This is the story of the Hailey Compton Village Pageant.
Pageants, good and bad, great and small, were commonplace affairs a few years ago. Every summer half a dozen of them were widely advertised and probably a dozen more ran blameless courses unnoticed except by those who took part in them. They were started by enthusiasts, worked up by energetic committees, kept within the bounds of historic possibility by scholarly experts. They came and went, amused a few people, bored a great many and left not a trace of their brief existence behind them.
The Hailey Compton Pageant was staged in a small unimportant village. The people who organised it, the vicar's wife and the local innkeeper, were unknown to fame. It had, at first, no backing in the press except a few paragraphs slipped into provincial papers by Miss Beth Appleby, a young journalist of promise but small attainment. It had, at first, no aristocratic patronage, except the half-hearted support of Sir Evelyn Dent. It began in a casual, almost accidental way.
Yet the Hailey Compton Pageant excited England from end to end, set every club in London gossiping, inspired a spate of articles in the daily papers, smirched the reputation of an earl and went near wrecking, at the next General Election, the prospects of a prominent statesman.
Such are the tricks which destiny, a sportive imp, plays with human affairs. An elderly gentleman, in search of local colour for a perfectly innocent book, visits a remote village. An energetic lady with a taste for theatricals seizes an opportunity for getting up a show. An innkeeper, civil to every one and anxious to be obliging to all possible patrons, sees a chance of making a little money.
What could possibly be less important? Yet out of the activities of these people rose one of the most widely discussed scandals of our time.
Chapter I
It has been said, somewhat bitterly, that the whole south coast of England is now one prolonged watering-place, very horrible because very popular. The bitterness is excusable, but the saying is an exaggeration. There are still some places unvisited by chars-à-bancs and excursionists, undiscovered, or at all events unused by those who "take the kiddies to the sea" for August.
Hailey Compton is a village which until the other day escaped the curse of popularity. Its good fortune was due partly to the fact that there are no houses or lodgings in it suitable for letting. Nor can any be built for there is no room for building. The village lies in a narrow nook between high cliffs and all the ground is already occupied by fishermen's cottages, with their patches of garden, the church, the vicarage, and the Anchor Inn. It is also—and this helps to account for its escape from the general fate—very difficult of access. The only approach to it is by a steep, sharply twisting lane, with a surface of abominable roughness. Horses descend with extreme difficulty and climb up again only if they are very strong. Motorists shrink from the hairpin bends and the blinding high banks between which the lane zigzags. Even chars-à-bancs drivers, the gallant swashbucklers of our modern traffic, never venture to take their clients to Hailey Compton.
Nevertheless a car crept down the hill one warm, May morning, a light car, driven by an elderly man who sat alone in it. He went very cautiously, his engine responding to its lowest gear, his foot pressed on the brake pedal, his hands clutching the steering wheel convulsively. This was Sir Evelyn Dent, and the car was a new possession which he had only just learned to drive, indeed had not yet learned to drive without nervousness. The age of sixty-five is rather late in life for acquiring so difficult an art as motor driving.