Unknown (77 page)

“I understand exactly what she feels,” said John. “I'd much sooner plague everyone with my death-cries—God! I'd like to plague 'em with 'em—than go to any of those places. Hospitals, prisons, workhouses—Mon Dieu! They make me shudder.”

Cordelia thought to herself, “That's just what a jail-bird like you would think. You ought to leave Father's service and be employed by Mrs. Legge along with Young Tewsy!”

John went over to Tittie's side. “Christ! My dear, can't we do anything to stop this?” he whispered to Crummie.

Mad Bet had been watching every movement of John's all the evening from her seat at the table. Mr. Wollop was addressing a few friendly words to her now; but she seemed unable to hear him. She now cried out to John so loudly that everyone stopped talking.

“Why don't ree pray to thik Tree o” Life, my king, what us two do know of? If you'd “a thought ro praying before. Mr. Geard mid come before!”

In a moment of respite from her pain, and arrested bv the silence and by the madwoman's voice. Tittie herself spoke now. “It's began to rain,” she said in a dull flat voice.

John stared into the fire across Tittie's fidgetty knees. “Bet's right,” he thought. “It's absurd that in all this company not a soul has thought of praying. Young Dekker, who is out for living a saintly life, doesn't believe in anything to pray to. God! What we want here is someone to really pray, then perhaps old Geard will hurry up and come.”

And with his face still towards the fire John dropped down surreptitiously upon one knee. “In Glastonbury,” he thought, '“it would seem popery or paganism to be caught really kneeling if you aren't in church.”

And John secretly prayed in his heart that Mr. Geard might appear during the next five minutes. He prayed lo his dead parent, exactly as he had done on his terrible walk to Stone-henge, when Mr. Evans had been sent to his rescue.

Mrs. Legge, accompanied by Sam Dekker and Dave Spear and several other people, now came into the room; but the general attention was distracted from their entrance by Mad Bet who suddenly rose to her feet.

John noticed that Mr. Evans was standing against the wall under one of the Recorders* John had just time to think to himself, after his fashion, “Evans looks as if he were standing against a hedge,” when Mad Bet stretched out both her arms towards Mr. Evans and uttered a piercing cry.

Evans himself swung round, his teeth chattering.

“What has he done to that thing? Oh, what has he done to it?” screamed Mad Bet. “Stop him! Stop him! It's too much! Stop him, you people! He's doing it again! Stop him! Can”t you stop him?"

The woman's hands were pointing, and her eyes wTere fixed, at a spot about a yard above Mr. Evans' head.

The shock of her words brought Mr. Evans back to his normal frame of mind. He came hurriedly towards the excited woman, mumbling as he did so something in Welsh. He did not stop till he was close up to her, where she had been pulled down to her "^at by Cordelia and Mr. Wollop.

He came up to her like a penitential monk approaching his superior for punishment.

The madwoman shrunk away from him at first, trying to free her arms from those of Cordelia, who was holding her tight, as if afraid she would do something violent.

But Mr. Evans, who kept on mumbling in Welsh, set her free from Cordelia's hold, and as soon as she felt herself free she stopped shrinking away from him.

“It's not . . . it's not,” whispered Mr. Evans to Mad Bet, so that no one heard him but Mr. Wollop and Cordelia. “It's my devil who does it . . . but I'm going to drive him out . . . on Midsummer Day • . , you shall see . . . you shall be there . . . you shall see him driven out ... he will never . . .”

Once more he began mumbling something hurriedly in Welsh.

Then Mad Bet did a very queer thing. She snatched off her black hat from her bald head and stretching out her arms seized Mr. Evans round the neck and drew his head down towards her own. No one but Cordelia and Mr. Wollop saw what happened; but Mr. Wollop's eyes opened as wide as Bert Cole's would have done when he beheld Mr. Evans' great Roman nose pressing against that horrible white rondure and his twisted mouth kissing it.

“The Grail Messenger!” thought Mr. Evans as he straightened his back and helped Mad Bet to straighten her hat and replace it on her head.

“Tewsy!” It was the voice of Mother Legge who had hardly entered the room than she was once more standing at the window. “Tewsy! Go to the front door, there's someone coming.”

