NIGHTS OF THE ROUND TABLE Page 12

  ‘A wonderful night, Laurie, my child! An enchanted night . . . the night on which they say, the Old Powers have sway once more over mortals, and the Church must stand aside—strange, strange. . . .’

  But the hint was enough—greedy, I clutched his hand and called to the company.

  ‘Knights of the Round Table—here is a story! No nonsense, Father . . . I’m sure there is—tell us the story!’

  Blinking at the lamplight and the chorus of shouts and encouragement that greeted him, the old priest, smiling, half-hesitating, drew out an envelope, thick and bound with a rubber band. ‘Yes . . . there is a story. I—it may seem a strange one for a priest to tell, but I can vouch for its truth indeed. It was written down shortly after it happened, by the dear friend to whom it happened, many years ago. He died, and in his will he left it to me, the one person to whom he had ever told the story, and till tonight its sacredness to me as well as its singular strangeness has kept it locked in my private safe. But with you, my friends—who do not see fit to laugh and jeer when you hear of things that seem beyond mortal knowledge eerie and inexplicable—there, I will read you this true story, only changing the name of my friend, lest he might have been known to any of you. I will call him Minchin—and the tale “Mr Minchin’s Midsummer”, or “How Pan came to Little Ingleton”.

  Little Ingleton, drowsy in the summer sun, lay curled like a sleepy child in the hollowed arm-curves of the mothering green hills that cradled it. Warm and white and frankly sleepy on a Sunday afternoon lay Little Ingleton, and the Reverend Thomas Minchin was cross.

  In the inexplicable absence of Potts the bellringer, Mr Minchin was tolling the school-house bell for Sunday School. He tolled the bell industriously, but the wooden lych-gate gave no click to announce an entering scholar; the waiting cypresses stood tall and grim beside the old green-mossed headstones jostling each other up and down the little hill-perched graveyard, and the Reverend Thomas peered out now and again and gave the bell an extra angry tug in his annoyance—but sleep and the idleness of Midsummer Day held his parishioners, and not even Miss Rosamond Perkins, the lady teacher in the Sunday School, seemed to mean to turn up; so at last, with a primmed-up mouth and a scowl that rivalled those on the faces of the grimacing gargoyles that watched him go, the Reverend Thomas Minchin, newly installed incumbent of Little Ingleton, clapped on his black shovel-hat and stalked forth to find his strayed flock.

  The Reverend Thomas did not yet know his way about the village very well—he was aware, as he plodded up the twisting little main street looking vaguely for the turning to Miss Perkins’s lodgings, that he looked an incongruous figure in his dusty black garb against the prevailing glory of blue and gold and white, and the knowledge somehow gave an added edge to his already-ruffled temper.

  He was a lean, stooping ascetic of a man with narrow lips and pale intolerant eyes, and his primly buttoned black clerical coat over tight black trousers and clumping square-toed boots, his flat black felt hat jammed squarely down on his head, expressed his personality as surely as any courtesan’s painted smile and shadowed eyes express hers. Though, to be sure, he would have been mightily enraged at the comparison—for was he not a man of God, a celibate, a teetotaller, a non-smoker, and in a word, all the other things that a clergyman (vide the Press) should be?

  This being so, surely he should have earned the respect and obedience of his people, so that they flocked to listen to the Word—but the remembrance of the empty school-house that afternoon brought a fresh scowl of sour anger to the face of the Reverend Thomas, and as he turned into a winding lane that seemed to resemble Miss Perkins’s description of her ‘road’ he muttered a word that in a layman’s mouth might have resembled profanity.

  Had he not instituted fresh services, countless in number and strict in their ordinances? Suppressed dancing in the village hall or on the green? Closed down The George and Crown except for the sale of ginger ale and such innocuous drinks—banished from the chemist’s shop poudre de riz, lip rouge, scents and other snares of the devil? Who but he had worked unceasingly for the regeneration of Little Ingleton—sunk as he had found it, in idle happiness, with but one or at most two services ’a Sunday, and used (low be it spoken!) to the lax ways of his predecessor, old Father Fagan, frail, gentle, kindly, who, it was whispered, at times so far forgot his duties as a clergyman as to watch and even take part in dancings and singings and junketings on the village green? Even Miss Rosamond Perkins, who wore pretty summer dresses of pink or blue and yellow patterned with gay little flowers, and had bright eyes and cherry lips—though to be sure, the Reverend Thomas had never noticed whether her lips were red or no—even Miss Perkins was reputed to have danced and laughed and played with these unregenerates before the advent of sterner ways.

