The Hopkins Manuscript

CHAPTER THREE

I am very much a creature of habit. It was my invariable custom to say: ‘Good morning, Mrs Buller,’ when my housekeeper brought my tea at eight o’clock – and ‘Thank you’ as she placed the morning newspapers upon the counterpane beside me.

It was a simple little ritual, so deeply engraved by years of habit that frequently I spoke the words in my sleep. I know this to be a fact, because upon apologising to Mrs Buller one morning at breakfast for not acknowledging my early cup of tea she assured me that I had said ‘Good morning’ and then ‘Thank you’ just as usual, although my eyes had been closed.

But if ever that habit were broken it was upon the morning after the fantastic meeting of the British Lunar Society. So drugged was I by the deep, unwholesome slumber which had come to me at dawn that the first sound to penetrate my bemused brain was the clock in Beadle Church tower striking nine, and the first sight to greet my aching eyes was a stone-cold cup of tea on my bedside table with an unappetising pink-brown scum upon it.

Even so I could not move. One leg of my pyjamas, grim token of a restless night, was rucked tightly above my knee, but I had neither the energy nor the inclination to adjust it. Vaguely I knew that something had happened, but I was far too tired to reason what it was.

I think that my uppermost, conscious mind was trying hard to persuade me that I had experienced a most unpleasant nightmare and that I had only to arouse myself, jump out of bed and pull back the blinds to make everything all right and normal again. The nightmare, said my befuddled, conscious mind, would vanish with the daylight as the meadow mists before the morning sun.

But all the while my innermost, subconscious mind was warning me that nothing so simple as a nightmare had occurred – that very soon I must summon the energy to face a most unpleasant truth.

When the chimes of Beadle tower came clear-cut across the valley it meant that the wind was from the north. I was pleased about it this morning because it would dry the scythed grass in the meadow and enable us to stack it before the leaves began to fall. I was pleased – but I knew that I was silly to be pleased, and tried to wonder why.

I think it was the sight of my blue serge suit, lying carelessly, almost flauntingly across the armchair, that brought me to full consciousness and reasoning. It was a suit reserved for special occasions, and I usually folded it neatly and hung it in my wardrobe before retiring. The crumpled carelessness of those sprawled clothes reminded me of the large double whisky I had taken upon my return home, and with a cruel lash-cut of recollection the whole incredible business of the night before came back to me.

In the spring of the year the world would end, and that was why I had been silly to think about stacking the meadow grass. Fully awake I lay there for a while, my eyes upon the bright crack of sunlight that filtered through the drawn curtains.

I lay there and wondered what I ought to do. Seven months of life remained to me – two hundred days. A lot could be done in two hundred days. How ought I to change my mode of life to get the best from those precious remaining hours? It would give me pleasure, and others pleasure, if I were to give my money away. There would be no point in giving it to charity in a lump sum, for it would simply remain invested. I could draw it in the form of half-crowns and go around giving it to poor men and poor women and poor children, and receive a hundred surprised, grateful smiles a day for the rest of my short life on earth. The idea appealed to my impulsive nature, but after reflection I discarded it. It was my duty to avoid arousing any kind of suspicion, and if I were to give my money away people would naturally wonder why, and possibly guess the truth. I could not risk divulging the Secret in this way. Besides which, if anything miscarried and the world did not end after all, I should simply feel a fool. I could hardly expect my money back.

No. I must do my duty by carrying on exactly as if nothing had happened. Not by one hair’s breadth would I deviate from the routine of life which I had so carefully constructed for myself. I got up and shaved: I took my bath and dressed and breakfasted.

I gained fresh confidence as I stood admiring the view from my breakfast-room window. I was happily placed in this lovely, secluded backwater of England. There were scarcely a hundred people in the village and the nearest town was over six miles away. If panic came it could scarcely touch us here. If famine descended upon us, my vegetable garden and poultry farm would amply supply the needs of Mrs Buller and myself. Even if mankind ceased work in the face of approaching death, my pullets would carry on until the end: my pullets would keep up their average of seventeen eggs per day until their very nests were whisked to eternity.

