I charged out to dig up the old man, closely followed by William. Daphne came out on to the landing. She had her blue dressing gown on—rather jolly. Her hair was rumpled, of course. Small kid sort of effect. I managed a hasty but quite charmingly satisfactory salute. She rubbed it off, absentmindedly, of course, and told us gratuitously, of course, about the mob of sans culottes at the front. Mrs. Coutts, up and dressed and not a hair unbrushed, joined us, and we all goggled out of the landing window. The populace had stopped chucking the soft fruit and other bouquets, and were beginning on the chunks of soil and the stones course. The dining room windows seemed to be copping it rather badly, and a chunk of rock about the size of a large grapefruit crashed through my bedroom window and broke a picture called Nymphs at Play which used to hang over the head of my bed. I didn’t like the picture, but it served to annoy Mrs. Coutts, and she used to push in every morning, to my certain knowledge, and turn it face to the wall, before the maid came to make the bed.
The general din brought old Coutts out. He had arrived at the shirt and trouser stage and had not shaved. Nothing would satisfy him, when he had had a look at the ancient society of rock-chuckers, but to harangue them.
“Useless to do so from the open window of a bedroom,” he said, surveying the two-foot hole in my casement. “I will go into the garden and enquire into this disgraceful demonstration.”
Even Mrs. Coutts, who usually represents the Church Militant in times of stress, thought this a damn-fool idea, and I am compelled to state that I upheld her. At least, I upheld her until I caught Daphne’s eye. When I did, I said that if he went, I would go with him. He didn’t even stop to put his coat and waistcoat on, but marched out at the front door and began by booming at them. His voice, on this occasion, was the voice he keeps for weekdays when we have the schoolchildren en masse in church, and they hoof the fronts of the pews and surreptitiously play football with the hassocks, and whack each other’s shins with the edges of the hymnbooks, and cough aggressively after the first six minutes of the address until the pronouncement of the Benediction.
“Good people,” megaphoned old Coutts, “what is the meaning of this?”
A dozen voices answered him in a kind of chant:
“Where be Meg Tosstick’s babby? Where be Meg Tosstick’s babby? Us ask the landlord! He don’t know! Us ask his missus! Her don’t know! Where be Meg Tosstick’s babby?”
After that, it sounded like the new setting we had to the Te Deum last September, or a dog fight at the Battersea Kennels, and the air was filled with stones. Suddenly there was a sharp report, and somebody on the outskirts of the crowd yelled:
“Duck your heads, lads! They’m shooting at us!”
Sure enough, young William’s airgun spoke the second time, and there was a decidedly anguished yelp from the ranks of the besiegers. The vicar swung round.
“William!” he yelled. “Stop that! Do you hear!”
“All right!” screamed William. “But I’ve got another slug ready for whoever bungs the first brick. You howling cads!” he continued, addressing the villagers. “If my aunt and sister weren’t holding the seat of my bags, I’d come down and make you sit up!”
The vicar took advantage of the diversion created by his nephew to announce that he would receive a deputation after Morning Prayer if they had a grievance. They were so used, I suppose, to cheesing their conversation when the old lad spoke, that they listened fairly quietly while he laid down the law about damage to property and unprovoked assault, and, at the end of his decidedly spirited address— delivered on an empty stomach, too, of course—they melted away without much backchat, and the vicar and I returned to the fortress and assessed the damage.
“I shall pay for the window out of the Bible Class Social Fund Box,” said old Coutts, sucking his finger which he had advanced too near the jagged edge of what was left of the pane.
“And in the meantime, Noel will have to sleep with William,” interpolated the woman.
“Not on your life!” I hastily, but, of course, ill-advisedly remarked. Mrs. Coutts spent breakfast time in recriminatory remarks directed chiefly at me. The village, I gathered, thought I had sneaked the baby. I let her run on. Really, it’s the only way.
