She advanced on him. “Young man, I’ve put up with a great deal from you on account of your alleged ill-health! But you are beginning to try my patience. You’ve been here a month now, and Dr. Castle assures me you are making good progress. Perhaps one of these days you will choose to consider the hospitality I am extending you and even, as I sincerely hope, your duty towards your Creator!”
The blood drained from Ernest’s face; he could feel the whiteness of his cheeks. Locking his fingers together for fear that otherwise he might strike this hypocritical old bitch, he grated between his teeth, “I owe nothing to the god that authorised such foulness as the War!”
And, before she could brand him a blasphemer, he tugged the door open and limped into blinding sunshine hatless and without his stick.
A single bell was chiming from the church. To his distorted perception it sounded like the tolling of a knell.
“Mr. Peake? Mr. Peake!”
A soft, inquiring voice. Ernest came to himself with a start. He was leaning on the wall dividing the grounds of the Hall from those of the vicarage. The bell had stopped. Facing him was a slender girl, face shaded by a broad-brimmed hat, wearing a plain dress of the same dark grey as her large, concerned eyes.
Even as he wondered frantically whether he had been crying out aloud—he knew he sometimes did—his hand rose automatically to lift a nonexistent hat.
“Good morning, Miss Pollock,” he forced out. “I’m sorry if I disturbed you.”
“Not at all. I was just taking a turn around the garden while Grandfather puts some final touches to his sermon.”
Feverishly eager to counter any bad impression he might have made: “Well, as you’ve no doubt deduced I shan’t be there to hear it, I’m afraid. You see, as I’ve been trying to explain to my aunt, I lost my faith when I saw what was allowed to happen over there. I couldn’t believe any more in a loving, beneficent, all-wise—” Suddenly aware that he was virtually babbling, he broke off in mid-word.
To his surprise and relief, there was no sign that Miss Pollock had taken offence. Indeed, she was saying, “Yes, I can understand. Gerald—my fiancé—he said very similar things the last time he came home on leave.”
Oh, yes. I heard about Gerald, didn’t I? Bought his at—Cambrai, I think it was. Tanks.
While he was still fumbling around for something else to say, from the direction of the house came a grinding of carriage-wheels on gravel, the sign that Lady Peake was about to depart for church. She could have walked this way in half the time it took to go around by the drive, but of course that would never have done.
She could also have well afforded a motor-car, and indeed Uncle Roderick had owned one before the War, but she had never approved, and more than once had mentioned how glad she’d been when their chauffeur joined up and her husband told him to drive to London in it and turn it over to the Army.
Miss Pollock glanced past Ernest’s shoulder. “Ah, there’s your aunt coming out. I’d better go back and rouse Grandfather. He does tend to lose track of time nowadays. Oh, by the way, in fine weather we like to take afternoon tea in the garden. Perhaps you’d care to join us?”
“Why—why, that’s very kind of you,” Ernest stammered.
“There’s no need to fix a date in advance. Any time you’re free, just ask one of the maids to pop over and say you’re coming. Now I really must rush. Good morning!”
And she was gone, leaving Ernest to wonder all over again whether he had been talking aloud to himself when she noticed him, and if so, what he had been saying.
As ever, his charming surroundings, aglow with the onset of summer, seemed permeated with menace, like the germs in fertile soil that could bloat and burst the human frame.
Gas gangrene. But what is gangrened in me is my mind …
The Hall, the vicarage and the church stood on the crest of a low hill, with the rest of the village scattered on level ground below and on the flank of another hill opposite. In olden days it had been a weary and toilsome climb to attend Divine Service, especially for children and the old, and many were content to proceed no further than a spring that formerly had gushed out near the bottom of the slope, for its waters were held to possess the power of cleansing and absolution.
Early in the last century, though, the incumbent Lord of the Manor had had the spring covered, and athwart its site had caused to be constructed a slanting paved track, rising from what was still called Old Well Road, that offered greater ease of access. He also had planted, either side of the lych-gate, a pair of magnificent chestnut trees. Beneath their shade, uncomfortable in their dark Sunday clothes on such a warm morning, were foregathered most of the inhabitants of Welstock, among whom, despite the fine weather, there were few smiles to be seen. Tragedy had struck the little community again, during the past week. Young George Gibson, who had been gassed in France and taken prisoner, and come home to cough his life away, had died at last, leaving his wife with three children.
As ever, the villagers had separated into two groups. To the left were the womenfolk and young children, ebbing and flowing around the schoolmistress, Miss Hicks. Apart from regrets at George Gibson’s death, their talk was mainly of high prices, illness—every hint of fever might signal another outbreak of the dreaded influenza—cottages out of repair and, with little optimism for the bride and groom, a forthcoming marriage. It was not a good time, they all agreed, to think of bringing more children into the world.
To the right were the fathers and grandfathers, surrounded by single young men—few of those, for more and more of their age-group were drifting away from the countryside in search of the glamour, and the better wages, to be found in cities. Beyond them again hung about a bored fringe of boys old enough to work but not yet concerned with the matters that so preoccupied their elders.
At the focus of this group were to be found Hiram Stoddard, smith and farrier—and incidentally wicket-keeper for the village cricket-team—and his brother Jabez who kept the Plough Inn, exchanging news and views with the local farmers. Within this cluster, but not of it, was the most prosperous of the latter, Henry Ames. He had moved here from the next county. Having lived in the area a bare ten years, he was still regarded as a foreigner, and though people were civil to him and his family they kept their distance. He was the only one among them still invariably addressed as Mister.
The men too wore grave countenances as they chatted. At first their talk, like the women’s, was of George Gibson and his bereaved family; soon, though, they moved on to more pressing subjects. They spoke of the shortage of labour—George had been a farmhand, living in a cottage on the Peake estate; they dismissed the theorists who argued that farming would soon become entirely mechanized, for none among them (always excepting Mr. Ames) could afford the expensive new machinery, and so many horses had been killed during the War that it was proving hard to breed up to former levels, while much the same applied to other kinds of livestock, vastly diminished because there had not been enough hands to tend them … No doubt of it: times were hard, if anything harder than in wartime. Someone mentioned the politicians’ promise of “homes fit for heroes” and the sally was greeted with derisive chuckles, lacking mirth.
Attempting to divert the conversation into a more cheerful path, Hiram broached the early arrival of summer and the promise of a good hay-crop. Mention of grass led by natural stages to mowing, mowing to the need to prepare the cricket-pitch, and that in turn to further depressed bouts of silence, as they remembered the many former players who would not again turn out for the team.