The Devil at Saxon Wall Read online

  ‘A heavy-faced, sullen-looking child,’ thought Jones. On impulse he said:

  ‘And how is Master Middleton, I wonder?’

  Mrs Passion made no attempt to reply. Jones wondered whether she ignored the question as mere flippancy. Instead she said, still gazing out of the window:

  ‘So old Mother Fluke been tending her tetties, have she?’ She averted her gaze from whom Jones’ startled memory informed him was her mother in order to swill the pale blue milk of a dairy-farming countryside into his cup on top of the superfluous lumps of sugar before she poured out the tea, and added carelessly: ‘Her’s been ill-wishing parson, did you hear, sir? And it’s him she’s been a-killing and a-burying, I shouldn’t wonder.’

  ‘That’s rubbish,’ said Jones, attempting to ensure that the conversation remained on the high level of playfulness which he had first intended. ‘You should make wax images, and stick pins into them.’

  ‘Oh, should you, sir? I’ll tell her, then,’ said Mrs Passion tonelessly. Jones looked at her in astonishment, but her dough-coloured, inexpressive face was set in its usual mask of sullen heaviness, and she scratched her head, just at the top of the parting, with the nail of her forefinger, as she always did, before absent-mindedly dropping two further lumps of sugar into his tea cup. Tired of arguing the point, Jones contented himself with giving her a reproachful glance, fishing them out with his teaspoon, and dumping them in his saucer where he thought she would certainly see them. She did, but her only reaction to the sight of the tea-stained lumps, beyond a sudden and unnerving giggle, was to pick them up between thumb and forefinger, and suck them noisily.

  ‘I do just love a knob of sugar with tea in, don’t you?’ she said. ‘That’s how the chaps makes love to ee in this village.’

  Jones made no attempt to sustain this aspect of the conversation, but remarked:

  ‘I feel it my duty to acquaint the vicar with your mother’s manifestations of ill-will towards him.’

  ‘Ay. Tell parson to set the hounds of hell on she,’ was Mrs Passion’s severely serious reply to what Jones had intended for persiflage. He smiled, but Mrs Passion’s countenance did not change its expression in the slightest.

  Jones had met the vicar during his first week in Saxon Wall. He had been nailing up a wall-bracket upon which he proposed to mount a small plaster cast of the Venus of Milo, the only piece of sculpture, except Epstein’s Genesis, to which he could put a name with the certainty of avoiding vulgar error. Suddenly, in the midst of his labour, he became aware of a lounging figure in the sitting-room doorway.

  ‘I know you’re busy, and I haven’t come to hinder you. But I just wondered whether I could knock a few nails in, or hang curtains or anything,’ the vicar said.

  Since that afternoon they had not met, and it was less the determination to acquaint the vicar with the nature of Mrs Fluke’s sentiments towards him than the desire to indulge in friendly gossip which caused Jones to take his way to the vicarage after tea and to hope that he would discover the vicar at home.

  His story of the ill-wishing was not received with the amusement he had anticipated.

  ‘Old Mrs Fluke? Oh, yes. I’m not a bit surprised. You see, she was ill a short time ago,’ the vicar said. ‘I used to take her some port and things occasionally. Now she has recovered she doesn’t get any more. It goes to old Part, the water diviner. I expected there would be trouble, but I had not anticipated that I should be ill-wished, because, as a matter of fact, she’s had her revenge another way.’

  ‘Oh?’ said Jones. ‘How was that?’

  ‘She informs me she is going over to the Baptists. They have several converts ready, I believe, and are only waiting for the rain. Their pastor is an energetic man, and I admire him. He is no scholar, but is evangelically inclined, and experiences peculiar joy in the contemplation of ninety and nine just persons. But the rain is not doing him justice, and the sinners will disappoint his expectations yet.’

  ‘The rain?’ said Jones.

  ‘Yes. The Baptists totally immerse their candidates for baptism, you remember. But the drought is so exceptionally serious this summer that, short of going up to the dewpond on the top of Guthrum Down, I don’t know how they will manage, unless it rains.’

  ‘But will the Baptists have Mrs Fluke?’ Jones inquired.

  ‘I don’t see how the pastor can refuse if she offers herself as a candidate for baptism. Anyway, she informs me that she shall not join the Methodists because her mother was one.’

