Mr. Tasker's Gods (16 page)

T
HE odour of the drawing-room of the
Turnbulls
’ residence was not so marked as that of the dining-room. There was, if you liked to notice such things, a certain musty scent hovering about the chair with the covered back, in which the so lately buried master used to stretch his legs after supper. There was likewise a sort of woolly, clammy, pink-stuff odour that hung about the work-basket and the little side-table on which Mrs. Turnbull kept her mending.

She was now there, sitting beside her
work-basket
in her drawing-room, with her two elder sons. The state of her mind was a blank. She hardly knew what had happened. So many days had she sat at her end of the table and watched—Mr. Turnbull had had the lamp so moved that she could see him—the coming and going of his knife and fork, and the regular tipping forward of his teacup towards her. She had become so used, so settled, to his table manners, to his study look, to his bedroom fancies, and to the Sunday prayer, that she expected the appearance of these signs and wonders to last for ever. It had never occurred to her—how could it?—that such a regular exponent of the art of eating could ever die. She had seen him so often go to funerals, with the words ‘I have to take a funeral this afternoon, my dear,’ and the return up the drive from his church very hungry for tea.

During the Rev. Hector’s time at Shelton there had been a fair number of these natural occasions. Once Mrs. Turnbull—it was the black-currant season—had almost sent down a wreath out of her greenhouse, when the matter in hand at the altar required, or nearly required, a set of infant’s clothes.

The fact of his having gone the same road as so many, could not, in so short a time, break a pathway into her inmost mind. She did not feel even during that walk that anything so portentous could really have happened. The crust of her established customs was still entire. It would require more than his just going out of the house in that boxed-up way to make her believe. So far her imagination had not been touched. She, poor lady, wept, of course, but she really did not know why.

So far, since his death, all she felt was that a sound, a groaning, grumbling, crunching sound that she had heard continuously for forty years, had ceased. With an oddly detached stare at her work, she was listening to the conversation of her sons about the money.

Henry had gone off to visit the lady of the heath, and a business letter from the lawyer lay, lately handled by the Rev. John, open, and leaning its crisp fat blue sheets against Mrs. Turnbull’s basket. It transpired that in August, two weeks after the vicarage tea, the Rev. Hector Turnbull had come to his lawyer in London.

‘Then he was there that time for business,’ thought the Rev. John.

The invested property that the Rev. Hector appeared to have possessed then was somewhere between Four Thousand Four Hundred Pounds and Four Thousand Five Hundred Pounds. Unfortunately since that time, during the autumn months, a dangerous period for old gentlemen who live in the country, the Rev. Hector had expended certain large sums. He had, without thought or wisdom, grabbed at his investments by the handful, and thus his estate had diminished by more than Five Hundred Pounds. A large sum to a legal eye. The money had not been gambled away on the Stock Exchange, the lawyer would have been sure to have heard about that. It had not gone to Germany or to the desert of Gobi. But it must have gone somewhere. Not having Duggs to kick this time, the Rev. John kicked his father’s chair.

‘This, then, is what must have happened, the worst of all things: he must have given them money, family money.’ The truth was out, it was not only that once at Portstown! And he, like the fool that he was, had promised to pay Mrs. Fancy’s rent in order to shield his father. That girl was not the only reprobate; there must have been two or three, perhaps half a dozen. There must have been a swarm of them settling upon his unprotected father like wasps, forcing him by the pain of their stings to run to the bank for gold ointment.

For almost the first time in his successful career the Rev. John felt annoyed with the world. It was, he thought, a very wicked world to live in. He could now see, all about him, so many temptations that lie in wait for the clergy. If only his father had been, what is politely called, ‘in the know’; if only he had been trained in the proper way, the way that the Rev. John himself used when he licked the honey out of the pot. It was a pity that the home-made jam of the vicarage had not stayed sweet longer. And to think of those women! For the first time in his life the Rev. John thought of them with pain. They were now, curse them! spending those pounds. And he might have had that money for himself! The Rev. John for the second time kicked his dead father’s chair.

