Mr. Tasker's Gods (17 page)

M
RS. ALLEN, the mother of Alice, lived three miles from Maidenbridge in one of a block of three cottages, near the high road that breaks the heath in two.

Before Alice, much to her mother's dismay, was conceived, another girl belonging to Mrs. Allen was already in the world. This other girl, whose name was Hester, was married very young, and none too soon, to a sailor. This sister was not best pleased that Alice had come home, and therefore spent the time teasing her about her holiday at Portstown. This teasing made Alice pay a visit to her friend Annie. It was when out walking with Annie on the day of the
Visitation
that the two girls had met the Rev. Edward Lester. He had asked Annie to meet him, if possible with a girl friend—a new member for the Church Girls' Club.

Alice, who always called a man in black
garments
‘sir,' fell into this second trap because of the gentleman, as easily as she had fallen into the first because of the man. Alice believed in God and in gentlemen. What they did with their lips and feet, was, when they did anything to her, just like their reading the Bible or ordering a lobster tea at ‘The Pink Arms.' Her Portstown visit had been so hurried and dreadful, like a nightmare, that she wished to try something better.

There were stories printed that fed her
daydreams
, penny stories; she had to hold her eyes very near the fine print to read them. There was all that nice part about the girl who wedded her mill-owner. Nearly every tale in the
Weekly
Joy
Ride
was set to this tune. There was a half-page picture of the servant, in cap and apron, scrubbing the floor, and a lean, snake-like
clergyman
in a long garment watching eagerly from behind. The picture was a very personal
temptation
to Alice. She too had been in that very same knees-to-the-floor attitude, and had known—how girls do know things!—that she was being watched. It happened that her friend Annie came to her senses just too late to save Alice, who had already been taken out a good many times by Mr. Lester in his motor to see old churches.

The shock of the climax of her trip to
Portstown
had
caused Annie to change her ways. She began to think that an unmarried, odd-shaped tradesman who kept the Penny Shop looked at her in church; he certainly followed her about in his shop. Annie loved the shop, and would have taken the forked oddity that belonged to it if he had offered himself.

The morning of the day wherein Henry Turnbull burst his bonds, found the heath garmented in the whiteness of a windless winter's morn that promised a boisterous ending to the day. Seawards, upon the higher uplands, the
light came first, while the sleepy mist still hung over the valley, deadening even the sound of a sheep's bell.

Mrs. Allen had, at the back of her cottage, a shed where stood a copper. It was in that copper that the water was boiled for washing. The dread of washing-day hangs over a cottage woman almost as heavily as the burden hung upon the back of Christian. And, as if to mock the poor creature, every new soap pretends to lighten her task with vain promises, and every old soap has a pretty picture in each morning's paper, saying, almost like God, ‘I can do it all.' The woman may try to procrastinate by pushing the clothes into a dirty cupboard or up the stairs, but in this world the end of all clean things is always in sight.

Life had been easy of late to Mrs. Allen. She had cast her burden of the wash at the feet of Alice. Besides washing and helping in the house, Alice had been paying for her lodging with part of the money given her by the drover. Much of that money had gone, by the advice of her friend, the Rev. Edward Lester, to fit Alice out in a dainty costume and hat so that she might be a proper person to walk with in the gardens. Because of this, and certain other expenses, the drover's money had now been quite exhausted, the last shilling having gone on a wedding ring. For a fortnight Alice had paid her mother nothing.

The fact that Alice's store was come to an end
led Mrs. Allen to tell the baker every time he called what an expense it was ‘'aving a great girl to keep at 'ome.' She also pointed out to Alice the list in the local paper of ‘Servants Wanted.' These and other hints made Alice bite her tongue but say nothing.

The father of Alice was a detached person. He was one who never regarded any human happening as having anything to do with himself. He worked on a farm as a carter. He had a thin, careworn, inquisitive face, and smoked a clay pipe. His wife and daughters were of far less importance to him than the dirty loose matches that he always had at the bottom of his pockets. He came home to his dinner at two, and sat and ate, without a word, whatever was put before him. Then he would push back his plate, haul out of his pocket the clay pipe, strike a match on his boot, and shuffle off to the stable to bait the horses. It was his habit to look at his family as if they were ten miles away from him. He would have been just as likely to touch the moon or the stars as his wife or daughters.