  Now he came to remember it, Miss Perkins had actually once or twice been guilty of murmuring on a fine Sunday in the hot classroom that it might be better to take the children out in the woods ‘to play with God’—to quote her own unusual phrase—‘to play with God in His lovely world’—than drone sleepily over their Bibles; but this had greatly scandalised the new vicar, and he had spoken so severely to Miss Rosamond Perkins about it that she had wept, and looking up at his austerity with eyes like bluebells drowned in tears, subsided into silence. Subsequently, he remembered with satisfaction, she had discarded her frivolous-patterned cotton frocks, her hat with its wreath of floppy roses, and taken to brown holland and a severe straw hat with a band of ribbon only. . . . This had pleased him, as showing a commendable wish to improve, but today he remembered the earlier rebellious murmur, and reviewing things grimly in his mind, decided that for some reason Miss Perkins had suddenly ‘broken out’ and taken her little band of scholars to the woods or fields.

  He quickened his step, sending up a little cloud of light floury dust, and his lips tightened as he peered through his short-sighted eyes at the names on the gates of the cottages. ‘Rose Nook’ was the name of the cottage, he knew—but it was strange, it seemed much further down the lane than he had surmised from Miss Perkins’s description.

  ‘Just round the corner of Pan’s Lane—you can’t miss it!’ Now he came to think of it, he supposed this was ‘Pan’s Lane’? Curious name, that—must have some connection with the old Roman times, and their crude gods; curious how traces of that sort of thing linger. The Squire had told him that King’s Panton, the little town in the valley’s hollow, far below high-perched Little Ingleton, was so called for its old name: ‘Kynge Pan hys towne’. Strange old heathen days—how thankful one should be for modern education, and enlightenment—now where was ‘Rose Nook’? It was tiring, plodding along in this heat, and the mental picture of Miss Rosamond Perkins, cool and happy in some sylvan dell, with the adoring children around her listening to some absurd fairy story—the sort of imaginative rubbish she was far too fond of telling—made his ill-temper, already sour, more acid still. He would find out from old Mrs Calder, where Miss Perkins lodged, where they had gone, and follow after them—he would come upon them suddenly in their idleness, and see them cringe in shame and confusion before his righteous wrath, hurry tearfully back to the School-house to their books and catechism! . . . And as for Miss Perkins? She must be spoken to severely—more than severely. . . .

  He was walking so fast in his wrathful energy that in the cloud of dust he was raising he could not see anything distinctly, and stumbling over an obstacle in his path came down full length on his respectable nose, knocking himself completely breathless.

  When, winded, angry and thoroughly undignified, he sat up at last, he found the obstacle over which he had stumbled was not one, but two—the long legs of a shabby young man in travel-stained grey flannel trousers, no shoes or socks, and a torn blue shirt, who sat surveying him gravely over a half-eaten hunk of bread.

  ‘My goodness!’ said the young man, ‘you did come a cropper!’ He laughed and took another bite.

  The Reverend Thomas was still too breathless to reply, but he blinked and s
tared, endeavouring to recover a touch of his lost dignity; but as he stared around him interest in his dignity was lost in his growing astonishment. Little as he knew of Little Ingleton, he was under the impression that he certainly knew by now all the lanes that ended in field-paths or cul-de-sacs—but it appeared he did not, for this lane was certainly new! Somehow it seemed to have fizzled out into a mere field-path winding away over the sloping hillside. Glancing back, Mr Minchin’s puzzlement increased, and he concluded that, lost in his thoughts, he must have tramped further and faster than he meant, and left the village itself far behind.

  A copse of trees, through which the tiny path wound, stood at his back, and all around the stillness of a summer afternoon brooded over green hill and sleepy valley, sentinel woods and white-flecked shining sky . . . under the lee of a steep bank the strange young man sat, nodding cheerfully at him, and continued to munch his bread, throwing the crumbs to an impertinent red squirrel, that, to Mr Minchin’s great amazement, sat perched and chittering at his elbow.