It was then that the two brothers decided what to do about their mother. The Rev. John knew that ‘the dear girl’ would scratch her out of it in a minute if she came to him, so the only thing to be done was for George to have her. She did not look just then as if she cared where she went. She would pay George for board and lodging three pounds a week, which would help the poor doctor with his rent. Though he had, however, secretly bought his house three years before.

The Rev. Hector Turnbull had left the interest of the family fortune to his widow during her lifetime, and then it was to be divided in the following manner. The Rev. Hector Turnbull
had some years before studied at college certain problems in figures, and he wished to show by his will that he had understood them. At the death of his ‘relick,’ half of his estate was to go to his eldest son John. Two-thirds of the remainder was to go to his second son George, and the residue of the estate to his third son Henry.

George looked at John. He wished, like the prophet, that he held a sword in his hand, or were not his nails long enough? Alas, they were always cut short as a doctor’s ought to be. And then he remembered. Was not his mother going to live with him and pay three pounds a week to help with the rent? Ha, ha! the rent! Thank God, his wife, who had been a nursery governess, did what she was told, that was one comfort. She had brought him no money, but she never spent any. John’s ‘dear girl’ was another matter.

The two decided that the household furniture was to be sold at once. George preferred the money, and John knew that such old stuff would not do for his ‘dear girl.’ After a moment’s silence, both the brothers thought, with almost the same matter in each mind, about Henry. What could be done with him? There was not, as far as they were concerned, anything very wrong about the will, even if certain ladies had brought the amount down by some hundreds. The unequal division of the estate had brought
the amount for them up again. An equal division would have told against John. As things were arranged, George would be left much the same. And as regards Henry, no doubt their father had remembered the money that had been given him to start his farm with in Canada. They always spoke of that log hut as Henry’s farm. Was it their fault that he had not succeeded in making his farm pay?

When Mrs. Turnbull asked meekly, ‘What shall our dear Henry do?’—‘We hope,’ said the Rev. John, ‘that he will be able to get some work.’

I
T was quite dark when Henry returned. A sharp sea wind had made his walk home a slow one. He had battled against it on the moor, enjoying its wild vigour, until he stood in its full blast upon the hill that overlooked the village, the hill that Mr. Tasker had descended after the meeting with his father. By the chalk lane a thorn bush, alone on the hill, bent like a doomed thing away from the wild sea winds and gave the traveller a momentary rest from the gusts. It was there, under the shadow of that thorn, that the weary stayed their steps—lone women, a weary cow, any strayed wanderers.

After a moment’s release from the wind Henry moved a little farther. Not a light showed in the village. He had sometimes before, of a dull winter’s evening, climbed the hill, and the village had always looked a blank darkness. Turning, with his back to the wind, Henry looked over the valley whence he had come, and there, in the middle of the heath, shone a star that had settled like a splendid glow-worm on the blank waste. He knew, as he watched it, that it came from the cottage he had left half an hour ago.

It was then that Henry’s soul, catching the fire of that light, began to strive within him for freedom. On the one side, in the village, there were human beings of divers kinds. There were full-fed, greed-haunted, soul-starved farmers;
work-worn labourers, scraped almost to the bone by their toil; mean-mouthed women, whose tongues rudely garnished their homes, and poisoned the beauty of the village; and children, who from the very first, even from the breast, were taught to hate all thoughts that are noble. They were, the people down there in their mud caves, shut out from all the fair gardens of wonder, of life, shut out by their own hands. Henry knew them now, his eyes were open. He saw that all their lives they were ruled and dominated by the greed of getting, longing always to get, never to be; the under ones waiting, like gaunt cattle with starved eyes, for their chance, for their chance of rising from stealing broken bits and sticks and cinders, to openly putting money, pulled from the already wasted souls of other labourers, in the bank. Henry knew their closed huts were there in the darkness, bound, chained, and dug into the earth, and he knew how they were ever ready to cast dung upon any shining spark of heaven-sent light that fell amongst them.

