The Missionary's Wife

by Tim Jeal

  ‘I might have known you’d hate injustice,’ he said softly. And his admiration set her pulse knocking loud and swift. He does care for me, she told herself. She was overjoyed and yet frightened. From the moment she had started to care for him, she had feared that a man who gave his whole life to the service of others would expect too much of those close to him. Then she reminded herself that Charles too had been daunting, in his own way. Perhaps she needed to be a little fearful of a man in order to fall in love with him.

  Robert offered to walk Clara home. As they emerged in the darkening street, the lamplighter was at work with his pole and ladder, and shops were closing. Robert was intrigued by the jeweller’s immense roll-down iron shutter, which was being levered into position as they passed.

  ‘People in my village would think the English very wicked to need such a thing.’ He smiled at her, but Clara was unsure whether he was being serious.

  ‘Are Africans really better people than we are?’

  ‘I only wish they were.’ He sighed. ‘In most tribes, the basketmaker and the blacksmith are the only skilled craftsmen, so there aren’t any precious objects to steal. Oxen are valuable; but every beast is immediately recognized, so only a madman would steal one. I’m afraid there’s very little virtue in their honesty.’

  ‘Do they ever steal from you?’

  ‘Never.’

  ‘But you must own things they consider precious.’

  ‘Oh, yes. But if they took my watch or even a cup or spoon, it would be obvious where it came from if they ever used it.’ After a pause, he murmured, ‘I really can’t express how much I enjoy talking to you about Africa.’

  The coal smoke in the air made Robert cough a good deal as they walked. After the clear, warm air of Africa, Clara imagined he must find these winter days in Sarston an ordeal. She could not help noticing how much more solemn he grew as they neared their destination. Then, unexpectedly, Robert took her arm. It was the first time he had touched her except to shake hands, and the pressure of his fingers through her coat filled her with unreasoning happiness.

  As they were walking along beside the railings of the little park close to her father’s house, she turned to Robert. He was staring ahead, unconscious that he was being observed. They were passing a lamp, and in that startling instant, before he could compose his face, she saw a look of such anguished uncertainty that her view of him as someone far above ordinary human frailty vanished like summer dew. And her knowledge of his weakness undid her. At that moment, she knew that never, not even in dreams, had she felt anything to compare with her love for this man.

  Without looking at her, he said in a voice that was both harsh and breathless, ‘I know I haven’t the right to ask as much of anyone – only Christ had the right to ask it of his disciples – but I must ask you, Clara, though you can have no idea of the sacrifices involved. You will have to give up everything if you accept me.’

  ‘Love is not afraid of sacrifices,’ she whispered.

  ‘Then will you have me?’ Hope transformed him after his nervousness. She was amazed at the force of the emotion her few words had unleashed. Yet while she remained silent, he still suffered. It was intolerable that he should be afraid and looking to her for a sign. She reached out her hands in a gesture of profound sympathy.

  ‘Yes,’ she told him. ‘Yes, my love.’

  Light-headed with relief, they embraced, leaning weakly against the sooty railings of the municipal park. The gas lamps glowed like blurred haloes in the evening fog.

  *

  When Alfred Musson heard the news of Clara’s decision, he wept. Clara had expected grief, but not the terrible racking sobs that shook her father’s body. Alfred had guessed that a proposal would be made, but he never dreamed that his daughter would accept without first discussing her answer. He was inclined to forbid the match but knew that Clara would disobey him if he did. He would also look ridiculous. Chapel elders could not with impunity pay lip service to the heroism of missionaries one moment, and the next treat them like lepers unworthy to offer marriage to decent tradesmen’s daughters.

  Alfred lay awake for hours each night and soon looked thin and haggard. While Clara could scarcely remember a time when he had not gone to the works unless really ill, in the days immediately after her announcement he delegated everything to his general manager and hardly left the house. Every day, he kept up his onslaught against the marriage, until Clara refused to dine with him unless he promised not to speak of it. Whatever his intentions, he usually succumbed to an outpouring of reproaches before Mrs Gabb, the housekeeper, brought in their pudding.