But even with the knowledge of our President’s words so vividly in mind, I believed in my heart of hearts that nothing very serious would happen to the earth. The moon would go back to its place: it would not hit us – could not hit us, for reason told me that the Divine Power that controlled our destinies would not so suddenly and callously lose interest in us. God would not permit His handiwork to be blasted to senseless destruction. I could well imagine a certain hysterical type of preacher crying out that God was destroying us because we had proved ourselves unworthy of Him, but I had no patience with this silly stuff. If God could create us then God could control our brains and minds: if we had failed it was because He had been unable to make better creatures of us, and that was His fault – not ours. God must have as much reason and as much sense as the visible beings that He had created, and it was most unlikely that He would advertise His own shortcomings by destroying us.

It did not occur to me that this all-important world of ours was one of a thousand million worlds eddying in the great hive of the universe. It did not occur to me that God had an intense, burning interest in them all – that even as we seethed and strutted on our own little earth, God might be planning and creating life upon a million others. If two of His thousand million worlds were to collide and destroy each other there was no special reason why He should be more concerned than I should be if two specks of dust ran into one another in my breakfast-room when Mrs Buller was sweeping the carpet.

But these thoughts have come to me only in the bitterness of the past seven years. Upon that sunlit autumn morning I am afraid my vanity persuaded me that God would never permit the world to end until I personally had finished with it.

Anyhow, the principal fact remained that I was a bachelor aged forty-seven, of set habits and comfortable circumstances. Even if I had wanted to, I could not have altered those habits upon my own accord. It needed more than a mere threat: it needed a complete, head-on collision with the moon to alter what I considered to be my rightful mode of life. The Burhampton Poultry Show was on Saturday and I had a reputation to keep up. I had entered six handsome Wyandotte cockerels, and my first duty after breakfast was to remove their portable run (with the assistance of Haggard, my gardener) to a clean spot in the meadow where they could benefit from the sweet grass and nutritious insects that infested it.

It was a magnificent autumn morning of crisp sunlight and refreshing north-west wind. As I worked with my gardener, Captain Alec Williams, the riding master, came along with one of his grooms and a waggon to stack a load of grass.

I had an arrangement with Captain Williams by which he paid me four guineas a year for my meadow grass, he being responsible for scything and stacking it in a corner of the field and collecting it as necessary. He paid me half-yearly, in June and December, and it occurred to me, as I watched him at work, that if the worst happened on the 3rd May he would get four months’ grass for nothing.

I did not resent this personally, but knowing what an honest man he was I realised that he would never forgive me if I allowed him to die in my debt. I decided to drop him a line suggesting that he paid me quarterly, so that his guinea upon the 25th March would practically cover the grass to the end.

It is remarkable how quickly a fine sunlit day can dissolve one’s cares. As the morning drew on and the sun grew warmer, and the bracing wind blew away the remnants of my headache, I found the trouble about the moon receding right into the background. For ten minutes at a time I completely forgot about it, as a man working in the sunlight of a garden around a haunted house might forget the ghost within until the shadows lengthen across the lawn.

I had a half-bottle of my favourite claret for lunch, and as I sat smoking a cigar and reading The Times beside my fire I felt prepared to argue against the greatest scientist in the world that the whole business about the moon was an absurd hoax – that everything would be all right and that I should continue to enjoy life upon my little estate for years and years to come. It was too absurd to believe.

During the afternoon I had one difficult moment when Haggard, my gardener, was helping me to clip my shaped yews. Without any warning he asked me whether my meeting had gone off all right on the previous evening.

It was upon the tip of my tongue to tell him that it had gone off quite unexpectedly: gone off, in fact, with a considerable explosion, when I remembered my oath and replied lightly that it had been a pleasant meeting at which we had discussed the action of the moon upon the tides of the ocean. It was my first lie for the sake of humanity and I was pleased with it.

He asked me whether the tide went out further at Southend than it did at Brighton because Southend was nearer the moon. I replied that this was no doubt the reason and tactfully changed a subject which I did not wish to pursue by making a suggestion concerning the shape of one of my yew trees.

When I had purchased Beech Knoll five years ago, the yew trees lining the path to the front door were trimmed into the shape of rabbits sitting up on their hind legs. By carefully training and clipping each summer I had altered these figures into hens sitting upon nests. I had achieved this by allowing the lower portions of the rabbit to bush out a bit (to form the ‘nests’) and by training a small piece of foliage in each tree to resemble a hen’s tail.

