden under Sunday frocks, but they never get into bed.

Edith sat upon the end of the bed, partly clothed, and tried in vain to draw a very large hole in the heel of her stocking together. She knew very well about the hole, for a little mite of a girl walking behind her the last Sunday had very plainly and loudly remarked upon it, coming down the church path. Alice, for some reason or other, was looking out of the window.

To the north of the village, in view of the girls' window, there was a low down, the kind of down that an idle schoolboy with a taste for trying to do things might have attempted to throw a cricket ball over, and receive it, if it were not
stopped by the gorse, running down to him again. This down was like a plain homely green wall that kept away the north wind from the village, and in March, when an icy blast blew on a sunny day and beat against it from the north, any old person could sit on the dry grass, the village side, and think of the coming summer.

It was over this hill that a road crept that joined the village to the world; at least this was one way to get there; the other way was round the bottom of the hill—‘down the road,' as it was called. But the more manly way was for the traveller to go over the hill. Whoever went down the road to get at the world was regarded by the strong-minded as a feeble fellow, or else in possession of a very poor horse that could not face the hill. This was the case of the small farmer of the village, whose old horses never cost him more than eight pounds and who always went down the road to get to the market town.

Alice was peering into the summer night, watching the hill, because at the top there was a light moving. Alice had at first taken this light to be a star; she had heard of the evening star, and she thought it must be that one, until it began to move, and then her reason explained to her that it must be the light of a cart guided by some delayed wanderer in the night.

Just then the owl hooted by the vicarage hedge, near the elm tree, and swept over the
house and hooted again on its way to the church tower.

Alice was now sure that something was happening in the darkness, something different from what had happened the evening before, or a good many evenings before,—something exciting. She had begun to hear voices at the dairy-house by the gate that she knew led to the meadow. She could not hear what was being said, but the sound of voices showed very distinctly that something had happened. Alice turned quickly, and her hair, that was already let down, brushed the window. She said
excitedly
the words of magic, ‘Something's the matter with Mr. Tasker.' The voices had come to Alice out of the night in the magical way that voices do come in the dark; she had heard them for more than a minute before she had realized that they were voices. They were curiously natural, and yet she knew that they had no business to be there.

Alice was the youngest of the vicarage servants, and it was Edith who opened the window at the bottom so that they could both lean out into the night and listen. Alice, who had the sharper ears of the two, gave expression to the mysterious sounds that floated in from the fields, the sounds themselves clearly denoting the presence of startled, trembling, human creatures.

Alice whispered to Edith in much the same tone of fear as the sounds, ‘Do you hear them?
They be frightened. 'Tis Mrs. Tasker and all of them; they be by the gate waiting—hush—be quiet—let the curtain bide—there's May's voice, she did always squeak like a little pig—listen—“Can't you, Edie”—that's Elsie, quite plain. Oh, I do wish I could hear what they be saying! There's the baby crying. What a shame having she out there—listen to Elsie—now they be all talking—they are all there by the gate—and they be so frightened.
Something'
s the matter with Mr. Tasker. Six o'clock is his time to be home; it must be near twelve. Old Turnbull struck eleven ever so long ago.'

The servants at the vicarage called the hall clock ‘Old Turnbull' after their master. It was their habit to give nicknames to nearly
everything
in the house.

‘Mr. Tasker don't drink, he don't ever spend anything, he don't treat Mrs. Green, he don't spend nothing—something must have happened.' Alice was beginning to enjoy the fear of it.

Slowly the light moved down the hill, and stopped; the voices by the gate became more high and more terror-stricken as the truth grew nearer, and the girls at the window felt that the dramatic moment had come.

‘He's opening the mead gate,' said Edith; ‘whatever can it be?'

They watched the light now moving across the meadow; it moved rather erratically, as though it were glad to be freed from the restraint of a
narrow lane. It kept on going out of the path like a lost star, and wandered here and there, the horse or the man having seemingly forgotten the right way to the dairy gate. However, after taking some wide curves, once almost
disappearing
, the light at last drew near the gate.

The watchers from the window noticed a change in the tone of the voices, which were now calmed down in suppressed excitement, except for the continual wailing of the babe. At last the light arrived at the gate, where the frightened expectant family were waiting, and the servants at the vicarage heard the sound of a man's voice.

The fact that the voice was as it had always been broke the magic spell: the man's voice robbed the night of the mystery. Instead of the aching excitement of unknown things, it brought to the girls the cruel fact of nature that man rules, and has ruled, and always will rule: it brought a cold, dreary, real existence of a fact into a night of fiction.

What was the matter with Mr. Tasker that he had returned in such a way that he was mistaken for the evening star?

Mr. Tasker was a dairyman of distinction. ‘He did very well in his trade,' so the village carpenter said, who knew him. Mr. Tasker went to market every Saturday, and it was to market that he had been the Saturday of his star-like return. He was a tall man with a
yellow moustache that stuck out about an inch from his upper lip, and the remainder of his face he shaved on Sundays. On Sundays also, about the time of the longest days, Mr. Tasker, his long legs clothed in trousers that had been in the family for about a hundred years, moved over the dairy fields after the evening service so that he might, if possible, catch a naughty little boy or girl breaking down the hedges or smelling the musk thistles.

