The Hopkins Manuscript

CHAPTER TWELVE

As the weeks passed by I discovered that the people of Beadle had divided themselves into three definite schools of thought.

The first school, and the one that claimed the largest following, was influenced by the country gentlemen whose views upon the matter reached the Fox & Hounds by way of their grooms and gardeners and chauffeurs.

In the opinion of the country gentlemen ‘the moon business’ was all a scare. Nothing would happen, but if it did, it would happen in China where that sort of thing always happened. In their opinion, it would not affect England. Things like that did not happen in England. We should ‘muddle through’ as we always had done in other troubles. We had a Government with a strong majority and the police were equal to anything.

I liked this view. It was healthy and defiant, and I sincerely wished that I could subscribe to it in full sincerity. It was the view most likely to assist in keeping law and order to the end, and I invariably supported it in public.

The second, or ‘middle school’ of thought was that which followed the opinion of the newspapers. The moon would ‘graze’ us: it would give us a big thrill, a severe jolt that might cause some damage, and bounce off again into space, never to return.

I think the people who believed this were the happiest, for they had something genuinely exciting to look forward to. They were prepared to see the stately beech trees of Burgin Park come crashing down like nine-pins: they were ready for a deluge, a hurricane, a terrific blowing about of dustbin lids, and a very fine sight as the moon passed overhead almost within touching distance. They did not, I think, associate any of this damage with themselves, and they talked vigorously and endlessly in the Fox & Hounds until closing time. And even after closing time they would stimulate the cool night air with their fantastic imaginings, frequently forgetting the huge, glittering ball in the sky above.

The third school of thought, the members of which I at all times endeavoured to avoid, were those who were known at the Fox & Hounds as the ‘prepare ye for the end’ crowd. They mustered, I should say, about one in ten of the population of Beadle and were drawn from all classes irrespective of calling and creed. These people were quite certain that the moon would destroy the earth completely, and they reacted to their terrible conviction according to their characters and temperament.

I have since realised that these were the genuinely brave people of the world. The majority of the rest of us preferred other opinions because we could not face the thing that was most likely to happen.

This school of thought was represented in its highest form by Hubert Edwards, our Vicar. From the evening upon which he first received the news I believe that Mr Edwards was convinced that the end had come. He did not accept it as a dramatic gesture of God’s wrath: he humbly and reverently believed that God in His wisdom had decided that the earth had served its purpose as an abode for His creatures, and that He was about to place it amongst the milliards of dead worlds that had, in their own time, played their inscrutable part in the Universal Scheme. His faith was unshaken, for Heaven, in Hubert Edward’s mind, was not local to the earth; it embraced every living creature that had played its part in every world in the unfathomable spaces around us. Nor did he lapse into religious heroics. He pursued his work in the village serenely and cheerfully: he well knew that many of his parishioners believed that the earth would survive, but never by word or inference did he seek to influence their views. Although he must have known the dugout to be a pitiful waste of time he was there every day, frequently with his coat off, wheeling a barrow: he was here, there and everywhere with a cheery joke and a large bottle of fruit tablets which he distributed as thirst quenchers. Perhaps the greatest tribute that can be paid to Hubert Edwards is that everyone attended his services every Sunday, and everyone secured renewed hope from them, no matter whether they belonged to the ‘all is well’ school, ‘the moon will graze us’ party or the fatalists. He spoke as he had spoken for twenty-five years in Beadle Church, simply because he had spoken his best from the day he came to us.

To this last school of thought, but at the opposite and most revolting end, belonged Murgatroyd, the publican. He, too, believed the end to be upon us – but it was an end that reeked of hearses, musty black plumes and grave-clothes. In his haunted, jaundiced eyes there lurked the mould of new-dug graves – in his hunted brain gleamed the spade of the sexton – the toll of the bell – blackness – dirt – and corruption.

He was rarely seen in the bar of the Fox & Hounds. Mabel, who tended the wants of customers, said that he brooded for hours by the fire in his fœtid little bed-sitting room upstairs: she said that he read the Bible and Whitaker’s Almanack, and moulded grotesque little figures out of putty. If he drank any longer he drank in secret, and almost every evening, when the spring twilight fell across the meadows, he would put on an old bowler hat that he used to go to the Races in, and walk the six miles through the valley to his bedridden old mother at Lullington. The old lady was senile and understood nothing: it was doubtful whether she even knew who he was, for he had neglected her for twenty years. But they said he would read scraps from old magazines to her, and sit there in silence until she had been asleep for hours, then wander home beneath the midnight sky.

