South Riding (16 page)

“It’s not marked.”

“No? Any compulsion? You weren’t asked, you know, to come galloping over my land.”

Snaith was still in the best of tempers, mild, superior.

“My God,” half whispered Carne. “Don’t you see your bloody carelessness has cost the life of a beautiful mare and hurt a man, and you haven’t even got a gun so that I can put her out of her suffering?”

“I realise that this is hardly an appropriate moment to discuss the ethics of fox-hunting. But if fifty grown-up men will amuse themselves by riding after one little animal to watch it torn to pieces by dogs, on other people’s property, they must accept the consequences.”

Hicks said afterwards that he couldn’t tell what might not have happened if Gryson had not then come cantering up with an old service revolver borrowed from an ex-soldier in the village.

“It’s loaded all right. Shall I do it?”

“No. Give it to me.”

Carne put the muzzle against the mare’s head and pulled the trigger. The body plunged once and was still.

“Was she insured?” asked the practical Gryson.

“No.”

Then, what with a broken shoulder and, he declared later, a broken heart, life became too much for George Hicks. He fainted.

They refused Snaith’s offers of help, revived the groom with brandy from Carne’s flask, and Gryson fetched a car.

The alderman stood by, polite, sardonic, co-operative and ignored.

Carne took his injured employee back to Maythorpe, arranging for the disposal of his poor mare’s carcase. He missed the afternoon meeting of the Highways and Bridges Sub-Committee.

“O
H
, G
OD
,” prayed Councillor Huggins, “Thou knowest that I am a sinner. But I know it too. I never pretended to be better than other men, or to be able to get on without Thee. Oh, God, to Whom the hearts of all men be open, Thou knowest that if once I get out of this mess, I’ll never sin this way again, so long as I live.”

The bus swayed and rattled along the Dollstall road. Councillor Huggins was on his way to take the mid-week evening Sisterhood Service at Spunlington. Until that morning he had forgotten this engagement. He was a careless man, jotting down appointments, business details and notes for sermons on the backs of envelopes, and stuffing them into his pockets. It was in the pocket of his mechanic’s overalls, only worn on the rare occasions when he himself repaired his lorries, that he had found the note about this evening’s service scribbled on an old invoice.

It had turned him sick.

He sat down on the bench in his tool-shed staring at it, running over in his mind a dozen different evasions. He could send a wire pleading illness. He could pretend to forget. He could . . .

He had never meant to enter Spunlington again.

It had seemed such a simple resolution. The village was off the beaten track. His lorries rarely visited it on business. In any case, he could always send a driver. It did not belong to the Kiplington or Cold Harbour divisions of the council. . . .

He had forgotten the chapel and his ministry; yet here he was, swinging down the dark country road in the lighted steaming chariot of the bus, on his way to fulfil the engagement so lightheartedly made three months ago.

At least, in the end, he had not tried to run away. Surely God would count that to him for righteousness? He was on the Lord’s business. If this involved not only fatigue and effort, but the grave imperilling of his reputation, surely that only increased his merit? After all, we are but little children weak. All men are sinners. What if, in a careless moment (three careless moments, to be precise), he had sinned with Bessy Warbuckle? He had seduced no virgin; and he had not been unfaithful to his wife, for Nell was no wife to him these days, and he was tolerably certain that the child which Bessy was trying to father on to him was another man’s.

But proof would be awkward. The whole business was awkward.

He bowed his head on his hands. His beard was wet with sweat. He wrestled with God.

After all, life had not been easy for him. Since the birth of his third daughter, his wife had lived with him as though she were his sister. That was hard on a man of normal instincts, a kind man, who would not force himself where he was not wanted, a God-fearing man, who preferred to take his pleasure within the law.

For eight years now he had enjoyed, as you might say, no home comforts, and Bessy Warbuckle was notoriously anybody’s girl for half a crown or an evening’s fun in Kingsport.