I now suggested that in one tree, as an experiment, we might entirely cut away the foliage that formed the nest, trim down the base until we had two parallel stalks, and so make a very passable gamecock.

Haggard agreed enthusiastically, but in doing it we had the misfortune to cut the stem that supplied the foliage for the head. We had no alternative but to trim the tail into a head, with the disappointing result of what appeared to be a small fat man with his trouser legs turned up, paddling in the sea.

Those who know the slowness of a yew tree’s growth will realise what this meant. For years I would be forced to look at this grotesque monstrosity and explain it away as best I could to my friends. My nerves were no doubt upon edge and I am afraid I lost my temper when Haggard suggested trimming it neatly all round and having a cannon ball.

‘Leave it alone!’ I said. ‘Let it grow out and we’ll do what we can next year.’

Even as I said the words I felt a sudden, sick bewilderment. It needed something definite, something intimate like this mutilated yew tree to give me a full sense of proportion. Yews were late starters and seldom made new growth until mid-May or June, and there was never to be another May, or another June. The old trees stood before me – olive green in the fading light: for five years I had known them as the faithful, unsleeping sentinels that lined my path – that greeted me in the morning and rustled a ‘goodnight’ to my bedroom window. And now they were over. Most of my trees would have awakened from their winter sleep and clad themselves in a sheen of delicate spring leaves to meet their death on the 3rd of May – but my yews were ended for ever – they had thrown out their last green tips of growth this summer and were doomed never to grow again: the end would come before the spring life stirred in them – they would die in their sleep… it was bewildering, and horrible…

‘You all right, sir?’ enquired Haggard.

‘Of course I’m all right,’ I snapped. ‘Why?’

‘You’re looking quite pale, sir. Turns cold quick in this wind at sundown. Better be careful of chills, sir.’

I was angry, and made no reply. Haggard apparently thought me a weakling – chilled by a puff of wind. How quickly his contempt would have changed to wonder had he known the truth! – had he known the awful reality that I had faced with no more than a passing paleness!

I had been very proud of the terrible secret I had carried away with me from our Meeting: proud of the trust reposed in me – proud of my supreme knowledge over ignorant millions, but steadily my pride was turning to impotent annoyance. What, after all, is the pleasure of holding within oneself a colossal, awe-inspiring secret when nobody around one even knows that you are keeping it? No more good than a brave smile to hide a toothache when nobody knows you’ve got a toothache!

I had no heart for further work. As I glanced up from my darkening yew trees I saw that the sun was setting, and once again there had crept into the sky that pulsating, rusty glow. I felt utterly miserable as I watched Haggard striding down the hillside with an armful of tools. Out in this carefree, sunlit garden I had been able to cast aside my thoughts of dread reality, but the beauty of this dying autumn day was making more horrible the knowledge that never again upon this earth would there be another summer – never again a haze of violet blossom in May – never again the spangle of June roses.

As I walked towards the house I felt for the first time in my life a dread of my library – the room in which I had spent so many peaceful evenings of solitude – the room that suddenly loomed before me as the cell of a friendless, condemned man.

By nature I am a sociable fellow with a ready gift for making friends, but my numerous hobbies had of late years taken possession of me to such an extent that I had quite lost touch with neighbouring society. Night after night I was perfectly happy by myself in my well-stocked library. My poultry accounts, my notes on botany and my foreign stamp collection filled the winter evenings until dinner time, and the after dinner period was never long enough for all that I had to do. So much of a hermit had I become that my housekeeper had strict instructions never to disturb me once I had risen from dinner.

But now, as I entered my library, its very ‘cosiness’ repulsed me. Deliberately I had furnished it with dark, heavy curtains and solid, enduring furniture to give it an atmosphere of solitude and repose. Suddenly it took upon itself a suffocating oppression. I realised that I had made of this room a dark, soft-footed servant rather than a friend in need.

The fire was crackling brightly and nothing could look more inviting than the tray of tea that stood on the table in the flickering light. But I had no appetite. I toyed with a slice of seed cake but my mouth was so dry that the seeds almost rattled inside it, and I had to gulp some tea to dispose of them.