  ‘That doesn’t make sense to me.’

  ‘Nor to me. I am glad of it.’ He lowered his voice, and put two fingers nervously between his throat and his clerical collar. ‘The only time the conversations in this village ever make sense, they are so unthinkably lewd that one is grateful, as in the present instance, for some obscurity in meaning. And these people’s amusements are as shocking as their talk. Do you know the first thing I put a stop to when I came here, nearly four years ago?’

  ‘Drunkenness?’ Jones suggested.

  ‘Cock-fighting. Nothing less. And in the south of England, too, you know. It must have been an unbroken survival from the fourteenth century or earlier.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes. I first preached against it from the pulpit and compared its horrors with those of Spanish bull-fighting, but this method met with no result whatever if you except a most inapposite remark rendered by the man Passion, who is, for all practical purposes except the accidental one of ‘having a hand with’ calving cows, quite definitely half-witted.’

  ‘Oh, really?’

  ‘Yes. Passion is Birdseye’s cowman. He came up to me on the day following that on which I preached my sermon, and he said: ‘That do indeed seem grand, that bull-fighting you mention, parson. I should like to see some of that there, so I should. But I suppose they bulls don’t be the valuable animals over to Spain as what they do be over here? Stands to reason, we can’t be keeping them for our own amusement, nor theirs, like what they Spaniards can.’

  Jones laughed, and the vicar joined in.

  ‘Well, I could hardly let it go at that,’ he continued, ‘so I went to the backyard of the Long Thin Man, and challenged every owner of a cock to fight me. I lost every time, of course. Took two or three terrific smashings. Broke my nose, and so on. But at last the innkeeper at the Long Thin Man—he’s an old pug, you know, and not a local man—I have great hopes of him—turned in his tracks, strangled his own two cocks and backed me up. The only other thing I’ve been able to do is to stop the killing of adders by the boys.’

  ‘But aren’t the adders rather unpleasant creatures?’

  ‘So are the boys—very unpleasant creatures. But nobody thinks they ought to be slaughtered with cudgels. They used to hunt these unfortunate adders in order to destroy them in the most brutal way. It was wanton. It was cruel. I didn’t like it. All the boys here sing in the choir. I turned them out. They didn’t get any money. I beat a few. They call me Old Satan now.’

  ‘I should have thought the Salvation Army would have been Mrs Fluke’s ideal of a religious body,’ Jones remarked, to end a considerable pause. The vicar shook his head.

  ‘The Salvation Army is superstitious where we are concerned. Their Captain told me herself that they don’t like making converts from the English Church. I don’t know why that is. It may be a local feeling, and confined to this one young woman, for aught that I can tell. Besides, Mrs Fluke informed my housekeeper not long ago—on the same occasion, incidentally, as that on which she told him that she was going to be an Immersed Believer when the Lord sent rain enough—that, in her opinion, there was nothing so terrible as an army with banners, unless it was David kicking his tambourine before the Ark of the Lord in Shiloh.’

  ‘Blasphemous old hag!’ said Jones, not attempting to hide his amusement.

  ‘Oh, no,’ said the vicar seriously, ‘not blasphemous at all, and not intentionally funny. She really visualises that scene, and is as shocked by it as Michal was,
and probably for the same reason. Have you never noticed that almost identical prejudices are apt to persist in the untrained female mind for generations? Oh, and by the way, if you are short of water at any time, please do not hesitate to come up here for some. My well has never failed, so far as living memory and the parish records will admit. I believe it used to be the well of a Saxon monastery which was almost certainly built upon this site. My belief is that the village took its name from the well, which was popularly supposed to possess healing properties, and should be known as Saxon Well, not Saxon Wall.’

  ‘That’s interesting.’

  ‘So are the people’s beliefs. About six months ago Ames, my colleague in the next parish, tumbled into his well. He now sends over here for all his drinking water. His reason is that he had been cleaning out his pigsties and his immersion fouled the well, but his parishioners, whose ideas are not materially different from those of the heathen Jutes and West Saxons who settled here, persist in regarding the well as the receptacle of holy water.’

  ‘Because their priest fell into it?’

