Mr. Tasker's Gods by T. F. Powys Read Free Book Online

the dining-room.
    That morning Mr. Turnbull came in to read prayers in a friendly mood. He even smiled athis son, who sat looking out into the garden as his habit was. Mrs. Turnbull was finding her place in the Bible. Mr. Turnbull had received that morning a dividend, larger than usual, the reason of its extra value being that in the town where the works were—and in the works was a portion of Mr. Turnbull’s money—there had been much distress amongst the poor, and the factory could hire female labour at a very low price. The babes in the town died in vast numbers of a preventible disease, the most preventible disease of all, simply starvation. The out-of-work men stood about and talked of the ‘to-day’s bride.’ They stood at street corners and said ‘bloody’ a great many times, this particular word denoting a mighty flight of imagination like the sudden bursting of a sewer. The ‘to-day’s bride’ in the picture paper was the niece of a duke. Some of the men thought her very pretty. One of the men, who was especially taken with the innocent look of the young bride—she owned all the poor part of the town—returned to his ‘home,’ the bride’s house too, and found in there a gaunt, haggard woman who was not his wife leaning over a bundle of dirty rags upon which lay his little son, starved, stark, and dead.
    Mr. Turnbull’s dividend carefully placed in the study drawer, he sat down to his breakfast with a ‘Thank God for this beautiful morning’ upon his lips. The eggs were good, Mrs. Turnbull  very pleased and patient, the idiot son very thoughtful and silent.
    Mr. Turnbull began to speak about the poor in his parish. He gave to the poor certain shillings sometimes out of the communion offerings, and twice a year he gave the children a tea. Just as he broke his egg he remembered, or rather his thoughts ran back, and fell down to worship the large dividend. He decided that the extra amount would more than pay the cost of the two teas, and that none of the few extra shillings that did get out of his pocket into the hands of the poor would have the chance to do so this year. Mr. Turnbull was glad. He looked around him, at the room, easy-chair, food, silent wife, silent son; he looked at the garden, at the little black clouds. He was satisfied; all this was very good, and after breakfast he went to the study to lock the dividend inside the safe. Mr. Turnbull then sat down by his table; he was content, he was ready to do what was right—to try to do what was right. He was making a sermon: it was his business to make the people understand sin. He felt serious when he thought of sin, and he also felt hungry.
    Mr. Turnbull took an interest in the young women of the village; he always called them ‘young women.’ He spoke to them at the evening service with fatherly prudence, recommending ‘household duties’ in preference to summer evening walks in leafy lanes, and hegave them solemn hints about the fate in store for backsliders. To this subject—about the leafy lanes—he appeared to be bound by a magic spell. He could never let it alone; the sight of a dainty white hat trimmed with a rosebud, in the back pew, was enough. He began, and somehow or other the word—not a very pretty word—‘uncleanness’ came inat the end. It always did come in at the end, and the hat with the flowers often bent forward to hide the face beneath when this peculiarly unpleasant word was uttered.
    To Henry it was quite a proper word, and he always applied it to a nasty heap of dirt that had found lodgment in a corner of the vicarage pew and naturally grew larger every Sunday because the church cleaner swept it there. ‘No doubt it was,’ he supposed, ‘against this heap of church dust that his father lifted up his voice in holy anger,’ and Henry wondered if this dust would ever rebel and try to get into his father’s eyes. The sermon was finished, the word ‘uncleanness’ being underlined, and the day passed as