  His complaints, though numerous, were invariably the same: the discrepancy in their ages made such a union unnatural; Haslam had taken advantage of her youth and innocence; scores of white people died of disease in Africa every year; there were no doctors for hundreds of miles; and absolutely no society. For a woman raised in the colonies, the life would be harsh, but for a gently nurtured girl from England it would be torture. According to Clara’s father, Robert was considering not her interests but only his own pleasure and comfort. ‘And what about me?’ asked Alfred. ‘Has Robert Haslam given a single thought to the constant dread a father feels when he knows that any day he may hear news of his child’s death?’ Alfred was also very angry that Robert had not talked seriously to Clara about recent disturbances in South Central Africa. In 1893, a mere two years before, the white pioneers had defeated the Matabele without subduing them. And why should a proud tribe of savages, who had not yet committed themselves in an all-out struggle, be content to accept the rule of white foreigners in a country over which they themselves had long claimed sovereignty?

  Her father’s conviction that Robert had somehow used his greater age and experience to trick her into accepting him made Clara very angry. In her opinion, to marry a man both wiser and morally better than herself could only be to her advantage. Never again, she told her father, after becoming Robert’s wife, would she feel guilty about leading a pointless existence.

  ‘Do you want me to live in a cage?’ she asked during supper one evening. ‘I might as well be dead if I spend the rest of my life in Sarston.’

  Alfred put down his knife and fork and said sadly, ‘You wouldn’t be the only girl to marry a local man and choose to live close to a widowed parent.’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ she cried. ‘And people would applaud me. They’d praise me even more if I remained a spinster and lived with you. Noble and self-sacrificing, they’d call it. I call it cowardly to run away from risks. How could I turn my back on the fullest life I could ever hope to live?’

  ‘It may be a short life,’ he muttered. His moist eyes under their familiar bushy eyebrows made Clara feel brutal. His hair had become much thinner recently, making him seem older and more vulnerable.

  ‘Nobody knows more about Africa than Robert,’ she reassured, distressed by his unhappiness. ‘Of course he’ll look after me.’

  He reached out to her across the plates to grasp her hands. ‘Clara, I beg you to examine your motives. Aren’t you confusing love with a passion for adventure? Are you really sure you’re in love?’

  All Clara’s tender feelings were frozen by his refusal to accept the reality of her emotions. And, as so often those days, their conversation ended in recrimination.

  Alfred’s last throw came two days later, when he threatened to disinherit her. Knowing he did not expect to influence her, Clara guessed that he hoped Robert might decide to delay matters, in case his haste might do lasting damage to his future wife. But Clara simply told her father, as gently as she knew how, that she would marry, with or without his consent, before the end of Robert’s furlough. From that moment, Alfred’s will to oppose her collapsed. If she was bent on self-destruction, what could he do?

  So Robert Haslam and Clara Musson were married. Alfred wanted a quiet ceremony, and since Robert’s parents were dead, there was nobody to argue with him. Certainly Clara did not want to see Sarston’s richest citizen
s studying her through lorgnettes and opera glasses. Her father’s incredulity at her choice of partner was a useful indication of what she might have expected from other affluent members of the community, and she had therefore been determined to give their curiosity no scope.

  Afterwards, Clara would have preferred to take rooms in Sarston, or elsewhere, until their departure for Africa; but her father would have seen that as a further act of betrayal. So a second bed had been moved into the room that had been hers since childhood, and it was here that her marriage was consummated. And in spite of the strain of being in the same house as her father, Clara was ecstatically happy. Robert treated her with devoted reverence, often murmuring endearments that sounded very like prayers to her, not that she minded in the least. He once spoke of her bed as ‘the altar of my passion’, a phrase she thought beautiful and in the spirit of ‘with my body I thee worship’. Their lovemaking became for her not just the greatest pleasure in her life but a perfect expression of their real union.

