South Riding (71 page)

“Oh, yes, to Mr. Reginald Aythorne. By the way, how is
Mrs.
Aythorne?”

There was no mistaking the demure sideways smile. Huggins opened his mouth to roar and then controlled himself.

“All right, I believe. They’ve moved south.”

“Ah. Very gratifying. That must be a great relief to you.”

“I don’t know what you mean and I don’t care. What I want to know is, what’s going to happen to the Wastes? You can’t just get away from it like that . . .”

“Like what? What are the Wastes to me?”

“Look here, Mr. Snaith, I’m not one of your clever business friends. I’m a simple sort of chap without much education, and you know it. I want this in A.B.C. language, please, and no funny business. I want to know what you’re going to do and what you expect me to do. We can’t go on working in the dark like this. We should tread on each other’s toes. Here it is as I see it.”

“Do tell me. And sit down, won’t you?”

Huggins sat.

“As I see it. Here we are going to build a new housing estate. You call up Astell and me and tell us that your money’s on Leame Ferry Waste, so to speak. You call me up a second time when I’m in a tight place . . .”

“Excuse me, you called on me.”

“Same thing.
And
you put me on to a good thing in land values. You lend me five hundred pounds and we invest it in them sheds on the Waste for security. Good. All right. But now you go to the Kingsport Corporation, and you sit on a joint committee, and you come back and tell us you don’t want Leame Ferry Waste after all. Oh, no. It’s no use to you, that isn’t. You want us to build south of the New Road. Where your new railway’s going. Well and good, well and good. But what about the sheds, eh? What about our little investment, eh?”

“I’ve never pressed you for repayment, have I?”

“Pressed me? Repayment?”

“That five hundred pounds. That little loan—because your daughter’s husband was in debt?”

“Good God, man, you don’t think we’d let it stop there? When we’d got a good tip? Why, Drew’s put in two thousand and Tadman another thousand, and Stillman wouldn’t part with the mortgage from Aythorne’s shed, and I’ve sold my life insurance to buy the forty acres below Tadman’s lot!”

“Oh,
that’s
the truth of the affair, is it?”

“Of course it is. Did you think we were all too slow to take your tip?”

Then Huggins saw that Snaith’s light eyes shone with disquieting brilliance.

“You don’t mean—you didn’t,” he stammered. “Surely you knew we should . . .”

“Conspire to defraud the county council?” suggested Snaith. “No. I can’t say that conclusion was uppermost in my mind. So it was you, Huggins, was it, who gave away your little plan to Carne by inviting him to join you. Why, I should like to know?”

“To stop him spoiling it all,” Huggins explained eagerly, sure here at least that he was on safe ground. “If he came in with us, he wouldn’t fight us on the council. That’s the way to get a man, you know. Make it worth his while to be on your side.”

“But what if you can’t? In this case, you see, it didn’t quite come off, did it? He demanded an inquiry into land purchase and libelled me.”

“That can’t hurt you much since he’s dead,” said Huggins brutally.

“No. Perhaps not. But I dislike imputations of corruption.”

“Well, it was you that put us on to it. It was your idea. You said . . .”

“Nothing at all about a conspiracy to force up land prices, I think. Really, you are even more stupid than I imagined. Didn’t you realise that this kind of thing can’t be done in the dark? Real estate can’t change hands and no one be any the wiser. There is such a thing as conveyancing; then there have to be leases and documents. I should have thought that a child in arms would know enough to steer clear of that kind of folly.”

“Every one does it.”

“Every one? Not in the South Riding. Nor in many other county councils, I think. Oh, I realise it has been done by certain members of town corporations, but sooner or later it usually comes out. And not very prettily, either.”

But Huggins had had enough of Snaith’s schoolmasterish superiority. He leant across the desk dark and menacing.

“Then why the hell did you put me on to it? What did you invest your five hundred for? Don’t tell me it was charity.”

“I shouldn’t dream of being so stupid as to call it charity.”

“I suppose you meant to have a gamble, and then got scared by Carne, and went doubling back.”

“To have a gamble. Yes. But not quite in the way you mean.”

“Then will you please tell me what you
do
mean. Because I give it up.”

“My dear Huggins, has it never occurred to you that there are more ways than one of gambling? Some people prefer horses, some cards; others go in for the stock exchange. Now I prefer to lose money on human nature. I pride myself on knowing it, and I like to back my fancy. Now there were several ways I could have spent that five hundred pounds— bought another motor-car, though I already have one, invited a number of people whom I dislike to share meals, which would give me indigestion, in my house which I prefer to have to myself. Travelled to America, which I have no desire to revisit. Added another wing to my house—which is already large enough. But no. On the whole I decided to expend it upon my hobby. That would give me more pleasure. So I handed it over to you, to see what you would make of it. After all, I had admirable Biblical precedent. Would you spend it on your family, your women, your social reputation—or would you put it into a napkin and bury it in the earth? Apparently you used it, very properly, to buy off Bessy Warbuckle’s blackmail, and then, fascinated by the ease of the game, tried to turn speculator. But it’s no good, you know. It doesn’t suit your naturally open, simple and sentimental nature.”

“You mean—you just lent me that money to see how I’d act?”

“Certainly, and allow me to assure you that it was worth it.”

Slowly Hugging rose. He towered over the little alderman.

“You did this to amuse yourself, did you? For fun, eh? You’ve not just made a fool of me. You’ve made me sin. For fun. Not for gain, not to get yourself out of a scrape, not to beat an enemy. Just for fun. Gambling with human nature— for your hobby. Because you’re rich and clever and know a thing or two we poor chaps don’t, eh?”

