The Missionary's Wife

by Tim Jeal

  Clara felt bemused. If no way of life was better or worse than any other, how could a missionary expect people to believe that his beliefs were superior? She was pondering this when Haslam declared loudly:

  ‘Africans ought to live as they like: owning little, sharing much, without envy of each other or lust for wealth.’ He smiled reassuringly at the puzzled faces in front of him. ‘But, my friends, while I love my African brothers and find much among them to admire, I see terrible cruelty too. When I first came to live with Chief Mponda’s people, Mponda had just strangled one of his wives for infidelity. Polygamy is unimaginably vile, and I am fighting it with all my strength. Mponda gives orders for twins to be murdered at birth. Tradition tells him that disaster will strike if he doesn’t. He’s not an unusually brutal chief, but in his eyes trial by ordeal is a perfect form of justice. So innocent people are forced to drink poison every year. And many harmless men and women are drowned or burned as witches. You cannot imagine the suffering caused by witchcraft unless you witness the horror of it yourself. Ladies and gentlemen, the conversion of a single chief to Christianity can spare the lives of hundreds and save the souls of thousands more. Unless you support missions with money, then you will be as bad as the man who sees someone dying in the gutter but does nothing to lift him up.’

  Robert Haslam was soon describing his winning of the tribe’s trust by treating diseases and building a watercourse. It suddenly came to Clara why his accent was so strange. The man had spoken no English for years. She gazed at him in astonishment. Without anyone of his own race to help him, this gaunt-faced man had compiled a native dictionary and translated the Bible. His description of doing this was so straightforward that she saw at once how incredibly difficult it must have been to find native idioms to match English ones, especially since numerous English words had no African counterparts.

  Haslam now described an attempt to kill him. He had been invited to watch a lion hunt, and during it, a spear had been thrown, wounding him in the thigh. Since he had been standing nowhere near the cornered beast, this could only have been a deliberate attack. Clara felt a tight emotional ache in her throat. She could not help comparing the dangerous events of his life with the petty social happenings of her own. He had risked everything repeatedly for the sake of others, yet how many times, since her mother’s death, had she run even the small risk of visiting one of her father’s sick workers? Unless giving employment to the dressmakers and drapers could be said to justify an existence, what did she ever do that was of the smallest benefit to a living soul?

  As the missionary uttered passages of Scripture, Clara remembered her mother’s lips framing the selfsame verses, and her eyes filled. ‘For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul … I am come that they might have life more abundantly … Commit thy way unto the Lord and He shall direct thy steps.’ For the first time in years, the meaning of these passages shone out clearly for her. She sensed that he would soon stop speaking and realized that she did not want this to happen. His voice sounded clumsy to her no longer, but rich and full and at the same time decisive. When he said a final prayer for all the suffering people in the world, the men and women around her were sinking to their knees.

  Afterwards, Robert’s outspread hands and compassionate eyes remained with Clara as she walked wet-cheeked into the gaslit street. Charles had once told her that all acts of self-sacrifice gratified some hidden desire or eased some personal fear. Self-indulgence was a lot less devious, he had said. How trivial he seemed now.

  The following day, Clara could not get Robert Haslam out of her mind. His dedication and courage haunted her. Until now she had regarded a man of almost forty as practically in his grave. Yet when she thought of Robert, age became irrelevant. Almost for the first time in her life, she believed she had encountered a truly good man. Thinking about him, Clara remembered something she had not thought about for years. When she was four, her favourite doll had been a small Negress made of wood. She had been called Martha, and Clara’s love for her had continued long after her hair fell out and her skull became dotted with holes like a worn-out brush. Without understanding why, Clara found this memory comforting.

  *

  Alfred Musson was treasurer of the West Street Chapel, and so most visiting preachers and missionary fund-raisers came to dine with him before they left Sarston. Robert Haslam was no exception. In the hall, his weather-beaten face and powerful voice had made Clara think him rugged. Seeing him again, and so close to her, she was surprised by his long, delicate features and high forehead. As he shook her hand, he said something unremarkable about being pleased to be dining with her father, and she was aware of his hand pressing hers. Though physically slighter than she remembered, he still radiated strength.

  Despite his greying hair and lined face, Clara noticed a boyish untidiness about the missionary: buttons missing on his old frock coat and a tendency for his necktie to slip to one side. He also had a habit of sitting exactly as it pleased him: hunched forward or leaning far back in his chair. On his first evening at her house, Robert Haslam managed to make her father laugh while discussing that most delicate of all subjects, ‘political agitation’. Robert achieved this by luring her father into suggesting ever more barbaric punishments for union men, until at last even Alfred had exploded at the absurdity of it all.

  After they had finished eating, Clara tried to get Robert to tell her more about the lion hunt and the attack on him that might have ended his life; instead he talked about lion hunting in general and the extraordinary bravery of the hunters.

