4
Now it came about that the soul trap—turning out a dead failure, since not a single fly went through the hole—instead of destroying Seedbaum, fixed him on a pedestal more secure than that which he had hitherto occupied.
He was indestructible, and the power which he exercised over the native mind threatened to be as indestructible as himself.
However, vengeance was coming. Retribution for all the wrongs he had committed, his swindlings, brutalities and beatings.
It came in this wise:
One afternoon Mrs. Connart, seated on the verandah and reading The Moths of the Limberlost, heard the cries of a child.
Right in front of the house, King Seedbaum was beating a native child for some fault or fancied disrespect towards his royal highness, cuffing it and cuffing it, whilst the squeals of the cuffed one affronted the heavens and the ears of all listeners.
Now, to touch a child or dog or cat in Mrs. Connart’s presence was to raise a devil. White as death she rushed into the house and white as death she rushed out again. She held her riding-whip, a Mexican quirt, ladies’ size, but horribly efficient in energetic hands.
Seedbaum saw her coming, couldn’t understand, caught the first lash on his right arm and along his back—he was wearing the pyjama suit—and his yell brought the village flocking and Connart running from a field where he was laying out some plants.
He saw the quirt lashing over Seedbaum’s shoulder, across his legs, and across the back, for the King of Maleka was now running, running and pursued for ten yards or so whilst the quirt got one last blow in.
Then he had his wife in his arms, and she was weeping.
“Did he touch you?” cried Connart.
“No—it was a child,” she gasped. “Beast! Look, he has run into his house.”
The street was filled with a crowd that all through the beating had remained spell-bound. Now it broke up into knots and small parties, all talking together excitedly.
Connart, with his arm around his wife, drew her into the house.
She sat down on a couch and laughed and sobbed. She was half hysterical, but not for long.
“I couldn’t help it,” she said. “I would do it again. It’s not because of us—but because he was beating a child.”
“Brute!” said Connart. “I’ll go down now and give him more. I want to have it out with him right now.” He turned to the door. She caught him.
“No,” she cried, “he’s had enough. He won’t do it again. Listen, what’s that?”
From away in the direction of Seedbaum’s house came a sound like the swarming of angry bees, also shouts.
They rushed to the door and saw Seedbaum. Seedbaum with fifty people round him, and every person trying to beat him at the same time.
“Good God,” said Connart, “you’ve taught them the trick—they’ll kill him.”
“He’s got away,” cried Mrs. Connart.
Seedbaum, breaking from the crowd, was making up the street, the whole village was after him; he passed the Connarts’ house and headed for the woods where he disappeared. Then his pursuers drew off, and, rushing to the house of Connart, swarmed at the railings, shouting and waving and laughing, whilst Mrs. Connart interpreted.
“They say he’ll never come back to the village again,” said she, “for they’ll kill him if he does; that he’ll have to live in the woods. Oh, George! I’m frightened—what will be the end of it all?”
The end was a whale ship that came into the lagoon. Seedbaum, living in the woods and supported by the generosity of the Connarts, was given notice by the three chiefs of the island, Matua, Tamura and Ratupea by name, that if he did not go away in the whale ship he would be killed before the next ship arrived. And he went.
He was almost friendly with the Connarts, in return for their food and protection, at the last, and as the natives would allow him to take nothing with him, he had to leave everything behind him, including the red cedar-wood chest, which thus came back to its rightful owner.
He did not even threaten the natives with governmental retribution; he knew he was done and placed out of court by his own conduct.
But the thing that always remained with Connart out of this affair was the fact that a population of active and vigorous people would still have been down-trodden by a merciless tyrant but for a little, quiet, calm-eyed woman, who had unconsciously and just from an uprising of her own spirit, “shown them the trick.”
Spirit—after all, what else is there in the world beside it?
ALLELUIA
By T. F. POWYS
Follow me into one of those shining days of April, when the blue in the sky has lost its March iciness and the village of Wallbridge pauses in its usual grey monotony to look for events.
Events come indeed, as they always do, for those who wait long enough for them. The first intimation that something was going to happen chanced to be picked up in the road by Mr. Tapper, labourer of Ford’s Farm.
Mr. Tapper had once found a penny in the mud, and ever since that eventful day the good man had kept his eye fixed upon the road when he walked abroad.
Mr. Tapper handed the paper he had found when teatime came round to his daughter Lily, remarking as he did so:
“’Tain’t nothink,” which merely meant, of course, that the paper wasn’t a penny.
Lily—the pretty Lily—gave her head a little shake, and read at the top of the printed sheet the word “Alleluia.”
It was all out then, of course, as soon as the pretty Lily had got hold of it, all the whole merry matter of the coming of Alleluia into Wallbridge. After he had handed in those papers at the doors—with the exception of the ones that he wisely dropped in the road, well knowing that anything picked up always interests—invited everyone to his meetings. Alleluia for he must have known everyone would call him Alleluia, began to preach and sing in a devout manner in the handsome tent that he had set up near to his van. He was so gentle and polite and so good at starting those emotional tunes—invented by Mr. Moody—that Wallbridge at once praised and patronised him.
Alleluia had come down from Oxford, and his confiding and childlike look, together with his silky moustache, had led him into the bypaths and hedges and so on and on until he reached the village of Wallbridge.
