The Major turned; the Squire turned. Up to that point the Squire had not noticed Percy Cullurne. Now all eyes were turned on Percy Cullurne. Percy Cullurne stood upright and saw us watching him. He scanned our eyes and shook his hands free of water, as he had done on that very spot thousands of times before, I am sure. He sniffed. He spat, though not in anger: it was a practical, working-man’s expectoration. He sniffed again and passed a hand across his mouth. Every action of his had become entrancing. One almost expected him to start dancing and singing, as in the music-hall, or produce a rabbit from his cloth-cap (needless to say, Percy Cullurne was not in his Sunday best). But then he fell still, and merely stared us back. It was our turn to move.
‘Ah!’ came from the Major. The Major thought that enough, evidently.
The Squire had no choice. Anyway, his Furies were at him. His moment of personal glory was crumbling before his very eyes. He cleared his throat. He could, with a great effort of will, have turned his back, and said nothing. ‘The greatest events,’ as Fielding puts it, ‘are produced by a nice train of little circumstances.’ How different things might have been then!
‘Ah!’ came from the Squire.
Percy Cullurne cocked his head slightly, like a faithful dog who has just received an unfamiliar command.
‘Cullurne,’ said the Squire. He lifted his chin up, and placed his small hands behind his back, and rocked to and fro on his heels. His hair-oil gleamed in a decent imitation of St Michael’s helmet.
‘There’s a place at the end, Cullurne. Make it thirty-three.’
The crowd murmured its approval, along with one or two shouts from smocks, to the effect that Percy could stop a regiment with two fingers, if he could find them — which from the laughter that followed was clearly not meant to be complimentary; but its probable vulgar import, hidden in the multiple folds of village irony, was wholly lost on me. Percy Cullurne rested an elbow against the pump and continued to stare at us with nothing but puzzlement showing across his features. The frumpy old lady to my right leaned across in front of me to the cantankerous gent on my left and whispered, ‘Village idiot!’ To my shame, I did not flick her hat off, but merely wrinkled my nose at the stench of naphthalene, and emphatically cleared my throat.
Small beads of perspiration began to run down the Squire’s nose. He compressed his lips and puckered them in and out, like a child about to cry (‘bivering’ — as the local dialect rather charmingly has it). He looked anxiously about him for what I could only imagine was an escape route. Fury was grappling with a sense of absolute funk. This was extraordinary. His fingers locked themselves behind his back, then writhed. I believe to this day that he knew he was defeated. Percy Cullurne had probably terrified him for years, though he was twice Cullurne’s age, and of course immeasurably superior in social position. I know men of impeccable breeding who live in abject fear of a particular domestic servant (often the butler). It is, I think, a need, a profound desire, acting within them. Percy Cullurne has never grappled with himself. He is, in one way, as insentient to his own soul as a plant or a tree because he has never felt a need to query that inner self. His soul is commensurate with desire: his desire is his soul, and the soul remains content merely to be.
‘Come on man,’ said the Squire, ‘come on.’
Cullurne passed a big hand across his big face, which appeared to wipe away the puzzlement, pushed himself off from the pump and began to walk towards us. It was a space of only some thirty yards, but his slow, shambling gait, the ease of his great limbs, the utter silence that surrounded the strike of his iron-shod heels against the hard ground, the sudden shattering of a big dry whorl of horse-dung by an oblivious boot, his long shadow dancing over the stony earth — all this made his progress as slow as a Titan’s, as if a figure from some Homeric bronze-hammered past had loomed, had risen again into our midst. I can’t honestly say now whether I knew what he was about to do: perhaps all of us thought he would shuffle onto the end of the line, to a cheer no doubt, and the meeting would have been accounted a great success. Whatever Cullurne was or was not to do, we knew we would never forget that slow, methodical advance towards us, transfixing time itself; bespeaking slow, hard hours in the field, or in the dusty barn, or in the great lavish garden of the Manor; and arresting, for a long minute, our madness.
Whatever we were thinking, two Important Persons were in no doubt of his intentions: the Vicar, his head on one side, his palms together, was ready to grant his blessing; the Major had come down from the podium and was standing with an equally ready hand extended from a crisp cuff; the Squire, however, was rigid from head to toe. The Sacrificial Lambs watched Cullurne from the corner of their eyes, until Cullurne came to a stop two paces from them, and from the Squire. The crowd were eerily quiet. The whole square appeared suspended in a great silence, into which Cullurne’s voice broke — I was tempted to say like the blows of a blacksmith’s hammer, but it wasn’t like that at all. It was not violent, it was not thrust from him: it seemed to branch as naturally from him, in those soft syllables, as a tree from the earth. I cannot put it into words. Suffice to say that he spoke quietly, as if only to the Squire — but there was not a man or woman in that wide square who did not hear him.
‘I’d rather,’ he said, ‘bide at home.’
The Squire swallowed. His fingers writhed.
‘Stay at home, man?’
The man nodded slowly. There were a few titters in the crowd, and a smock snorted. The cantankerous gent on my left tut-tutted violently.
The Squire lifted his chin still higher.
‘Duty, Cullurne. I would be proud for one of my servants to answer the call of the hour. His country in need. And so on. Duty, Cullurne. Duty.’
The Major’s hand drooped, but did not fall. The Vicar’s mouth puckered into a mew of distaste. My heart, I have to say, was hammering wildly. There was a curious taste of metal in my mouth. The church rang the quarter, thudding its fleet hooves across our temporal defiance. As the echoes washed away, the under-gardener spoke again.
‘I’d rather bide at home, sir. That’s all.’
The crowd’s titters grew into chuckles. The young men in the line shifted from foot to foot, grinning.
‘I see,’ said the Squire. He looked about him, as if for aid. People averted their eyes — myself included. He began to glower. He was grappling with himself; it was painful to watch. It was, in some profound way, embarrassing.
‘Yes. I see. He would rather stay at home. Yes. I see. What? Well, if a man would rather stay at home, then who are we to stop him, what? What? Thank you, Cullurne.’
Bare reportage cannot convey the deep hatred sometimes evinced between men through the simplest address. The words of the Squire were more spat out than spoken. The crowd murmured. Cullurne turned and walked away, and every eye followed his long strides, every heart beat to his steady rhythm — until each step became no more than a faint echo, dwindling to silence through the empty lanes.
Activity broke out again in the square: the crowd began to disperse into small knots, the young men gave their names to a dapper clerk who had suddenly appeared from the side of the crowd, the hoops rattled and a green-liveried automobile roared to a stop outside the Post Office and diverted everyone’s attention. It was the Major’s. When I looked above it, at the eaves, I saw nothing. The house-martin had gone.