The Hopkins Manuscript

CHAPTER ELEVEN

I had not been in the market town of Widgeley for ten minutes before I began to wish that I were back in the calm, unchanging atmosphere of Beadle. I suppose town folk are more sensitive to fear than village people, or possibly their less active lives provide a more fertile breeding ground for morbid thoughts. I can only say that the atmosphere of Widgeley was far different from the trustful optimism of my native village, and there was an unhealthy flavour about the place which I did not like.

People seemed to be wandering restlessly in the streets with no definite purpose, and as I entered the Unicorn for my customary lunch before the Show I had to stand quickly aside to allow a strange and pathetic scene to pass before me.

A handsome woman, obviously of good social standing, was helping a grey-haired chauffeur to lead an elderly man along the passage, and behind them walked a pretty girl of about eighteen, carrying the man’s hat.

There was such pitiful dismay and shame in the eyes of that girl and woman that I knew them to be the wife and daughter – and the man was helplessly, revoltingly drunk.

I could see at a glance that he was not an ordinary drunkard, for there was pride and intellect in the finely chiselled face even as it lolled hopelessly to and fro. I could visualise quite easily what had happened – that quiet country family driving to the market town – that wife and daughter leaving to do some shopping – the father, in a fatal moment of inactivity and loneliness, breaking suddenly under days of hideous, pent-up strain…

From the coffee-room window I watched the little group cross the Market Square to their waiting car. I saw a party of loungers gather round and snigger while the woman held her husband’s arm as he vomited in the gutter. As I watched the sedate old Daimler drive away there came a chuckle at my elbow and I turned to find Tim, the waiter, standing by me.

‘Major Hildesley,’ he remarked, ‘one of our Magistrates.’ And then he chuckled again. ‘Not much chance for him on the Bench again!’

I had little appetite for lunch. I could not detach my mind from that pathetic scene. I could not bear to think how that proud family would pass the rest of the day – and the long days to come.

There were scenes in the dining-room that disturbed me, too. A young man came in and loudly ordered a grilled steak. Within a couple of minutes he was abusing Tim, the waiter, for not bringing it, and as Tim was explaining that all grills took ten minutes the man crumpled up his newspaper, flung it upon the floor, stamped out of the room and did not return.

A fat, red-faced man, to whom meals must surely have been an absorbing pastime in happier days, was finicking and fussing with a helping of steak-pie. He turned the cubes of meat over this way and that in an aimless, helpless way that so got on my nerves that I could have shrieked at him. At last he pushed the plate away with a heavy sigh, called for a large whisky and soda and gulped it like a thirsty animal. I was very glad to leave the Unicorn for the more familiar atmosphere of the Poultry Show.

As far as I was personally concerned things could not have been better. Broodie defeated her three mediocre rivals with laughable ease and carried off her fiftieth First Prize. This I expected, but what pleased me so much was the fact that my little Bantam hens received an Honourable Mention. When the reader bears in mind that I had not entered these little birds with any thought of a prize he will readily understand the pleasure I felt.

But my personal success was really the only bright spot of the whole afternoon.

The Poultry Show itself was a mockery of former days. It seems that the courage of the Committee in deciding to carry on had aroused a lot of stupid amusement amongst the rougher elements of the town, who had gathered at the door and were cheering and laughing as the hens and cockerels were carried in. It is the worst possible thing to disturb highly trained birds in this way and I was justly angry.

When I entered the Hall I found it barely a quarter full, and Pomfret Wilkins, the Secretary, greeted me with an exuberance that seemed, in the circumstances, a little overdone. He told me that a number of entries had been cancelled at the last moment, and several had simply not turned up, without a word one way or another, just as if the Show had slipped their memory as something of no importance whatever.

It was all terribly depressing, and I was furiously angry that Broodie should achieve her fiftieth victory under such unworthy conditions. Some of the exhibitors put on a kind of swaggering bravado as if they were heroes to have come at all, and the judges carried out their responsible duties with an impatience and a carelessness that was a lasting disgrace.

There were scarcely a dozen people remaining in the Hall when the prizes were distributed, and the Chairman’s mind was so hopelessly off his duty that he completely forgot that it was customary to invite an exhibitor to say a few words when one of his hens achieved a specially notable distinction.

He apologised when I reminded him, but there were only eight people left when I began my speech. Although I spoke for less than fifteen minutes three of these people actually left in the middle of it, and the others turned out to be the five men who were waiting to take the platform away when I had finished. In the circumstances it is not surprising that my carefully prepared joke, about Broodie receiving big offers to star in a film, completely misfired. It was received in silence, and I was very glad, as I have already said, to start back to my own brave village of Beadle again.

But as I watched the towers of that once friendly, happy town fade into the twilight I knew that the last effort to keep up the old traditions was over for ever: the last happy, normal event had been bravely attempted, and had dismally failed.

After dinner that night I went out into my garden to see the new moon: the February moon: the last moon but two. I sat in my arbour of yew trees where four long months ago I had first opened the fateful letter that called me to the memorable meeting of the British Lunar Society. The thin crescent was high above the beech trees of Burgin Park. Except for its brilliancy it seemed little different from usual, but as my eyes grew accustomed to the night sky I perceived the darkened portion of the moon looming huge and venomous against the thin bright crescent. I think, in its concealed darkness, it was more terrible than ever it seemed when later it emerged in its full brilliancy – it was like the foul black head of an octopus rearing its way through a dark, weed-slimed ocean.

I could not bear to be alone with that bloated thing for long. As I stood there I half expected to see it move and change before my eyes – but it lay so firmly, so serenely in the sky that I could scarcely believe that in every second it was plunging upon its dreadful, relentless journey towards us.

I drew the curtains in my library and tried to lose myself by entering into my Poultry Journal the hollow victories of that afternoon. I turned the six closely-written folios that recorded Broodie’s triumphant rise to fame, and a lump rose in my throat as a procession of happy days came back to me – starlit evenings, riding home in Mr Flidale’s van with Broodie in her crate beside me. Perhaps it will all seem paltry and trivial to the man who finds and reads this manuscript in the long distant years of the future – but it was something real and honest and thrilling in those happy, sunlit days.