The Root of All Evil

CHAPTER VIII

The Commination Service

At five o'clock that afternoon, by mutual agreement, Jeckie Farnish sold to John Bradingham the stock and goodwill of her grocery business, and a few days later she paid in another heavy cheque to the credit of Farnish and Grice, and, at the same date, secured the alteration in the deed of partnership which made matters straight between her and Lucilla. There was something of a grim desperation in Jeckie's face as she walked out of the solicitor's office whereat this transaction had been effected; she was feeling something that she had no desire to speak of. But Lucilla felt it, too, and said it.

"Well!" she remarked in a low tone as the two partners walked away from the town. "I don't know how it is with you, but I've put my last penny into that pit! Me and Albert's got just enough to live comfortably on till we begin to get some returns, but I can't ever find any more capital!"

"No need!" said Jeckie, almost fiercely. "Wait! as I'm doing."

She herself knew well enough that she, too, had thrown in her last penny; there was nothing for it now but to see the additional capital flow out steadily, and to wait in patience until the first yields brought money. In the meantime, she was not going to waste money on herself and her father. Selling most of the furniture which she had gradually accumulated, and leaving the house behind the shop, which had become an eminently comfortable dwelling, she transferred Farnish and herself to a cottage near the pit, told him that there they were going to stop until riches came, and settled down to watch the doings of the little army of workers into whose pockets her money was going at express speed. Wait – yes, there was nothing else to do.

There was not a man amongst all that crowd of toilers, from the experienced managers to the chance-employed navvy, who did not know Jeckie Farnish at that stage of her career. She was at the scene of operations as soon as work began of a morning; she was there until the twilight came to end the day. Here, there, everywhere she was to be met with. Now she was with the masons who were building the cottages on her bit of land outside the Leys; now with the men who were constructing a solid road from the pit-mouth to the highway; now with the navvies who were making the link of railway that would connect Savilestowe Main Colliery with the great trunk line a mile off behind the woods; now, careless of danger and discomfort, she was down one or other of the twin shafts, feverishly eager to see how much farther their sinkers were approaching to the all-important regions beneath. Sometimes she had Lucilla in her wake; sometimes Albert; sometimes Farnish. But none of these three possessed her pertinacity and endurance; a general daily look round satisfied each. Jeckie, when she was not in her bed or snatching a hasty meal, was always on the spot. Her money was at stake, and it behoved her to see that she was getting full value for every pennyworth of it.

She was not the only perpetual haunter of Savilestowe Leys at that time. The men who worked there at one or other of the diverse jobs which the making of a coal-mine necessitates – all of them strangers to the place until the new industry brought them to it – became familiar with a figure which was as odd and strange as that of Jeckie Farnish was grim and determined. Morning, noon, and night a man forever hung around the scene of operations, a man who was not allowed to cross the line of the premises and had more than once been turned out of them, but whom nobody and nothing could prevent from looking over fences and through gaps in the hedgerows and haunting the various means of ingress and egress, a wild, unkempt bright-eyed man, who was always talking to himself, and who, whenever he got the chance, talked hard and fast and vehemently to anyone he was able to lay a mental grappling-iron upon; a man with a grievance, Ben Scholes. He was always in evidence. While Jeckie patrolled her armies within, Scholes kept his watch without; he was as a man who, having had a treasure stolen from him, knows where the thief has bestowed it, and henceforth takes an insane delight in watching thief and treasure.

The first result of Scholes's discovery that Jeckie Farnish had done him over his forty acres of land was that he took to drink. Immediately after leaving the sign of the Golden Teapot he turned in at the "Coach-and-Four," and found such comfort in drinking rum-and-water while he retailed his grievances to the idlers in the inn-kitchen that he went there again next day, and fell into the habit of tippling and gossiping – if that could be called gossiping which resolved itself into telling and retelling the story of his woes to audiences of anything from one to a dozen. Few things interest a Yorkshireman more than to hear how Jack has done Bill and how Jack contrived to accomplish it, and while Scholes never got any sympathy – every member of his congregation secretly admiring Jeckie for her smartness and cleverness – he never failed to attract attention. There were many houses of call in that neighbourhood; Scholes began a regular round of them; he had a tale to tell which was never likely to pall on folk whose one idea was to get money by any means, fair or foul, and the sight of his lean face and starveling beard at the door of parlour or kitchen was enough to arouse an eager, however oft repented, invitation.