In one way he possessed an extremely sharp instinct for gain, and that was in the matter of getting odds and ends of clothing from the farmers for whom he worked. He watched the farmers' clothes like a Jew, and knew the exact moment when an extra patch was considered one too many for them. It was then that Mr. Allen, slowly and cautiously, brought out the
oft-recurring
request for an old pair of trousers. Yet he never wore any but his own old garments. There were fourteen old suits, that various farmers had given him, huddled together in a wooden chest at the back of his bedroom. No one dared touch them. On Christmas day he sometimes looked them over.

Mrs. Allen was a believer in chance. She let everything slide. She let things that she cooked burn, then she got into a rage, and ended up with a good cry. Her washing-days were blank despair. But now that Alice did the washing, Mrs. Allen went into her neighbour's for a short respite from the world's cares, a respite that generally lasted the whole day.

The washing-day now come was no exception. Seeing Alice with her arms bare and the tub full, Mrs. Allen just stepped up to her neighbour's door to borrow a morsel of tea, a commodity that she was always forgetting to buy. After nearly four hours, during which the other neighbour, the proud one, had been pulled and torn, and at last cast into a drunkard's grave, Mrs. Allen saw Alice knocking at the window and heard her calling:

‘Our mother must come at once!'

‘Our mother,' hoping that something had happened, flustered out into the garden and found Alice under the clothes-line with a large basket full of washed clothes all ready and waiting to be hung upon the line, with the pegs in a small basket near by.

Around the sullen weariness of the winter's afternoon there moved the signs of a coming storm. Airy messengers, dark, scraggy clouds, followed each other, rat-like, over the sky; and gusty, dissatisfied rushes of wind brought, even so far inland, the smell of seaweed.

Alice and her mother turned to watch a country gentleman strolling by on the road from the manor-house. He was something for them to watch, like a shadow on the side of the world. He took off his hat to a lady riding a bicycle, and called his dogs to heel as the lady free-wheeled past. He had only glanced casually into the garden. Poor women do stand in their gardens. He too passed on, and the women turned back to each other.

Alice told her mother that she could not reach the line, though the line was just the same as it had been on other washing-days. She asked her mother to hang up the clothes. Mrs. Allen, with the bells of scandal, hatred, and malice still ringing in her ears, began to take the things out of the basket and to hang them on the line. Turning to pick up a sheet, she saw that Alice was not helping.

‘Bain't thee goin' to do nothink?'

‘You can hang out to-day mother; I be tired,' the girl said.

There was something in the feeling of the garden, maybe a grin from the mould, that made Mrs. Allen stare hard at her daughter.

A motor whirred by in the road. Neither the girl nor the woman this time turned to look round. There was another movement in the wind for them. Alice, with her hands by her side, meekly looked up at a shirt of her father's. She remembered a patch of dirt near the collar that she had not been able to rub out, and there was the dark patch, still showing, on the line. She wondered why that dirt had hurt her so, for when she had soaped it and rubbed it, a sharp pain had passed like a burning bullet through her body. She had felt faint and had nearly fallen.

‘Oh, bother the dirt!' she had said when she felt better. ‘Let it blow out on the line!'

She was still a girl.

In the shed, after that faint feeling had passed, she wrung out the water from the shirt and tossed it into the basket. With her hands limp beside her, she looked at the shirt. The wind blew it well, but the patch of dirt was still there.

Mrs. Allen looked at Alice. Around the two in the garden there still lurked that creeping grin. Mrs. Allen understood. She threw down the clothes, and grabbed Alice by the arm, dragging her indoors.

‘Now I'll talk to 'ee!' she said, as a country mother would say it.

Mrs. Allen gave her daughter the plain sermon of the poor, the girl having betrayed her condition by her refusal to hang up the clothes. All the
morning, Mrs. Allen and her neighbour had been gloating over and enjoying the excitement of ‘a case' in the next block of houses by the heath. Besides this case, their conversation about their neighbour had been what Mrs. Allen would have called ‘tasty.' Had not the baker said next door, ‘that he would have the money she owed, or else …'? That was something for them to have overheard! This news and the case by the heath really had lightened for them the heavy January day, with a ticklish sense of trouble coming for another. And now here was ‘our Alice' in the same way, more far on perhaps. This time other mothers would lap from her dish of country cream, and put a stop to her
conversations
.

Once before she had been in just such a fury with Alice, and that was when she first felt her move in her womb; for was not the other brat tumbling and screaming, and making a mess of the floor? Instead of walking nicely down to the inn she had to get its clothes off and put it upstairs to bed. This bother was enough for her without any inside movement. On that occasion, the last that her man had touched her, her first anger subsiding, she had to take what would come; but what good it was going to do to any one, she did not know. And so Alice had taken her turn at falling about and screaming.

