He had almost reached the limit of exasperation. In the most placid of humours, he would have found it somewhat disconcerting to play harvest hymns with a barley whisker tickling the back of his neck. Even if Mrs. Willerby was rejoicing in the end of the strike, she might have decorated the organ loft with greater discretion and less exuberance. The scent of geraniums, which Coast abominated, was mingled with an odour of rotting apples, damp prayer books and perspiring humanity from the choir stalls below. Together they involved him in a nightmare of discomfort.
"Wheat and tares therein are sown,
Unto joy or sorrow grown...."
Precious little joy about it! A record of nothing but failure piled on failure, humiliation on humiliation. Of course, knowing his luck, he ought never to have expected the strike to be anything but a fiasco. After he had taken all the trouble to get Hunting down from Manchester, after he had gone himself night after night to sit in the beer-stifled atmosphere of the Flying Fox, trying to drive a little common sense into the bucolic obstinacy of those cursed villagers, wasn't it just his luck that that fool Rossitur should come down and spoil things?
"Grant, O Lord of life, that we
Holy grain and pure may be...."
Oh, damn! He ought to have played piano there! Well, as if it mattered! As if anything mattered very much, when he could see through the mirror that hung before him Mary Robson standing erect and triumphant in the front pew. It was all very well for her to sing hymns when the harvest was gathered in and the men were going back to work next Monday, and her husband had kept well in spite of the gloomy prognostications of the villagers. Well, she had scored again for the twentieth time—and he had to sit on Mrs. Cox's best vegetable-marrow and play the tunes for hymns that celebrated his defeat.
That fool Rossitur deserved smothering. He did really. Just when things were going rather well, what business had he to come down and tell the men that after the farmers had compromised by offering £3 a week the strike had gone on long enough for economic purposes, and that its protraction was merely the result of personal enmity?
All that talk about justice and disinterested co-operation was sentimental nonsense. If he told the truth, Rossitur would have acknowledged that the Northern Clarion paid him to advertise it among the labouring classes. Any extension of "progress" implied increased circulation for his paper.
"But the fruitful ears to store