“I can’t face it. Oh, God, I can’t face it.”

Supposing she turned up there in the chapel, her eyes black as bootbuttons, her smile bold as brass? Her tilted nose, blue hat and bright cheeks floated towards him in a vision. How could he preach the Lord’s word with sin staring at him?

They had oil lamps at Spunlington which stand; the harmonium wheezed and creaked. Bessy might stand up and denounce him in the chapel.

Yet he was going. Every rotation of the wheels brought him a little nearer. Because to have run away would mean permanent, irreparable defeat.

“Unto Thee will I cry, O Lord, my strength! Think no scorn of me. O pluck me not away, neither destroy me with the ungodly and wicked doers. I will wash my hands in innocency, O Lord. And so will I go to Thy altar. . . .”

Supposing she had not seen the notice?

7.30 Sisterhood Meeting.

Address by Councillor Alfred Ezekiel Huggins

of Pidsea Buttock.

Supposing she never came at all? That letter might have been a try-out. How did he know she had not sent a dozen others to her more vulnerable clients?

He would dismiss all thought of her. He would remember happier things, the meeting, for instance, of the Highways and Bridges Sub-Committee last Monday. Snaith was a card. Snaith was a wonder. What really had happened about the Ministry of Transport? Beale swore he had never known that the ministry had been approached directly. How much had Snaith done on his own responsibility?

It was there, certainly. All straightforward and above board. Astell was dead keen. It was Astell who said, “If we get the road, we shall get the Leame Ferry Waste housing estate. One leads to the other.” Queer chap, Astell. A crank. But he had guts.

If the road ran direct from Skerrow up to Kiplington, it must cross the Wastes, and if it crossed the Wastes. . . .

The wilderness and the solitary place should be glad for them. They would triumph. They would bring such happiness to Kingsport that future generations should call them blessed.

Unless——

Like a tormenting fly, buzzing round the desk in a hot chapel, fear returned to him. If Bessy denounced him, if she named him as father of her child, it was not only that he would be exploited, pillaged, mocked. All that was nothing. But he would lose his chances of the Lord’s own service—the addresses he delivered, the visits he paid, the work on the council, the slum clearance, the houses built, the roads made.

And a highway shall be there and a way, and it shall be called the way of holiness. The wayfaring men, though fools, shall not err therein.

Oh, God, if I stand by you, stand by me in my peril—in my hour of bitter need. Cut me not off from the congregation of the righteous.

The bus came to a halt in Dollstall market place. The first stage of Huggins’ journey was achieved. He descended, looking down almost in wonder at the curved cloth of his black preaching coat thrust out before him.

Fear is a fire which burns without consuming. Mr. Huggins had passed through it, but remained visibly unaltered. His too, too solid flesh did not melt, though his pulses pounded, his skin perspired, and the boiled egg he had eaten with his tea lay like a leaden weight across his chest. His mind leapt from triviality to triviality.

Carne wouldn’t like the Kiplington Road scheme, but Carne hadn’t bothered to turn up at the meeting. A day’s pleasure was more to him than the county’s business. Foxhunting. What papish monks had been called the Hounds of God? These were hounds of the devil. Huggins had once preached a first-rate sermon against fox-hunting.

The Dollstall market-place harboured peace. The shopkeepers were putting up their shutters, quenching the streams of golden light that rolled across the shadowed pavements.

Oh, God, how easy and pleasant it must be to live as little shopkeepers, to close one’s shutters for the night, to retreat into the cosy flrelit kitchen, to drink cocoa for supper with one’s family, to be untouched by sins and dreams and missions, unafraid of conscience, undriven by desire. Deliver me, deliver me, O God, from the evil-doers of whom I am chief.

Then it seemed to Mr. Huggins as though God laid His calming hand upon him and told him to be a man and go and have a drink.

There was a quarter of an hour to wait for the Spunlington bus. The windows of the Tanner’s Arms glowed like rubies behind their crimson blinds.

