A Month in the Country Read Online Free Page A

you’ (he added doubtfully).
    Incredible! I thought. Why are so many parsons like this? Must one excuse their defective sensibility towards their fellows because they are engrossed with God? And what about their wives? Can they possibly be like this at home?
    â€˜Of course, it isn’t absolutely sure anything’s there,’ I said, trying to sound matey.
    â€˜Of course there’s something there. I may have a certain reservation (which I’m not prepared to discuss) about Miss Hebron but she was no fool. She went up a ladder and scraped a patch until she found something.’
    Good God, this was appalling! Scraped a patch! ‘How big a patch?’ I moaned, sounding hysterical and staring wildly into the gloom above my chancel arch – (my cheek-bone clicking away like mad).
    â€˜One head, I believe,’ he said. ‘Certainly not more than two.’
    A head! Perhaps
two
heads! Probably half a dozen heads! She would have used sandpaper and a pan-brush. I felt like running up the ladder and beating my head on the wall.
    â€˜Then she whitewashed it over again,’ he went on, quite oblivious to my distress. ‘You might as well know here and now your employmenthas not my support. But, no doubt, you guessed this – reading between the lines of my letters. It would never have reached this stage but for the unreasonable position taken up by her solicitors when I asked their agreement to an alternative use for your twenty-five guineas and their pig-headed refusal to pay out her £1000 bequest to our Fabric Fund until the will’s conditions were fulfilled.’
    I gazed up into the darkness. However had she known it was there? But what if there was nothing except what was left of her heads? But if Keach, plainly a notable unbeliever, believed there was, then there must be. It occurred to me that perhaps he’d had a scrub too.
    â€˜It will be in full view of the people,’ he complained.
    â€˜It?’ I asked. ‘It?’
    â€˜Whatever it is,’ he said curtly, looking up the ladder. ‘It will distract attention from worship.’
    â€˜Only for a short time,’ I said. ‘People tire of colour and shapes which stay in the same place. And they always believe that they have more time than they will have and that, someday, they’ll come on a weekday and have a proper look.’ I should have said ‘we’ – I’m just the same.
    Do you know, I believe that he actually did consider the validity of this argument before rejecting it. Then he went. He hadn’t told me who Moon was. Perhaps we should run into one another behind the lilac bushes.
    I ran up the ladder again and did a few gentle bounces on the platform; it was commendably firm. Then I contemplated the great sweep of lime-washed wall before me. Yes – ‘contemplated’ – no other word will serve: it was a solemn moment. It went (the wall, that is) up to the roof timbers and sideways and downwards to the limits of the arch. Like a blind man I ran the flats of both hands along its surface until I found the places she’d distempered again. By nature we are creatures of hope, always ready to be deceived again, caught by the marvel that
might
be wrapped in the grubbiest brown paper parcel.
    But I
knew
it was there. And I knew it was a Judgement. It was bound to be a Judgement because they always got the plum spot where parishes couldn’t avoid seeing the God-awe-full things that would happen tothem if they didn’t fork out their tithes or marry the girls they’d got with child. It would be St Michael weighing souls against Sin, Christ in Majesty refereeing and, down below, the Fire that flameth evermore – a really splendidly showy crowd-scene. Perhaps I’d have done better to have bargained for payment per head.
    I was so excited that only darkness stopped me from making a start. What luck! My first job … well, the first job on my