A country woman passed by in the road
carrying
a string bag. She glanced, or rather, her
eyes hung inquisitively about the Allen garden. It was empty except for the few things that Mrs. Allen had pinned up on the line; most of Alice's work was still in the basket. The passing woman looked up at the dim sky. ‘It was going to rain,' she thought; ‘Mrs. Allen would never dry her clothes.' The woman's steps quickened with joy.

Indoors, her mother used towards Alice all the established word-clawings that come so naturally to the peasant in a case of this kind. She began with the usual:

‘And me was a farmer's daughter! I gets this, seein' to you so good. I'll put 'ee in road, little 'arlot. Slut! Bringing this insultin' talk upon your poor parents. Damn 'ee, little whorin' toad! That's what swung 'eeself 'ere for. I knowed thik money came from they men. Get out of 'ouse! Father can't abide kids.'

While this gentle mother was rebuking her, Alice cried. When her mother had quieted a little, Alice left the couch where she had sunk down, and without replying, she went out of the door that led to the road. At the same time her mother went out of the back door, meaning to visit her neighbour. She found her neighbour very close indeed, being just outside Mrs. Allen's own door, where she had only that moment taken her ear away from the keyhole. She had come there with the pinch of tea.

As Alice walked out into the road the sharp pain came over her again. This time no faintness
followed, because her mind burned with the thought of what she was going to do.

Returning from the walk that was needed to prepare his appetite for his afternoon tea, was the country gentleman. One little long-haired dog had been giving him some trouble. It had had the shameless audacity to follow, barking, a motor car almost twenty yards down the road. The gentleman was tying on to its collar the strap that he carried in his pocket for that purpose. In front of him there was a girl—Alice: he noticed that she was there. It was her business and not his to know what she was there for.

T
HE same morning that Alice washed her clothes, the Rev. Edward Lester was lunching with Mr. and Miss Rudge at their house called ‘New Place,’ near Maidenbridge. He was asked to say grace before the meal commenced, and did so, looking meekly down at the table flowers.

Alice’s steps followed the road, and then turned off by a little muddy lane that led to the heath. Her foot sank in the mud; taking it out, her shoe came off. She picked it out of the mud and tied it more securely. Around her and beyond her was bare heath. She looked up sometimes towards a black clump of firs about one mile away, just the kind of grove to suit her just then.

Alice and her sister, when they were little, had gone one day in the spring to those very trees and had played near a deep pool at the bottom of the gravel quarry just across the road. She now passed along the track that the heath carts had made. The touch of the earth, the mild smell of the heath, tried to catch her attention; they would, these quiet things, have tried to call her back, so that she too might be found ready for another spring. In their many voices they whispered to her to wait.

Going over from the trees to the quarry, Alice crossed a few yards of rough heath. A gorse bush made a last effort. It pricked her leg. She pulled at her skirt and rubbed, but she still went on. Climbing up a little heap of gravel
near the quarry, the girl saw that she was not alone. A tramp was bending down and filling a can with water. As she stood there he turned round and saw her.

The tramp stood and watched her. Was this girl alone? his look questioned. He lifted up his tin can to his mouth—a great bearded mouth,—drank, and spat into the pond.

Alice sank down before him and became a mere patch of humanity upon the face of the heath, being to the eyes of the tramp a limp, trembling bit of carrion.

The tramp was not behindhand in taking advantage of what he saw, his fears of the police being stifled under three quarts of beer. For was there not a female here and darkness coming? The place where Alice had sunk down was
exposed
to the view of the heath, the tramp was not too drunk to understand that. Taking her arms, he dragged her over the brow of the pit to a spot by the water where not even the clump of trees could see them. The trail of her dragged body was left in the sandy soil.

While he dragged her the tramp had his back to the water; that was why he did not see a tired cow, come down to the pool to drink, upon the other side of the quarry. It was only when he got the girl there safe in his power that he looked round and saw the cow. The cow slowly lowered its head and drank. The tramp was content. This was the kind of pastoral picnic that he
enjoyed, where he could take and eat at his leisure. Never had a sick ewe-lamb fallen so easily into the claws of a wolf as Alice had fallen into his hands. He might afterwards throw her, she was so near fainting now, into the pond; no one had seen them. The tramp rubbed his hands and cast a long look upon Alice.

Above, in the darkening sky, ravening clouds passed racing each other. The girl lay with her head sunk down and with bits of gravel and heath in her hair. She was entirely at his mercy. From the sky and the girl, Mr. Tasker’s father looked again at the cow that just then raised its head and stared at the tramp. And at last Mr. Tasker’s father did notice something queer about the cow.