When Mr. Tasker talked to any train or market companion, he kept his head far away and looked upwards as though he were interested in the formation of clouds, unless it happened that the conversation was about pigs, and then he brought his head down very low and became very attentive and human.

Mr. Tasker worshipped pigs, and a great many of his gods, fat and lean, were always in the fields round his house. He killed his gods himself, and with great unction he would have crucified them if he could have bled them better that way and so have obtained a larger price.

On this particular Saturday Mr. Tasker had started out at his usual time after having given orders to his family to take special care of a certain black sow that he loved the best of all his gods. On the road he passed the usual kind of market women who had missed the carrier. One or two had even the hardihood to ask him to let them ride with him in the wagon; in
answer to this the high priest of the pigs only sniffed, and flicked his horse with the whip.

The pigs were duly unloaded into a pen, where they were to be sold. One, the largest, lay down until a pork butcher reminded him of his duty with a knowing prod from an oak stick. Presently, a little bell having tinkled, the auctioneer and his followers, a crowd of eager buyers, and Mr. Tasker with his eyes upon the clouds, approached, and the future of the pigs was assured. In a few weeks they were to be transformed by human magic into smoked sides and gammon. They had been purchased by a mouth filled with a cigar and representing the ‘West County Bacon Supply Co.'

The pigs had sold well, and Mr. Tasker walked very contentedly up the town, where it was his custom to expend sixpence upon bread and cheese. It was just by his favourite inn that the thing obtruded itself that delayed his return. He met his father.

The thing happened like this: As Mr. Tasker went along up North Street, his head well above the market women, and his thoughts with his gods, he saw a disreputable old tramp standing by the door of the very tavern that he himself wished to enter. The old tramp had a face splendid in its colour, almost like the sun. He stood surveying mankind from an utterly
detached
point of view: he even looked hard at the young ladies, he looked at every one. His look
was bold and even powerful. This old tramp regarded Mr. Tasker, when that gentleman so unluckily presented himself before him, with a look of supreme contempt, and then the tramp laughed. His was the laugh of a civilized savage who had kept in his heart all the hate and lust and life of old days. His laugh made a policeman look round from his post by the bank, and even compelled him to walk with the stately policeman-like stride towards the two men, for what legal right had any one to make such a noise of violent merriment in the street?

Mr. Tasker's mind was filled with a great deal of understanding. His work as a dairyman was a mystery that required a large amount of wise handling and a great deal of patient labour. With his beasts, Mr. Tasker was a perfect father: he waited by them at night when they were ill. Once he nearly killed his little girl—he hit her in the face with his hay-fork—because she had forgotten to carry a pail of water to a sick cow. Mr. Tasker was brave; he could handle a bull better than Jason, and ruled his domain of beasts like a king. At the same time, there were events that Mr. Tasker could not altogether keep in control, and one of them was his father.

On this Saturday Mr. Tasker's mind had been so full of his pigs that he had not considered the possibility of meeting his father. The last news of his father he had received from the
clergyman of the village. The clergyman had stopped him one day by the post office and had said to him:

‘I am sorry to hear, Mr. Tasker, that your father is in prison again. It must be a great distress to you all, and you have my full sympathy in this trouble, and I know how you must feel. I fear he is an old man in sin'—which was quite true. ‘I wonder if you have ever thought of trying to keep him in order yourself? You might allow him, your own father, to live with you. Don't you think he might help you in feeding the pigs?'

As the clergyman was speaking, Mr. Tasker had withdrawn his gaze farther and farther from the earth as though he were intent upon watching some very minute speck of black dust in the sky. The allusion to his pigs brought him down with a jerk, and, bending towards the clergyman, he said:

‘You cannot mean you think I ought to do that, Mr. Turnbull? My pigs never did any one no harm.—My father feed they pigs!—Why can't 'e be kept in prison? Don't I pay rates?' And slowly Mr. Tasker's gaze went back to the sky.

The clergyman was a little surprised at the undutiful behaviour of Mr. Tasker, ‘but perhaps,' he thought, as he walked along the grassy lane that led to the vicarage and tea, ‘perhaps it would be better if they did keep such evil kind of old men in prison.' Mr. Turnbull was a Conservative.

When the son saw the father by the tavern his first thought was to wish himself somewhere else,—if only he had learnt a little more about his father; if only he had inquired about the time of his being let forth out of the public mansion that had so long been feeding him with bread and beef; if only he had kept his eyes more upon the people in the street and less upon his balance at the bank, he might have had time to turn out of the way. Mr. Tasker's mind, that was always ready to work out the difficult problems of dairy management, now seemed completely lost. The situation was one that he could not master: he could not even pray to the black sow to help him. He himself had often forced and compelled others, and now it was his turn to be forced and compelled.