An Episode of Sparrows

by Rumer Godden

  There was a pause while he put some bundles of spoons on the stirrups; Lovejoy looked at the back of his neck where the grey hairs were stiff; the band of his striped shirt was not very clean, he wore no collar, and the green sweater under his apron was baggy and stained. After the overwhelming beauty of the hardware shop it was a relief to get back into her familiar shabby world. She said, “A fork alone would do.”

  “Is she starting window boxes?” asked Mr. Dwight.

  When he had finished arranging the spoons he went back into the shop and began turning things over. Lovejoy followed and watched. “I did have one, somewhere,” he said under his breath and moved a pile of cookery books. “Somewhere,” breathed Mr. Dwight and lifted a folded tablecloth, some old tennis balls in a net, a hat, and at last, from under a long-clothes baby doll, he brought out a small dusty fork; the varnish had come off its handle, its prongs were crusted with dirt, but it was a fork. “There’s a trowel to it somewhere,” said Mr. Dwight. “Maybe not its, but it’d do. I’ll look for it. Tell Mrs. Combie I’ll let her have it this evening.”

  “How—much?” asked Lovejoy.

  Mr. Dwight looked earnestly at the fork. “It’s a nice little fork,” he said slowly. “It’s handy.”

  “It’s dirty,” said Lovejoy.

  “It’s strong,” said Mr. Dwight.

  “One prong is bent,” said Lovejoy.

  “Well, she can have it for one-and-six,” said Mr. Dwight. “The same for the trowel. Two-and-nine the pair. Take it or leave it.”

  Lovejoy did not know why she bargained; no more than thirty-three shillings had she two-and-ninepence, and April was begun, and the seeds were still in her pocket. She looked at the fork, where he had thrown it on top of the tablecloth in all its usefulness and dirt. “You wouldn’t hire it?” she said.

  “No, I wouldn’t,” said Mr. Dwight. “One-and-threepence. Two-and-six, the two.”

  •

  “Mr. Vincent, can you lend me half a crown?”

  It was a bad moment to choose; Lovejoy saw that too late. She was finding out how difficult it is to notice other people when one is busy. Vincent was at his desk in the restaurant, doing his eternal accounts, and his face when he looked up was even whiter, more knotted with worry, than usual. “Half a crown?” he said. “I’ll soon need half a crown myself.”

  He and Lovejoy gazed down at the figures, meticulously written, in the long, thin account book. “There are nine million people in London,” Lovejoy had once told him, but Vincent had shaken his head. “There are about three thousand,” he said solemnly, “three thousand real people, if that.” Still, three thousand was a large number. “You’d think some of them would come,” he said.

  “Some do,” said Lovejoy.

  “Not enough to do any good, not real people.” He shook his head as if he could not understand, and Lovejoy tiptoed away.

  •

  “Do you know what that child has been doing?” asked Cassie, outraged. “Singing in the Square.”

  It was lunchtime; Cassie had been in that morning; she dropped into the restaurant every day—“or twice or three times a day,” said Vincent bitterly—and on her way home had gone across the Square to Mortimer Street, meaning to go into Driscoll’s and see if she could discover what extravagance Vincent had bought that day; she had caught Lovejoy in the act and brought her back. Now Mrs. Combie, who was serving vegetables for Vincent—there were three people in the restaurant—let the pots stand on the table and, leaning her weight on it, as she did when she was tired, looked at Lovejoy across the potatoes. Lovejoy defiantly looked back.

  “Like her mother!” said Cassie.

  “Don’t be silly, Cassie. Mrs. Mason is a concert artist,” said Mrs. Combie, and Lovejoy could have put her arms round the flowered overall and kissed her.

  “Singing. Begging!” said Cassie.

  “Did you, Lovejoy?” asked Mrs. Combie. Her voice sounded damped and sad and Lovejoy hung her head.