I must confess that I felt a bit like the first missionaries must have felt as we walked into church behind the choir that Sunday morning, but the service was allowed to run its usual course, and although the tougher element of the village sat at the back and chewed gum, there was no disorder and no interruption. After the Benediction had been pronounced, the vicar stood on the steps of the chancel, cleared his throat, looked all round the church, and said:
“I am ready to meet in the vestry any person or persons with a grievance against me or against any of my household.”
He was not belligerent, but he sounded dangerous. However, two youths and an older man were at the vestry door when we were ready to go back to the vicarage for lunch. The older chap, a respectable bloke, but an atheist and a postman, was the spokesman. He took off his cap when old Coutts invited him into the vestry, and spoke quite respectfully, but there was no mincing of words. He said bluntly:
“I wasn’t at your house throwing they stones. I don’t hold with misdirected violence nor ’timidation. But us wants to know what you and your good lady done with that poor girl’s babby, Mr. Coutts. Us knows you be the father, but where be little un?”
Old Coutts went most frightfully red.
“My good man,” he said, in a kind of choking gargle, “you are being profoundly, utterly and ludicrously slanderous. Your remarks are actionable. Be careful what you say.”
He paused and scowled at the postman fiercely, snorting somewhat.
The man stuck to his point.
“Beg pardon, Mr. Coutts,” he said, “but that poor girl was living under your roof when it happened, wasn’t she?”
“She was,” said the vicar, grimly.
“Unless it were Mr. Wells,” said the frightful fellow, suddenly turning on me.
“I deny it,” I said feebly.
“I’ll let the lads know, then,” said the postman, “but I doubt whether they’ll be satisfied with plain denials. It’s facts we’re after, Mr. Coutts.”
“Then you can go to hell to get them,” said old Coutts, irascibly, forgetting, of course, where we were.
So the bird slouched off, taking the two youths with him.
“I’m going to get Burt and his negro and Sir William to put out anybody who causes a disturbance at Evensong,” said the old boy, grimly. He’d been a missionary at some period in a probably purple past, and seemed well on to the psychology of the thing, for a disturbance at Evensong there certainly was. In fact, a bally riot would perhaps convey a more correct and enlightening impression.
Whether the second lesson was an unfortunate choice, or whether the time for the hurling of the first hymnbook had been pre-arranged, we shall never know;—any more, I suppose, than we shall know the same thing about the stool chucked by the old Scotswoman at Archbishop Laud’s backer in the year sixteen-thirty or forty something. Anyway, it came whizzing along, and only just missed me. I was reading the lesson, of course. I didn’t know what to do, but the vicar’s voice behind me said:
“Carry on, Wells,” and I was aware that he was standing beside me at the lectern. Suddenly the air was full of hymnbooks, and amid the frightful din—I stopped reading, of course—I had to—I could hear Mrs. Gatty’s voice declaiming:
“Cuckoo! Cuckoo!”
Most inapposite, of course.
CHAPTER X
sundry alibis, and a regular facer
« ^ »
By the time I had struggled out of my surplice and coat, the riot was nearly over. The last stalwarts among the attacking party were being thrown out among the tombstones by Burt (who seemed to be enjoying himself), the vicar (who was trying not to seem to be enjoying himself), and Foster Washington Yorke, who, to the strains of “I got wings” was doing his bit with zealous fervour and Christian impartiality. Coming in at the death, so to speak, I put my boot behind a youth named Scoggin, whom I had been longing to kick for nearly eighteen months, and we barred the church door and continued the service. The vicar cut the sermon down to thirteen minutes by my watch, and, at the conclusion of the service, instead of going out into the vestry, he marched straight down the aisle to the West door, and, unbarring it, strode into the porch. I followed him, of course. There were the attackers lining the path, waiting for us. Our appearance immediately at the conclusion of the service was unlooked for, however, and it was obvious that we had taken them by surprise. The vicar gave them no time to recover, but, raising his arm and pointing first at those on the right and then at those on the left, he said: