“And since?”
“The damnedest fool God ever made.”
The surgeon asked him no more questions.
CHAPTER XXIII
FANSTEAD is a little country town built on the plan of a sparsely equipped herring bone. There is the central High Street, a jumble of old half-timbered houses and staring modern red-brick buildings, and sprouted from it a series of lateral roads, lanes and alleys, dwindling in importance to the High Street tip, and each petering out into the sweet country vagueness of hedges and fields. All save two. One of these ends abruptly at an inconveniently distant railway station. The other, villa bordered, meanders pleasantly for a mile or so to the tiny village of Pendish where it meets at right angles the great high road, and stops modestly, confronted all of a sudden with rolling open country, swelling downs patched with meadow and corn-field and crowned with great clumps of woodland.
Pendish was too small even to have a church. There was a tiny chapel for the convenience of Baptists. But Anglicans tramped into Fanstead or to the larger village of Banton-on-the-Hill, another mile along the great high road. It had a tumbled-down inn, the “Whip and Collar,” and a straggling row of thatched cottages, and a tiny red-brick villa labelled as the home of the County Police. But it also had a post-office, which was also a shop; and this was a small, square two-storied Georgian house imposing among its thatched neighbours and maintaining itself with a curious air of dignity, in spite of the front door open to the public during business hours, and the miscellaneous assortment of sweets, tobacco, tapes and picture postcards exposed in what was once the dining-room window.
It was the freehold of Mrs. Pettiland, a widow of fifty; she had inherited it from her father, a Norfolk thatcher who had brought his mystery to the west and practising it with skill and saving a little fortune brought to him by his wife, had amassed enough to buy the square stone house where he had ended his days. They said in the village that he had never recovered from the shock occasioned by the fate of his son, his apprentice and later his partner, who had gone raving mad a week or two after his marriage and had to be confined in the County Asylum.
Well, the old man had slept with his fathers for many years; his wife had joined him; the son still lingered on in the madhouse; and Mrs. Pettiland, very much alone in the world, save for her husband’s relatives in Fanstead, sold stamps and sweets to the village, and as a very great favour let the best bedroom to an occasional painter with unimpeachable introductions.
She was dark-haired, fresh-coloured, and buxom; she dressed with neatness, wearing old-fashioned stays that gave her a waist and a high bust; and she was the most considerable personage in Pendish.
When she had received a letter from her sister-in-law, Myra Stebbings, asking her as a favour to put up a foolish young man named Briggs who had got himself run over by a motor-lorry, if ever he should act on her suggestion and come to Pendish, she considered it less as an introduction than as a command. Whether she loved Myra or not, she did not know. But she had an immense respect for the dry, grey-faced woman who had come every year to stay with her, so that she could visit the brother whom she had loved, in the house of awfulness, five or six miles away. She stood somewhat in awe of Myra. Her own good man had died comfortably in his bed and had gone for ever, after a couple of years of placid content. It was sad; but it was the common lot. The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. But at the idea of a woman’s husband being shut off from the world in the living tomb of the County Asylum, she shuddered. Myra always conveyed to her the vague impression, so impossible to be formulated by an uneducated woman ignorant of traditional reference, of a human soul defying the tragedy of existence.