  “It wasn’t any use,” she said. Standing on the edge of the pavement, she had sung some of her mother’s songs. One lady had opened a window and thrown her threepence—a queer dark lady who stayed at the window to listen. “I couldn’t help myself,” said Olivia when Angela said she had encouraged the children to beg. “It sounded such a cheep in the Square.” A maid came out from another house and told Lovejoy to go away, and a lady came from the gardens and said the noise was waking her baby. Lovejoy moved to another house and was told to go away from there, and then Cassie came. “I want two-and-six,” said Lovejoy hopelessly, “—two-and-threepence, I’ve got threepence from the lady. Could—could I write to my mother? If you would lend me a stamp?” she asked Mrs. Combie.

  Mrs. Combie looked more tired and said, “Dearie, I don’t know her address.”

  “You don’t know—” began Cassie.

  “She’ll write presently,” said Mrs. Combie with dignity and put some buttered carrots in a dish and carried them to Vincent.

  “If you ask me you’ll be landed, Ettie,” said Cassie when she came back.

  “Mrs. Combie,” asked Lovejoy when Cassie had gone, “couldn’t you lend me half a crown and put it on the bill?”

  Mrs. Combie looked over Lovejoy’s head without answering for a moment; she was looking through the glass door into the restaurant, where Vincent for once was busy—“But chops and liver and bacon, and an omelette, there’s nothing in that,” she said to Lovejoy. Her eyes stayed troubled, on Vincent as he moved about, and Lovejoy knew again that for all Mrs. Combie’s kindness and the way she understood, Lovejoy and Mrs. Mason and everyone else could be drowned or lost or starved for Vincent. “Half a crown?” said Mrs. Combie. “I couldn’t do that. I daren’t. You see, your mother hasn’t paid, not for two months.”

  Lovejoy went back to the bomb-ruin, slipped through the gap and down the bank, bent and ran, doubling in and out of the walls, to the garden. She crouched in the middle of it, trying to dig a hole with her finger, but the earth was too hard; all she did was to stub her finger so that it swelled and sent pain up her arm. Then she sat, nursing the throbbing finger in her armpit, her head on her knees.

  •

  The places where money was kept were these: telephone boxes, the coppers put down for the newspapers while Sparkey’s mother was at lunch or tea, gas-meters, and the boxes on the doors in the Ladies’. Lovejoy had inspected these; she had been the round of the kiosks, pressing button B, and collected nothing at all; the people round Catford Street were too poor to forget their threepences. The kiosk boxes, like the gas-meters and the lavatory boxes, were impregnable to her; her hands were small and she had no tools. There were tills in the shops, but shop people in the High and down the Street took no risks; the tills were behind the counters or enclosed in wire cages with cashiers in charge of them. There was a till on Vincent’s desk but from the beginning Lovejoy ruled out Vincent and reluctantly she ruled out taking the money from the newspapers; there was something too trusting in the way it was left there; the very innocence and stupidity of it protected it; even the boys, who had been known to break open a telephone box, did not touch those coppers.

  There was one more place Lovejoy knew where money was kept: in churches.

  Like every other child in Catford Street, Lovejoy had looked into St. Botolph’s and Our Lady of Sion. At St. Botolph’s, just inside the door, were two collecting boxes, one labelled in Mr. Wix’s colloquial way “People are still poor,” the other “Our Organ Fund,” but it was no use trying St. Botolph’s because, keeping guard in it, were church ladies; Lovejoy had been chased out of it before now. The Catholic church was different; nobody watched there. “There’s nothing worth stealing,” Angela would have said. That was true; St. Botolph’s was beautiful, Our Lady of Sion was makeshift and gimcrack; the statues were of the cheapest plaster and the Stations of the Cross that hung along the walls were coloured prints in cheap wood frames; the altar cloth was plain linen, the screen behind, plain blue; Father Lambert had
no ladies to embroider for him, the hands that helped him were too rough for silk and gold thread, and yet there was far more money in the Catholic church—boxes and boxes, thought Lovejoy. There were four boxes at the entrance, two for guilds, one for payments for the small paper books that were for sale in the rack above it—but anyone could take one for nothing, thought Lovejoy, and no one would know—one for the poor, and one “To Build Our Church and Schools,” like the aeroplane outside. “Yes, we’re fearful beggars,” Father Lambert would say often. That was not all; inside the church were more: a box called “Sisters of Nazareth” and a box for candle money. There were always candles burning on the small candle rails, though here again anyone could take a candle and light it without paying; sometimes people lit three or four but they always put in their twopences; probably the boxes were full of money, thought Lovejoy longingly.