The February moon grew to fullness and waned without creating undue excitement in Beadle; it was very large, and golden more than brilliant. Its face had given place to the mountain ranges of the telescope, but it behaved in an orderly manner and in some ways, I think, aroused disappointment and a good deal of crowing from the ‘all is well’ school. There were some who even asserted that it was smaller during its last days, and that it was going away again.

We were now in the midst of March, with a bare six weeks to the fatal night of the 3rd of May. I no longer attended the meetings of the British Lunar Society. Scientific calculations had ceased to interest me: the sharp edges of my hopes and fears had worn smooth by their frequent and painful friction against reality, and I no longer suffered acute feelings of any kind. I had fallen into a state of resignation, but I was not altogether unhappy. Orders had come from the Government that we were to make three separate entrances to our dugout as precaution against one, or even two of them becoming blocked. This provided plenty of healthy work, and I had never felt fitter in my life. I toiled all day with my wheelbarrow and in the lengthening spring evenings I even found heart to potter in my garden. I actually mowed the lawn, but thought it too absurd to weed it. The daffodils were very beautiful, clustered in the corners of my meadow, and I spent many evenings in my yew tree arbour gazing wistfully upon their sheen in the fading sun.

Something happened one evening towards the end of March which must have been fate’s recompense for all that I had suffered – a friendly whisper of fate that urged me, towards sunset, to take my stick and walk across the downs. It was so trivial and casual in its beginning, and yet it was to bring such happiness to the tragic days ahead.

At the northern corner of my meadow I had cut a way through the thornbushes and laid a plank across the deep surrounding ditch so that I could walk straight up the hillside to the springy turf of the downs. This little ready-made bridge had always been the starting point of my favourite evening stroll. It led me for three miles along the ridge to the edge of a pine wood from which the whole plain lay before me, and on a fine spring evening I could watch the sun set over the meadows and still be home in ample time for dinner.

It was a boisterous evening of dark cloud that scurried in the rising wind, and as I neared the end of my journey I saw two solitary figures approaching me: two dark, striding figures against the narrow, lemon-tinted strip of sunset that lay squeezed against the horizon beneath the gathering storm. As they came towards me I saw them to be a girl and a boy. Their coats were fluttering and their heads were bent to the fierce gusts that moaned across the downs, and suddenly the girl’s beret blew off, and the boy chased it over the crest of the hill. I could not help admiring the girl as she stood there against the sunset: there was something in the manner of her bearing, something in the way she stood with her legs planted against the power of the gale, that told me that she would stand up against far more than a howling wind if need be.

I am a man of retiring nature with an absurd instinct to circle right around a fellow mortal who happens to be as solitary as myself, but a friendly fate was guiding me that evening: I walked straight on, and as I was about to pass, the girl turned with a merry laugh and spoke to me.

‘He’s got it!’ she cried.

In my embarrassment I replied with a singularly futile remark.

‘Lost your hat?’

She nodded towards the boy upon the slope beneath us.

‘Do him good,’ she said. ‘He’s getting too fat.’

The boy was returning with the little blue beret clenched in his fist, and I would not have said from his lithe, striding figure, that he stood in much need of exercise. And as he came up with us I recognised Robin Parker, Colonel Parker’s nephew, of The Manor House – the boy whom I had met with his uncle at Waterloo Station a few weeks ago when he was returning for his Christmas holidays.

The recognition caused me to glance quickly back to his companion, and I realised that this tall, pleasant girl must be his sister. I remembered her quite well as a child, riding her pony across the downs, but I had lost touch with her since she had been away at school. Children have a most startling way of suddenly growing up.

The boy recognised me at once. ‘D’you remember me, sir?… at Waterloo Station?… You know my uncle… my name’s Parker.’

I was pleased to be remembered so easily by a boy whose crowded schooldays must bring so many and varied faces before him…

‘Of course I remember,’ I said, and wished that I could think of some easy, amusing thing to say. But my life had brought me very rarely into the company of young people and I’m afraid I could only add the rather silly, drawing-room visitor’s remark… ‘I remember you even although you are growing up so fast…’

‘He’s much too fat,’ repeated the girl… ‘look how he’s puffing!’

‘I’m not too fat!’ retorted the boy. ‘I might have been once but I’m not now! Anyway, you’d be out of breath if you’d chased a greasy little hat for half a mile.’

Suddenly the boy became conscious of his social duties.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘This is my sister Pat’ – and I felt the firm pressure of the girl’s cool hand.

‘I remember you quite well,’ I said, ‘when you used to ride your ponies up here on the downs.’