  To please her father, she took Robert to the works one day and showed him the various processes through which raw clay passed before its final transformation into painted and glazed vessels. They examined the huge cupboards in which the pots were steam-dried, row after row of them on shelves. ‘“Hath not the potter power over the clay, of the same lump to make one vessel unto honour, and another unto dishonour,”’ declaimed Robert. Alfred was dismayed when the missionary expressed pity for the girl who painted the lines on cups. Her job was dull now, agreed Alfred, but one day she would graduate to flowers and be the envy of the other factory girls.

  The following day, Clara and Robert drove out in Alfred’s brougham on to the moors to the west of the town. The landscape was scarred by spoil from coal mines, and the pit-villages they passed were drab and grim. But Robert had been hungry for open skies. Up on the top of Hartoft Ridge, Clara told the coachman to stop, and they got out. There had been heavy rain, and the moorland was dark and forbidding. They walked along the track, stepping between puddles that reflected a stormy sky.

  After walking in silence for some time, he stroked the fur trimming on the cuffs of her coat. ‘I’m afraid you’ll need rather different clothes in Africa.’

  Pleased that he should want to discuss her wardrobe, Clara said eagerly, ‘I’ve been going through the catalogues of several tropical outfitters.’

  Robert frowned. ‘Don’t they mainly cater for the kind of ladies who go to Africa with their husbands to shoot game? I’d prefer you to wear homelier things. A local dressmaker could run up some simple designs. Fine and fancy things don’t last, not with frequent washing.’

  ‘But will I have time to get everything made before we sail? The outfitters do at least have plenty of styles and sizes in stock.’

  He looked her full in her face, and she knew at once that he was bracing himself to say something she would find unwelcome. ‘I’ve thought a lot about this,’ he said at last. ‘I’m afraid we can’t go out together at the same time. Before I left, the tribe was about to move to better grazing. I’ll have to build another house for us in the new village.’

  Too shocked to speak at first, she finally gasped, ‘Can’t we live in a native hut while you’re building it?’

  ‘It wouldn’t suit you at all.’

  ‘I’m not a Dresden shepherdess,’ she cried.

  ‘Clara, my sweet, their huts have no chimneys. Smoke from the cooking fire seeps out through the thatch and goes everywhere. In the rainy season, the mud’s terrible, even inside. They know nothing about drainage.’

  She grasped his arm. ‘I’d rather drown than stay in Sarston without you. Think what my father’s going to say.’

  Robert slipped an arm around her waist. ‘I wish I could alter the facts, my dearest. I’d love you to come out with me, but it wouldn’t be right. Water’s a worse problem. A few weeks after the rains end, there won’t be a drop for a bath. Everything has to be saved for drinking and cooking. Until I’ve built a storage dam, life will be unbearable.’

  She was so choked that her voice was scarcely audible. ‘Why didn’t you tell me weeks ago?’

  ‘It would only have depressed you.’

  ‘I had a right to know.’

  ‘It would have cast a cloud over our wedding. I can’t believe it would have made you refuse me if you’d known.’

  ‘Of course not. But there would have been less reason to marry quickly. That’s the point.’

  ‘You’re wrong there, Clara. I won’t be in England again for five or six years.’

  Clara felt an ache of disappointment in her throat. Robert was wonderfully clear-headed, but he had no idea why he had caused her such offence. By protecting her from unpleasant living conditions, he had shown a serious lack of faith in her. How many missionaries felt that their wives lacked the fortitude to share all their discomforts? Hardly any, she imagined. When Robert tried to hold her gloved hand, she pulled it away. Even as she longed for him to let her suffer in silence, he kept telling her things he ought to have said before. Apparently a schoolhouse and a chapel had also to be built in the new place. But worse than anything was his determination to delay her arrival until after the chief had been converted.

  ‘I would like to see his baptism more than anything on earth, Robert. I know how much it will mean to you.’