  ‘Because their priest fell into it. But, really, it’s quite useless to be shocked by their ideas. It is simplest to disregard them. “This year the heathen men ravaged Sheppey.” Are you a student of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Mr Jones?’

  Jones laughed.

  ‘I used to be a student of abnormal psychology in my youth,’ he said. ‘Interesting, rather.’

  ‘I wish you joy of a study of the abnormal psychology of some of my communicants,’ the vicar retorted. ‘I believe you would find it sufficiently remarkable. And talking of that, you are just the man to assist us in amusing the children at their annual Sunday school treat. We are going to have it in the grounds of the old castle here this year, because we haven’t very much money. I should be tremendously happy if you would come and help. We shall give them tea out of doors if it’s fine, or in this house if it’s wet, and then we are going to arrange races and competitions, a scout display, a wild flower hunt, a display of country and morris dancing, and all that kind of thing. We shall send them off home at about half-past eight or nine o’clock, so it wouldn’t really be a very long day for you.’

  Jones shook his head.

  ‘Not me,’ he said. The vicar smiled.

  ‘Oh, come,’ he remonstrated. ‘I know you detest the idea, and I suppose you’ll be bored all the time, but really you’ve no idea of the difference it would make to me to have another man on the scene. Of course, the ladies are admirable—absolutely admirable—I don’t know what we should do without them, but—I should so much appreciate it if you could be persuaded to take an interest in the thing, and come along and help.’

  Jones, inwardly cursing himself for a fool, mumbled that he would come.

  ‘That’s splendid,’ the vicar said heartily. ‘I’ll make you a judge in the races, then. I usually do the starting, and one or two of the ladies hold the tape and judge, but it’s been unsatisfactory because they’ve nearly all got children in for the sports, and it’s apt to provoke a partisan spirit, with the result that a certain amount of unpleasantness almost invariably follows the distribution of the prizes.’

  ‘Oh, Lord!’ groaned Jones. The vicar reassured him.

  ‘Nobody will question your decisions,’ he said.

  ‘As long as I don’t suffer personal violence at the hands of mothers whose sons have been listed as “also ran” I suppose I must be prepared to put up with unpopularity,’ said Jones. ‘When’s the affair?’

  The vicar was about to tell him when the housekeeper came in. He was a Japanese whom the vicar had brought with him from a Mission station and whose importance in the eyes of the village was that mothers frightened their children by intimating that the Japanese would eat them if they did not behave themselves in accordance with parental prejudice. This fact the older children invariably rejected upon the evidence of Miss Banks, the school-mistress, who asserted that the Japanese existed exclusively on rice and was forbidden by his religion to partake of the delights of cannibalism. His English was laconic, but unremarkable.

  ‘Mrs Fluke.’

  ‘Show her in, Nao.’

  ‘Very good. Very much upset.’

  ‘What about?’

  ‘Not say.’

  Mrs Fluke, whom Jones was meeting face to face for the first time, was indeed upset. She curtsied to the vicar, a sure sign to him that she had come to make what she regarded as a serious complaint, and commenced her story without preamble.

  ‘Mrs Passion?’

  ‘Martha Passion, as she calls herself!’

  ‘Now really, Mrs Fluke, you must not make these unpleasant insinuations. It isn’t right, and it isn’t kind. Oh, and by the way, ought you not to go to the Baptist Minister for advice?’

  ‘Nohow,’ said Mrs Fluke, emphatically quoting Tweedledum and fixing a rheumy eye on Jones as though daring him to smile. ‘I know what I’m doing, and it’s not joining no Baptists I am. They’re un-Christian.’

  ‘Un-Christian?’ said the vicar. ‘You really must not make these—these exceedingly disconcerting statements.’

  ‘I am aware of what statement I’m making, Reverend, although you might not think it,’ rejoined Mrs Fluke. She still kept her eyes on Jones as she added: ‘Eighty-one next harvest and fully possessed.’

  ‘Quite,’ said Jones in what he trusted was a conciliatory tone, although he remained for the rest of his life uncertain whether she was referring to demoniacal possession or the full possession of her faculties.

  ‘Yes, and she and that half-wit she wedded milking my only cow before my eyes and stealing my eggs off me.’

  ‘Nonsense!’ said the vicar sharply. ‘Nonsense, Mrs Fluke!’

