By the time they had sung another hymn, and Mr. Rawlings had slowly climbed into the pulpit, Ellis’s faith in him was fully restored, and he sat back expectantly. The sermon did not disappoint him. It was short, obvious, and applicable to the life of everyone present, from the gnarled ancient who bent over a stick in the front row to the little vacant-eyed children who looked around, open-mouthed, beside their elders, and made no attempt to take it in. For that matter, no one seemed to listen. Perhaps for them the discourse was only a part of the ritual, a recognised part of the occasion’s furniture, so to speak, like the pulpit, the voluntary, and the taking round of the plate. But, if they did listen, they would get nothing but good: a good that depended less on the thing said, sound and homely though it was, than on the quality that radiated steadfastly from the man who said it.
Ellis’s acquaintance of the night before, who had given him his prayer book, had to encounter him once more with the plate. Ellis, singing lustily, dropped half a crown in it, suddenly caught sight of the man’s crimson protruding ears, and all but burst out laughing.
The organist played them out of church with Bach’s “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring,” and Ellis, delighted, made his way round to offer his congratulations. She proved to be a girl of about twenty-three or four. Shy at first, she thawed out in the warmth of his approval. They talked music hard, and the girl only became self-conscious again when they came outside and walked slowly towards the lych gate, a target for the eyes of those who, by the immemorial custom of all villagers, stood outside the church to talk and stare.
Suddenly aware of the change in the girl’s manner, and her anxiety to get away, Ellis saw the onlookers. He bade her good-bye, once more loudly congratulating her on her playing, turned on the onlookers a stare with which their own could not compete, and set off up the road. Damn the fools, he thought. Why couldn’t they forget his trade and look on him as a human being, for one day in the week at least?
Then his brow cleared, and the effect of the service was reinstated in his mind. It had done him good: real good. Ellis drew a deep breath, hit himself upon the chest, looked round upon the morning, and decided that it was fair. He realised, too, where his feet were taking him. He would go to the Baildons’, ostensibly to see how Gilk was getting on, but really in the hope of a word with Joan.
He found Gilkison busy in the front room, and looking as if he had never stopped since the evening before.
“Where are the women?” Ellis asked, after contemplating him for a moment.
“I’ve no idea.”
“Fat lot of help you are.”
“About as helpful to you as you are to me.”
“It’s twenty past twelve. At ten to one I’ll come and fetch you back to your Sunday dinner.”
“Run away till then.”
It was useless to retort at him. Ellis sniffed, and went out into the passage. He stood, and cocked an ear. Culinary sounds indicated that someone was in the kitchen. Probably Mrs. Baildon. In that case, Joan might be in the garden. He could have looked over the hedge, but, if he had seen her, she might equally well have seen him, and retreated: and he wanted, if possible, to take her off her guard.
The back door was open. Ellis went noiselessly past the kitchen window. He need not have bothered: the occupant turned on a tap, and could not have heard anything short of a fall over the dustpan and brush that stood against the wall.
He went out boldly, knowing that, till he reached the currant bushes and the raspberry canes, he was in full view of the window. With any luck, her back would be turned.
A path twisted through the bushes. He followed it, and came suddenly upon Joan. The girl was lying in a deck chair, her long bare legs up on a stool.
Seeing him, she started, took down her feet, and sat up. She flushed, and for a couple of seconds he thought she was going to harden against him.
“Don’t disturb yourself. I’ll sit on this.”
He took the stool, and smiled at her with such obvious friendliness that she smiled back, and half relaxed.
Ellis nodded towards her book.
“Reading? Or working?”
“Working.”
“You looked as if you were enjoying it.”
“It is interesting,” she said defensively.
He held out his hand, and she gave him the book. It was on Drama, and she had it open at the Restoration. Ellis flipped over the pages.
“Etheredge—Vanbrugh—Sedley. Don’t expect they let you read them in the original, do they?”
She blushed again, and her eyes answered the twinkle in his. “Father has some of them.”
“Ever read Sedley’s Mulberry Gardens? Some fine talk in that. Chap talking about his girl to another chap, who’s throwing cold water on the affair. Second chap asks how old she is. Lover says, seventeen. T’other chap says, ‘I have drunk excellent Hockamore of that age.’ Grand answer: ‘Damn thy dull Hockamore, and thy base jaded Pallatt, that affects it.’ They knew how to talk in those days. Little bit further down, they’re talking about fate and their stars, and one says, ‘The stars are pretty twinkling rogues, that light us home sometimes when we are drunk, but they care not for you or me.’ Always stuck in my mind, that scene did. You ought to read it.”
“I’ll look out for it. There is an edition of Sedley, upstairs.”
“When d’you go up to Oxford? October?”
“I hope so. That is——”
“I hope so too.”
He looked at her. Shyly still, but steadily, she met his gaze. Her manner was so different from the last time that he decided Miss Attwill had been talking to her, and blessed the instinct that had led him to interview the aunt first.
“I had a great time with your aunt,” he said. “I think she’s a darling.”
Joan smiled. “She said you were a cheeky toad.”
“I know. But I fancy she’d rather have cheeky toads than respectful ones.”
“Yes.”
“You know,” Ellis said, “ours is a rotten job, in some ways. Everyone looks on us as a natural enemy—yes, even the innocent. It’s astonishing, the way people draw together when they see a policeman. I’m not sure they’re not even more frightened of us in plain clothes than in uniform. But none of ’em will ever treat us as human beings. That’s one reason why I fell in love with auntie. She didn’t take me for an enemy. Not even when I asked her the most embarrassing questions.”
He could see she was trying to picture the scene.
“What did she do?”
“The worst question of all—the one really embarrassing one—she answered right away, and told the truth, when she needn’t have at all. The others she either didn’t answer, or warned me that, if she did answer, the answers would be lies.”
“That’s just like auntie,” Joan said, her eyes alight behind the big lenses.
“Yes. She treated me as if I were human: and she believed me when I said I hoped it would all clear up properly. For you and your mother, I mean.”
The ground was very delicate now. Ellis wondered if he had brought the subject up too soon. Joan looked down at her hands. She seemed to be hesitating whether to speak or not. He kept quiet, making himself receptive, creating as it were a vacuum into which her words could come.
“All the same,” she said at last, “if we’d done it, you’d want to catch us and to hang us.”
“I never want to hang anybody,” Ellis said. “What’s the sense of it?”
“Well, then, why——?”
“I didn’t make the law. What the law does to the people I catch isn’t my affair. I only want to catch them if they’re a danger to society, or in order to protect innocent people who may fall under suspicion. As in this case.”