  It was not easy to steal in the Catholic church because it was never empty; it was busy, not with church ladies but with people. At St. Botolph’s the people came to the services but here they came in and out all day long; they knelt for a moment, to say a special prayer, or prayed a long time, or they lit candles. This traffic was a disadvantage from Lovejoy’s point of view, but it was balanced by the fact that no one took any notice of anyone else; anyone could pray at the candle rail for an hour and no one would think it queer. You can do just as you like, thought Lovejoy, but you have to kneel down, or bend your knee, as you come in and go out. Well, I can do that, said Lovejoy.

  She prospected and pondered till the second day, when, after she had helped Mrs. Combie wash up, she quietly stayed away from school and went to the church. She had thought it might be empty after lunch when the shop and factory workers had gone back to work and the children were at school. At this time people were in their houses, either washing up or feeding babies or sitting a moment to read the paper, listen to the radio, or snatch a few minutes’ peace, like Vincent. It should be empty, she thought and skipped up the flight of broken steps that led from the Street to a landing that had been the old church porch and where the bell hung now on a makeshift crossbar; from the landing more steps had once led into the crypt; now they were the church entrance. Lovejoy went stealthily down them; she had Vincent’s screwdriver in her pocket and she felt like a burglar.

  But the church was not empty. “Damn!” said Lovejoy. Two girls with scarves over their heads knelt at the back, but it was not hopeless; Lovejoy knew, by the white overalls lettered with blue that they wore under their open coats, that they worked at the laundry in Garden Row and would have to be back there at two o’clock. She went past them into the church, almost up to the front, slipped into one of the flimsy pews, and knelt down; she looked through her fingers at the candle box.

  The candles were lit on a rail that stood by the altar; the box was fixed to the wall; the label on the top read: Candles 2d.; twopences and twopences, thought Lovejoy; there were nine candles on the rail. One-and-sixpence! thought Lovejoy. She might be slow at reading but she was quick at adding up, especially money. She meant to go closer in a moment, but as she knelt she saw a subdued shine from the opposite corner of the church and she noticed what, in her brief runnings in and out, she had not seen before.

  The long hut that now made the church had been put up over the ruins and, rising through the temporary concrete floor were three of the old church pillars; probably they had been too heavy, too expensive to move until the remains were razed altogether to build the new church; the pillars had been left as they were, broken off short, and they made a side aisle to the church; bookshelves and cupboards had been put along it, but at the far end, up by the altar, screened from the main church by the top pillar and a blue curtain, a chapel had been made; as Lovejoy looked, a man came out from it, pausing by the pillar to genuflect and cross himself before he left the church. After a moment Lovejoy stood up and tiptoed across to look.

  It was like another tiny church; there were rows of chairs, a small altar with another blue screen behind it, a vase of paper roses, and above it, on a pedestal, a plaster Mother and Child.

  Below the statue was another rail of candles and another candle box.

  A girl was kneeling on one of the prie-dieux—nothing but girls, thought Lovejoy crossly, girls going gabble, gabble, gabble. This one had a string of beads in her hands and as she prayed she played with it. A necklace in church! thought Lovejoy primly. Even she knew better than that.

  It was quiet, remote, almost secret in here. Lovejoy knelt down, watching the girl, willing her to go away, and in a moment the sliding beads grew still, the girl put the necklace in her pocket, stood up, and went to the candle stand. She took a candle out of the holder, lit it from another candle, looked up at the statue, and, letting the wax run down to make a warm bed in the socket, fixed the candle upright. Then she took out a purse, found two pennies, and put them in the candle box; Lovejoy heard them clink as they fell, and the box top moved as if it were loose. Lovejoy could not look properly, only through her fingers, but her heart began to beat quickly. As the girl moved aside to kneel again before she went, Lovejoy saw that the padlock on the box was open.

  For a moment she could not believe her luck; she looked so hard that her eyes blurred and she had to rub them and look again. There was no doubt about it, the box was open, the small strong padlock dangled from the hasp undone; the girl walked away down the church, and Lovejoy was alone with the open box.