There had been a general movement meanwhile towards the group that surrounded Mad Bet. Something in the human mind leaps up with rapturous release when some outrageous event is occurring. Most men live but a half-life, dull, tame, monotonous. The occurrence of something that is outrageously startling, upsetting to all proprieties, to all conventions, stirs such people with a primordial satisfaction. The submerged Cro-Magnon in hem, or at least the submerged Neolithic man, swims up in them ike a rising diver from the bottom of the atavistic sea and they rush forward, or steal forward, towards the spot where the forbidden thing is occurring.

Once more as John watched the broad back of his hostess standing at the window, while with her plump hands, each of which had a wedding ring upon it, she held the black and white curtains apart, he got the feeling that she was protecting a nursery of naughty children from some monstrous invasion . . . from some unearthly “questing Beast” whose featureless face made of decomposing stuff of darkness was even now pressing against the window.

“It is a wet night,” remarked Mr. Wollop to Cordelia; but Cordelia was desperately trying to remember what it was when she was alone on Chalice Hill before the rain caught her by the giant oaks, that had made her feel so strong to deal with Mr. Evans. But as she watched him now seated at the mahogany table with an immobile face, like the very face upon that biblical “Penny” that made Christ utter the words—“Render unto Caesar”—she began to question whether it were in her power to help him. “He has got something serious on his conscience,” she thought, “or he has got some mania that I can't understand. Why did he do that to Betsy just now? It was horrible to see him.”

“Yes,” she responded aloud to Mr. Wollop's mild remark, “but it's because people aren't talking so loud that we hear it now. Everyone seems whispering as if something were going to happen. I hope that miserable woman isn't going to die.”

“She's kicked off her nice rug,” remarked the ex-Mayor reproachfully.

“Yes,” Dave Spear replied to a question of Barter who had just appeared at' the mahogany table to re-fill Clarissa's glass from Miss Camel's Silver Bowl, “Yes, my wife and I have received word from Bristol that we'd better stay till June at any rate if we can't get them to strike till then.”

Mr. Barter felt one of the most grievous pangs of self-reproach that he had ever known when he heard this calm declaration. What a Judas to Philip he had been! Oh, he should never have let these contemptible Somersetshire workmen get so out ol hand! What would he do without him? And what was he doing? Making toys! While a real industry like those Dye-Works was being threatened. Aye! He would like to be flying through this wild rain now, with his fingers on the control, heading for Glas-tonbury from Wookey, through the liquid darkness. BahL What

jumpy idiots these Glastonbury fools were. What the devil------

“I can't bear it! Oh, my God!” Tittie's voice was hardly the voice of a human being. The iron ball with spikes had changed its shape . . .

Young Tewsy's voice rang out so quickly after the woman's cry as to seem a portion of the same litany of chaos. “His Worship, the Mayor, Madame!”

Mr. Geard did not stop to take off his dripping overcoat. He pushed Mrs. Legge aside as if she had been a feather's weight.

Everyone stared at him now as shamelessly as did his predecessor in office. The very Recorders on the wall seemed staring at him.

And well they might be!

The heavily built man in his dripping clothes was now pushing his way through them, bent double, and with his hands pressed against his great belly. “Oh, my God! Oh, my God!” he was groaning out, as he stumbled forward.

The man's whole body seemed undergoing some sort of convulsion. Blindly he stumbled against the mahogany table. The Silver Bowl seemed to catch his attention. He caught it up as he passed. Mr. Barter, who had just dipped Clarissa's glass in it, drew back hurriedly, spilling the liquour he held.

“Let this cup------” howled Mr. Geard in a tone that made

even Mr. Wollop shiver, for it seemed more like the bark of a great Sedgemoor fox than the voice of a man; and even as he cried he flung the thing with all his force upon the ground, flung it just at Crummie's feet, who was running, laughing and weeping, in wild hysterics towards him. When he reached Tittie, whose voice had now sunk again into moans, he snatched her up in his arms, as a fireman in a whirl of flame might seize a burning woman, sank down in the chair with her on his lap, and began, in his own natural voice, that familiar refrain which had won him his nickname. "Blood of Christ deliver us I Blood of Christ

save us! Blood of Christ have mercy upon us!**

His voice got lower and lower as he went on. Then it fell into complete silence. Still he continued hugging the figure in his arms and slowly rocking himself and her. backward and forward, backward and forward. There was such a dead silence in the room all this while, that the voices in the other rooms became like the intrusion of revellers at an execution or at a childbirth.

