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Deadham Hard by Lucas Malet

L >> Lucas Malet >> Deadham Hard




Garden parties, tennis tournaments, the Napworth cricket week, claimed
Damaris' attendance in turn, along with agreeable display of her foreign
spoils in the matter of Paris hats and frocks. Proofs arrived in big
envelopes perpetually by post; first in the long, wide-margined galley
form, later in the more dignified one of quire and numbered page. The
crude, sour smell of damp paper and fresh printer's ink, for the first
time assailed our maiden's nostrils. It wasn't nice; yet she sniffed it
with a quaint sense of pleasure. For was it not part of the whole
wonderful, beautiful business of the making of books? To the artist the
meanest materials of his art have a sacredness not to be denied or
ignored. They go to forward the birth of the precious whole, and hence
are redeemed, for him, from all charge of common or uncleanness.

Finally Miss Felicia, arriving in mid-June, paid an unending visit, of
which Damaris felt no impatience. Miss Felicia during the last two years
had, indeed, become a habit. The major affairs of life it might be both
useless and unwise to submit to her judgment. She lost her way in them,
fluttering ineffectual, gently hurried and bird-like. But, in life's
minor affairs, her innocent enthusiasm was invaluable as an encouraging
asset. It lent point and interest to happenings and occupations otherwise
trivial or monotonous. If silly at times, she never was
stupid--distinction of meaning and moment.--A blameless creature,
incapable of thinking, still more of speaking, evil of the worst or
weakest, her inherent goodness washed about you like sun-warmed water, if
sterile yet translucently pure.

And so the months accumulated. The clear colours of spring ripened to the
hotter gamut of mid-summer, to an August splendour of ripening harvest in
field, orchard and hedgerow, and thence to the purple, russet and gold of
autumn. The birds, their nesting finished, ceased from song, as the
active care of hungry fledglings grew on them. The swallows had gathered
for their southern flight, and the water-fowl returned from their
northern immigration to the waters and reed-beds of the Haven, Sir
Charles Verity's book, in two handsome quarto volumes, had been duly
reviewed and found a place of honour in every library, worth the name, in
the United Kingdom, before anything of serious importance occurred
directly affecting our maiden. Throughout spring, summer and the first
weeks of autumn, she marked time merely. Her activities and emotions--in
as far, that is, as outward expression of these last went--were
vicarious, those of others. She glowed over and gloried in the triumph of
her father's book, it is true, but it was his adventure, after all,
rather than her own.

Then suddenly, as is the way with life, events crowded on one
another, the drama thickened, sensation was tuned to a higher pitch.
And it all began, not unludicrously, through the praiseworthy, if
rather ill-timed moral indignation of Canon Horniblow's newly
installed curate, Reginald Sawyer.




CHAPTER II

RECALLING, IN SOME PARTICULARS, THE EASIEST RECORDED THEFT IN
HUMAN HISTORY


He was short, neat, spectacled, in manner prompt and perky, in age under
thirty, a townsman by birth and education, hailing from Midlandshire.
Further, a strong advocate of organization, and imbued with the deepest
respect for the obligations and prerogatives of his profession upon the
ethical side. He took himself very seriously; and so took, also, the
decalogue as delivered to mankind amid the thunders of Sinai. Keep the
Ten Commandments, according to the letter, and you may confidently expect
all things, spiritual and temporal, to be added unto you--such was the
basis of his teaching and of his private creed.

He came to Deadham ardent for the reformation of that remote, benighted
spot, so disgracefully, as he feared--and rather hoped--behind the times.
He suspected its canon-vicar of being very much too easy-going; and its
population, in respect of moral conduct, of being lamentably lax. In
neither of which suppositions, it must be admitted, was he altogether
incorrect. But he intended to alter all that!--Regarding himself thus, in
the light of a providentially selected new broom, he applied himself
diligently to sweep. A high-minded and earnest, if not conspicuously
well-bred young man, he might in a suburban parish have done excellent
work. But upon Deadham, with its enervating, amorous climate and queer
inheritance of forest and seafaring--in other words poaching and
smuggling--blood, he was wasted, out of his element and out of touch. The
slow moving South Saxon cocked a shrewd sceptical eye at him, sized him
up and down and sucked in its cheek refusing to be impressed. While by
untoward accident, his misfortune rather than his fault, the earliest of
his moral sweepings brought him into collision with the most reactionary
element in the community, namely the inhabitants of the black cottages
upon the Island.