God tempered the wind to the shorn lamb, and, though it was not always easy to recognise His commandments, Huggins was an experienced disciple. Before peculiarly exacting spiritual ordeals, he would permit himself little harmless relaxations—a tin of salmon for tea, an extra pipe of tobacco, a squint through a closet window at Mrs. Riley washing herself at the sink next door. God knew that a warrior in His service must have his rum ration before he went over the top.

Mr. Huggins entered the Tanner’s Arms and found young Lovell Brown, the cub-reporter, there before him.

Lovell did not look in the least like an angel with a naming sword at the gate of paradise. He stood sipping cheap sherry and trying to warm his feet after three hours spent at an autumn ploughing match on the wolds and a long cold bus ride; but he recalled Huggins to his sense of responsibility.

“Ginger ale,” the councillor ordered sullenly. Beastly stuff, popping about in your guts. But he had told this youth that he was a teetotaller, and he had a public reputation to maintain.

Lovell grinned cheerfully.

“Good-evening, councillor. Cold, isn’t it?”

“Nip in the air.”

“Off anywhere?”

“Preaching—at Spunlington. Sisterhood.”

If it was the Lord’s will, it was the Lord’s will, and at least he was accounting truly and openly for his movements. “We ought to see more of you young people nowadays at chapel.”

“You don’t give us time,” grinned Lovell. “Work us too hard. They told me I shouldn’t have anything to do in the South Riding. But look at it. Concerts, football, ploughing matches, hunting accidents. . . .”

“None of those lately, are there?”

“On Monday. A fellow called Hicks, groom of Carne of Maythorpe. Broke a shoulder and killed a horse near Minston Allotments.”

“Was Carne with him?”

“Yes. Valuable horse, I understand. He took the groom home.”

So that was why Carne had not come to the meeting. Truly a sign from heaven. This is the Lord’s doing, and it is marvellous in our eyes.

No withdrawal now. God meant the salvation of the South Riding to go forward. Huggins was a humble instrument in His hands.

He lurched out, to see the Spunlington bus lumber up from Flintonbridge. “Nothing’s ever as bad as you think it’s going to be.” He repeated to himself this tag that had been his consolation in former times of trouble. It had never failed. It would not fail him now.

And, sure enough, when he arrived at Spunlington, there was Mrs. Barker, her face like a rising sun beyond the misted glass of the bus window. There was his name printed large on the chapel notice-board. There was the congregation nicely filled out for a week-day meeting. And there was no Bessy Warbuckle.

Councillor Huggins rose on the tide of his elation. He announced the psalm, “The Lord is my shepherd”; he prayed with deep, tender understanding for those in trouble; he preached an address so kind, so intimate, so human, that Mrs. Barker pressed his hand afterwards—an unprecedented demonstration—and besought him to come to her house for supper until bus time. Instead of lurking cold, wretched, hunted in the dark lanes with Bessy Warbuckle, he sat in Mrs. Barker’s cosy parlour, a citadel of safety, drinking cocoa, eating apple pasties, welcomed with respect and gratitude, assured that his words had brought help and comfort to many.

Oh, it was better to be good than to do evil. Whoso dwelleth under the shadow of the Most High shall never stumble. Never again, no never, would Alfred Huggins stray from the paths of righteousness.

“There are times,” said Mrs. Barker, handing cocoa-nut buns frilled with a freshly netted d’oyly, “when a word in season is a real gift from God.”

“I was moved to-night,” said Mr. Huggins humbly. His spoon stirred the thick rich cocoa and melting sugar. “I was moved. Not unto us . . .”

He meant it. Tears moistened his eyelids. He felt good and weak and simple. The Lord had been his shepherd. He had wanted nothing.

It was 9.45 and bus time.

“Now don’t come out. You’ve been good enough. I’m set up with that hot drink.”

The door opened into the darkness of the road and closed again. He groped in thick mud towards the bus stop.