Appleby's Answer (6 page)

But why, you ask, am I interested in the place? Well it seems that the last incumbent actually to live there came to a violent and mysterious end! He was murdered!! It is quite notable how seldom this happens to clergymen in real life, so an authentic instance is naturally of interest to me. And I have a notion that just a peep at the scene (although not, of course, exposing myself to the renewed importunities of its owner) might be not without imaginative stimulus. Nor might quiet chats with the older among the surrounding peasantry be wholly unproductive. In short, tomorrow as ever is, I propose to drive over and go on the prowl for copy! I think this entitles me to sign myself, with love,

 

Your enterprising friend,

 

PRISCILLA PRINGLE

 

The writer of this letter was as good as her word – as indeed she ought to have been, since she was actually proposing to herself to be a good deal better. For a plan – let it be announced at once – had formed itself in Miss Pringle's mind.

There are several ways of beginning a reconnaissance in foreign territory of a rural sort. The most common is to discover a sudden need of stamps, and draw up at the village post-office. If the post-office is the everything-shop as well, so much the better. There will then be three or four female cottagers (as Miss Pringle would have called them) gossiping in the place; these will fall silent as you enter, and then draw aside out of what you may be fond enough to suppose a proper feeling of deference towards the gentry (even foreign gentry); in fact, there has been a sudden outpouring – as of a flood of adrenalin into the bloodstream – of suspicion and hostility of the most primitive sort. But you need not greatly worry about that. This is civilisation, after all. The village constable is bedding out lettuces in his garden next door, and (although it wouldn't be his real inclination) he knows that his livelihood depends upon defending you at need. One of the women makes a gesture, indicating that you should jump the queue. They do in fact want to get rid of you, so that they can resume their talk. But you decline, and withdraw modestly into a corner of the constricted space, perhaps affecting to study some faded picture-postcards of local beauty-spots. So the women continue with their miscellaneous purchases, and within a minute they have forgotten about you and resumed their tittle-tattle. Whereupon you listen in. Persons seeking dream cottages, dilapidated and going for a song, but offering the largest scope for inspired modernisation, tend to have particular faith in this method of setting to work.

Miss Pringle, however, was not in quest of a hovel, since she was very nicely accommodated in this particular in her own part of the country already. What she sought might be defined as a synoptic view of the social situation in Long Canings and round about. For this reason (but also, of course, because she was a stout churchwoman) she had chosen to present herself at matins in Long Canings church.

For there was still a church in some sort of working order, attended to in such leisure as the pastoral care of the people of Gibber Porcorum afforded the rector of that more populous parish. Miss Pringle had made preliminary enquiries, and she had come over on a Sunday – a pleasantly sunny Sunday – upon which Long Canings was having its innings. As her little car chugged over the last stretch of downland and dropped down to the venerable Wilts and Berks canal, she realised that ‘Kandahar', alias The Old Rectory, was not going to be hard to find. It dominated the suddenly contracted horizon like a cathedral or a gasometer, and the church in the shade of which it ought modestly to have reposed would in fact have gone into it two or three times over. Apart from a pub and a few scattered cottages of no very prosperous (or even picturesque) appearance, the two structures, moreover, seemed to constitute the totality of the village or hamlet of Long Canings. But this was presently revealed as not quite so. Beyond the church was a shrubbery, beyond the shrubbery was a lawn, and beyond the lawn and on a lower level was a large and rambling – although nowhere lofty – manor house put together over some centuries (one had to suppose) to the effect of a careless miscellany of architectural styles. Beyond all this again, and plainly appurtenant to the manor, was a pleasingly imposing park. Miss Pringle, who had a fondness (proper in a lady of good family) for all evidences of spacious and ordered living, felt that she would be much more at home in this squirearchal fastness than in the towering, arched, crocketed, and generally hideous redbrick residence of Captain A G de P Bulkington (also of the Imperial Forces Club, Pall Mall).