I had determined, in the false optimism of that sunlit morning, to make no change in my normal routine of life, but the shadows of an autumn evening threw a sadly altered light upon my vow. How horrible to sit alone in this room through the steadily lengthening darkness of the winter evenings! How terrible to sit alone, counting away the minutes that divided me from a ghastly end! There seemed no alternative: I could not suddenly begin a series of unexpected calls upon my neighbours, for that would arouse the surprise and suspicion that I was in duty bound to avoid.

But I knew that I must do something to preserve my sanity, and after long thought I resolved upon what may seem a pathetic attempt to alleviate my awful loneliness. I resolved to read from beginning to end the works of Sir Walter Scott. I possessed these in thirty volumes, and one a week would carry me far into the winter – even until the day when I should no longer need to nurse my secret.

As I rose and went to my bookshelves something happened to warn me of the dire state of my nerves. Mrs Buller had orders to pull my curtains firmly when she brought my tea, in order to give comfort to the room, but tonight these curtains worried me – I desired a sense of freedom, and I paused by the windows to draw them apart.

As I did so I glanced into the night. I saw the moon and nearly cried out in terror. It was rising over the valley – inflamed – diabolically swollen – hideously menacing! I dragged the curtains to, staggered to my chair and crouched over the fire. My forehead was cold and slimy with sweat. The scientists were right after all, but hopelessly wrong in their calculations, for the moon was already upon us! – I sat there quivering – waiting for the end: waiting for a rending crash in the beech trees – earthquake – tumult – blackness – eternity! By a strange twist of the brain that I have known so often since, I found myself struggling to decide whether there was any last thing I wanted to think about before the power of thought was beyond me for ever.

My jagged nerves had robbed me of the reason to reflect that the waning moon on a frosty October night was often yellow and distorted in size, and when presently I crept to the windows and peered through the crack of the curtains – when I saw it there – silver and serenely normal above the meadows – I cursed myself for an idiot and a coward.

I glanced at my watch. It was half-past six: an hour and a half before dinner time: a lonely dinner with more eternal time before I could go to bed. I could stand it no longer; I had to do something, and in desperation I decided to walk down to the village to buy some stamps at the post office.

I was happier out there in the clear, frosty night. I took the path across my meadow and climbed the stile to the village street. I had no fear of the moon out there beneath it: the moon and I knew all about each other now.

As I passed the gate of the Vicarage a new thought occurred to me. Last winter we had played one or two evenings of bridge. Hubert Edwards, the Vicar, his wife and I, and Major Willoughby from The Grange as a fourth, had arranged a weekly game, but the Major fancied himself a good player – insisted upon 6d a hundred and was so exceedingly difficult to get on with that the arrangement collapsed after three weeks, I having lost seventeen shillings and the Vicar and his wife nearly a pound between them.

Nothing had been said about bridge this winter, but here was a ray of hope – a chance to break the endless monotony of the empty nights that loomed ahead of me.

The Vicar was at a meeting, but Mrs Edwards was delighted to see me. She was quite sure that Hubert would enjoy a game on Tuesday evenings and suggested Mr Fayne-Higneth, Lord Burgin’s new agent, as a fourth. She and the Vicar would be happy to dine with me on Tuesday next at seven and would bring Mr Fayne-Higneth with them.

I was so pleased with this quick success that I decided to postpone my purchase of postage stamps until the following evening and to drop in to the Fox & Hounds instead.

At one time, when old Joe Sparling was proprietor, I had frequently dropped in for a glass of sherry before dinner. There was a comfortable little saloon bar where I would usually meet Alec Williams, the riding master, and one or two of my other neighbours. After a chat we would stroll into the public bar and please the good-hearted farm hands by playing a game of darts with them.

But I never liked Murgatroyd, the new proprietor. He was a bustling, bullying type of fellow, far more concerned with how much you drank than with how long you stayed. One evening three years ago I had been drawn into an unpleasant and undignified argument with him over the feeding of Bantam cocks of which he professed to be an expert. Since then my visits had grown less frequent and now for over a year I had never even crossed the threshold of the Fox & Hounds.

But it now seemed to me a duty to go there. Our President had impressed upon us the necessity of keeping careful observation upon the public and reporting immediately any sign that they were receiving rumours or otherwise learning facts that must be kept from them.

