Read Mr. Tasker's Gods for Free Online

You’ve come about that nasty dog. Father has just shot at it. It would go after my chickens. How silly of it not to die!’ and the young lady smilingly explained to the clergyman the trouble the little black dog called ‘Dick’ had given them, the yells of agony continuing only a little way down the road. Just then the father, coming out from the barn, saw the clergyman, and his smiling daughter told him that Mr. Neville had come about ‘that bad dog.’ The farmer, without saying anything, but in his heart cursing the priest for interfering and the dog for not dying, went out with a great stick and beat the dog to death in the road. The girl, composed and plump and smiling, watched this event from her front door. The priest strode away, and meeting the farmer, who carried the dead dog by one leg, walked past him without speaking a word, to his own house.
    The farmer, to revenge himself against the clergyman for taking the side of the dog, presented to the village a carefully prepared report that Mr. Neville had a wife and ten children in Whitechapel ,and that every night at the vicarage he drank brandy with his housekeeper, out of tea-cups . The village imagination enlarged and magnified and distorted these tales until they were believed by every one, and a fine time they had of it, these village story-tellers, rounding off their little inventions when any new item of vicarage fiction came their way.
    It was easy for the people of the village to hate Mr. Neville, and they hated most of all the vicar’s face. Perhaps because he looked at them gently and forgivingly, as if he forgave them their sins. They did not like his kind of forgiveness ; they much preferred a brutal scolding, they asked for the whip. The children very soon learned to call out rude words at him as he went by, their favourite yell being a doggerel rhyme about the Lord’s Prayer, that began:
    ‘Our Father which art in Heaven,
    Went up two steps and came down seven….’
    This they shouted out as loud as they could when they saw their priest in the road.
    Only that foolish fellow, Henry Turnbull, loved him. And the two friends sat together that July afternoon, and smoked cheap cigarettes, regarding with wakeful interest the great trees and the long grass.
    Henry had really been very much shocked that day, and he wanted to see his friend shocked too. Henry had not understood what he hadseen. It was to him an isolated incident of terror in the homely life of the village, and he wanted it explained away. Its horror had made a very distinct impression upon his mind; he had never been told before so plainly that all was not right with the world. The girl’s kiss had been wonderful . He always remembered that. And the failure at cutting down the fir tree was only a failure. And his hardships abroad, like a trying campaign, had given him a lasting contentment at home. But now this new thing had appeared, and he wanted his friend to tell him what it meant. He opened the subject by talking about his father’s churchwarden.
    ‘He is a very hard-working man. He goes to church every Sunday and gives milk to the school tea. He is really a great help to my father. He sits amongst the boys at the back and prevents them spitting at each other, and turns them out sometimes. Father likes him very much, and praises the way he makes his little girls work. Father says there would be no idleness nor want in England if every one were like Mr. Tasker. Only, how can he drag dead skinned horses into his yard to be devoured by pigs?’
    Mr. Neville watched the trees as he answered. He said quietly:
    ‘You must expect men like that to act rather crudely. Mr. Tasker would tell you that he must pay his rent; he would say that, like theJehovah of old, his pigs cry out for blood and his children for bread. Mr. Tasker wants to get on, to rent a larger dairy, a farm perhaps, or even after a time to buy land, and his pigs are his greatest help. The fault is not Mr. Tasker’s,