The church bell was ringing, monotonously although not quite metronomically, as she drove up. There was nobody in sight, so that when she had parked her car unobtrusively she hastened forward, concluding the congregation to be already assembled within. There was one other car in evidence. Although rakish and secular rather than clerical in cut, its position close to the chancel announced the fact that it had lately embarked the rector of Gibber Porcorum a few miles away and now decanted the rector of Long Canings to perform his subsidiary offices as soon as the bell stopped. In the little churchyard she remarked a large Gloucester Old Spot (not nowadays a fashionable sort of pig) reposing on a flat tombstone, and a surprising number of pheasants perched here and there on upright ones. From somewhere nearby, but invisible behind a high wall, came the sound of stamping, champing, rattling, snuffling, sneezing and snorting which one associates with a well-populated stable-yard.

Composing herself appropriately, Miss Pringle entered the church – and looked round perplexed, since there appeared to be nobody else in the place. But the bell had suddenly stopped, and when she glanced towards the west end (where there was a kind of potting-shed which she knew must lie beneath the tower) it was to become aware that an aged man, rather like a tortoise in a humble walk of reptilian life, had abandoned a dangling rope the better to survey her with what could only be described as offended incredulity.

‘Be you seeking summun?' the tortoise asked.

The question, as addressed to somebody entering a sacred place, was susceptible of a serious interpretation. But Miss Pringle was a little disconcerted.

‘I have come to attend matins,' she said. ‘Surely–'

‘You're early,' the tortoise said morosely – but nevertheless failed to return to his bell. In a religious silence, Miss Pringle sat down. A wooden placard on the wall informed her in barely decipherable lettering that in the year 1604 Jn. Spink, Gent. had donated an unusual sum of 7s. 4d. for the relief of the poor of the parish. An answering placard reminded her that she must not marry her Grandmother's Husband. She became aware of an odd and not displeasing smell as pervading the church, and concluded that the rite of incensation must obtain in it. Olfactory analysis, however, suggested that what was in question could only be a mingling of sundry embrocations, liniments, and saddle-soaps, and must be due to the tortoise's diurnal and secular employment.

Three small girls and a small boy appeared in the choir. The girls stared at Miss Pringle, and then turned to each other, whispering and giggling. The boy also stared at her, but with unrelaxed gravity, and while picking his nose. And then, quite suddenly, the officiating clergyman – doubtless the rector – was advancing from the vestry, with his prayer-book held open before him. If one discounted the children (who had small appearance of being capable of serious devotion) and the tortoise (who had sat down at the back of the church and was unfolding a Sunday newspaper), it seemed that Miss Pringle herself was to be the only worshipper.

But this was a false alarm. For now the church-door opened – to admit, in the first instance, only the sounds of an indignant female voice, vigorous whackings seemingly delivered with an umbrella or parasol upon a thick hide, and a quick succession of loud protesting squeals. By means which would have distressed St Francis of Assisi, the Gloucester Old Spot was being persuaded of the impropriety of its proposing to attend divine service. The creature could be heard retreating with injured grunts, and its assailant, breathing a little heavily from her just exertions, passed up the aisle and sat down immediately in front of Miss Pringle. She was of about Miss Pringle's age, and her attire attested to a position in the upper ranks of society. Nevertheless the smell of embrocation and saddle-soap was immediately intensified. Miss Pringle, who was of course a woman of notably acute intelligence, recalled that this region of England was much given to equestrian pursuits.

The door opened again – and Miss Pringle, glancing round, was a shade disconcerted to see that Captain Bulkington had arrived. She had indeed thought it probable that he would be a church-goer, but had envisaged a congregation numerous enough to enable her to escape his observation if she wished to. This was plainly far from being the case; in fact the Captain now sat down within six feet of her, and after placing a bowler hat carefully under the pew proceeded to kneel with great propriety and his familiar creak. And almost immediately it turned out that he was not alone. There was the sound of a second mild disturbance just outside the church: the smack of a stone on stone, a second and duller smack immediately followed by an anguished squeal, a loud laugh and a shout of ‘Got him!' from a young and triumphant male voice. Then they entered with complete decorum, and took their places beside the Captain, two youths in impeccable Sunday clothes. They looked round the church, detectably offered each other an expressive glance, and sat back with an air of stoically controlled suffering. Whereupon Captain Bulkington coughed significantly and they tumbled rather lumpishly on their hassocks, conscientiously screwing their eyes very tight meanwhile.

