The Hopkins Manuscript

CHAPTER EIGHT

The day upon which the news was broken to the world turned out to be one of the most disappointing in my life. It sounds absurd, but it is true.

As far as the village of Beadle was concerned, the whole thing completely misfired. It was partly due to the weather, partly to the general dullness of the villagers, but the chief blame must rest with the Vicar himself.

I really do not know what I had expected. No doubt I imagined panic-stricken people running screaming down the lanes, leaping stiles and burying their faces in the meadow grass – I visualised a fear-maddened mob smashing down the doors of the Fox & Hounds, bursting open the cellars and drinking themselves into stupor – I imagined others refusing to leave the church and kneeling the whole night in prayer. It was natural for me to imagine a hundred fantastic happenings when at last the ordinary people knew their fate. But I must explain what actually occurred and dwell no longer upon my imaginings.

To begin with, we were extremely unfortunate with the weather. I awoke to the dreary dripping of water from the drainpipe beneath my window and when I drew the curtains I saw my garden as it can only look upon a wet Sunday in January. The bare branches of the trees were slimy with rain and the sodden, worm-cast lawn looked bald and hopeless. Even my cheery little Bantams scarcely raised their heads when I went to feed them.

The Sunday papers were unusually dull, and I filled in the time before morning service by heating some glue over the dining-room fire to gum a strip of green baize in my bookcase. The door of this bookcase had a way of opening by itself and I hoped that this would stop it.

The rain had almost ceased by the time the bell began to call us to the service, and a weak, watery sun had edged its way half-heartedly through the clouds.

From my bedroom window, as I dressed for the service, I looked down for the last time upon the placid people of Beadle as they threaded their way along the winding lanes in their Sunday clothes. Never again, I reflected, would they walk so placidly – so free from care.

In my annoyance of the previous night I had nearly decided to ignore the service as a protest against the Vicar ignoring my help, but curiosity had got the better of me and I reached the church with the last peal of the bell.

St. Peter’s, Beadle, had none of the charm associated with an ancient country church. Although its vaults burrowed down into the thirteenth century its structure had been destroyed by fire in the reign of George II. It had been rebuilt with an ugly, light-brown brick from a neighbouring kiln, and while it possessed attractive bells and a passable tower, the soil that it stood upon was so poor that no ivy or creeper had ever mustered the energy to climb its walls and even the churchyard yews lived in a state of perpetual exhaustion. Two stained-glass windows, the gift of the second Lord Burgin, only served to enhance the forlorn bleakness of the others, and the morning sun had a way of shining diagonally upon the faces of the congregation, making repose most difficult.

The Vicar was respected and popular in a limited way, but despite his twenty-five years in Beadle he had never shaken off the disadvantages of following the fiery old ‘Vicar Hutchings’ who had become almost legendary in the village and its neighbourhood by reason of his terrifying denunciation of every form of evil and most forms of good. When Vicar Hutchings had burst a blood-vessel at the Harvest Festival in 1920, the arrival of the timid, middle-aged Mr Edwards was scarcely noticed for twenty years and it was only recently that he had become a part of Beadle. Normally his congregation numbered about eighty of the 130 people in the parish, but only a stalwart fifty braved the weather on this historic Sunday. As I pulled off my galoshes in the porch I glanced at their placid, cow-like faces and wondered what they would all be thinking as they walked home under sentence of death.

Presently the shuffling and whispering died away with the entrance of the Vicar. A few late-comers crept into their places and the service began. The old man showed no sign of strain or distress. I thought that his face seemed a little paler, but his childlike grey eyes were as serene as ever.

The service followed its placid, age-encrusted course: the old man read one or two routine announcements, then cleared his throat and removed his spectacles. I saw the notes before him and I knew that the time had come.

In some respects he delivered his message well. The old man possessed dignity, and a clear, pleasant voice. I learned later that the bishops had issued merely a statement of fact and a few suggestions, leaving each vicar to frame his message in words most suitable to his own congregation. But when I say that Mr Edwards delivered the message well I only mean that the quality of his voice and his calm behaviour were open to admiration. The message itself was, as I expected, quite hopeless from the start. In his endeavour to avoid alarm the meaning of it all became misty and obscure, and his attempt to blend it with the old-fashioned forms of conventional sermon made it sound almost exactly like what he had said every Sunday for twenty-five years. He blundered and stammered pathetically at one point when he attempted to explain the scientific aspect of the matter, and was far more at home when he was appealing to his congregation to accept God’s will.