  ‘But that’s just what it isn’t, then, Reverend!’ shrilled Mrs Fluke. ‘They’ve done it twice, and that’s twice more than I can abide. And if you don’t speak about it from the pulpit I shall not ever sit under your shadow no more. It’s a shame and a disgrace that a respectable widow can’t get justice from the only gentleman in the parish.’

  ‘You did not see Mrs Passion and her husband milking your cow and stealing your eggs, now, did you?’ asked the vicar, unmoved by the specific tribute to his birth and breeding. ‘You didn’t see them!’

  Mrs Fluke unwillingly abandoned an impregnable position.

  ‘With the human eye, that is the eye of error, no,’ she admitted. ‘But with the eye of the spirit, that which I see yesterday as it were in a glass darkly, yea, and all.’

  ‘Now, look here, Mrs Fluke,’ said the vicar angrily, ‘I’ve told you before that if you go in for this crystal-gazing and all this awful rubbish, you’ll be damned utterly, for ever and ever, and go to hell! Do you understand that?’

  ‘Ay,’ mumbled Mrs Fluke. She brooded, pulling out her lower lip between thumb and forefinger. Suddenly she brightened.

  ‘You do speak beautiful, Reverend, when you’ve a mind to,’ she said.

  ‘But it’s precious seldom you have a mind to, I must say!’ quoted Jones under his breath. Mrs Fluke averted her eyes from him, and crossed herself.

  ‘What on earth are you doing now, woman?’ cried the vicar.

  ‘What’s he muttering at me for?’ she mumbled, pointing at Jones, but without looking at him.

  ‘I was quoting,’ Jones answered guiltily.

  ‘From the Good Book, I hope, young man.’

  ‘Well, no.’

  ‘I thought not.’ She looked triumphantly at the vicar. ‘As for the Baptists, I’ll tell you. You call to mind the story of Elijah?’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘How he poured water over the altar?’

  ‘Yes, yes.’

  ‘And yet the fire came and burned everything up?’

  ‘Certainly.’

  ‘Yes, well then, why can’t the Baptists get us some rain sent down? Immersed believers!’ Jones choked back a spasm of irreverent mirth. ‘Water’s their god, and he have no use for them! So I have no use for them eith
er.’

  ‘Now, really, Mrs Fluke!’ said the vicar, very severely, ‘I cannot allow you to make these extraordinary remarks in my presence. I am not here to defend any denomination of nonconformist persuasion, but I really will not listen to these disaffected and mischievous suggestions. Are you a heathen, woman? Don’t you realise that, in good time, under Providence, rain will come?’

  Mrs Fluke shook her head more in sorrow than in anger.

  ‘Now, Reverend, you know better than that,’ she said. ‘It’s so that Mr Turphy can’t immerse his believers, that’s what it is. And if I can’t neither get water nor stop that Martha Passion milking my cow on the sly, I will catch her up in the branches of a tree, like the young man Absalom, and there let a soldier run his sword through her.’

  ‘I’ll speak to Mrs Passion, but I’m convinced that it’s all a lot of nonsense,’ said the vicar hurriedly. Mrs Fluke dropped another curtsy, and seemed inclined to prolong the conversation, but the vicar pressed the bell, so she contented herself partially by saying, as a kind of parting shot:

  ‘Well, thank you kindly, not but what it’s your bounden duty to help me carry my burdens, and now I’ve got what I came for, here’s fourpence towards the children’s treat, though I hear the behaviour last year was a disgrace to man and beast, and it’s a pity Elisha and his bears aren’t in this village sometimes.’

  The vicar accepted the fourpence without thanks or comment, took a large book, ruled for cash, out of a table drawer, and entered Mrs Fluke’s name and the amount of her contribution.

  ‘Queer old party,’ said Jones when she had gone. The vicar, who had filled and lighted a pipe, removed it from his mouth, and was about to make a remark when the Japanese again appeared.

  ‘Mrs Passion, master.’

  ‘Show her in, Nao.’

  ‘Very good. Daughter of above Fluke and ditto.’

  Mrs Passion was more than ditto, thought Jones, regarding her dead white face and quivering nostrils with interested apprehension. Like her mother, Mrs Passion came straight to the point.