"Nah, then, Scholes! – come thi ways in, and tell us how Jeckie Farnish did tha' out o' thi bit o' land – here, gi' t'owd lad a drop o' rum to set his tongue agate! Ecod, shoe's t'varry devil his-self for smartness is that theer Jecholiah! Nah, then, Scholes, get on wi' t'tale!"

Scholes had no objection to telling his tale over and over again, and there was not a pair of ears in all that neighbourhood which had not heard it; if not at first, then at second hand – nor was there a soul which did not feel a certain warmth in recognising Jeckie Farnish's astuteness; Scholes himself recognised it.

"Ye see, shoo hed me afore iver shoo come to t'house!" he would say. "Knew t'coal wor theer afore iver shoo come reck'nin' to want to buy mi fotty acre and mak' an orchard on't! But niver a word to me! Buyin', shoo wor, not fotty acre o' poor land, d'ye see, but what they call t'possibilities 'at ligged beneath it! T'possibilities o' untold wealth! As should ha' been mine. Nowt but a moral thief – that's what shoo is, yon Jecholiah. Clever' 'er may be – I don't say shoo isn't, but a moral thief."

"Tha means an immoral thief," said one of his listeners.

"I mean what I say!" retorted Scholes. "I know t'English language better nor what thou does. A moral thief! – that's what yon woman is. I appeal to t'company. If ye nobbut come to consider, same as judges and juries does at t'sizes, how shoo did me, ye'll see 'at, morally speakin', shoo robbed me o' my lawful rights. Ye see – for happen ye've forgotten some o' t'fine points o' t'matter, it wor i' this way – "

Then he would tell his tale all over again, and would afterwards argue it out, detail by detail, with his audience. In that part of Yorkshire the men are fond of hearing their own tongues, and wherever Scholes went the companies of the inn-kitchens were converted into debating societies.

One night, Scholes, full of rum and of delight in his grievance, went home and found his wife dead. As he had left her quite well when he went out in the morning, the shock sobered him, and certain affecting sentences in the Burial Service at which he was perforce present a few days later turned his thoughts toward religion. The truth was that Scholes, already half mad through his exaggeration of his wrongs, developed religious mania in a very sudden fashion. But no one suspected it, and the vicar, who was something of a simpleton, believed him to have undergone a species of conversion; Scholes, anyhow, forsook the public-house for the house of prayer, and was henceforth to be seen in company of a large prayer-book at all the services, Sunday and week-day. Very close observers might have noticed that he took great pleasure in those of the Psalms which invoke wrath and vengeance on enemies, and, on days when the choir was not present and the service was said, manifested infinite delight in repeating the Psalmist's denunciation in an unnecessarily loud voice. But no one remarked anything, and if the vicar secretly wished that his new sheep would not bleat quite so loudly, he put the excess of vocalisation down to the fact that Scholes was new to his job and anxious to obey the directions of the Rubrics. Moreover, he reflected, the probability was that Scholes would soon tire of attendance on the services, and would settle down to the conventional and respectable churchmanship of most of the folk around him.

Scholes, however, developed his mania. He suddenly got rid of his farm, realised all that he was worth, and went to live, quite alone, in a small cottage near the churchyard. From that time forward he divided his time between the church services and the doings on Savilestowe Leys. Whenever there was a service he was always in church – but so soon as ever any service was over he was off to the end of the village, to haunt the hedgerows and fences, and button-hole anybody who cared to hear his story. This went on for many an eventful month, and at last became a matter of no moment; Ben Scholes, said all the village, was a bit cracked, and if it pleased him to spend ten minutes in church, and all the rest of the day hanging about the outskirts of Jeckie Farnish's pit, why not? But in the last months of the operations at the new pit, the first day of another Lent came round, and the vicar, with Scholes and a couple of old alms-women as a congregation, read the Commination Service. Scholes had never heard this before, and the vicar was somewhat taken aback at the vigour with which he responded to certain fulminations.

"Cursed," read the vicar in unaffected and mellifluous tones, more suited to a benediction, "cursed is he that smiteth his neighbour secretly!"

"Amen!" responded Scholes, suddenly starting, as if a thought struck him. "Amen!"

"Cursed," presently continued the vicar, "is he that putteth his trust in man…"

"Amen, amen!" said Scholes fervently. "Amen!"

