Saltmarsh Murders

CHAPTER IV

maggots in the church porch and public house maggots

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Mrs. Coutts concluded Sunday breakfast with a third cup of tea and a final despairing exhortation to the vicar to threaten, from the pulpit, all those who misbehaved at the fête on the following day. The vicar made no answer and went upstairs to put on his boots.

The service went off much as usual, except that a little shrivelled woman, with a yellow skin and beady black eyes, sat in the Gatty pew beside Mrs. Gatty and that little Mr. Gatty, who was a regular attender at Morning Prayer whenever he was home for the weekend, was absent from the service. Both the Burts turned up. Most unusual.

Immediately the Benediction had been pronounced, Mrs. Gatty rose from her knees and walked down the centre aisle to the church door. Mrs. Bradley hastened after her. The rustic congregation, standing while the vicar and I and the choristers passed into the vestry, gaped after them. The greatest surprise was still in store, however, for, as the congregation passed out of the church, Mrs. Gatty, who was standing beside the broken and ancient holy water stoup in the porch, pointed her finger at the squire and announced in clear tones:

“Thou wast once a lion, and wast killed by the jawbone of an ass.”

This was so startling a rendering of the fact that Sir William, who had been an army officer, had found himself obliged to send in his papers because of malicious army-society gossip, that he turned very red, glared at Mrs. Gatty, and, almost dragging Margaret, who was holding his arm, hastened towards the lych gate and literally fled away. Mrs. Gatty next turned her attention to the innkeeper, a gross man, hairless and white-faced, with watery, pink-rimmed eyes. Although he got the cocoanuts cheap for us, I never really liked the man, good tempered though I always found him.

“And thou art unclean, pig that thou art,” she pronounced. The innkeeper smiled, with admirable self-restraint, I thought.

“That’s all right, Mrs. Gatty, ma’am,” he said, kindly. The smile gave a pleasanter impression of the man. He walked on.

I was the next to come under Mrs. Gatty’s notice. She pointed at me as the vicar and I came out at the vestry door.

“A kid of the goats! A kid of the goats!” she said. I blushed, I suppose. Anyway, I know I laughed.

“Oh, hang it, Mrs. Gatty!” I protested, and I would have gone on talking, but that Mrs. Bradley signalled me to depart. I don’t know why everybody obeys that little old woman.

Bransome Burns, the financier, was compared to a shark. He raised his hat in reply, and hastened down the road in pursuit of his host and his host’s daughter. He had been called a shark before, I suppose. Several others received marks of attention from Mrs. Gatty, and then Mrs. Bradley got her away, but not in time to save the vicar, who was compared by Mrs. Gatty to a curly-fronted bull; his wife was referred to as a camel and poor Daphne as a high-stepping, supercilious giraffe; an obvious libel, as, at any other time, I should have pointed out. Daphne took it well, of course, and giggled readily, and all of us went back to the vicarage pursued by the shrill comments of the mistress of the Moat House. Luckily we had scarcely thirty yards to go.

“I wonder where Mr. Gatty was?” said Daphne to me, as she lingered while I hung my hat on the hall stand. I do not usually wear a hat, except on Sundays. “Shall I come to the study and hear your headings?”

I was to preach at Evensong, and, I don’t know why, preaching at Evensong always puts wind up me. I’m all right in the morning, you know, but there is something about the solemn evening hour that gives me cold feet. The vicar won’t have the sermon read. He says that a rustic congregation does not like it, and I think it most likely that he is right. In spite of all the reasons, however, why it was essential that I should go into the pulpit well prepared, I rejoice to state that I put them aside, and closing the study door behind us, I took Daphne in my arms.

Whether I did rightly or wrongly, my luck held, and, having taken a deep breath and a last look at Daphne’s face, I plunged into my discourse that evening, and for nearly thirty-five minutes I held forth on the text, “They shall run and not be weary; they shall walk and not faint.”

Even the choirboys listened. I think they thought I was going to give them some tips for the sports on the morrow. So I did, as a matter of fact, for I talked, among other things, of the virtues of abstemiousness of all kinds. In fact, I preached the very sermon, in view of the Bank Holiday fête, that Mrs. Coutts would have given her ears to have the vicar preach. Both of them congratulated me afterwards, and Daphne held the lapels of my coat and told me that it was a lovely sermon, and that I was to ask her uncle, that night, for his consent to our engagement.

