Free Mr. Tasker's Gods by T. F. Powys Page A

order to go to bed, and it was then that he saw the book that Alice had knocked out of the shelf. It lay there open upon the floor, but the dying twilight was too far gone to show what was written upon the open page. Henry, like all souls who breathe quietly, was profoundly superstitious. He recognized the book as Milton. He had taken it into his keeping together with Jeremy Taylor’s Holy Living and Dying some weeks before. It was an old volume of a dull brown colour and contained, he knew, a poem called ‘Paradise Lost,’ that others besides Alice have called ‘dry.’
    Henry partly closed the window, there wasalmost a taste of autumn in the air, and he saw one figure carrying a basket of potatoes away from the allotment. He lit a candle and took up the open book so that it remained as it had fallen. Then he shut his eyes and passed his finger over the page until his finger stopped of itself,—he had done the same thing before,—and he read the lines that his fingers, guided mystically, had pointed out:
    â€˜O earth, how like to heav’n, if not preferr’d
    More justly; seat worthier of gods, as built
    With second thoughts, reforming what was old!
    For what God after better worse would build?’
    Henry knew quite well that the last line of the four was the one that was meant for him. In his voluntary lessons with the Old Fathers, he had learned to think a little for himself. The atmosphere of the Schoolmen was thought, and from the Schoolmen the Church Fathers had learned and in their turn begotten thought.
    Henry had no doubt that God had created the heaven before the earth, because He dwelt there. Henry had also, that evening, learned a little about man, who is an important part of the earth. He had beheld the true nature of the best part of the new creation, and now he read:
    â€˜For what God after better worse would build?’
    There was in the tone of that line a blow for some one, and for whom? Even though thewords were uttered by Satan newly entered into the serpent, Henry could not set it aside as one of his lies: it was a question and not a lie. The truth of that fatal question was too plainly appalling; it had come out of the serious and long-suffering mind of John Milton. A well-meaning man might have thrown at Henry’s head a thousand books written by German freethinkers , or English modern poets: Henry would have smiled, they could not have hurt him. The seed of doubt had this time been sown by a different hand, by a man who could not lie, and who uttered dread truth out of Satan’s mouth.
    â€˜For what God after better worse would build?’
    Henry slowly undressed; he too was being turned out of the garden by a remorseless angel, and he had begun to take his first steps in that outside desert place. That night his sleep was broken: a dog howled continually somewhere in the dark, and he dreamt of a great snake that could speak living words.

CHAPTER IX
THE TUG-OF-WAR
    T HE morning of the first tea! This festival took place when the village school broke up for the summer holidays.
    The Shelton National School was a dingy building built about the year 1835 by Squire Rundle. The back part of the school pushed its way among the tombs in the grave-plot, and the front jostled the village street, into which road from an open pipe the school drains fell. On the street side there was no window, the only window being on the side that looked out to the gravestones. Into this pleasant retreat, hung round with maps, the children of the village hurried every morning. It might be that half a dozen times a year their education was interrupted by a funeral or a wedding. On these occasions they were allowed for a few moments to look out of the window. A large brown stone, bent with age, leaned dubiously outside to mark the resting-place of Thomas Pitman, Esq., and his wife, Amelia, who died about the year 1812; the date was hardly legible.
    The festival of the first tea had