"Cursed," continued the vicar, glancing round at his respondent parishioner, and nervously hurrying forward, "are…"

"Covetous persons, extortioners!" exclaimed Scholes, anticipating certain passages to come. "Amen, amen! So they are – amen!"

Then without waiting to hear what it was that the prophet David bore witness for, he clapped his prayer-book together with a loud noise, and hurried from the church; through one of the windows the vicar saw him walking among the tombs outside, gesticulating, and evidently talking to himself. When the service was over, he went out to him. "I fear the service distressed you, Scholes," he began, diffidently. "You are – "

Scholes waved his arms abroad.

"Nowt o' t'sort!" he exclaimed. "I wor delighted wi' it! I could like to hev that theer service read ivery Sunda'! I wor allus wantin' to mak' sure 'at a certain person 'at I could name wor cursed. An', of course, wheer theer's cursin' theer's vengeance – vengeance, vengeance!"

"Don't forget, Scholes, that it has been wisely said, 'Vengeance is Mine: I will repay, saith the Lord,'" answered the vicar, in his mildest tones. "You must remember – "

"Now, then, I forget nowt!" retorted Scholes. "I know all about it. But t'Lord mun use instruments – human instruments! Aw, it's varry comfortin', is what ye and me read together this mornin' – varry comfortin' to me. Cursed! 'Covetous persons'! Aw! – ye needn't go far away to find one!"

The vicar was one of those men who dislike scenes and enthusiasm, and he left Scholes to himself, meditating among the gravestones, and went home to tell his wife that he wished somebody would give the man a quiet hint that loud upliftings of voice were not desirable in public worship. But next Sunday Scholes was not in his accustomed place – the front pew in the south aisle – nor did he come to church again. The clauses in the Commination Service had set his crazy brain off on another tack, and from the day on which he heard them he forgot the temporary anæsthetic which religious observance had brought to him, and sought out his older and more familiar one – drink. He took to frequenting the "Brown Cow," a hostelry of less pretensions than the "Coach-and-Four," and there he would sit for hours, quietly drinking rum and water – as inoffensive, said the landlady, as a pet lamb in a farm-house kitchen.

For Scholes no longer talked about his grievance. He became strangely quiescent; sharper observers than the landlady would have seen that he was moody. He never talked to anybody at this stage, though he muttered a great deal to himself, and occasionally smiled and laughed, as if the thought of something pleased him. But one night, as he sat alone in a corner of the "Brown Cow," there came in a couple of navvies whom he recognised as workers at the hated pit, and a notion came into his mentality, which, crazy as it was rapidly becoming, yet still retained much of its primitive craftiness. He treated these men to liquor; they came to be treated again the following night, and the night after that; they and Scholes henceforth met regularly of an evening in their corner, and drank and whispered for hours at a time.

There came a day whereon these men and Scholes no longer forgathered at the "Brown Cow." Instead, they met at Scholes's cottage. It was a lonely habitation, a tumbled-down sort of place in the lee of the old tithe-barn, and had been empty for years before Scholes took it and furnished it with odds and ends of seating and bedding. It stood well out of the village, and could be reached unobserved from more than one direction. Here the two navvies with whom he had made friends at the "Brown Cow" began to come. Scholes laid in a supply of liquor for their delectation. And here, round a smoky lamp and a spirit bottle, the three were wont to talk in whispers far into the night.

Had Jeckie Farnish or Lucilla Grice known of what it was that these three men talked – one of them already obsessed with the belief that he was the Lord's chosen instrument of vengeance, the other two cunningly anxious to profit by it – neither would have slept in their beds, nor felt one moment's peace until Scholes and his companions were safely laid by the heels. But they knew nothing; nothing, at any rate, that was discomposing or threatening. Ever since the time of putting more capital into the concern the making of the colliery had gone on successfully and even splendidly. The two shafts, up-cast and down-cast, had been sunk to depths of several hundreds of feet without any encountering of more than the ordinary difficulties; the two great dangers, water and running sand, had not presented themselves. On the surface the building of the various sheds and offices had proceeded rapidly; some were already roofed in; in one the winding machinery and engines had been installed. The connection road was made; the link of railway finished; and on the high ground above the Leys three rows of ugly red-brick cottages were steadily approaching completion. The man who made his silent calculations that morning when Jeckie Farnish stood by him in grim silence came to her one day with a sheepish smile on his face.