“What if he doesn’t give it?” I said. She replied:

“I wouldn’t marry you without it, old thing.”

This was a blow, as I considered it extremely unlikely that, with Daphne not yet nineteen, the vicar would consent to her binding herself. However, my luck was in. He listened until I had finished and then asked me about my prospects. Well, out of the thirty thousand, my mother and sisters had had twenty, of course, and I had retained the other ten. He seemed satisfied, and told me I was destined for a bishopric.

“You’ve a worldly outlook,” he said. He hesitated a moment, and then added, “Of course, I don’t want you two to marry yet. She isn’t old enough. But you may have an understanding, if you choose.”

I said to Daphne:

“Did you mean it when you said you wouldn’t do it without your uncle’s consent?”

“Yes,” she said. “So I’m glad he consented, Noel.”

So was I, by the end of the next day. There was a row at the Mornington Arms that evening. (The vicar had done his best to get the magistrate to refuse a license to Lowry if he insisted upon opening on Sundays, but as Lowry undertook not to open until eight o’clock, when the service was over, he got his licence.) Curiously enough, the dust-up was between Lowry himself and his barman, Bob Candy. It seems that Candy had tried to get up to see Meg Tosstick and make her name the father of her baby, and had tried to shove Mrs. Lowry out of the way. She called out for Mr. Lowry, and Mr. Lowry came running up and ordered Bob out of the house. Bob thereupon turned round upon both the Lowrys and accused them roundly, in the presence of several witnesses, of terrorising the girl into keeping her mouth shut. The Lowrys were very indignant at this, and both tried to shout Bob Candy down, and five of the customers took him and locked him in the woodshed in case he should get violent. They don’t seem to have been at all gentle with him; probably, as he was the official chucker-out to the pub, they had some old scores to settle. Bob soon seems to have cooled off in the woodshed— owing, probably, to his unfortunate ancestry, he was terrified of the darkness—and he apologised to Mr. Lowry and begged to be set free, and they told him that Meg Tosstick, far from being terrorised at the inn, was being treated like their own daughter, and that the dear good vicar—old Coutts, of course—had asked that she should have every comfort and attention. All this was also said in front of several witnesses. Interesting evening at the Mornington Arms, I should imagine. Still, only one thing happened to mar the day, as far as I was concerned. Upset, I suppose, by the row at the inn, Bob Candy came round last thing at night—that is, at about eleven o’clock—to say that he would not play in the cricket match on the morrow. This was a fearful blow to us. Bob, although no scientist with a bat, was the sort of chap you find in some village teams—a man with a good eye and a gift for perfect timing. On his day you simply couldn’t get him out. We always used to put him in first, because he was a highly restive, excitable sort of bloke underneath his bovine, brooding exterior, and would work himself up into a fearful state of nerves while waiting for his knock. So he went in first, and I’ve known him, not once, but twenty times, carry his bat. And he was no stonewaller, mind you. He would pick out unerringly and smite unmercifully every ball that was hittable. The others he would leave alone or block. He held a straight bat as though by nature. A natural player, in fact, if ever there was one. And as rotten a field as you’d meet in a fortnight’s progress through the shires. We used to play him at mid-off, because village batsmen always hit to leg. It’s using a scythe does it. Bred in the bone, those leg strokes of a village batsman. Bob had his uses at mid-off, of course. For instance, you could depend upon him to appeal, in a threatening bass, at every doubtful point in the game. Useful that, with an umpire like Sir William, who wants to do his best for the village, but isn’t really taking much interest in the match. It guides his decision, so to speak. Unsporting, of course. But then, village cricket always is. That’s what makes it so frightfully sporting, if you know what I mean.

Bob, therefore, was a real loss to us. He would give no reason for dropping out at the last minute, except to say that Lowry had given him a holiday until six o’clock and he didn’t want to go to the fête, so he was going off by himself. In the end, we had to let it go at that. A cursed nuisance, of course. We argued for about an hour, but it was not a scrap of good. The poor mutt had made up his mind. Apart from this, I went to bed a happy man. I soon fell asleep, and dreamed about Daphne. It was one of those nebulous dreams. Nothing exactly happened, but we were together and I was extraordinarily bucked. William woke me at six-thirty on the following morning to come and bowl to him, and I was so full of beans that I actually arose from a perfectly comfortable bed, and went and did it. Got him second, fifth and seventh balls, too.