Unknown (20 page)

Philip Crow, whose habit was not to beat about the bush, now looked straight at his business companion. He felt no necessity to propitiate, for any direct purpose of his own, any of these people; and that being the case, his narrow, clear-cut, war-axe consciousness simply eliminated them.

“I wish you would do it for me, Tom,” he said in a hurried, quick voice. “I'd far sooner not trouble Mr. Zoyland; or anyone else for the matter of that”—and he gave a quick, rather derogatory glance at Sam.

“I don't . . . know . . . that I could deal with . . . Wookey Hole, Father,” murmured Sam nervously.

What he really felt at that moment was an extreme reluctance to deal with Mr. Philip Crow.

Tom Barter surveyed his employer with complete aplomb. He was a shortish, squarish man of clear complexion and with a round, fair, bullet-shaped head. He was the only person under that green-shaded lamp who seemed entirely at ease and carefree. He had been gazing at Nell Zoyland with a shameless glance of covetous impersonal lechery.

“Can't leave the office, Phil,” he said. “You people never know where your own machine is tricky and jumpy. If I left that office, for Wookey Hole, even for a fortnight, 'twould take six weeks to get things straightened out.”

Philip Crow made a humorous grimace directed towards Mat Dekker. His gesture said, “You see what a good subordinate I have; and how prettily he plays the role I've composed for him.” ^

At that moment Will Zoyland came clattering in, boisterous, burly and jovial, and plumped down his gun against the wall.

“No otter, Sam!” were his first words as he shook hands with his two visitors. “You needn't tell me what you've come for, Crow,” was his next remark, “for I see it in your grasping slave-driving eye! You want to kidnap poor Will as your damned showman! That's what he's after, isn't it, Nell! Isn't it, Sam?”

“Well, Zoyland,” snapped Philip sharply, evidently disliking intensely the burly giant's familiar tone, “will you come out there for a couple of months? I've got a chap from London, an official antiquary and ,all that sort of thing, for the summer; but people are beginning to come already and I've got no one there now but just my ordinary workmen to show 'em round.”

“Can't answer off the reel like this, Crow. Can't do it!”

He leaned heavily upon a sort of mahogany sideboard that stood against the wall. Three silver salvers, bearing the arms of the Marquis of P., clattered down from their propped-up position; and the whole sideboard groaned under his weight. Philip turned instinctively to Nell. How many times had he not been forced to get what he wanted from a rebellious man by wheedling a practical woman!

“By the way, Mrs. Zoyland,” he said, “I hope that wild stepbrother of yours hasn't heard about the trouble that started last week among my people at Wookey. Don't you tell him, if he hasn't! The very last thing I want to see is Dave Spear and his fanatical wife down here at this juncture.”

It was a good thing for Philip at that moment that the suspicious and malicious ears of Cousin John didn't catch this speech. John would certainly have translated these words in the very opposite sense from that which they apparently bore. “Write at once,” John would have translated them, “to your step-brother, Dave and hold out to him the lure of a possible strike down here, so that he'll bring his wife at once.” Nor would John have been greatly mistaken. The truth is that the main motive that brought this Norman conqueror to Whitelake that evening had nothing at all to do with William Zoyland or with Wookey Hole. William was only the official motive. The true dynamo that brought this electrifier of Wookey Hole posthaste to Queen's Sedgemoor was the maddening temptation of Cousin Percy's slender waist.

Astute business man though he was, Philip had, when it came to his passions, a swift-plotting recklessness that stopped at little. Besides, his contempt for the practical ability of Cousin Persephone and, for the matter of that, of the ability of her husband also, was unbounded. No! He'd get Percy down here and give her all the rope she wanted. Let the sweet creature “agitate” as much as she liked. He'd settle the strikers and cuckold the Communist! It was precisely the kind of dangerous human game that suited his Battle-of-Hastings temperament. Did he divine in some sly diplomatic cranny of his secret heart that either Nell Zoyland or William Zoyland would be certain to tell the Spears the very thing he so arrogantly bade them not to tell? He probably did; but as with all daring and successful men the tricks and devices of his subconscious nature were much more formidable than his rational schemes; and so by a sort of automatic protective instinct he kept them subconscious!

Had Nell's wits not been purged of idealistic vapour bv the white rays of the great planet she might have missed the singularity of this request. As it was, she was shrewdly struck by it. With quick feminine craft she concealed her surprise. But in her heart she actually formed the words with which she would comment upon this episode to William Zoyland.

“Manufacturers don't as a rule try and stave off the arrival of agitators by appealing to their relatives, do they, Will?'' And * she could hear the bellowing ”Ha! Ha! Ha!" with which William would receive this sally.

“No, I'll be careful, Mr. Crow,” she said. “I'll be careful! Not that I often write to poor Dave. We're only half-brothers, you know.”

Tom Barter, his eyes fixed on his own old-fashioned gold watch chain from which hung the good upper-middle-class, county-family seal of the Barters of Norfolk, thought to himself, “Think of that funny little Johnny Crow turning up in town! Aye, but I'll be glad to see the little urchin again.” And then Tom Barter's mind ceased suddenly to think in definite words. The “little river” and the “big river” at Northwold, the Bridge at Didling-ton, were more than words. Such memories as they held could not be put even by the practical, cynical, lecherous Tom, into any human sentence. WTiitelake Cottage vanished away, as he fumbled with his father's ancestral seal, a tall heron standing on one leg. All these people vanished away. He only felt the presence of little Johnny Crow. He only felt the cold strong wind in the reeds of the Wissey. There was no longer any well-run office, no longer any factory by Wookey Hole. The smell of the bottom of a boat came over him so vividly that if he had not been the practical manager of three factories, he would have wTalked straight out of that house.

“Tomorrow I shall see little Johnny,” he thought. And then he thought, “I'd give a hundred pounds to sleep one night with this girl here!”

Philip himself had now resumed his direct attack upon William Zoyland. Somehow it rather tickled his fancy to be able to say, “My guide at Wookey, related, so everyone maintains, to the Marquis of P.”

Meanwhile Nell, seeing him so engaged, had managed to pull Sam out of the open door into the river-scented garden.

“Don't you mind, little Sam,” she was saying, “don't you mind the way things are!”

It was fortunate for some of the persons in that small group that the sudden passing of an airplane over Whitelake Cottage completely absorbed the general attention. It was tacitly assumed 4that it was to watch this illuminated air-equipage that Sam and his hostess had wandered off in the darkness; and soon they were all staring up at it beside the obscure, melancholy shapes of empty chairs, dim tables and shadowy tea-cups upon the chilly lawn.

“Barter! It's the man from Wells!” cried Philip, with nervous, intense interest. “Or it's a plane exactly like his. We ought to have stayed in tonight.”

Tom Barter moved in the darkness close to the side of his employer. “All planes look the same, Phil, at night,” he said in a low, emphatic tone. He spoke so quietly that no one but Nell, who chanced to be nearest to Mr. Philip, caught these words and this tone.

“He doesn't want Mr. Crow to give away something,” the girl thought. “Fit tell William about his hushing him up so. I shouldn't wonder if they aren't buying an airplane.”

When the plane had vanished, Philip and Tom Barter moved ofE towards their car, Zoyland striding alongside of them and ths rest following. They soon formed a loquacious group around the car, uttering those spontaneous and lively genialities which among human beings imply instinctive relief at being able to get rid of one another. It was at this moment that Mat Dekker said, “I sometimes have thought of a queer thing, my friends.”

Sam, who had been in a sullen daze since the episode of the river bank, pricked up his ears at his father's tone. It was very rare for Mr. Dekker to adopt this sermonising manner. Never was a priest less pontifical than he.

“What, Father?” murmured Sam dutifully, when none of toothers took the least notice of this remark.

“I've thought that the conquest of the air,” Mat Dekker went on, “is such an enormous event in the history of the human race that it is probably responsible for these reckless and chaotic impulses which we all feel nowadays. What do you people think? I'd go even further,” he continued, raising his voice in the darkness, "I'd go so far as to say that all these strange spiritualistic-occurrences that we hear so much about are the result of Man's having found out how to fly.'!

"Tom here would give his head to be an airman/* threw out Philip-with an explosion of motiveless malignity.