Then there came a grotesque and even rather an unpleasant sound. It was the stertorous breathing of the sleeping woman.

MAY DAY

It was the First of May, and through the open kitchen window of Elizabeth Crow's little house on Benedict Street floated delicious sun-warmed airs. The house looked to the north, across the outskirts of Paradise. There was a small oblong patch of ground, outside, with a rough wooden fence round it, identical with all the other back-gardens of that street; and as in the case of most of the others this patch of earth was devoted rather to vegetables than to flowers. Beyond the garden was a triangular field where one of Miss Crow's neighbours kept a couple of cows; but beyond this, except for the roofs of a few scattered Paradise hovels, the water-meadows stretched clear away towards the site of the Lake Village, and Philip's .landing field, and Number One's Backwear Hut. On the stove in this kitchen stood a sauce-pan of boiling potatoes and a large black pot full of some sort of savoury stew. In the centre of the kitchen was a bare deal table, the well-scrubbed top of which had assumed, so soft and friendly did it look, the whiteness of a pail of rich cream. On this table was a huge glass bowl filled with an immense, tightly packed mass of bluebells. The gorgeous blue-ness, a deep Prussian blue mingled with blotches of purplish colour, rose up like a thickly packed cloud of almost opaque essence out of this bowl of heavy-drooping blooms and expanded and expanded till its richness of tint attracted towards it and seemed utterly to absorb all other coloured things in the room. It dominated the gleam of the shining pots and pans of that small kitchen as completely as its fragrance overpowered the smell of the cooking. An empty basket with a few torn blossoms, a few long, pallid leaf-spears, and a few sap-oozing stalks, stood on the dresser, indicating that the flowers had been brought here that very morning. They had indeed been picked by Jackie and his little band in Wick Wood, and one could see that they were at their very height of blooming and would not last much longer. The children had found two or three early pink campions on the way to Wick Wood, in the leafy banks of Maidencroft Lane, and these were now protruding, like carmine flags in a purple sea, from the midst of the rest. These bluebells must have been the direct descendants of flowers that had been the background of many a Druidic May Day ritual round those great oaks. They brought with them in their oozy stalks and in their drooping heads the feeling of a thousand springs of English history. They brought too the sense of masses of hazel-branches darkly clustering around these blue spaces in the deep wood and hiding the fluttering chaffinches and blackcaps whose songs issued forth from their entanglement.

Nor had this great bunch lost that imprint of children's fingers that country people recognize so quickly—the stalks plucked off so short under the flower-heads and the blossoms pressed so lightly together! In addition to these flowers there were two girl? in Miss Crow's kitchen.

The May-Day feeling in the air, the wTarm sunshine, the presence of such a quantity of flowers at their full height of blossom, gave to the high spirits of the girls, as they chatted volubly together, that delicious quality of young feminine life which is so fleeting and so easily destroyed. The presence of a man destroys it in a second, introducing a different element altogether. Totally unconscious of what is happening to their young bodies and souls, girls, when they are thus alone together, give themselves up to all manner of little gestures, movements, abandonments, which not only the presence of a man but the presence of an older woman would drive away. Certain filmy and delicate essences in young girls' beings come to the surface only when they are alone like this with one another. When any of them is alone by herself it is different again; for then her own thoughts are apt to play the part of intruders and cause these fragile petals of her identity to draw in and close up.

The two girls I am now speaking of were seated at the table on straw-bottomed chairs. They were Sally Jones and Tossie Stickles, the plump form of the latter enveloped in a capacious white apron, while the former wore a gay spring hat and a bright scarf round her warm young neck. The girls were sipping hot cocoa from big steaming cups, and as they chatted across the mass of bluebells the clock in St. Benignus' Church struck the hour of noon.

“Did her ladyship open the letter her own self?” enquired Sally.

“ 'Twere 'dressed to her for I read the words meself as I came along. It said 'The Lady Rachel Zoyland, care of John Geard Esquire, Glastonbury, Somerset.' It didn't say our street and it didn't say our number. It said 'Esquire.' Be our Mayor really a Esquire, Tossie, do 'ee reckon, now he be a worshipful?”