The event fell out thus. The days shortened, the evenings lengthened
growing misty and secret as October advanced. The roads became plashy and
rutted, the sides of them silent with fallen leaves under foot. An odd
sense of excitement flickers through such autumn twilights. Boys herded
in little troops on wickedness intent. Whooping and whistling to disarm
their elders' suspicion until the evil deed should be fairly within
reach, then mum as mice, stealthily vanishing, becoming part and parcel
of the earth, the hedge, the harsh dusky grasses of the sand-hills, the
foreshore lumber on the beach.

Late one afternoon, the hour of a hidden sunset, Reginald Sawyer called
at The Hard; and to his eminent satisfaction--for social aspirations were
by no means foreign to him--was invited to remain to tea. The
ladies--Damaris and Miss Felicia--were kind, the cakes and cream
superlative. He left in high feather; and, at Damaris' suggestion, took a
short cut through the Wilderness and by a path crossing the warren to the
lane, leading up from the causeway, which joins the high-road just
opposite the post office and Mrs. Doubleday's shop. By following this
route he would save quite half a mile on his homeward journey; since the
Grey House, where he enjoyed the Miss Minetts' assiduous and genteel
hospitality, is situate at the extreme end of Deadham village on the road
to Lampit.

Out on the warren, notwithstanding the hour and the mist, it was still
fairly light, the zigzagging sandy path plainly visible between the
heath, furze brakes, stunted firs and thorn bushes. The young clergyman,
although more familiar with crowded pavements and flare of gas-lamps than
open moorland in the deepening dusk, pursued his way without difficulty.
What a wild region it was though! He thought of the sober luxury of the
library at The Hard, the warmth, the shaded lights, the wealth of books;
of the grace of Damaris' clothing and her person, and wondered how
people of position and education could be content to live in so out of
the way and savage a spot. It was melancholy to a degree, in his
opinion.--Oh! well, he must do his best to wake it up, infuse a spirit of
progress into it more in keeping with nineteenth-century ideas. Everyone
would be grateful to him--

A little questioning pause--assurance in momentary eclipse. Then with
renewed cheerfulness--Of course they would--the upper classes, that is.
For they must feel the disadvantages of living in such a back-water. He
gave them credit for the wish to advance could they but find the way.
All they needed was leadership, which Canon Horniblow--evidently past
his work--was powerless to supply. He, Sawyer, came as a pioneer. Once
they grasped that fact they would rally to him. The good Miss Minetts
were rallying hard, so to speak, already. Oh! there was excellent
material in Deadham among the gentlefolk. It merely needed working,
needed bringing out.

From the lower, the wage-earning class, sunk as it was in ignorance, he
must, he supposed, expect but a poor response, opposition not impossibly.
Opposition would not daunt him. You must be prepared to do people good,
if not with, then against their will. He was here to make them rebel
against and shake off the remnants of the Dark Ages amid which they so
extraordinarily appeared still to live. He had no conception so low a
state of civilization could exist within little over a hundred miles of
the metropolis!--It was a man's work, anyhow, and he must put his back
into it. Must organize--word of power--organize night classes, lectures
with lantern slides, social evenings, a lads' club. Above all was there
room and necessity for this last. The Deadham lads were very rowdy, very
unruly. They gathered at corners in an objectionable manner; hung about
the public-house. He must undersell the public-house by offering counter
attractions. Amongst the men he suspected a sad amount of drinking. Their
speech, too, was so reprehensibly coarse. He had heard horrible language
in the village street. He reproved the offenders openly, as was his duty,
and his admonitions were greeted with a laugh, an insolent, offensive,
jeering laugh.

Sawyer cut at the dark straggling furzes bordering the path with his
walking-stick. Recollection of that laugh made him go red about the ears;
made his skin tingle and his eyes smart. It represented an insult not
only to himself but to his cloth. Yet he'd not lost control of himself,
he was glad to remember, though the provocation was rank--

He cut at the furze again, being by nature combative. And--stopped short,
with a start, a tremor running through him. Something rustled, scuttled
away amongst the bushes, and something flapped upward behind him into the
thick lowering sky above. A wailing cry--whether human, or of bird or
beast, he was uncomfortably ignorant--came out of the mist ahead, to be
answered by a like and nearer cry from a spot which he failed, in his
agitation, to locate.