On the other side, alone on the heath, there was that one light shining, the burning symbol of the living fire. That fire could not be held in darkness, its freedom had come wonderingly. It had broken out upwards from the bands that held it chained to the earth forces.

Henry left the hill, and, after passing through the village, entered the house from which his father, earlier in the day, had been carried. As
he passed the door, the first drops from the clouds that rushed by overhead struck his face. Closing the door behind him, he heard his brother’s voice, the doctor’s, asking him to come into the
dining-room
, for they wished to speak to him.

The Rev. John Turnbull was stretching his legs in his father’s dining-room chair. He had been smoking a cigarette, and was sitting in silence, considering, no doubt, what he was to say to his brother. The Rev. John explained the Will: he explained that, after their dear mother’s death, Henry would no doubt be able to start a small market garden, ‘but he must be careful this time to make it pay. Our own hands, you know, are full of expenses.’

Their father had spent a fortune lately, the Rev. John languidly said, ‘on women.’ There was no need for him to hide the truth, as their mother was not present.

‘It is of course a great sorrow, and must be borne by us three,’ he said. ‘George thinks that our dear father’s mind has not been lately quite normal; he complained last August of the sun. It is a great blow to the family, and to me, being in Orders, a deep disgrace. And besides, he has spent money. You will lose your share of what has been spent that way. I am afraid that you will not receive quite what you have expected.’

Henry had stayed rightly attentive, showing no sign of what he thought about the exposure.
He really did not think anything about it. If his brother had said that the Rev. Hector had spent his money in buying kittens to eat at
breakfast
, Henry would have taken the news in the same way, because there was nothing in him that desired to do as his father had done.

John leaned forward and lit a cigarette by the lamp. He went on to explain, with the silent approval of the doctor, where his mother would live, and finished up by consolingly remarking, ‘that it was a mercy their father had been taken before he had squandered all their fortune.’

So much harm had Alice done by looking pretty and pulling so hard at the village tug-of-war.

All his life Henry had been the idiot in the house, whose duty it was to dig in the garden, and whose pleasure to accept and make the best of the smallest and the outside slice of the family beef. All he desired now was to be left alone in the garden. But in the garden, no man since the Fall may stay.

The Rev. John had used more than once in his talk to Henry the polite and genial term, ‘old fellow.’ And he would have been glad, no doubt, to have old-fellowed Henry across the Atlantic. He began, when Henry was bidding him
good-night
, like this:

‘You know, old fellow, how fond we are of you. You have to push a bit, you know, to get on in the world. A chap needs some go in him to get on even in the Church. Look here, old
fellow,’ he said, getting up and smacking Henry on the back, ‘you must make up your mind to do something.’

Just at that moment Henry experienced a sensation of lightness and freedom, and a longing for cool deep waters, for wide rivers, and peaks towering above them, for far plains and
everlasting
primeval forests; he quietly left the dining-room, and, gently shutting the door, he went upstairs to his own room, and lit a candle.

He took up the Christmas-card, his altar picture, the cross and the child. They were there as they are upon earth—the cross and the child. A pretty card of bright colour. And the child—what was the little one doing near that cross? Would it not have been better to have no cross, or no child? Henry held the card nearer the light. The pink cheeks of the child burned him, the cross dropped blood. He tore the card in half.

He looked round the room at the furniture. All this was to go. He had no place now to sleep. Often, coming in tired from the garden, he had rested on his bed, waiting half asleep till the gong sounded. He knew every inch of his room. The sheep’s skull that he had brought home once when he was a child was still there. That foolish girl feeding the ducks—she looked strangely at him now. And the two china cats that a nurse-maid had given him. The
nurse-maid
had been deaf.

He thought of the garden. He was turned out of that too. He could touch, in his mind’s eye, the first daisies of spring. He saw the scented white violets; he had made a wreath from them for his father. He thought of the old wheel-barrow, and of the aged mowing machine that required so much care, and of the sweet, cool grass as he pressed it in the barrow. And he thought of the soft brown earth of the kitchen garden—he must leave that too, and the delightful scent of the herbs; there was no sage or thyme as sweet anywhere as theirs. He remembered the old-fashioned roses that grew by the tool-house. He had broken one off once, and given it to Alice. She had not cared about it.

How often had he weeded that long border near the lawn, separating the weeds from the flowers in the rich dark soil. And how far the laurel hedge threw its shade on late summer afternoons. There was the seat, under the ash that he had planted. He had often taken some brown-covered Church Father to read under that tree’s shade. He remembered some odd, terse remarks of Hall, a bishop of Norwich. He must leave the garden, there was no staying there for him now. He must break away from his loves and go out into the night. The angel with the sword of flame bade him begone.

Henry left his room and went quietly
downstairs
. Without taking his hat or overcoat, he opened the front door and let himself out into the
night. At the first rush of wind and rain, the feeling that all matter had broken up came to him again, as though the earth itself were passing away like a cloud of mist born in the night. How fast the wind drove in great sweeps from the sea! Was it like himself, hurrying, fleeing, drifting, towards the east; and the rain with it, flying in haste, flying, seeking the new dawn—towards the east? He, like the wind and the rain, would escape and be free. He stepped lightly on, even gaily, the wild west wind rushing, calling, and beating behind him, hurrying him towards the hill beyond which lay the great heath. A little brook that crossed the road was swelled into a large stream. Henry walked through it. To him it seemed a river of fire.

At the other side of the stream he stopped; another thought held him. The pull-back of the wave caught him up. He had left the garden and Alice behind him! He saw the girl, Alice, her full lips pouting; she was complaining of a scratch as they picked gooseberries together, for his mother’s jam, in the vicarage garden. He had not looked at her then; he looked at her now—and loved her.

Why not return to the garden and find her there picking gooseberries, and kiss her lips—the lips he had not noticed? he knew quite well how she stood. But he felt the girl Alice spit upon him, while his brothers patted him on the back.

He climbed one of the tumuli at the top of the chalk downs. The howling storm made it almost impossible for him to stand. He began a battle with the wind for the possession of the hero’s grave. During a lull he laughed aloud, he had won the battle. Quite near him, just under a hill, he heard a lamb bleat.

Henry wandered down the road towards the heath. He longed for space, wide open space. The wind drove the dark night before him and danced by his side. Away on the heath he saw a light shine. His thoughts were now quite merry, almost childishly merry. They dwelt, as a child’s would, upon the happenings at home—how his brother had reasoned upon the value of goodness, how seriously John had spoken about money, and how he had talked about their father because he had slipped. It was quite
ridiculous
that he should have slipped—but then he had always had such bad colds in the winter, he must have wanted a change from those colds. Henry laughed aloud. Why, what queer little dancing devils his father must have kept in his study drawer beside his account-book and sealing-wax! And had he carried them down into the village when he went to visit his people? How cunning he had been, how sleek and important! What a strange house he had left behind him! Why had his mother cried over that neatly dug deep hole in the ground, wherein the profound joke of the man that had been his father was laid? There
was no need to cry over him. It was odd indeed that his kind of form and feature could ever have come out of the clay. The return into the clay set him, at least, right with nature.

And there was John, sitting in his father’s chair, his look serious, even rather worried, like a father’s when he wants to say an unpleasant thing without giving offence. John was talking about work, and was quite concerned to see how Henry would take it.

Henry had now strayed out on to the heath. He wandered along the path that led out into the wilds. All at once he was conscious of a light burning by the roadside. Henry found himself near a garden gate. He leaned over it and watched the light.

Henry unlatched the gate and went into the little garden and knocked at the cottage door. Molly opened it to him. Seeing a lost wanderer standing there, soaked with rain, she brought him in.

Henry sank on to the cottage sofa. He could not explain how he came to be there.