“Come on, Philip!” she cried. “Come on and help me break up their damned van.”
By this time the attack had brought most of the village out of doors. Dogs were barking; geese and ducks were flapping in all directions; Sylvia kept turning round to urge the sexton, whose progress was hampered by a petticoat’s slipping down, not to bother about her clothes, but to come on. A grandnephew of the old woman picked up the crimson garment and, as he pursued his grandaunt to restore it to her, waved it in the air like a standard. The yokels, who saw the squire watching from his gate, assumed his complete approval of what was passing (as a matter of fact he was petrified with dismay), and paid no attention to the vicar’s efforts to rescue the Treacherites from their doom in the fast-nearing pond. The van of the iconoclasts was named Ridley: “By God’s grace we have to-day lit such a candle as will never be put out” was printed on one side. On the other was inscribed, “John Treacher’s Poor Preachers. Supported by Voluntary Contributions.” By the time Sylvia, Cassandra, and the rest had finished with the van it was neither legible without nor habitable within.
Naturally there was a violent quarrel between Sylvia and Philip over her behavior, a quarrel that was not mended by her being summoned later on by the outraged Treacherites, together with Mr. Dorward and several yokels.
“You’ve made a fool of me from one end of the county to the other,” Philip told her. “Understand once and for all that I don’t intend to put up with this sort of thing.”
“It was your fault,” she replied. “You began it by egging on these brutes to attack Mr. Dorward. You could easily have averted any trouble if you’d wanted to. It serves you jolly well right.”
“There’s no excuse for your conduct,” Philip insisted. “A stranger passing through the village would have thought a lunatic asylum had broken loose.”
“Oh, well, it’s a jolly good thing to break loose sometimes—even for lunatics,” Sylvia retorted. “If you could break loose yourself sometimes you’d be much easier to live with.”
“The next time you feel repressed,” he said, “all I ask is that you’ll choose a place where we’re not quite so well known in which to give vent to your feelings.”
The argument went on endlessly, for neither Sylvia nor Philip would yield an inch; it became, indeed, one of the eternal disputes that reassert themselves at the least excuse. If Philip’s egg were not cooked long enough, the cause would finally be referred back to that Sunday morning; if Sylvia were late for lunch, her unpunctuality would ultimately be dated from the arrival of the Treacherites.
Luckily the vicar, with whom the events of that Sunday had grown into a comic myth that was continually being added to, was able to give Sylvia relief from Philip’s exaggerated disapproval. Moreover, the Treacherites had done him a service by advertising his church and bringing a certain number of strangers there every Sunday out of curiosity; these pilgrims inflated the natives of Green Lanes with a sense of their own importance, and they now filled the church, taking pride and pleasure in the ownership of an attraction and boasting to the natives of the villages round about the size of the offertory. Mr. Dorward’s popery and ritualism were admired now as commercial smartness, and if he had chosen to ride into church on Palm Sunday or any other Sunday on a donkey (a legendary ceremony invariably attributed to High Church vicars), there was not a man, woman, or child in the parish of Green Lanes that would not have given a prod of encouragement to the sacred animal.