Since these must be pupils (and presumably postulants for the Brigade), Miss Pringle covertly eyed them with a good deal of curiosity. They belonged to contrasting types. One was very tall and very fair, and would no doubt have been handsome in a thoroughly patrician way if he had not also been very weedy (Miss Pringle believed that was the word) and devoid of either a brow or (it seemed) a jaw-bone. The second began like the other (if, that was to say, one started one's inspection from the top), but then quite dramatically diverged from his fellow, since he was more jaw-bone than anything else. Furthermore he was short and burly and his arms seemed unnaturally long. Miss Pringle was almost certain that he must own a lurching gait and bandy legs. The gaze of the first was vacant; and of the second, ferocious. It seemed likely, however, that their common denominator would readily be discovered by an educational psychologist.

But now there was another – and, as it proved, final – incursion of the faithful. A lady of imposing presence swept into the church, exchanged a passing greeting with the embrocation-and-saddle-soap lady, glared stonily at Captain Bulkington and stonily at Miss Pringle, and made her way to a pew of superior pretension immediately in front of the lectern. She was followed by a florid gentleman so patently endowed with Miss Pringle's favourite attribute of perfect diffidence that Miss Pringle was able to tell at once that here was the proprietor of the adjacent mansion which she had glimpsed before entering.

And now the service began.

‘Hymn two hundred and three.'

‘Hymn three hundred and two.'

The first of these injunctions had been uttered by the rector, and the second – more loudly and not at all diffidently – by the squire. It seemed probable that the squire was right, since a kind of bill of fare depending from a nail near the pulpit declared that 302 it was. Music, approximately organ-like in character, had begun to wheeze encouragingly from somewhere at the back. Miss Pringle wondered whether it was being provided by the tortoise. But a glance assured her that the tortoise was still occupied with his newspaper. So somebody else, charged with the production of this all-important aid to devotion, must somehow have slipped in unobserved.

The situation was a divisive one. The four children in the choir, whose faces now registered a sort of glazed terror, plunged pipingly into 302. The squire and his lady sang 302. The embrocation-woman, who appeared to be tone-deaf, shouted the words of 302. But the rector stuck to 203, and was splendidly supported by Captain Bulkington and his charges. Miss Pringle, finding her sympathies sundered, solved her problem by a silent opening and shutting of the mouth. After this the service ran on smoothly to the First Lesson, in which the squire, rather in the manner of a chairman of companies making an annual report to shareholders, communicated to his auditory various incidents in a battle between Abijah and Jeroboam. And then there was the
Benedicite
.

But at this point a certain amount of disturbance made itself audible from without. In the main it was no more than a matter of the cheerful yelping of small dogs, and Miss Pringle remarked that the congregation took this in its stride. A little puppy-walking was going on in the interest of the local hunt; and it was conceivable that a number of the more polite children in this part of Wiltshire were regularly in the habit of contracting out of the obligation of divine service by undertaking this necessary part of a hunt's activities round about 11 a.m. of a Sunday morning. But if the juvenile hounds hadn't disturbed the worshippers they had certainly disturbed the Gloucester Old Spot, which was making a terrible row. They had also disturbed the pheasants, whose alarmed clack-clacking almost drowned the canticle. Or was it by a sinister pop-popping that the pheasants were disturbed? There could be no question as to the fact.
Somebody
was out shooting
something
– or indeed several persons were. Rabbits? Or was it a pigeon battue? Or were unspeakable ruffians even discharging illicit shot-guns at the sitting pheasants as they perched piously on those tombstones? These questions were clearly agitating the squire. The Gloucester Old Spot panicked; the puppies yelped, sequacious of as yet non-existent foxes; the pheasants clattered and whirred, fearful of leaving their little lives in air.