He spoke for nearly twenty minutes. When he finished there was a slight rustling of satin Sunday dresses and the hollow pop of a farmer’s starched front as he relaxed his position. I do not believe that half a dozen people in the whole of that gathering had the slightest idea of what the Vicar had been talking about. I glanced over my shoulder at the cluster of pink, vacant faces behind me: a thin slant of sunlight fell upon them from the gaunt, unstained windows, and those faces looked like a bunch of moons themselves. But unlike the one the Vicar had been talking about, these moons around me would never in a thousand years draw nearer to the earth.

The congregation knelt in prayer as they had done in Beadle since Richard Cœur de Lion built their church to gain God’s favour in his first Crusade: they filed out very slowly as old ladies blocked the way in their search for umbrellas and galoshes in the porch, and as I pulled on my own galoshes I was cheered by a sudden inspiration.

I had expected to leave church that morning robbed of all my superior knowledge of the moon’s descent upon us: I had expected that the secret I had held with a chosen few would by now be shared by everyone in Beadle, but owing to the incompetence of the Vicar and the bluntness of the congregation my secret seemed to be as safe as it ever was.

But with one vital, all-important difference! – I was now free to talk! – I was free to explain it all, clearly and sanely and vigorously – and succeed where the Vicar had so ignominiously failed!

It was twelve o’clock. I would go at once to the Fox & Hounds! No longer would I be a barely tolerated visitor! – In a few moments I would be the centre of a stunned, silent audience: I would play before the people of Beadle the part that Professor Hartley had played before the Members of the British Lunar Society. I would become the one man in this village, the one man for miles around, whom everyone would seek! Dr Hax and the Vicar would become nonentities and I the hero! I would pay these old fools back in their own coin and show them what it felt like to be snubbed and neglected. The reader may feel that I was ungenerous at that moment, but he will readily sympathise and support me when he thinks back upon the treatment I had received from the ‘big men’ of the village.

As I hurried through the lingering congregation I quickly received my first opportunity. Old Barlow, the postman, was standing at the gate arguing with his wife in a heated voice. He stopped me by laying a hand upon my arm.

‘Mr Hopkins,’ he said. ‘What was it the Vicar said was going to happen on the 3rd of May?’

‘He said,’ I replied in a quiet voice, ‘that on the 3rd of May the moon will strike the earth and the world will end.’

To my astonishment the old man turned to his wife with an idiotic leer of triumph.

‘There you are!’ he cried. ‘I told you it wasn’t no Bazaar! Nobody ever has Bazaars in May!’

‘We had a Bazaar in May six years ago,’ shouted the old woman. ‘It was for the new club-room – and it was May because the stalls were got up with lilac blossom!’

I was about to explain in detail but the two old fools went doddering down the lane, abusing one another.

A girl was shouting at her deaf grandmother, almost at my elbow.

‘He says the world’s going to end, Grandma!’

‘Eh?’ said the old lady.

‘He says,’ bawled the girl, ‘the world’s going to end!’

The old lady’s eyes lit up in a gleam of memory.

‘That’s more like old Vicar Hutchings,’ she cackled. ‘Vicar Hutchings used to say that every Sunday.’

I heard the girl still shouting as they turned the bend in the lane.

‘He says it’s going to end on the 3rd of May!’

‘That’s what old Vicar Hutchings always said,’ murmured the old lady. ‘But Vicar Hutchings never gave no date.’

I do think that a lot of the blame must be laid upon the long-deceased Vicar Hutchings. That fiery old man had so often consigned the people of Beadle to eternal flame, wrath to come, etc, that the gentle Mr Edwards with his plunging moon was naturally a bit of an anticlimax.

I think the average feeling amongst the congregation that morning was that Mr Edwards, growing jealous of the undiminishing fame of his vigorous predecessor, had tried to pull it off himself with the moon as a novelty in the place of Vicar Hutchings’ hellfire, but that he did not possess the personality to get away with it.

But at least a glimmering had apparently sunk into the people after all. A little group, mostly younger members of the congregation, had gathered around the vestry door and Mr Edwards was speaking to them. I pitied the old man for having to suffer the added torment of explaining it all for a second time, but I really had no patience with him. He should have made it clearer upon his first attempt. I hurried off to the Fox & Hounds, burning to play my own dramatic part.

