The Glimpses of the Moon Read Online Free PDF Page B

living almost entirely in the kitchen. The wooden name-sign on the gate had been the last despairing bleat on Roland’s slughorn in face of the Dark Tower; after that they had abandoned the attempt to humanize their surroundings and had instead anaesthetized themselves by constantly going into Glazebridge to the cinema, where they often saw the same programme three days running, worsening their condition, as they stared at the screen, by getting diarrhoea from eating too much ice-cream.
    The Rector, returning from India, had been surprised to find his property baptized in his absence, but, not being a man very sensitive to literary nuances, had done nothing about the sign until many years later, when the Major had filled a conversational gap by suggesting that not worrying was probably a Popish practice, and so
ipso facto
unfit to be continuously recommended on the gates of proper Christian people of any sort, let alone proper Christian clerics. Though temperamentally little subject to anxiety himself, the Rector, struck by this notion, had at once gone to work on the nuts and bolts which held the sign to the massive wrought-iron curlicues of his great-grandfather’s gate. When these resisted him - being by now rusted tight - he had seized a hatchet and dealt the sign itself a heavy blow diagonally across the middle, and would certainly have gone on to reduce it to splinters but for being interrupted by a parishioner in trouble. Later, after he had given the parishioner a lot of money and no advice, it had occurred to him that since many undeniable Protestants, such as Jesus of Nazareth, had advised against worrying, the Major must have been speaking frivolously; so that apart from asermon against frivolity the following Sunday, with special reference to the Major (lightly camouflaged as ‘a certain retired military person’), he had expelled the matter of the sign from his mind, and it had stayed expelled.
    When the party from The Stanbury Arms arrived at the Rector’s gate they saw a grey Mini neatly parked outside it
    Visitor.
    They went on in nevertheless.
    The Rector’s acreage was planted to a disconcerting extent simply with hedges - huge, unkempt, dusty, spider-haunted walls of lonicera and laurel and yew; making your way among them, you felt that you were in a giant’s knot-garden, or a maze. And that Fen and Padmore and Fred and the Major were going to have to make their way among at least some of them was at once obvious. From somewhere out of doors over to their right, the Rector’s voice, which even when imparting confidences could be heard fields away, was being raised in wrath.
    â€˜I don’t care,’ it was saying. 7 don’t care. For all I care, the population of Plymouth can light its houses with tallow dips. Pylon, indeed. You’re not putting any pylon in
my
paddock, and that’s flat. And I’ll tell you another thing.’
    Guided partly by this uproar and partly by the Major, who professed to know his bearings, they plunged into the greenery, and so presently reached the source of the disturbance, which proved to be an overgrown circular grass clearing with an ancient sundial in the middle and hedges all round. With force rather than finesse, the Rector was in process of trimming these hedges, which as a result were beginning to look like a sort of cubist switchback. He had got down from his step-ladder and was waving his shears threateningly at a terrified little man in grey.
    â€˜Ha!’said the Rector.
    If you took the Rector from the top downwards, the first thing you saw was iron-grey hair thatching a high, noble forehead. Below this point, however, matters deteriorated abruptly. No doubt about it, the Rector’s actual
face
was simian - so that the overall effect was as if Jekyll had got stuck half-way in the course of switching himself to Hyde. The clothes were a crumpled, laurel-spattered clerical black, with dog-collar and withoutsize