The Fox & Hounds was a pleasant, half-timbered little place that lay back from a small green in the centre of the village. I felt almost shy as I pushed open the saloon door, and something akin to physical pain as a blast of strident music hit me in the face. The large, ornate radio installed by the new landlord was one of the reasons why my visits had ceased. I had disliked the automatic piano of Joe Sparling’s day but that at least became silent after the consumption of each penny. I hoped that the radio might have worn out, but it seemed healthier than ever.

The saloon bar was occupied by a solitary fat man in gaiters who eyed me up and down with impudence. For some years past I had deplored the decay of country ‘types’. When I was a boy a farmer was a farmer and none could mistake his hearty, weather-beaten face and breeches and gaiters. Today there were crowds of ‘half-farmers’ who aped the gentleman – who wore anything from corduroys to canary-coloured jerseys – who scraped impatiently about in the fields and lived on petrol pumps.

This fellow in the bar was not the type of farmer that I admired, but he was obviously connected with the land although he debased a sturdy profession by carrying an umbrella.

‘Good evening,’ I said.

‘Evening,’ he grunted.

Murgatroyd, the proprietor, was nowhere about – he had probably gone to the pictures at Mulcaster, and the barmaid who served me with a glass of ale was a stranger to me. I regretted more than ever the self-centred interests that had drawn me in the past few years from the village people. At one time, when first I came here, I knew them all by name, but now when I so desperately needed companionship, they were all strangers to me.

I tried to engage the girl in conversation. I thought it would be a good idea to arouse her alarm about those strangely-coloured sunsets so that I could do my duty by calming her fears with an elaborate (but untrue) explanation of them.

But I had scarcely started when someone called to her from the public bar and she turned her back on me.

I sat in a corner opposite the fat man and again attempted to begin a conversation about the sunsets. But he was a dull, surly fellow who took no interest in it whatsoever. He complained bitterly about the decay of the potato market, and when I endeavoured to interest him in my scientific theories of poultry breeding he grew violently angry. He said there wasn’t a farthing left in English eggs and a man was a damn fool who pretended there was. When I began to explain the effect of water-heated tubular metal perches upon a hen’s laying capacity, he got up and went out without saying goodnight.

My loneliness surrounded me like a shroud. The radio in the public saloon was making such a row that I could not recognise any of the voices or judge how many men were there. Nor could I summon the courage to walk in. One needed a companion when one strolled from the saloon into the public bar and in my dejected state I could not face a crowd of strangers alone. I listened for a while to the ‘plonk’ of darts and occasional rounds of laughter – then I put my glass down and left the saloon. The Fox & Hounds had failed me: my thoughts were thrown back upon that lonely hillside home of mine, and with something verging upon panic I knew that I could not face that silent, curtained library. I would walk: I would take the road towards Lullington and not return until the stroke of eight. I would go straight in to dinner and perhaps the soothing effect of a meal would help me to tolerate those dreaded hours to bedtime.

Some youths were lounging outside the general shop: they were laughing and chattering raucously together, but stopped to stare at me as I passed. One was the boy who worked for the butcher, and although he knew me quite well he made no attempt to touch his cap. The old country custom of touching caps and bidding goodnight had died out except amongst the older men and the country was rapidly becoming a drab, thin imitation of a London suburb.

Something about those aimless, chattering youths infuriated me. I longed to wheel around and lash them into silence and awed respect with my secret. I was ignored by everybody, yet I had only to stride into the Fox & Hounds, hold up my hand for silence and tell them what I knew to become the centre of amazed attention! My house would be besieged by the countryside! – group after group of round-eyed people would be ushered into my library to receive a ten-minute speech and a message of encouragement and hope! My name would be upon the lips of everybody and my house would become the Mecca of all Hampshire!

But a vow was a vow. In honour bound I must hold my tongue, but as I walked that winding lane to the ridge of the downs I began to long for the day when the Secret would be broken – when the whole village would know that for long, terrible months I carried the incredible truth so calmly that none even suspected it!

I walked for a long while in companionship with the waning moon: I stood for some moments at the edge of Cheddow Wood, looking down at the silver streak of the Arun as it wound through the water-meadows of the valley. I drew from that peaceful scene a wistful serenity that gave me courage to turn back upon my homeward journey.

Had I known of the things that lay ahead of me: had I a glimmering of the living death that was to come in place of the oblivion I expected, I believe that I should never have returned to my home that night. I believe that I should have gone down the hillside to the River Arun and died while there still remained distinction between life and death.