It was quite proper that the tramp should understand something about cows. He had been bred amongst them and had been laid to sleep on their warm dung while his mother milked. He knew very well the look of the thin, lean kine of the heath, and he knew that the last thing the heath kine would think of doing at this season of the year would be to go down to the pools to drink. And why had this beast a rope round its neck? The cow was now standing very still the other side of the pool, with its neck stretched out, looking with soft, strange, bewildered eyes at Mr. Tasker’s father. Mr. Tasker’s father turned to the girl. She lay just the same. He looked away from her, there was the cow still regarding him with her soft stare. Then he
saw the dim form of a man climbing down towards the cow.

Near by the lonely clump of trees, on the fast darkening heath, there had now come together three persons and a cow. The newcomer brought a new chance upon the scene, a possible change in the event contemplated by Mr. Tasker’s father. The newcomer did not look at his own thirsty cow—any one could see that it was there—but at the tramp and the girl. His was just as inquisitive, though not as harmless a gaze as that of the cow. After regarding the fallen girl and the man above her for a moment, out of the mouth of the third person came words:

‘What the bloody hell be ’ee doin’ to thik maid?’

There happened to be two females that the drover had for some time past kept in his mind’s eye. One of them was ‘she’ whom he had beaten and who had a week or two later gone ‘thud,’ and the other was the maid to whom he had given his gold in order that the one called ‘she’ might not haunt him. In the girl lying there upon the rough gravel so near to the tramp, the drover recognized the maid that he had once carried to her home after pouring his gold into her lap. She looked in much the same doleful state now, only instead of a homely elm shedding its leaves from above, a huge man overshadowed her.

The fear of his former mistress had become a moving spirit in the brute mind of the drover. Night or day, he knew that wherever he went,
she was with him. After Neville died he
expected
at any moment to see her bruised body, with the scar by the lip, moving beside him. He still had the words of the priest, like a shield, before him, and when a cow would not go the right way he withheld his hand from beating her, and twas often damned by he farmer who employed him for not hurrying his charges along the road faster. Ever since his visit to Neville his life had been a marked life. His old brute nature was there still, nothing could alter that, but there was something there with it that gave a new tone to his life—a sense of unnaturalness about himself had appeared, a feeling that he was being guided, a distinct prod from somewhere else. He now knew what a cow felt like when it is being driven by an unknown purchaser into a new pasture. In the tavern brawls, in the market rows, the fear of ‘she’ was a cloak over his tongue.

But now, beholding the maid whom he had once, following the priest’s counsel, befriended, so foully used—for he had seen the tramp drag her to the pit—he snatched at the idea that ‘she’
had this once loosened his chain, and was
throbbing at him inside to revenge. The cow
ceased to look at Mr. Tasker. Seeing her driver
walking away from her, she lay down.

The tramp stood beside his prey, that seemed now very poor and worthless carrion. Mr. Tasker’s father had no wish to give up the event that the darkness and the pond had put in his way.

In the wild moan and creak of the clump of trees, in the dim gathering darkness, there was formed again out of the mouth of the drover words:

‘What the bloody, blasted hell, be ’ee doin’ to thik maid?’

Receiving no reply to his polite inquiry, the drover began to draw nearer to the two, slowly moving round the pit.

Mr. Tasker’s father was generous in his temper. There was no needless jealousy in his way of life. He was willing to share, in a friendly way, his spoils with a friend, when he could see his own safety and pleasure in that line of conduct. The situation of himself and the girl had become, by the advent of the other figure, one of sharing. He met the arrival from the other side with the suggestion, delivered in mild language, that they, one after the other, might obey their profound elemental instinct, and then vanish quite decently into the night. The girl could, if she wished to, walk into the pond.

The generous offer produced no response. The drover’s mind could not be led by more than one idea at a time. He was aware just then of a direct impulse from ‘she’ to throw Mr. Tasker’s father into the deep end of the water. His brute nature had taken another line from that of the tramp’s and had gone back for it just as far. It was perfectly natural that two brutes should struggle over a fallen female, but with these two the naturalness was not complete, because the
drover, taking his orders from ‘she’ was there as the deliverer. The convenient suggestion that Mr. Tasker’s father met him with, had the effect of making the voice of ‘she’ sound in him like a war trumpet. He advanced towards the tramp with a perfectly plain mission in his mind, and with as good a will to victory as ever Christian had shown to Apollyon.