  ‘Imagine being so close that you can smell the lion’s breath and hear the black tuft on his tail thumping the ground. Even then you won’t be close enough to kill him with a spear.’

  Robert said other things that made Clara think he was deliberately trying to understate the dangers and discomforts he had faced. He talked about the kind of toys African children liked – tin trumpets and skittles were very popular; and how Africans reacted on first seeing such civilized wonders as Eno’s Fruit Salts fizzing in a glass – they believed it would be boiling hot. Haslam did not mention his wife’s death in Africa five years before – Clara learned this from her father after Robert had gone. Later during this first evening, her father tried to get his guest to define how he stood on a particular doctrine that was currently controversial among nonconformists. But Robert sidestepped the question, saying instead something that would stick in Clara’s mind.

  ‘Christianity is really a way of life and nothing to do with dogma. There’s only one question to ask: “Do I follow the example of Christ’s life in the way I live mine?” No other question matters.’

  *

  Alfred Musson had heard that Robert Haslam meant to spend no more than ten days in Sarston. In fact he would stay nearly three weeks, returning there, after lecturing in other towns, on five separate occasions before his furlough expired.

  One afternoon, a few days after dining at the Mussons’, Haslam called on them again. Alfred was not at home, but Clara received the missionary in her father’s library. After some inconsequential chatter, Haslam lifted a copy of David Livingstone’s Missionary Travels from the shelves and started to read aloud. In Robert’s chosen passage, the great man described how he had made his own building bricks and how his wife had baked their bread in an oven hollowed out of an anthill.

  ‘“There is little hardship in self-dependence, and married life is all the sweeter when so many comforts emanate from a husband’s and wife’s own hands. To some it may even seem a romantic life.”’ Robert had read these words with an apologetic smile. But from the expression on Clara’s face, it was clear that she did not think he had any need to reproach himself. He was still reading when Alfred returned, almost an hour later.

  On the following Sunday morning, Alfred left early for chapel with some of the other elders. Clara had not thought of going too, until Mr Haslam unexpectedly called for her. As she walked beside him through the t
own, feeling slightly dazed, she became intensely aware of the shape of his hands and of a lock of hair that fell across his brow. She found herself telling him about a revival meeting in the chapel years earlier and her failure to declare her faith. This memory upset her more than she had expected.

  ‘But I see God shining in you so clearly,’ he insisted. And then, to her amazement, the warm concern in his ungainly voice squeezed from her the admission that she had lost her faith. It was the last thing she had imagined herself telling him. Yet now that she had done so, she longed for guidance.

  Robert said gently, ‘Seeds of belief can remain dormant for years before coming to life. Don’t regret the past, Miss Musson. Our lapses and our returns to Christ are all part of our spiritual growth, like circles in the trunk of a tree.’

  It was a bitterly cold morning, and their breath came in clouds. As they crossed the railway bridge, a red signal light glowed in the deep canyon of the track.

  ‘But surely,’ she murmured anxiously, ‘dormant seeds don’t come to life unless the soil around them changes.’

  He gazed at her with understanding. ‘Changes can come imperceptibly, like a sea tide. Even now the change may be on its way.’ His eyes held hers, and for a fraction of a moment she felt that they saw each other without any barriers or pretences. ‘You mustn’t worry,’ he added softly. ‘Not everyone has a Damascus Road experience. Love life. Follow Christ’s example. Seek and ye shall find.’

  At first she pretended to herself that she did not know why these words were such a relief to her. But she did know, really. If he had been disappointed by her confession, or condescendingly censorious, it would have been impossible for her to continue seeing him. But since he seemed happy with a gradual process of aspiring towards faith, she could feel relaxed with him.

  *

  In the immediate aftermath of Charles’s treachery, Clara had made the acquaintance of some cavalry officers, whose regiment had been stationed just outside Sarston. Subsequently she had been invited to witness full-dress parades and point-to-points and to attend a regimental ball. The conversation of her hosts had been largely about sport and horses; and since many of them were said to have mistresses, Clara had found it hard to feel at ease with them. By their code of behaviour, a born lady, or even a rich merchant’s daughter like herself, was absolutely out of bounds before marriage, since she would be ‘ruined’ if ‘deflowered’ – more accurately, her marriage chances would be ruined. Consequently many of these young officers preferred affairs with married women.

  After Charles’s treachery, Clara felt that she could never risk marrying any man who she suspected might be the type to fall in and out of love. She could not endure the thought of becoming one of those wives who were obliged to turn for their happiness to children, house, and garden after their husbands had betrayed them. If she was ever to give her heart again, she would have to be sure that she was prized by an entirely honourable man. In spite of having longed to be mistress of a great house, she now thought only of being married to a man with special qualities. Her faith in love had survived but in a new form: she saw it as something sacred – more a matter of personal dedication than an arrangement bringing happiness or self-fulfilment.

