Saltmarsh Murders

“Another one has come,” said Mrs. Coutts. Old Coutts had gone up to bed with neuralgia, and Daphne and William were playing quoits tennis out of sight of the front door.

The next day happened to be Sunday. On Sundays we breakfast at eight o’clock, on weekdays at eight-thirty. I have never discovered the reason for this unless it is to get the vicar out of bed soon enough for him to have a last glance over his sermon for Morning Prayer. I usually have to be wakened, therefore, on Sundays, but on this particular Sunday morning something roused me with a start. I sat up in bed, and observed a large squelchy object stuck on the outside of the bedroom window. It had all the appearance of an over-ripe, flattened-out tomato. I arose and inspected it. It was an over-ripe, flattened-out tomato. Blinking, as much to clear the brain as the eyeballs, I took another goggle at the frightful fruit. Beyond it I could see the vicarage hedge, and beyond the hedge a collection of the lads of the village. They were engaged, apparently, in plastering over-ripe fruit, bad eggs, and chunks of horse and cow manure over every window of the vicar’s residence. I opened the window, rashly, as it turned out, and began to shout at them. Just at that moment the window beside mine was flung up and young William’s boyish, excited bleat announced:

“If you don’t cheese it, you ugly stiffs—”

A chunk of horse-dung took him over the eyebrow. At the same instant a last season’s egg got me in the left ear. We both shut our windows, shot out on the landing and made for the bathroom. William was seriously annoyed. He didn’t know many expletives, but those he knew he made full use of. I couldn’t very well follow suit, of course, but I listened sympathetically.

“But what’s it for?” enquired William, scrubbing his now shining face upon the towel. “What’s the giddy idea? That’s what I want to know.”

I charged out to dig up the old man, closely followed by William. Daphne came out on to the landing. She had her blue dressing gown on—rather jolly. Her hair was rumpled, of course. Small kid sort of effect. I managed a hasty but quite charmingly satisfactory salute. She rubbed it off, absentmindedly, of course, and told us gratuitously, of course, about the mob of sans culottes at the front. Mrs. Coutts, up and dressed and not a hair unbrushed, joined us, and we all goggled out of the landing window. The populace had stopped chucking the soft fruit and other bouquets, and were beginning on the chunks of soil and the stones course. The dining room windows seemed to be copping it rather badly, and a chunk of rock about the size of a large grapefruit crashed through my bedroom window and broke a picture called Nymphs at Play which used to hang over the head of my bed. I didn’t like the picture, but it served to annoy Mrs. Coutts, and she used to push in every morning, to my certain knowledge, and turn it face to the wall, before the maid came to make the bed.

The general din brought old Coutts out. He had arrived at the shirt and trouser stage and had not shaved. Nothing would satisfy him, when he had had a look at the ancient society of rock-chuckers, but to harangue them.

“Useless to do so from the open window of a bedroom,” he said, surveying the two-foot hole in my casement. “I will go into the garden and enquire into this disgraceful demonstration.”

Even Mrs. Coutts, who usually represents the Church Militant in times of stress, thought this a damn-fool idea, and I am compelled to state that I upheld her. At least, I upheld her until I caught Daphne’s eye. When I did, I said that if he went, I would go with him. He didn’t even stop to put his coat and waistcoat on, but marched out at the front door and began by booming at them. His voice, on this occasion, was the voice he keeps for weekdays when we have the schoolchildren en masse in church, and they hoof the fronts of the pews and surreptitiously play football with the hassocks, and whack each other’s shins with the edges of the hymnbooks, and cough aggressively after the first six minutes of the address until the pronouncement of the Benediction.

“Good people,” megaphoned old Coutts, “what is the meaning of this?”

A dozen voices answered him in a kind of chant:

“Where be Meg Tosstick’s babby? Where be Meg Tosstick’s babby? Us ask the landlord! He don’t know! Us ask his missus! Her don’t know! Where be Meg Tosstick’s babby?”

After that, it sounded like the new setting we had to the Te Deum last September, or a dog fight at the Battersea Kennels, and the air was filled with stones. Suddenly there was a sharp report, and somebody on the outskirts of the crowd yelled:

“Duck your heads, lads! They’m shooting at us!”

Sure enough, young William’s airgun spoke the second time, and there was a decidedly anguished yelp from the ranks of the besiegers. The vicar swung round.

“William!” he yelled. “Stop that! Do you hear!”

“All right!” screamed William. “But I’ve got another slug ready for whoever bungs the first brick. You howling cads!” he continued, addressing the villagers. “If my aunt and sister weren’t holding the seat of my bags, I’d come down and make you sit up!”

The vicar took advantage of the diversion created by his nephew to announce that he would receive a deputation after Morning Prayer if they had a grievance. They were so used, I suppose, to cheesing their conversation when the old lad spoke, that they listened fairly quietly while he laid down the law about damage to property and unprovoked assault, and, at the end of his decidedly spirited address— delivered on an empty stomach, too, of course—they melted away without much backchat, and the vicar and I returned to the fortress and assessed the damage.

“I shall pay for the window out of the Bible Class Social Fund Box,” said old Coutts, sucking his finger which he had advanced too near the jagged edge of what was left of the pane.

“And in the meantime, Noel will have to sleep with William,” interpolated the woman.

“Not on your life!” I hastily, but, of course, ill-advisedly remarked. Mrs. Coutts spent breakfast time in recriminatory remarks directed chiefly at me. The village, I gathered, thought I had sneaked the baby. I let her run on. Really, it’s the only way.

I must confess that I felt a bit like the first missionaries must have felt as we walked into church behind the choir that Sunday morning, but the service was allowed to run its usual course, and although the tougher element of the village sat at the back and chewed gum, there was no disorder and no interruption. After the Benediction had been pronounced, the vicar stood on the steps of the chancel, cleared his throat, looked all round the church, and said:

“I am ready to meet in the vestry any person or persons with a grievance against me or against any of my household.”