Mr. Tasker's Gods by T. F. Powys Page A

afternoons will. The Rev. John Turnbull had been in the hay-field; he had found the gate, and his brothers called to him as they passed. He had been talking to the small farmer with the club foot and had at the same time begun to think of his tea.
    The mother of the family, Mrs. Turnbull, had been well brought up. Her father, decently dead, was in his day a small county squire, his estate only being a farm or two better than a yeoman’s, so that he had never been made even a justice of the peace. He belonged to the old fashions, and used to wear in the summer time—he always talked about the summer time—a pair of white cord trousers and a soft brown hat, so that he appeared to the public to be somewhere between a bricklayer and a South African trader.
    This good man had more than one daughter, wise, sensible girls, who helped in the dairy and fed the chickens. Jane, the eldest, married the Rev. Hector Turnbull, who came courting when the cherries were ripe and helped her to gather them, up a ladder, and to collect the eggs from the home farm, that was not more than a hundred paces from the squire’s house. One brown henhid her nest half-way up a hay-stack from which a slice of hay had been cut, and to this nest Jane climbed every day by a ladder. On the afternoon of the proposal Hector Turnbull climbed there too, and in his hurry and excitement to kiss her he sat down upon the new-laid egg, and Jane forgave him and married him.
    When she married, she gave up her fortune to her husband and began to make home-made jam. At first she used to cover the jam-pots with paper bought on purpose and cut into rounds and dipped in a saucer of brandy. The rich odour of brandy was one of the delights of Henry’s childhood. As the years grew longer and the sun behind her life began to go down, she gave up the brandy, and, instead of special paper, she tied up her jam with cut pieces of the Standard.
    Mrs. Turnbull had very few thoughts of her own. She gave up what she owned in the way of ideas with her fortune to Mr. Turnbull. And after his arrival she could hardly call her prayers her own; even her religion belonged to her housekeeping, for when she knelt down she could not prevent herself praying that this year at least the rhubarb jam might not go bad.
    Mrs. Turnbull was a woman who accepted her daily life just as she accepted her daily bread, prayed for, and presented to her by Mr. Turnbull upon the end of a long knife. It was her pleasure to sit at one end of the almost square table andto watch Mr. Turnbull eating his tea. When she said her prayers she forgot Mr. Turnbull, but she remembered the jam. There was a motion in the act of kneeling that reminded her of tying up the pots.
    Mrs. Turnbull was a large woman with something of the Central Empire about her, with a round and homely face. It was only when she chanced to look up from her mending that she disclosed a doubt. This doubt was the only thing not quite right about her, the one beat out of place in her normal pulse. It was a look of doubt that waited for something. It was in her eyes when she raised them from her needlework and let them rest upon the one dark corner of the drawing-room. In that look of a moment one read the strange news that all was not right even in her sheltered world.
    Was that the look whence the idiot had come?
    Mrs. Turnbull was fond of one chair, and she generally sat in the same room. She was one of the easiest people in the world to find if she was wanted, because she was a lady who never went out.

CHAPTER VII
THE MASTER’S VOICE
    T HE Rev. Hector Turnbull sat down to tea with his sons and his wife, and Alice, dressed daintily for the occasion, brought in the toast. Mr. Turnbull was in a good humour that afternoon . He had been scolding a new school teacher because she wore a blouse too gay for the national school. He told her ‘she must dress more plainly,’ and explained to her that a teacher’s duty is to guide others ‘in