“Get into your seat, Phil, and let's start!” was the quick retort.

Barter's words were simple but his tone was black with indignation. Philip Crow, from the very first time his Norfolk friend had used his Christian name, disliked being called “Phil” by his head-manager. In his displeasure now he was prepared to go on teasing him.

“Barter's the most normal person I've ever met,” he said, without moving a step, “but when it becomes a question of flying, he's as jumpy as a girl who hears her lover's name.”

“Why don't you go in for flying, Mr. Barter? You could so easily take lessons,” said William Zoyland with innocent-wicked mischief.

For a second the reserved Norfolk man was quite silent. Then he burst out.

“Get into the car, Phil, can't you? I'm catching cold!”

But Philip suddenly swung round.

“Can't I take you two home?” he said.

Tom Barter at once echoed this. “Of course we must take them home. There's easy room for three; and I'll sit on my heels.”

Philip repeated his invitation. “Please get in, Mr. Dekker; please get in, Sam!”

The husband and wife—his arm had slipped round her waist now, and only peevishly, not with any repulsion, she tossed it from her—joined their persuasions to those of the two motorists.

It took quite a little while for these four men to crowd themselves in so that Philip, who was driving, could use his brakes. But they started at last; and the last word was Philip's.

“Think over that offer of mine, Zoyland. And remember I can give you a few shillings more than I scraped up for you last year.”

Mat Dekker begged the manufacturer to drop them opposite St. John the Baptist's Church, and it was an incredible relief to Sam when at last, alone with his father and in complete silence, he walked up the path to the church porch. To their surprise, although it was well after eight o'clock, they heard voices in the nave as soon as they pushed open the door and inhaled the familiar musty smell. The verger had left a gas-jet burning in the vestry under the great tower, and the little red light of the Real Presence was suspended above the altar, but otherwise the church was completely dark. And yet it was not! The father and son, with the easy movements of long usage, opened the door so quietly that they caught the sacrilegious striking of a match in the western aisle. By the little yellow flame of this match shaded between human hands,'they perceived that two men were bending over the lidless and empty sarcophagus of Joseph of Arimathea. One of these men was on his knees, evidently tracing out, in concentrated absorption and with his index finger, the famous initials /. A. which are so deeply cut upon the northern end of this huge receptacle. Whether it was a visual illusion due to the flickering of the match, or whether it really occurred, Mat Dekker could not be sure, but he fancied he saw this man, the one whose fingers were fumbling at those formidable initials, bow down his head as if praying to this empty tomb!

The priest swerved reverently at the sight of'this real or imaginary act of devotion and, followed by Sam, moved hurriedly to the vestry, where with instinctive and discreet disregard of what he felt to be a legitimate gesture of impulsive piety, he proceeded to do what he had come to do. This was to rinse out a small glass chalice and fill it with wine, ready for the morning's consecration. While he did this, Sam sat down on a wooden chair by the vestment cupboard and stared sombrely up through the vestry door at the dimly lit receding pillars of the perpendicular nave. He kept feeling again and again the pressure against him of that beautiful girlish body. With this feeling there returned loo the damp and deathly smell of the river weir and the murderous desire he had had at that spot. He lowered his gaze from the dim vista of high carved arches and with his vision still framed by the vestry door he let it rest upon the red altar light, signifying the living presence of the Body of God. He could hear the trickling of water being poured from one glass into another in the preparation for tomorrow's Mass, and he could catch a little faint squeaky sound, like the voice of a new-born mouse, of a cloth being rubbed against the edges of glass vessels. To what precise point did his father carry his belief in the miracle of Transubstantiation? It went much further anyway than his own vague superstitious uneasiness.

“I feel just like a dog barking at the moon,” he thought, “when I see that red light.” The pit of his stomach suddenly seemed to sink inward then for he thought to himself, “She is going to sleep with him again! I could feel it in the air when we came away.” That little, squeaky, rubbing sound behind him seemed to be going on forever. “She's probably taken off all her clothes now,” he thought, “and she's holding up her nightgown with her bare arms to slip it over her shoulders. He's got her now; to work his will upon. ... Oh! Oh! Oh! . . .” Sam tried to push this image away from him but it persistently returned.