Under ordinary conditions the young cleric was neither troubled by
imagination nor lacking in pluck. His habitual outlook was sensible,
literal and direct. But, it must be owned, this wide indistinct
landscape, over which pale vapours trailed and brooded, the immense
loneliness of the felt rather than seen, expanse of water, marsh and
mud-flat of the Haven--the tide being low--along with the goblin
whispering chuckle of the river speeding seaward away there on his left,
made him oddly jumpy and nervous. No human being was in sight, neither
did any human dwelling show signs of habitation. He wished he had gone
round by the road and through the length of the village. He registered a
vow against short cuts--save in broad daylight--for his present
surroundings inspired him with the liveliest distrust. They were to him
positively nightmarish. He suffered the nastiest little fears of what
might follow him, what might, even now, peer and lurk. Heretofore he had
considered the earth as so much dead matter, to be usefully and
profitably exploited by all-dominant man--specially by men of his own
creed and race. But now the power of the earth laid hands on him. She
lived, and mankind dwindled to the proportions of parasitic insects, at
most irritating some small portions of her skin, her vast indifferent
surface. Such ideas had never occurred to him before. He resented
them--essayed to put them from him as trenching on blasphemy.

Starting on again, angry alike with himself for entertaining, and with
the unknown for engendering, such subversive notions, his pace
unconsciously quickened to a run. But the line of some half-dozen ragged
Scotch firs, which here topped the low cliff bordering the river, to his
disordered vision seemed most uncomfortably to run alongside him,
stretching gaunt arms through the encircling mist to arrest his flight.

He regarded them with an emotion of the liveliest antipathy; consciously
longing, meanwhile, for the humming thoroughfares of his native
industrial town, for the rattle and grind of the horse-trams, the
brightly lighted shop-fronts, the push all about him of human labour, of
booming trade and vociferous politics. Even the glare of a gin palace,
flooding out across the crowded pavement at some street corner, would
have, just now, been fraught with solace, convinced prohibitionist though
he was. For he would, at least, have been in no doubt how to feel towards
that stronghold of Satan--righteously thanking God he was not as those
reprehensible others, who passed in and out of its ever-swinging doors.
While towards this earth dominance, this dwarfing of human life by the
life of things he had hitherto called inanimate, he did not know how to
feel at all. It attacked some unarmoured, unprotected part of him.
Against its assault he was defenceless.

With a sense of escape from actual danger, whether physical or moral he
did not stay to enquire, he stumbled, a few minutes later, through a gap
in the earth-bank into the wet side lane. Arrived, he gave himself a
moment's breathing space. It was darker here than out upon the warren;
but, anyhow, this was a lane. It had direction and meaning. Men had
constructed it for the linking up of house with house, hamlet with
hamlet. Like all roads, it represented the initial instinct of communal
life, the basis of a reasoned social order, of civilization in short.
He walked forward over the soft couch of fallen, water-soaked leaves,
his boots squelching at times into inches of sucking mud, and his
spirits rose. He began to enter into normal relations both with himself
and with things in general. A hundred yards or so and the village green
would be reached.

Then on his left, behind an ill-kept quick-set hedge that guarded a strip
of garden and orchard, he became aware of movement. Among the apple trees
three small figures shuffled about some dark recumbent object. For the
most part they went on all fours, but at moments reared up on their hind
legs. Their action was at once silent, stealthy and purposeful. Our young
clergyman's shortness of sight rendered their appearance the more
peculiar. His normal attitude was not so completely restored, moreover,
but that they caused him another nervous tremor. Then he grasped the
truth; while the detective, latent in every moralist, sprang to
attention. Here were criminals to be brought to justice, criminals caught
red-handed. Reginald Sawyer, having been rather badly scared himself,
lusted--though honestly ignorant of any personal touch in the matter--to
very badly scare others.

Standing back beside the half-open gate, screened by the hedge, here high
and straggling, he awaited the psychological moment, ready to pounce. To
enter the orchard and confront these sinners with their crime, if their
activities did by chance happen to be legitimate, was to put himself
altogether in the wrong. He would bide his time, would let them conclude
their--in his belief--nefarious business and challenge them as they
passed out.

Nor had he long to wait. The two smaller boys, breathing hard, hoisted
the bulging, half-filled sack on to the back of their bigger
companion; who, bowed beneath its weight, grunting with exertion,
advanced towards the exit.

