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

the paths of virtue and decorum.’
    â€˜In my school, in the school of our church,’ and he looked at the roof, ‘we expect our assistants to be plain.’
    Mr. Turnbull saw with secret pleasure what was coming, and so did the other watchers who were there to learn their lessons. And it came. Not the least important part of the poor girl, her feelings, were outraged, and she bent over a desk and sobbed, holding both hands, girl-like, over her eyes.
    The clergyman noted the white skin of her neck—the blouse was certainly too low for a teacher—and then he put his hand on her hair and said, ‘Don’t cry,’ and leaving the girl and the school, he walked to the vicarage. And his thoughts were the thoughts of a male hyena.
    Mrs. Turnbull watched him eat his tea and received from him a piece of bread at the end of a knife. The meal over, she retired into thedrawing-room followed by her son John, who felt it would be kind to talk to his mother a little. Her elder sons did what they liked with her: they smoothed her down, they flattered her, they pinched her cheeks,—John even sat with his arm around her waist and breathed the smoke of his cigarette into her ear. She always smiled and appeared never to mind what they did. He now told her about the dear girl and her charming ways. He said she owned a maid and beautiful dresses—‘frocks,’ he called them. And he said with a kind of playful laugh, ‘that she wished to be married very soon.’
    â€˜If we have a baby, a little girl, we will call her after you,’ he said to his mother; and the mother answered, ‘Just as you like, dear.’ ‘And, Mother,’ he said, ‘it is heavenly the way we love one another.’
    The Rev. John Turnbull might be called ‘clever.’ He was able to talk about one thing and think about another. He talked to his mother about ‘the dear girl,’ and he thought about a little bit of torn lace—at a penny- three-farthings a yard, bought at Maidenbridge—that he had seen when a certain female creature, young and warm with hay-making, was slipping down from a wagon on to the white clover. And then his inner vision was able to change again, even with his arm round his mother’s waist. He damned to the very deepest hell his bankers, who had refused him an overdraft of Fifty Pounds,even though he had told them all about ‘the dear girl,’ just out of pure love for her, as he had told his mother. The banker said ‘that they would be very glad’—the second manager rubbed his hands as he said,—‘very glad indeed to see him again when things were more settled’; and then they wished their customer ‘all happiness.’
    John Turnbull had inherited from some distant Turnbull a character very different from his brother George. He was fond of spending money. There were a great many expensive pleasures that John liked, and his London rector, even though the Rev. John had a loud rich voice, only gave him the paltry salary of Two Hundred and Fifty Pounds a year. ‘Twice as much as a pig of a dissenter gets,’ so the rector told him, whose habit it was to allude to Low-Church curates as ‘pigs’ and ‘dissenters.’
    John’s London rector was a rich man of bold opinions. He had been a great sportsman in his time, and owned a large house in Wales. When he was down there he strode over the hills with an alpenstock and taught his three servants, nice town girls, to play golf. There was a wife, who remained somewhere, dressed in black, behind the girls.
    With his arm round his mother, the Rev. John turned over one or two more pages of thought matter not quite proper to be printed, and then he remembered that he had promised Mr. Taskerthat he would go down that evening and look at his pigs. Dr. George was writing letters, and John, who liked to have a companion, decided that it would be a Christian act to