  He refused to meet her outraged eyes, but stared at his muddy shoes. ‘I wish the chief had no enemies, but he does; and these misguided people bitterly oppose his conversion. They hate me, Clara.’ He sighed heavily. ‘I can’t give them a chance to upset you, my dear. As soon as the ceremony has taken place, there’ll be no more hostility. For both our sakes, please be patient. It may not be as long as a year. Please try to understand.’

  ‘A year?’ she repeated dumbly.

  She stood motionless for a moment, then turned abruptly and walked towards the brougham. Dear God, a year. Robert walked beside her for a while, until she turned her back on him so pointedly that he stopped. When she reached the carriage, she told the coachman to drive her home.

  ‘And the gentleman, madam?’

  ‘He wants to walk.’

  The coachman did not know Robert’s identity and so was only mildly surprised. In the interests of economy, Clara’s father – though owning a carriage – did not employ his own coachman but instead hired a man from the local livery stables whenever he or Clara wished to be driven.

  As the brougham began to move, Clara realized she was being childish and spiteful in a girlish way; but in her eyes, this did not make her situation any less tragic. How could he speak of not seeing her for a year without tears and without contrition? A separation, which would plunge her into a black midnight of loneliness – was that something to tag on to the end of a long list of difficulties, as though it were just another item? Perhaps she should have listened to her father. But Clara’s pride prevented her from admitting such a possibility. If she’d been wrong, she would simply face the consequences.

  Only moments after she had entertained such stoical thoughts, the rapid motion of the brougham and the passing moorland made her panic. Suppose Robert was never to forgive the insult to his dignity? Of course, he would say he did, but would it be true? Would he ever understand how much he had hurt her? Although she longed to shout out to the man to stop, or, better still, to turn around, when she thought of Robert’s offence she wanted to fling herself on the padded leather and weep. While her throat was tight and her eyes smarted, she did not shed a tear.

  As the brougham passed some farm buildings about half a mile from the spot where Clara and Robert had walked together, the coachman bent down from the box and tapped on the front window. She let it down a little.

  ‘The gentleman, ma’am. He’s runnin’ and wavin’ behind.’

  Clara turned and peered through the small oval rear window. Robert was indeed running and waving; a sad, ungainly figure in the distance.

  ‘You’d better stop,’ she muttered, not knowing whether to weep or l
augh.

  When Haslam reached the carriage, he was panting, and his shoes and trousers were plastered with mud. The coachman let down the step and opened the door, and Robert clambered in. He sat huddled in the corner, as if afraid his wife might recoil from him if he presumed to sit too close. After the brougham had moved off, Clara glanced at him, and his posture was so humble that her feelings began to soften. But she did not turn to him or give him any sign of her more forgiving mood.

  ‘I … I … really …’ he gasped, still very breathless after running, ‘really should have warned you. I’ve been alone too long … too long isolated from the company of gentlewomen. I ask your pardon, Clara, I lost my first dear wife … Only my concern for your safety gave me the strength … to be unselfish enough to consider returning without you.’

  She was moved by his words but said quite coldly, ‘That’s no excuse for keeping your fears to yourself.’

  ‘I was afraid I might put you off … I loved you so much. I couldn’t endure the thought that I might lose you.’ He looked at her with such sad, contrite eyes that she could not help moving towards him. The next moment, he was kneeling, clumsily embracing her waist. To see her dignified Robert at her feet was so astonishing that she almost forgave him there and then. ‘There is another point,’ he murmured, resuming his seat. ‘I’d have little time to be with you if you come now. I’ll rarely escape the saw pit and the carpenter’s bench while there’s building work to be done.’

  Robert’s appearance was so slim and scholarly that to think of him bent double, wielding an axe or a pick, upset her. During the journey home, she allowed him to hold her hand for a few minutes towards the end of their journey.

  Once Robert realized that he was forgiven, he was so overjoyed that he burst into tears – something she would never have thought him capable of. Only hours later did she realize that he had held his ground and got her to accept that he would return to Africa alone.