Huggins was a preacher. Eloquence and moral indignation were his
forte.
His training and experience came now to his aid. He never paused for words.

“All right. I’m not complaining. I shall take my medicine, don’t you fret, and face my colleagues and tell them we’ve been fooled and we shall have to stand the racket. But just understand this, please. I’m a sinner. I confess it. And I’ve caused others to sin. And I shall bear whatever just penalty God exacts of me. But you, you, you!” The great raw-beef fist shot out. “You, who gamble with human souls for your amusement—who tempt others to fall into traps that don’t happen to threaten you. You, who go creeping and crawling along the earth on your belly like the snake you are, seeking what Christian’s soul you can send to perdition, with your little loan here, and your little job there, and your hints and your tips and your insinuations, pushing others over the brink of hell and holding back yourself! Always on the right side of the law while you hurl others to destruction. You— you—you!”

Words at last failed him. Striding round the desk he took the little alderman by the shoulders, lifted him clean out of his chair, and shook him—shook him till his eyes protruded, his lips turned blue, and his teeth rattled and finally stuck sideways on their loosened plate half-way out of his mouth in an extraordinary independent grin. Then he dropped him, like a broken doll, into his seat and stood contemplating his handiwork.

Snaith slid forward, only half conscious, incapable of movement.

Huggins fell to his knees.

“Oh, God,” he prayed, “behold us sinners. Look down upon us in Thy everlasting mercy. Thou knowest our inmost thoughts, whatever they be, righteous or unholy. Do judgment, Oh, God, according to Thine infinite pity. Oh, Lord, I have been Thy servant Let me never be confounded. Amen, Amen.”

He rose. He strode out of the office and down the ringing stone corridor. He knew that he was a ruined man. He would retire from the council. He had thrown away his savings. His reputation was at a man’s mercy.

But he breathed great draughts of air into his lungs. Triumph exalted him. He had told Snaith what he thought of him. He was triumphantly free. He had spoken his heart before God in admonition.

He was due to give an address at the Davis Street Methodist Church at half-past five. He kept his appointment. He took as his text: “The sixth chapter of the Epistle of St. Paul to the Ephesians, tenth verse: Finally, my brethren, be strong in the Lord and in the power of His might. Put on the whole armour of God that ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.”

It was the sermon of his life.

Anthony Snaith, whom he thus accused of spiritual wickedness and identified with the powers of darkness, took longer to recover. He rose stiffly, pulled out his teeth and found the plate cracked, put them in again regretfully and began to straighten his hair.

He was trembling violently. Since his oppressed and bullied boyhood he had retained a horror of physical violence. What Huggins had done to him had affected him more profoundly than in its immediate consequences.

There was a carafe with water and a tumbler balanced upon it on the side table. Snaith groped his way towards this, gulped down a long drink of the tepid and dusty fluid, and felt rather better. He sat down and tried to come to terms with himself. His pulses were leaping, his head ached, his whole body trembled in an ague.

Yet his collapse was wholly corporeal. Already his quick mind was analysing the experience, already his thin lips twitched to a doubtful smile.

For Huggins was wrong. Snaith did not wish men to do evil. He was only torn between two principles of desire. Sometimes he wished to frustrate and thwart men’s natures, so that they might all be as he was, impotent of passion. In that desire lay negation and lethargy and death.

But sometimes he wished them to fulfil their natures. He remembered very well his desire for Huggins. That five hundred pounds had been the price of life, of vitality, of fulfilment. Tempestuous, lustful, violent, whatever the preachers was by nature, that he should be. Poverty should not frustrate him. Fear should not hold him back.

And he had run true to type. On the whole, that was very satisfactory. Even this ridiculous business of buying up the Wastes had a crude liveliness and initiative about it. Snaith could imagine those earnest Kiplington tradesmen cherishing their dreams of enrichment in their crochet-decorated parlours. Well, well, well. Not entirely wasted money.

Not entirely wasted because even his bruised body and aching head reminded him that he had not, after all, that day been quite without experience of passion. He had been literally swept off his feet by an orgasm of fury. He had been, as they say, shaken well out of himself. And there was an odd masochistic pleasure to be found in this contact with energy, even though the energy itself were hostile—a sort of vicarious satisfaction, a novel response to unfamiliar stimuli.

He retied his tie in front of the little mirror, observing with critical attention the pale secret face reflected back at him.

It had done him no harm, and it would do Huggins good. Huggins would be a wiser, more honest man for that day’s work. For after the storm, Snaith reflected, came the whirlwind, and after the whirlwind (seeing that he was as good a Methodist as Huggins and knew his Bible), after the whirlwind, he thought, the still small voice.

T
OM
S
AWDON
was cleaning the petrol pumps in the Nag’s Head yard when the Cold Harbour bus stopped and a stranger alighted and stood looking up and down the level road. He was a tall slouching old fellow with a tweed deerstalker cap and long grey moustaches that blew in the brisk May wind.

“Hi, you!” he shouted. “Which way to Maythorpe Hall?”

“Straight along and it’s on your right. Big stone gate-posts among trees, with eagles on them.”

“How far?”

“Matter of a mile and a half to the gate. Half a mile up the drive.”

“Humph! Puff!” The old man had a chortling irritable cough. “They told me the buses passed the gate.”

“So they do if you stay in them long enough. You got out too soon, sir.”

“Fellow shouted ‘Maythorpe’!”

“That’s right. This is Maythorpe village.”

“What time’s the next bus?”

“About half-past five.”

“Damnation!”

A lively old fellow, a gentleman, Tom decided. Also a possible fare. He wrang out his cloth.

“Any taxis round here?”

“I have one, sir.”

“You have, have you? How much d’you charge to drive me to the Hall—
and
back?”