  Transferring his attention to the young man himself, Mr Minchin frowned. He wore no hat, and his face was brown as a pine-cone, his hair bleached and wiry with the sun and wind; it stood up over each eye with a comic alert whisk that gave him a curiously impertinent appearance—his face was long and thin, with a narrow chin that ran to meet a hooked nose that stood out like a wedge between two light eyes—dancing, irreverent eyes, the colour of a hawk’s. The Reverend Thomas winced and looked away from those eyes, and his resentment increased. What business had this ragged vagabond to survey him with such obvious amusement! He should have lowered his own eyes in shame at his garments—they were well-cut enough, but disgracefully torn and travel-stained, and that shirt! Well, not only were the sleeves rolled up to the shoulder, but the unbuttoned front lay open almost to the waist, showing skin burnt brown as the merry face, or very nearly—thus proving indubitably that this graceless fellow was in the habit of doing without even a shirt very often! . . .

  ‘It’s so much cooler in this hot weather!’ said the stranger.

  He took another bite, and Mr Minchin jumped. So astonished was he that he remained sitting on the path, his hands spread each side to support him, staring at the young man who had so curiously guessed his question and answered it. Coincidence—but—odd, very! . . .

  ‘Decent clothing is scarcely a question of convenience,’ he said stiffly.

  The hooked nose came down over the lean chin and the young man grinned, surveying the dusty figure before him.

  ‘Obviously, from your point of view, or you wouldn’t wear those horrible black things! Why do you?’

  Mr Minchin gasped in amazement; not only at the revolutionary suggestion contained in the remark, but at the stranger’s temerity in making it.

  He answered severely, rising and dusting the insulted clerical garments as best he could—though he was conscious, under the scrutiny of the merry-eyed stranger, that he was not cutting his usual dignified figure.

  ‘You do not seem aware, sir, that I am a man of God!’

  The stranger twinkled again, quite unimpressed.

  ‘I can see you are a clergyman all right—is that what you call a man of God?’

  Mr Minchin was outraged.

  ‘Sir! Are you not a Christian, that you ask me such a question?’

  The stranger threw a last handful of crumbs to the waiting squirrel, and clasping his hands round his dusty knees, surveyed Mr Minchin again. Then laughed, softly, oddly.

  ‘A Christian? I don’t think I’ve ever been asked that before!’

  ‘Then it’s quite time you were,’ said Mr Minchin virtuously.

  ‘Time—ah, there’s so much time, isn’t there?’ said the stranger, rather irrelevantly. ‘But to continue, O Man-of-God! What brings you wandering out here this Sunday afternoon—when presumably all Men-of-God should be herding their flocks willy-nilly into church?’

  The faint flavour of insolence in the stranger’s tone, strangely matching his impertinent upflaming hair, stung Mr Minchin, and his response was severe.

  ‘I agree with you. But unfortunately . . . my Sunday School class did not appear, and I came out to find them. . . .’

  The young man, hunching his shoulders back against the warm red earth of the bank, laughed suddenly, amusedly: a gleeful spurt of laughter like the uprush of a spring to the sunlight.

  ‘So for once Pan won, eh? The old gods against the new—the lure of the sun and the hills and the blue, blue sky . . . ha, ha! Well, my worthy son of the Christian church, go on . . . so you came a-wandering to find your straying flock, eh?’

  ‘Er—yes. . . .’ For the life of him the Reverend Thomas could not quite help an odd little feeling of trepidation under the fire of the yellow hawk’s eyes that watched him, and he finished lamely, ‘And I—er—wandered considerably further than I meant. . .’

  ‘You did indeed! . . .’ said the young man grimly.

  There was a moment’s silence while he eyed the clergyman up and down, then down came the hooked nose again in a grin, and rolling over, he stretched for a shabby knapsack reposing against a giant root.

  ‘Down Pan’s Lane—into Panton Wood—over against Pan hys towne—and all on a Midsummer Day! Oh, wonderful—amazing—my poor dear earnest-minded friend!’

  He extracted a fat round bottle and tin mug from the bag as he talked—sheer nonsense to the puzzled clergyman—and uncorking the bottle with a pop that certainly sounded more than luscious and tempting to the thirsty ears of the Vicar of Ingleton, poured out a foaming crimson draught and held it out invitingly.