  “I must have left it open,” Father Lambert was to say afterwards. “Now I wonder how the devil I came to do that.” He thought for a moment and said, “Perhaps it wasn’t the devil.”

  Lovejoy was alone in the church too, as far as she could hear. Getting carefully up, and being careful not to knock over a chair, she looked; one girl, the girl who had been in the chapel, was still there but she was by the wall—praying to the pictures, thought Lovejoy. It seemed odd but it suited Lovejoy well; the girl had her back to Lovejoy; she stood up, passed to another picture, and again knelt down. Lovejoy did not in least know what she was doing, but as the pictures went right round the walls it seemed likely that she would be some time.

  Lovejoy came back into the chapel and stood by the candles, looking at the box. The whole church seemed hushed, waiting. Do it. Do it, said Lovejoy, and the church seemed to say it too; the open box was like an invitation, like—a little too like—the newspaper coppers. In spite of all the boxes, she knew by the aeroplane outside that the church had no money to spare. She hesitated; then she remembered Cassie and her mother, and her face hardened.

  Delicately, with her finger, she slid the padlock off, caught it and laid it quietly down, lifted the hasp, and opened the box; there was not much money inside but she put in her quick little claw and scooped some of it out. It did not chink much; not more than twopences being put in, thought Lovejoy. Experienced in hiding things, she did not put all the money into her pockets but some into her thick woollen socks and some into the handkerchief pocket of her knickers. There was a sixpence; her fingers, feeling for pennies, nearly dropped it; but all the rest was in coppers and it was heavy; I hope my socks don’t come down, thought Lovejoy. Three times she dipped, then pulled the socks up, gave a hitch to her knickers, shut the box, closed the hasp, slid the padlock into place and locked it. The whole thing had not taken two minutes; she peeped into the church; the girl had moved one picture down.

  Lovejoy unmistakably chinked as she moved. I’d better go, fast’s I can, she thought and had begun to move heavily away when the statue on its tall pedestal caught her eye.

  Angela said the statues in the Catholic church were cheap and vulgar, but to Lovejoy they seemed beautiful, especially this one of Mary. “Her robe’s a beautiful sky blue,” she told Vincent afterwards.

  “Plaster blue!” said Vincent with scorn.

  “Yes,” said Lovejoy happily, “and she has a white plaster veil and plaster lilies.”

  “Ough!” said Vincent as if that hurt him.

  “It isn’t ough,” s
aid Lovejoy, offended, and did not tell him any more. Mary’s pink hands and face were a little bright, perhaps, but she had pretty, shiny painted nut-brown hair and on the back of her head was the usual gold plate. Lovejoy did not know the purpose of that but she thought it decorative; like a dear little new kind of hat, she thought. The Baby had one too.

  To Lovejoy the statue was exquisite, but now, as it caught her eye, its eyes were looking down at her—down into me, thought Lovejoy uneasily; she had the uneasy feeling that the statue was real and had seen what she had done, had seen but was not angry; the eyes had been sad and gentle before, they still looked gentle and sad—not even cross, thought Lovejoy; that mysteriously offended her.

  It was against the code she had been brought up in all her life, the code of all the children in Catford Street: an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, or two eyes, two teeth, if you could get them. This steadfastness—and yet what could a statue do but be steadfast?—its unchangingness seemed to put her guilt squarely upon Lovejoy and she did not like it. “Yah! Boo!” said Lovejoy rudely, but the statue stayed the same.

  She began to panic. It had all been too easy, as if it were a trap; but it was not a trap; there was the church door open, the girl still murmuring her prayers. Lovejoy had only to walk out, carefully, so that she did not chink, and the money was hers.

  Instead she had a strong feeling that she could not walk out, that she should put the pennies back. Almost she did. She had been perfectly collected and calm when she opened the box, but now her skin prickled, and her hands and her forehead, under her fringe, were wet. Why doesn’t she look away? thought Lovejoy. Turn your head, she wanted to say sharply, but of course the statue could not, it was only plaster. “Silly little fool!” said Lovejoy scornfully at herself and with a mighty effort she walked down the side aisle. At the bottom she turned. The eyes were still looking.