‘Adam and Eve!’ the girl laughed. ‘They’re pensioned off now. Adam’s older than I am… he’s nearly twenty-one.’

I should say that Pat was about nineteen, and her brother a couple of years her junior: she was pressing her little beret upon her head and it was a slander upon her brother’s part to call it ‘greasy’. It was surprising how quickly she made it look so neat and attractive: an ordinary woman would have taken an hour to achieve that carefree, jaunty tilt before a looking-glass. She just rammed it on, pushed her hair up, and there it was.

‘You live in the house that looks across at us from the other side of the valley, don’t you?’ she asked. ‘We’ve often argued about it.’

Why on earth such an obviously polite remark should have pleased me so much I do not know, but it certainly did please me to think that Pat should have argued about where I lived.

‘That’s mine,’ I replied, ‘and the meadow below, in the valley.’

‘With all those neat little chicken-runs?’ she enquired. They were not ‘little’ by any means, nor should one describe them as ‘runs’, but anything that this girl said was pleasant, and very far from objectionable. If Dr Hax or the publican had called them ‘runs’ it would have been different: they were ‘poultry houses’ – scientifically designed – scientifically heated and ventilated according to my own patent…

‘Yes,’ I replied with a smile… ‘all those neat little chicken-runs!’

Without formal arrangement or accepted invitation I found myself strolling back with the boy and girl across the downs. They were so charmingly natural, so easily friendly that I felt within a few minutes as if I were an uncle upon a visit to The Manor House.

Pat and Robin had only returned home that afternoon. ‘Pat’s at Oxford,’ said Robin, ‘pretending to read History.’

‘Reading History like mad,’ corrected Pat.

Robin was at Eton. It had been hoped to keep the schools and colleges open until the normal end of term but parents had made such urgent appeals to have their children with them for every moment of these last, pitiful days that nearly all the big public schools and the universities were closing that week.

‘The Vice-Chancellor of Oxford,’ said Pat, ‘announced that owing to present circumstances Hilary Term will end a week earlier than arranged, but if anything miscarries, and the world refuses to end on the 3rd of May, then Summer Term will be extended two weeks until July 4th to make up for the loss of time. Isn’t that perfect Oxford!’

‘Perfect!’ I replied. ‘But I was at Cambridge – and I’m sure Cambridge will ignore a trivial matter of this kind!’

They laughed. It was delightful to hear the way they laughed at my jokes which are normally too subtle for stodgy, ordinary people. But as they laughed I wondered what thoughts lay behind those steady, fearless eyes. Could they understand? They were of an age to understand, and I knew in that moment that never again, no matter what terrors came to me, would I be afraid.

‘Could I persuade you to stroll across to see my poultry?’ I enquired. ‘I’ve got some rather nice little birds over there.’

Robin stole a glance at his watch. ‘Sure!’ he said. ‘But we must be back by seven. Uncle’s a stickler for boiled shirts at dinner. If I were to sit down in a sweater, he’d say “let the world end and be done with it!” ’

The wind was whistling through the thorn hedge as I led Pat and Robin across the plank bridge to my meadow. Pat fell in love with Broodie at first sight and Robin was immensely struck by my game little Bantam cockerels. Broodie, who had grown a little sedate beneath the load of her many honours, grew quite skittish when Pat dangled a tuft of groundsel above her head, and Robin showed me how to mesmerise a Bantam by holding its head beneath its wing and revolving it in rhythmic circles in his hands. I did not like this altogether because the other Bantams pecked the little mesmerised bird when it came to, but I was not preparing them for an immediate show so it did not matter.

I persuaded Pat and Robin to come into my library. It was the first time I had ever entertained such young and amusing visitors, and it was lucky that I could produce a bottle of ginger beer for Robin, and a tin of chocolate biscuits that I had purchased for my bridge evenings. Pat, the grown-up young lady, accepted a glass of sherry and sipped it as though she had taken it all her life!

I showed them my stamp collection and they were both very envious of my three-cornered Cape of Good Hopes. I was about to read them an article I had just prepared upon Migrating Birds when Robin leapt to his feet like a jack-in-a-box and exclaimed: ‘Good heavens! – it’s nearly seven!’

I watched them stride down my hillside path in the dusk: they waved to me from the gate, and were gone. My library seemed very cheerless and empty when I returned to it. I could almost have wished to have left that little sherry glass upon the fireside table, just as Pat had laid it down. Those little balls of silver paper which Robin had pulled from the chocolate biscuits shone in the fender more brightly than my fire.