Sawyer laid aside his walking-stick, and, as the leader of the procession
came abreast of him, pounced. But missed his aim. Upon which the boy cast
down the sack, from the mouth of which apples, beets, turnips rolled into
the road; and, with a yelp, bolted down the lane towards the causeway,
leaving his accomplices to their fate. These, thrown into confusion by
the suddenness of his desertion, hesitated and were lost. For, pouncing
again, and that the more warily for his recent failure, Sawyer collared
one with either hand.

They were maladorous children; and the young clergyman, grasping woollen
jersey-neck and shirt-band, the backs of his hands in contact with the
backs of their moist, warm, dirty little necks, suffered disgust, yet
held them the more firmly.

"I am convinced you have no right to that fruit or to those vegetables.
You are stealing. Give an account of yourselves at once."

And he shook them slightly to emphasize his command. One hung on his
hand, limp as a rag. The other showed fight, kicking our friend liberally
about the shins, with hobnailed boots which did, most confoundly, hurt.

"You lem' me go," he cried. "Lem' me go, or I'll tell father, and first
time you come along by our place 'e'll set the ratting dawgs on to you.
Our ole bitch 'as got 'er teeth yet. She'll bite. Ketch the fleshy part
of your leg, she will, and just tear and bite."

This carrying of war into the enemy's country proved as disconcerting as
unexpected, while to mention the sex of an animal was, in Reginald
Sawyer's opinion, to be guilty of unpardonable coarseness. The atmosphere
of a Protestant middle-class home clung to him yet, begetting in him a
squeamishness, not to say prudery, almost worthy of his hostesses, the
Miss Minetts. He shook the culprits again, with a will. He also blushed.

"If you were honest you would be anxious to give an account of
yourselves," he asserted, ignoring the unpleasant matter of the dogs. "I
am afraid you are very wicked boys. You have stolen these vegetables and
fruits. Thieves are tried by the magistrates, you know, and sent to
prison. I shall take you to the police-station. There the constable will
find means to make you confess."

Beyond provoking a fresh paroxysm of kicking, these adjurations were
without result. His captives appeared equally impervious to shame,
contrition or alarm. They remained obstinately mute. Whereupon it began
to dawn upon their captor that his position risked becoming not a little
invidious, since the practical difficulty of carrying his threats into
execution was so great. How could he haul two sturdy, active children,
plus a sack still containing a goodly quantity of garden produce, some
quarter of a mile without help? To let them go, on the other hand, was
to have them incontinently vanish into those trailing whitish vapours
creeping over the face of the landscape. And, once vanished, they were
lost to him, since he knew neither their names nor dwelling place; and
could, with no certainty, identify them, having seen them only in the
act of struggle and in this uncertain evening light. He felt himself
very nastily planted on the horns of a dilemma, when on a sudden there
arrived help.

A vehicle of some description turned out of the main road and headed
down the lane.

Laocooen-like, flanked on either hand by a writhing youthful figure,
Reginald Sawyer called aloud:

"Hi!--Stop, there--pray, stop."

Darcy Faircloth lighted down out of a ramshackle Marychurch station fly,
and advanced towards the rather incomprehensible group.

"What's happened? What's the matter?" he said. "What on earth do you want
with those two youngsters?"

"I want to convey them to the proper authorities," Sawyer answered, with
all the self-importance he could muster. He found his interlocutor's
somewhat abrupt and lordly manner at once annoying and impressive, as
were his commanding height and rather ruffling gait. "These boys have
been engaged in robbing a garden. I caught them in the act, and it is my
duty to see that they pay the penalty of their breach of the law. I count
on your assistance in taking them to the police-station."

"You want to give them in charge?"

"What else?--The moral tone of this parish is, I grieve to say,
very low."

Sawyer talked loud and fast in the effort to assert himself.

"Low and coarse," he repeated. "Both as a warning to others, and in
the interests of their own future, an example must be made of these
two lads."

"Must it?" Faircloth said, towering above him in the pale
bewildering mist.

The little boys, who had remained curiously and rather dangerously still
since the advent of this stranger, now strained together, signalling,
whispering. Sawyer shook them impatiently apart.

"Steady there, please," Faircloth put in sharply. "It strikes me you take
a good deal upon yourself. May I ask who you are?"

"I am the assistant priest," Reginald began. But his explanation was cut
short by piping voices.