There were, of course, troubles in even so gentle a young man’s path; there were difficulties and doubts—little worries—so that Alleluia’s eyes were not always without their tears.
The Wallbridge people were not always so loving as they should be. The Rev. John Sutton, the vicar, disapproved of the preacher’s looks and was even slightly contemptuous of the glory hymns. This unkindness hit the young man hard, because, outwardly, the vicar seemed pleased with the work that he was doing.
And there was Lily. Lily had to be considered even by Mr. Tapper, her father, as something female. Mr. Tapper put her down entirely, with her mother included, to the simple fact that he had stayed too long out one lovely June fair day at the Stickland revels. Even that day he saw as all Lily’s fault, feeling, truly perhaps, that the child brings her parents together.
Even then Mr. Tapper was middle-aged, but that only made him blame Lily the more. If it had not been for Lily, Mr. Tapper might have gone on hawking saucepan lids and receiving beer in exchange for the country matters in his tavern songs.
When Lily was eighteen a very important event happened to her. She bought a new looking-glass to replace a cracked one that had always given her face such an ugly cut down the middle. Before this new one—she had stolen the money for it from her drunken parent’s pocket—she could touch herself and preen herself, and wonder at a red mark on her bosom that looked almost like a bite.
That must not happen again; of course it wouldn’t after Alleluia’s preaching; young Wakely would have to take her home more gently in future. Following the lovely hymns, it was not quite proper to be covered and eaten and bitten by kisses all the way home.
“No you mustn’t, Tom.”
Pretty Lily said the words before her glass in order to practise them. She used to sit quite near to the young preacher, and had got his child’s look and his silky upper lip quite by heart. He would be always speaking about love and about doing kind actions to one another, and every hymn was filled with the delicious savour of subdued sin.
Lily was quite moved by all the excitement, but she wished to be more careful about Tom, and so she was....
Alleluia had grown fond of looking upwards too, and for many nights he had seen only one face in the sky. Alleluia was forced to allow that the pretty face in the sky had nothing whatever to do with the hymns he had been singing; he knew it was not God’s face, nor David’s, nor any other heavenly person’s. But, alas, it so pleased Alleluia that he wandered abroad in search of it sometimes, and often it was midnight before the preacher opened his van door to go to bed.
The excessive longing for events to happen in a village sometimes over-reaches itself; it did, indeed, over-reach itself this time in Wallbridge.
As usual, events pass in a sober grey way in the country. The dismal sermons of all the Rev. John Suttons are nearly always of the same dismal colour. And even the Wallbridge quarrel between old Mother Wimple and Farmer Told had become dull coloured, too. The sun shone as best it could, and sometimes the moon would appear, though none of these heavenly lights proved strong enough to break the leaden colouring.
But the people had longed, and when the people long something happens.
It came in this wise. A morning dawned with a splash of red, that splashed the grey sod, that splashed the hills and the meadows, and even gave to Farmer Told’s white cow a red blood-stained look.
Her hymn-book soaked, her pretty Sunday clothes so sadly torn, her pretty lily face rudely beaten and broken: there was quite a little pool of blood in the chalk-pit, the grey colour lurid for once.
This was more than peaceful Wallbridge had wished for. This dreadful dash of red made even the April sunshine look a little queer. It could never be the same usual Wallbridge wind that blew upon the stalwart forms of the inspectors and policemen who had the case in hand.
Alleluia had been found, almost crazed, near the chalkpit; he had been looking for pretty Lily all night, he said, and had only found her at dawn. There was blood upon his clothes, he had held her body in his arms.
Others told so much, too. They had been seen together very often; they had been followed, watched, and the stars needs must have blushed, so folks said. Tom Wakely had been away that red night, so it could not have been he who had done it.
Honest Mr. Tapper gave the strongest evidence, and Alleluia was hanged.
Perhaps this was a little hard upon Alleluia, but all men said he should have stuck to his hymn-singing and not gone out to look for pretty lilies at night-time. One wit even remarked that he could have sung his hymns in the town in a cheaper fashion without a stretch of the neck at the end of it.
The red splash of pretty Lily’s blood coloured some dozen or so years of Wallbridge life, but after that time was passed the old grey began to hang heavy again and an owl hooted.
The owl must have settled upon Mr. Tapper’s chimney, so near did the sound of its hooting seem to Mr. Tapper.
It was midnight, two old women—one was Mrs. Tapper—were sitting by the dying man’s side.
“’E do die ’ard,” Mrs. Tapper remarked in a friendly tone.
Mr. Tapper was thoughtful.
“If only he hadn’t wandered off into the lanes on that fair day in June! He might even have been drinking beer instead of dying hard.”
The owl perched upon the cottage chimney hooted again. The ice upon Ford’s pond cracked—the midnight frost was abroad.
Mr. Tapper spoke his last words.
“Our Lily, she weren’t murdered by thik young preacher,” said Mr. Tapper.
“Who did kill she?” the old women whispered excitedly.
“’Twas I,” said Mr. Tapper, “because young Wakely never give I thik beer ’e’d promised. I did blame she for it.”
The owl hooted, the old women looked at one another—and Mr. Tapper’s jaw slowly dropped.
THE MONKEY’S PAW
By W. W. JACOBS
From The Lady of the Barge, by W. W. Jacobs. Copyright, 1902, by Dodd, Mead and Company.