But apparently I had been forestalled. Murgatroyd, the proprietor, was hurrying out as I arrived. He was dragging his coat on, his hat was askew and he was surrounded by a group of chattering villagers. He stared at me with his usual impudence and shouted out:

‘Have you heard all this claptrap about the moon!’

‘It is true,’ I replied. ‘I knew it all three months ago.’

‘Then why the hell didn’t you tell us, you damn fool!’ he shouted, and then, ignoring me and turning to the villagers: ‘Come on! – let’s go and see this doddering parson!’

His rudeness infuriated me, and for the first time in my long residence in Beadle I lost my temper in public. Had I been a man of lower standing in the village I should have knocked the fellow down. As it was I ran after him along the road and shouted:

‘You were kept in ignorance because a fool like you would have gone off his head with fright! – that’s why you were not told!’

I was about to say a great deal more when an old man walking beside the landlord – an old fellow who farmed a smallholding near Tewcastle – laid a hand upon my arm and said: ‘Keep your head, sonny. It’s up to all of us to keep our heads!’

The humiliation of this nearly suffocated me: I strove to reply, but words failed me. I was being told to ‘keep my head’! – I! – I who had known the truth for twelve weeks – who had held this dreadful secret in such iron control that none had suspected it – was told by a fat-headed farmer to ‘keep my head’!

Without another word I turned upon my heel and strode away to my hilltop home, thanking heaven that I lived in a little world of my own, remote and aloof from the village yokels. There is something ugly and indecent about smug ignorance. I felt that I needed to wash my hands and face and rinse my mouth before I could return with dignity to my own thoughts.

I had expected with every reason to become the friend and philosopher to every man, woman and child in Beadle as a result of my inner knowledge of the moon’s approach: I had expected to stand with the Vicar as a bulwark of courage and wisdom against the childlike fears of the villagers: I had expected to be given a leading part in the construction of the dugout upon the hillside, and here I was, ignored and insulted, driven back to the solitude that I had endured for twelve weary weeks. To make matters worse I had omitted, in my hurry to reach church, to remove the tin cup of glue that I had placed upon the fire to mend my bookcase. It had boiled up and overflowed and had stunk the house out. I opened all the windows and doors, and wandered in my garden while the smell blew away – I wandered like an exiled Napoleon upon St Helena, looking down with infinite contempt upon the people who had repudiated me.

I could never enter the Fox & Hounds again: I doubted if I would ever again see the Vicar, for he would have incessant callers and would probably lose his head completely in his sudden rise to importance. I was thrown back upon Mrs Buller, my housekeeper. It occurred to me that if I told her everything I knew, she would soon spread it amongst the villagers that I was a man with important facts and unique experiences to relate.

I accordingly detained the old lady when she came to remove my tea-tray. She had been to the morning service and I began by asking her what she thought about it all.

She told me that she hadn’t heard it all properly. She had been worried about the sweetbreads that she was going to fry for my lunch, for they had smelt a little strong when she had washed them. But she had thought Mr Edwards had been ‘quite good’ and quite like old Vicar Hutchings, whom she remembered as a girl.

I explained the whole thing to Mrs Buller in a few simple, selected words.

She nodded now and then, but did not even put the tray down.

I could see that her poor old cottage-bred brain was utterly unable to grasp the overwhelming significance of it. She had never, apparently, visualised the moon as a solid, spherical body revolving majestically in space: to her it was a flat, shining disc sewn to a dark fabric of black sky that moved overhead and took the moon along with it. She obviously had no notion of its size, or its original distance from the earth. Size was controlled by the distance she could see, and she had been short-sighted since a child.

The idea of the moon’s return to the earth did not disturb her very much: she was visualising, I could see, a large silver tray hitting the roof with a clang and bouncing down the hillside.

She remarked that she hoped it wouldn’t land upon the earth when it was a new moon, because in that case the sharp points might cut somebody. She asked me whether my sweetbreads had been all right, and went off to prepare dinner. She returned a moment later to say that if the smell of the glue upset me she would set my dinner in the library.

I lay back in my lonely chair, gazing into the fire, crushed by the heartrending isolation that must, I suppose, be the tragic lot of any intelligent man who lives in a village like Beadle.