“What’s happened to old Towin then, Becky?” Charley asked. “Isn’t he on the boat with you?”
She wrinkled her face into a frown. “Old Towin Thomas was a sinful man, Charley Samuels, and I don’t think of him no more. He wouldn’t believe in the Master, or take the Master’s cures, and as a result, he died of a malignant cancer that wasted him away until he didn’t weigh above a stone and a half. Frankly, it was a blessing when he passed over. I’ve followed the Master ever since then. I’m now coming up for my two hundred and twenty-third birthday. I don’t look a day over a hundred, I reckon, do I?”
Greybeard said, “That line sounds familiar. Do we know this Master of yours, then, Becky? It’s not Bunny Jingadangelow, is it?”
“You were always free with your tongue, Greybeard,” Becky said. “You mind how you address him, because he doesn’t use that old name now.”
“It sounds as though he still uses the old tricks, though,” Greybeard said, turning to Martha. “Let’s go aboard and see the old rascal.”
“I’ve no wish to see him,” Martha said.
“Well — look, we don’t want to be stuck here on this sea in this mist. We could be lost here till autumn comes, and by then we ought to be well on our way down river. Let’s go and see Jingadangelow and get him to give us a tow. It’s obvious that the captain of the ship must know his way about.”
They did as he said, and ferried themselves out to the steamer in Pitt’s boat. They climbed aboard, although the deck was already crowded with the faithful and their offerings.
Greybeard had to wait while the women from the island entered the Master’s cabin one by one to receive his blessing before he was allowed to enter. He was then shown in with some ceremoney.
Bunny Jingadangelow sprawled in a deck chair, wrapped in the greasy equivalent of a Roman toga, a garment he evidently considered more fitting for his new calling than the antique collection of rabbit skins which had previously been his most notable garment. Round him — and now being carted away by an old man in shorts — were material tributes to his godly qualities, vegetables, lettuces with plushy fat hearts, ducks, fish, eggs, a fowl with its neck newly wrung.
Jingadangelow himself still affected his curling moustache and sideburns. The rotundity that once afflicted only his chin now covered new territory; his body was corpulent, his face assumed the pasty and lop-sided podginess of a gibbous moon, and was of a hitherto unprecedented blandness — though it gathered a good percentage of its area into a scowl as Greybeard entered. Becky had evidently passed on the news of his visit.
“I wanted to see you because I always thought you had a rare gift of insight,” Greybeard said.
“That is perfectly true. It led me to divinity. But I assure you, Mr. Greybeard, since I gather that you still call yourself by that undistinguished sobriquet, that I have no intention of exchanging gossip about the past. I have outlived the past, as I intend to outlive the future.”
“You are still in your old Eternal Life racket, I see, though the props are more elaborate.”
“You observe this handbell? I have merely to ring it to have you removed from here. You must not insult me. I have achieved sanctity.” He rested a podgy hand on the table by his side, and pouted in discontent. “If you haven’t arrived to join my Second Generationists, just what do you want?”
“Well, I thought — I came to see you about Becky Thomas and this pregnancy of hers. You’ve no—”
“That’s what you told me last time we met, centuries ago. Becky’s no business of yours — she’s become one of the faithful since her husband died. You fancy yourself a bit as a leader of men, don’t you, without actually leading them?”
“I don’t lead anyone, because I—”
“Because you’re a sort of wanderer! What is your goal in life? You haven’t one! Throw in your lot with me, man, and live out your days in comfort. I don’t spend all my life tramping round this lake in a leaky boat. I’ve got a base at the south end called Hagbourne. Come there with me.”
“And become a — whatever you call your followers, and make my wife become one? Not likely! We—”
Jingadangelow raised his little bell and tinkled it. Two old women doddered in, both dressed in a parody of a toga, one of them run to a gross corpulence and with protruding eyes which took in only the Master.
“Priestesses of the Second Generation,” Jingadangelow said, “tell me the objects of my coming.”
With a singsong delivery, in which the thinner woman led by about half a sentence, they replied, “You came to replace the God that has deserted us; you came to replace the men who have left us; you came to replace the children that were denied us.”
“There’s nothing physical in all this, you understand, Greybeard,” Jingadangelow said parenthetically.
“You bring us hope where we had only ashes; you bring us life where we had only sorrow; you bring us full wombs where we had only empty stomachs.”
“You’ll agree the prose, in its pseudo-biblical way, is pretty telling.”
“You make the unbelievers die from the land; you make the believers survive; and you will make the children of the believers into a Second Generation which shall refurnish the earth with people.”
“Very good, priestesses. Your Master is pleased with you, and particularly with Sister Madge, who puts the thing over as if she believes what she’s saying. Now, girls, recite what you must do for all this to come to pass.”
Again the two women assumed the recitative. “We must put away all sin in ourselves; we must put away all sin in others; we must honour and cherish the Master.”
“That is what one may term the qualifying clause,” Jingadangelow said to Greybeard. “All right, priestesses, you may go now.”
They fell to holding his hand and patting his head, begging to be allowed to stay, and mouthing pieces of jargon to him.
“Confound it, girls, I’m in audience. Leave me alone!”
They fled from his righteous wrath, and he said irritably to Greybeard as he shrugged himself about in his chair to get comfortable again, “That’s the penalty with having disciples — they get above themselves. Chanting all this repetitive stuff seems to go to female heads. Jesus knew a thing or two when He chose an all-male team, but somehow I seem to get along better with women.”
Greybeard said, “You don’t appear totally submerged in your role, Jingadangelow.”
“The role of a prophet is always a bit wearing. How many years have I kept this up? Centuries, and centuries to come yet! But I give ’em hope — that’s the great thing. Funny, eh, to give people something you don’t have yourself.”
A knock came at the door, and a tatterdemalion man lost in a grey jersey announced that all the Wittenham women were safely ashore and the boat was ready to move on.
“You and your party had better leave,” Jingadangelow told Greybeard. It was then that Greybeard asked for a tow. Irritably, Jingadangelow said it should be done, if they could be all ready to sail almost at once. He would tow them as far as Hagbourne in exchange for a certain levy of work from Pitt, Charley, and Greybeard. After some consultation, they agreed to this, and put together their belongings; most of these were stowed in the dinghy or Pitt’s boat, while the rest came with them on to the steamer, where they were allotted an area of deck space.
By the time they were under way, the mist had cleared. The day remained brooding and heavy.
Pitt and Charley became involved in a game of cards with two of the crew. Martha and Greybeard took a walk round the deck, which bore the scars of the seats on which holiday makers had once sat to view the old river. There were few people aboard: perhaps nine “priestesses” to minister to Jingadangelow’s wants, and a few crewmen. There was also a couple of idle gentlemen who lounged in the shade at the stern and did not speak. They were armed with revolvers, evidently to repel any attack that might be made on the boat, but Greybeard, disliking their looks, felt some relief that he had his rifle with him.
As they were passing the saloon, the room curtained off for Jingadangelow’s use, its door opened, and the Master himself looked out. He greeted Martha ostentatiously.
“Even a god needs a bit of fresh air,” he said. “It’s like an oven in my cabin. You look as lovely as ever, madam; the centuries have left not a footmark in their passage over your face. Talking of beauty, perhaps you’d care to step in here and have a look at something.”
He motioned Martha and Greybeard into his cabin, and towards a door that stood at the other end of it. “You’re both infidels, of course, born infidels, I’d think, since it has always been a theory of mine that unbelievers are born whereas saints are made; but in the hope of converting you, perhaps you’d like to see one of my miracles?”