Mr. Tasker’s father, unwilling to let his victim go without giving her something at least to remember him by, bent his form down almost to cover her and struck a heavy blow at her
upturned
face with his fist, enjoying the satisfaction of seeing her blood before he turned to meet the drover.

The drover went at Mr. Tasker’s father as his old dog would have done. He went at his throat, and seized it after having first delivered a well-placed blow with his fist. Before two minutes were past the tramp found himself rolled, kicked, beaten, and at last shoved into the deep end of the pond. Thence he crawled out, some minutes later, taken rather aback at this ending to his plans, and went his ways.

The drover, having won the battle, turned to see what had happened to the girl. She was lying in just the same place where the tramp had left her.

There were two creatures for the drover to deal with that night, the girl and the cow. It would be awkward for him if ‘she’ met him driving the cow, having left the maid to her fate.

The drover carried water from the pit and bathed the girl’s face as tenderly as though she were a new-born lamb, while the gusty winter’s night closed in about them. What was the next thing that ‘she’ meant him to do? The night was there, the cow, himself and the maid. He could not take up his stick and walk away from the other two, and it was not likely that every heath cottage he took her to would prove to be her home. Besides, there was the cow. She had to be driven to a Shelton farm, and Shelton was a good six miles away.

The drover considered. About half-way to Shelton, on the heath, there was, he knew, a cottage. He had stopped there a few days back for water, and a lady had given him a cup of tea. He would have to pass that cottage on the road to Shelton. But how to get both cow and Alice that far? He took up the tramp’s tin and walked over to the cow. The first need of a sick calf is milk. With one or two knowing prods he induced the cow to rise. He filled the tin with milk, carried it to the girl, and slowly fed her.

At the moment when Alice was drinking the milk, the man who had been permitted to give her a place in the world was returning home to his tea from the stable. Mr. Allen moved slowly, with his head held sideways and his cap drawn over his face because of the wind. Under his cap he was smiling. The farmer had given him a waistcoat. This gift had been brought to him
in the stable, the result of the carter’s many hints while following the plough. He now tenderly bore it towards his home.

After kicking his boot against the sill of the door to loosen the mud, Mr. Allen entered the house. He sat in his chair before the table and looked at the lamp, and his eyes half closed like a bat’s. He sat for half an hour. Certain moving, sometimes speaking, figures who were in the habit of putting his food before him did not come. Time passed. Another thirty minutes completed the hour. Then some one opened the back door. It was Mrs. Allen, who came in from the neighbour’s, and, as was
perfectly
natural, she began to make a noise, crying, moaning, ejaculating, wringing her hands, and enjoying all the excitements of a mother’s feelings.

‘What had she done or said to make Alice run away?’ And she considered the different ways by which a young girl can end her life. She pictured herself, the sobbing, bereaved centre of attraction at the inquest, kissing the Book.

While all this telling of the story was proceeding from his wife, Alice’s father was still smiling at the lamp. Perceiving that the noise from the woman near him had quieted a little, he very tenderly took from under his coat the soiled waistcoat. He held it out in the light and brushed it with his hand. Smoothing it down, he noticed the name of the maker on the buttons. Then he laid it very carefully on the table.

The wife, bringing her mind from her daughter’s coffin to her husband’s waistcoat, stooped over the table to touch the precious gift. The farmer’s present reminded her of her husband’s tea. They ate, and after the meal she was pleasantly aware that the usual three slices of bread that Alice would have eaten were still attached to the loaf. The loaf had not diminished like the one she had cut from at the last meal.

Far out on the heath, Alice was able to sit up, revived by the drink of warm milk from the tin can. The drover had defeated the tramp, but there was now the night to deal with. From the scudding black clouds fell a dozen
wind-driven
splashes of rain, that stung and bit the face, telling of more and worse to follow. Attached to the cow’s head was a rope. There usually was a rope on a driven cow’s neck, but the drover’s mind struggled dimly with some other recollection, of a cow in a picture with a rope on its neck.

Slowly his mind pieced together, himself, as a little boy, being hustled out into the night by a great red-armed mother. He was sent to beg for dinner at the ivy-covered parsonage at Old Stoke, two miles from his parents’ dwelling. While the dinner was being put into a basket, the cook sat the little dirty boy beside the kitchen table, washed his hands, and gave him a large picture Bible, that she took from beside the tall clock, to look at. The first picture he had seen
had been a cow being led by an old man with a light on his head instead of a hat. Riding on the cow was a very grand lady holding a smiling baby. For fifty years the picture had been hidden somewhere in the mind of the drover. Now he remembered it quite well—as well as the two lumps of sugar that he had stolen when the cook turned her back to him.