In the afternoon, the mizzling rain set in and the glass dropped steadily. The leaves were falling from the trees; the garden had lost most of its colour; there were a few roses still and a few wretched little pansies who looked, as Frampton told himself, like artists at a public school. It was a vile afternoon. In his uneasiness, Frampton could not endure the thought of sitting to a book or books; he did not feel like work; he could not draw; something in the storm made him want to dodge it somehow, by getting drunk or going out on a spree. He thought of going for a long walk, but the day was dirty and mizzle was falling; he thought that it would not be worth the mess. He would only be wet through and plastered with mud, and wouldn’t enjoy a trudge with his own thoughts, through a wet landscape, with all the views blotted by rain. He wondered if there were any local man who would come out for a talk or a walk. He could think of none who seemed in any way endurable. The rectors and others he put aside. Hard up as he was for companionship, he could not stand those fellows; besides, he would get into disputes with them about faith and so forth. He was half prompted to do half a dozen things, and yet could not feel urged to do any.
The pub of old Hordiestraw seemed the best that the country offered; a game of darts with a few of the lads there and a chat about old times with a few of the oldsters; he would get something good to remember all his days from those fellows. Yet, on second thoughts, he could not stomach the thought of the bar, with its stink of stale tobacco and old drinks and old swinky habituées.
Still, something had to be done; he did not quite see what; he would go melancholy mad there doing nothing till midnight.
He might go back to London and go on a bust. But going on a bust had no attractions for him; the thought of it made him sick. He loathed cinemas; he hated theatres; he disliked concerts, for so often a concert made him endure two hours of what he didn’t want for ten minutes of what he did.
One of the maids knocked at the door; he called to her to come in. She was a comely girl who had got herself engaged since coming to
He looked through the letters; they did not keep him five minutes; then he opened the paper, and at once saw the heading: “Ancient Paintings Laid Bare in Stubbington Church.” He read, that two days before (which may have meant two days before the writing of the article, on the Wednesday of the week), some ancient wall-paintings had been laid bare by the removal of some panellings. The works were supposed to be of the fourteenth century, and to represent King Stubba’s fight with the pagans and subsequent conversion to Christianity. These works were in a little church called St. Lawrence in the Peppery. He had not heard of the church and had not seen it, but had heard of the Peppery as a place where people had once made long tobacco pipes; there was a couplet somewhere:
He judged that the light would be bad, but still, he could take a torch; he would go over to see these paintings. A glance at the map of Stubbington showed him the Peppery; it opened off the Market Square; within half an hour he was walking down the Peppery to the church.
He felt sure that on a day so contrary he would find, when he came there, that the church would be closed. In this he was wrong. It was not closed. The door stood open. A woman, who was making the church ready for the next day’s service, was emptying the altar flower vases into the gutter.
“Can I see the old paintings?” he asked.
“They’re in the side chapel,” she said; “the far side there; but you’ll not see much of them; it’s so dark.”
With the willingness to help the stranger and the helpless which is so marked a feature among the English, she followed him into the dark little church and pointed out an inner gloom at the north-east corner.
“It’s in there,” she said; “up in the corner there the paintings are, if it’s the paintings you want to see. But I don’t call them paintings myself; only a lot of queer mess, I call them. But you’ll see them for yourself, sir. Very old paintings, they’re said to be, and all about religion.”