  When Robert had left the Mussons’ house after dining there for the fourth time, Clara experienced an emptiness so desolating that she could not hide her distress. In six weeks Robert would return to Africa, and she might never see him again. Although Clara herself did not know it, her father was well aware of her feelings and was terrified by them. Since his wife’s death, Alfred had become so dependent on Clara that he dreaded the day when she would eventually marry. The possibility that she might then live abroad had been his worst nightmare. Yet so absorbed had Clara been with her own emotions that she had scarcely noticed her father’s distress.

  After breakfast each day, Alfred usually retired to his study to go through his post and read the papers before leaving for the pottery works. Clara would listen for his tread on the stairs, so she could be in the hall in time to kiss him goodbye. On the morning following another of Haslam’s evening visits, Clara moved towards her father in the usual way, but he stepped back from her. His kind, tired eyes were acutely anxious.

  ‘You’ll be seeing Mr Haslam later, I daresay?’

  ‘He’s presenting Scripture prizes at Mill Lane School,’ she answered, as if the event were only of passing interest to her.

  ‘Will you be going, Clara?’

  ‘I’ve been asked, so perhaps I will.’ But of course she would go, and she knew that her father knew. His silence was very painful to her.

  ‘Do you love him?’ he blurted out at last. The fear in his voice both reproached and stung her. How could something so precious to her seem like death to him?

  ‘What a question!’ she replied briskly, forcing a smile. Her father’s tragic expression did not alter.

  ‘He certainly loves you.’

  ‘He’s never given me any sign of it.’

  Her father took a deep breath, as if struggling to suppress anger. ‘Then why does he keep visiting us?’

  ‘Don’t be angry,’ she begged. How could her even-tempered and affectionate father feel such hostility? His face was flushed, and he could not keep still.

  ‘It’s unforgivable,’ he burst out. ‘A man of his age playing on a young girl’s feelings. But he’s so good and selfless, isn’t he?’

  ‘He is good, Father,’ she insisted.

  ‘Is he really?’ Her father nodded with heavy irony. ‘What’s good about making you love him just before he leaves for Africa? Do good men behave like that?’

  ‘My feelings are my fault, not his.’

  ‘Don’t be an idiot, Clara. He’ll ask for your hand as soon as he thinks you can’t bear him to leave England. Missionaries aren’t fools. They know that when they ask too soon, the woman is still too worried about foreign discomforts to say yes. She’ll only lose her head when the man’s about to go.’

  ‘You don’t know Robert at all,’ she gasped out, stunned by her father’s mistrust. At the same time she was wildly excited. Was he right? Could Robert really love her?

  That afternoon, she went to the prize-giving. The school hall was crowded with pupils, parents, and visitors. Robert talked to the children in a relaxed and natural way about how African girls and boys spent their days, and what was expected of them by their parents and their chief. As always, Clara was moved by seeing this ungainly but mesmeric man holding the attention of a roomful of people. She could not stop gazing at him. His hair was greying, but his brisk movements were those of a far younger man.

  After the prizes had been presented, the governors and their wives departed, and Clara pushed her way through the throng of children towards the platform. She found Robert talking animatedly to the new mistress of the junior school. To see him standing beside this young and attractive woman made Clara catch her breath – not because she suspected that their conversation was anything but innocent, but because in that instant it came to her that Robert owed her no special duty of any kind. It was quite possible that he respected the teacher more than her, since she earned her living and was of use to others. Clara walked away to calm herself for a moment, but cannoned into the headmaster in the doorway. He was dragging in a pretty, curly-haired girl by the ear. The child looked familiar to Clara.

  ‘Let her go,’ she cried. Her anger at this public humiliation of a child was sharpened by her own distress. ‘What on earth has she done?’

  ‘She didn’t curtsy to the governors’ wives,’ snapped the headmaster. ‘Didn’t even stand still, though they walked by as close as you are, Miss Musson.’

  As the headmaster released his grip, the girl raised her head, and Clara at once recognized her.

  ‘Will you cane her hands, Mr Rivett?’

  Mr Rivett drew himself up. ‘I think you can depend on me to know what punishment is required when children show no respect to their betters.’

  A year earlie
r, Clara had sometimes come to the school to read to the younger children when their teacher was ill. She remembered this particular child, in her spotless pinafore and carefully darned stockings. Her name was Jane Hobley, and her younger sister had recently died and been denied a church funeral – only receiving committal prayers at the graveside – and all because the vicar had mistakenly feared that the corpse might infect the congregation. Diphtheria had been given as the cause of death on the certificate, although the doctor had never visited her. The family had sworn that she died of pneumonia, but the vicar had refused to lift his ban.

  Clara said sharply, ‘Were the vicar and his wife anywhere nearby when Jane refused to curtsy?’

  ‘They were, Miss Musson, but I fail to see what that can signify.’

  While Clara was explaining, with Jane’s help, she turned and saw Robert Haslam listening to her. As soon as the child had been pardoned, Robert eyed Clara with such a tender gaze that her cheeks burned.