"It's Cap'en Darcy, that's who it is. We never meant no 'arm, Cap'en.
That we didn't. The apples was rotting on the ground, s'h'lp me if they
wasn't. Grannie Staples was took to the Union last Wednesday fortnight,
and anyone's got the run of her garden since. Don't you let the new
parson get us put away, Cap'en. We belongs to the Island--I'm William
Jennifer's Tommy, please Cap'en, and 'e's Bobby Sclanders 'e is."

And being cunning, alike by nature and stress of circumstance, they
pathetically drooped, blubbering in chorus:

"We never didn't mean no 'arm, Cap'en. Strike me dead if we did."

At which last implied profanity Reginald Sawyer shuddered, loosening
his grasp.

Of what followed he could subsequently give no definite account. The
dignities of his sacred profession and his self-respect alike reeled
ignominiously into chaos. He believed he heard the person, addressed as
Captain Darcy, say quietly:

"Cut it, youngsters. Now's your chance."

He felt that both the children violently struggled, and that the round
hard head of one of them butted him in the stomach. He divined that
sounds of ribald laughter, in the distance, proceeded from the driver
of the Marychurch station fly. He knew two small figures raced whooping
down the lane attended by squelchings of mud and clatter of heavy
soled boots.

Knew, further, that Captain Darcy, after nonchalantly picking up the
sack, dropping it within the garden hedge and closing the rickety gate,
stood opposite him and quite civilly said:

"I am sorry I could not give you the sort of assistance, sir, which you
asked. But the plan would not have worked."

Sawyer boiled over.

"You have compounded a felony and done all that lay in your power to
undermine my authority with my parishioners. Fortunately I retain the
boys' names and can make further enquiries. This, however, by no means
relieves you of the charge of having behaved with reprehensible levity
both towards my office and myself."

"No--no," Faircloth returned, goodnaturedly. "Sleep upon it, and you will
take an easier view of the transaction. I have saved you from putting
unmerited disgrace upon two decent families and getting yourself into hot
water up to the neck. I know these Deadham folk better than you do. I'm
one of them, you see, myself. They've uncommonly long memories where
they're offended, though it may suit them to speak you soft. Take it from
me, you'll never hound them into righteousness. They turn as stubborn as
so many mules under the whip."

He hailed the waiting flyman.

"Good evening to you, sir," he said. And followed by the carriage, piled
with sea-chest and miscellaneous baggage, departed into the
mysteriousness of deepening dusk.

Had the young clergyman been willing to leave it at that, all might yet
have been well, his ministry at Deadham a prolonged and fruitful one,
since his intentions, at least, were excellent. But, as ill-luck would
have it, while still heated and sore, every feather on end, his natural
combativeness almost passionately on top, turning out in the high-road he
encountered Dr. Cripps, faring westward like himself on the way to visit
a patient at Lampit. The two joined company, falling into a conversation
the more confidential that the increasing darkness gave them a sense of
isolation and consequent intimacy.

Of all his neighbours, the doctor--a peppery disappointed man, struggling
with a wide-strewn country practice mainly prolific of bad debts,
conscious of his own inefficiency and perpetually smarting under imagined
injuries and slights--was the very last person to exercise a mollifying
influence upon Sawyer in his existing angry humour. The latter recounted
and enlarged upon the insults he had just now suffered. His hearer fanned
the flame of indignation with comment and innuendo--recognized Faircloth
from the description, and proceeded to wash his hands in scandalous
insinuation at the young sea-captain's expense.

For example, had not an eye to business dictated the sheltering from
justice of those infant, apple-stealing reprobates? Their respective
fathers were good customers! The islanders all had the reputation of hard
drinkers--and an innkeeper hardly invites occasion to lower his receipts.
The inn stood in old Mrs. Faircloth's name, it is true; but the son
profited, at all events vicariously, by its prosperity. A swaggering
fellow, with an inordinate opinion of his own ability and merits; but in
that he shared a family failing. For arrogance and assumption the whole
clan was difficult to beat.

"You have heard whose son this young Faircloth is, of course?"

Startled by the question, and its peculiar implication, Reginald Sawyer
hesitatingly admitted his ignorance.

The Grey House stands flush with the road, and the two gentlemen finished
their conversation upon the doorstep. Above them a welcoming glow shone
through the fanlight; otherwise its windows were shuttered and blank.