  ‘Have a drink, old boy? But I’m thirsty too—so drink fair!’

  Despite his iron Prohibition principles it was with quite a considerable effort that Mr Minchin waved the mug away.

  ‘Thank you, no. I quite realise you mean it kindly—but my cloth forbids.’

  ‘Your cloth? Good Lord!’ The stranger’s laugh was faintly scornful—‘I’ve had many a cheery drink with other fellows of your cloth, as you call it! Come, drink up!’

  ‘I am—fortunately—not concerned with the irregularities unfortunately committed by others of my calling,’ said Mr Minchin stiffly.

  Unmoved, the stranger quaffed the rejected wine; over the top of the mug his piercingly bright eyes stared at the clergyman. ‘Mistakes? Are you then so much better than your fellows?’ He set down the mug with a flourish. ‘I seem to remember—somewhere—something about a Pharisee who thanked God he was not as other men. . . .’

  The Reverend Thomas flushed angrily, confounded and momentarily speechless. Before he could think out a sufficiently crushing answer the young man was off again.

  ‘So you’re the new vicar of Little Ingleton? I’ve heard of you! Round about King’s Panton—we’ve been talking quite a lot about you lately. . . .’

  This was a sop, and though Mr Minchin was feeling a little distrustful of this remarkable young man, he smiled; cautiously, warily, but he smiled. The allusion to King’s Panton relieved his mind. This was probably—now he came to think of it—one of Mr Imray’s fellows from King’s Panton Manor House down in the valley; the verger had told him he always had five or six studying for exams, reading for the Bar, being coached . . . doubtless this was one of his pupils. Eccentric, of course—but obviously a gentleman . . . and to a gentleman even going barefoot and wearing an open-necked shirt might be excused, though Mr Minchin secretly hoped most devoutly that the stranger would not walk down the main street of Little Ingleton thus arrayed! King’s Panton—that was fifteen miles away as the crow flies—it was certainly gratifying to hear that fifteen miles away they were talking of him and of his work in cleansing, in regenerating Little Ingleton. . . .

  ‘I don’t know that I should quite call it that!’ said the stranger coolly.

  ‘The Reverend Thomas jumped again, and the young man laughed.

  ‘Oh, I’m a thought reader—one of my hobbies!’ His eyes danced as he watched the other’s chapfallen expr
ession. ‘Great fun it is—I often guess what our fellows are thinking about, and it makes them no end annoyed. But what makes you think you have done so much for Little Ingleton?’

  Mr Minchin stiffened.

  ‘I think, if you have heard as much about me as you say, that I need hardly answer that question?’

  The young man looked at him reflectively.

  ‘That, of course, is a matter of opinion!’ he commented lazily. ‘You may think that driving your school-children into a stuffy room on a gorgeous day like this is doing good. . .

  Mr Minchin exploded.

  ‘Doing good? Doesn’t the Prayer Book say—’

  ‘I know all the Prayer Book says—read it all before you were born!’ said the stranger brusquely.

  In his annoyance Mr Minchin failed to note this remarkable assertion from a young man at most twenty-four.

  ‘I know God demands a certain amount of attention. His curious, half-wistful, half-insolent gaze strayed over the brooding hills, and he paused, then went on briskly—‘but I fancy, you know, that God is a fair-minded Deity . . . and if folk come to worship Him on a Sunday morning, what harm is there if for the rest of the day they give worship to other gods-and maybe other gods than He?’

  Mr Minchin gasped in horror and amazement—the poor young man was mad, surely!—Mr Imray should not have let him go out without a hat in the sun. . . . As the alarming thought that he might be consorting with a raving lunatic crossed his mind, the young man jumped up, and bursting into a frank laugh, stood arms akimbo in the sun watching him. Through all the bewildered fright and anger that confused him Mr Minchin was aware of a quick stab of sheer masculine jealousy of the slim wiry frame that confronted him, muscular and lithe and brown—why, he was only just thirty-four himself, and he should be like this long-limbed, sun-tanned vagabond, not a lean shrivelled bone of a man buttoned into a black coat and deliberately turning away his eyes when a pretty girl glanced at him! Through the heat and confusion of his thoughts the stranger’s mocking voice came to him, taunting, accusing. . . .