“Then I may as well go,” I pointed out, and got up as gracefully as my mackintosh and goloshes allowed. “And I’m sure you shouldn’t come out again with your asthma, Mrs. Weekes. Can’t I take the Work Party for you this afternoon?” I felt this a handsome sop to my defection, but it was only a partial success as Mrs. Weekes clearly felt so luke-warm a Christian as myself was hardly to be trusted to read aloud to the Working Party; but I got away with reiterated instructions about the page of The Mill on the Floss at which Mrs. Weekes had arrived in the last half-year.
The vicarage was full of the smell of baking when I returned; lunch was late, and Arthur was later, and there was no second post. One of my good resolutions for Lent is always to make cheerful conversation at meals for Arthur; but as I read the papers till he came in, wet through and sneezing, I longed for a foreign phrase-book to help me.
“Ha! I see Mr. Strang has been struck by lightning!” is an opening with which my fancy played, but it was quite unnecessary. Darling Arthur had met by chance a sergeant in the Xth, in the street to-day, who served with him in France, and he told my husband that he can look in and have a talk with his men any time, for they’re such a hopeless lot it can’t harm them any way; and Arthur looked as elated as if he were a missionary monk just given leave to sail from Iona to the mainland to carry the Gospel. The sergeant even went so far as to say that a bit of a holy sing-song wouldn’t hurt them in their blanky billets, and we passed into a candid discussion on the English Hymnaries which would have made the hair of Mr. Elgin and Miss Croft fall out with disapproval.
“Not ‘Fight the Good Fight’,” I urged. “Remember, Dick says that the national hymn now is ‘Abide with me’ and nothing else. It brings to a soldier’s mind lovely memories of Cup Ties and barrel-organs in the street, and, if they’re regulars, intense relief that the Tattoo is over for another something something year.”
“Yes,” agreed Arthur, “it’s another most interesting facet on the English psychology. The thought of thousands of jolly sportsmen requesting that the Cross may be held before their closing eyes as they await the Kick-off is curiously suggestive. I wonder what visual images it actually conveys to their minds.”
“I think it expresses emotions you haven’t felt but would like to,” I suggested, “and that’s why it’s silly to choose good dull poetry by Blake and Cowper and Addison, and jog them out slowly in church. I don’t mean ‘Jerusalem’, of course. Even my dear old grannies love to shout that they will not cease from mental strife, but that’s just a case in point. They can’t have bows of burning gold and arrows of desire, but they’d like to.”
Arthur exclaimed that at that rate I would hold a brief for all the most sentimental hymns which Mr. Elgin hates, and I went off to my working-party, cheered by unclerical criticisms of popular favourites, promising to ask the assembly to choose a hymn before our Guild Meeting. He had anticipated “Rock of Ages”, and I, “Nearer to Thee”; but we were both rebuked by old Mrs. Jones who said that as it was Lent what about “Christian dost thou see them?”—”with a good rumble in the bass if you please”. I did my best to oblige, and to ignore my memory of Dick’s comment that the second verse is the best description of indigestion he’s ever seen.
“Oh, not that old ‘has-been’!” was the reaction of the working-party, as they settled down to their work —the pink flannelette in its most curious size and shape was all ready. As my feelings about George Eliot are, alas, almost identical, I tried instead bits of The Diary of a Provincial Lady and The Demon in the House by Angela Thirkell, with unparalleled success. They would hardly allow me to stop; we omitted the last hymn, as Mrs. Jones candidly stated that stop laughing she could not, not even if it was for “Brother thou art gone before us”. I could only realize, later, that Mrs. Weekes will think more poorly of me than ever, and the ghost of George Eliot will haunt me eternally.
After tea I sat down to answer Lucy’s request, and was disturbed by only three telephone calls and one man in overalls at the back door, and another in a trilby hat and suede shoes at the front door, asking for railway fares to Manchester and London respectively. I am sure that many other clergy-wives must have puzzled as I do over the apparent connection in the popular mind between the Church of England and our main railway lines, but at least my generous confiding husband was out, and I heartlessly refused to oblige.
Private Jenkins, in view of his imminent departure for France, called to ask if Kate might pop round with him to the pictures for half an hour, and of course I was weak-minded after all, and let her leave the house at 7, and determined not to hear the back door open on her return at 12. On these occasions I cook a hot supper and eat it with Arthur in the nice warm kitchen, and we always settle down by the study fire on Monday evenings with special content. As his head nodded over a vast theological book, I re-read this, and felt, I fear justly, that this was hardly a day either of Christian, social or domestic utility, with which to impress Lucy. But let her wait! I have three committees and a lot of parochial visits to-morrow!
I feel that perhaps at this point I should say something to Lucy about what I feel when at last I tear myself reluctantly from the fire and my book, and go to perform the operation everyone still refers to as “saying their prayers”. In the corner of her front sheet I notice is a PS. in minute writing: “And, darling, do tell me—are you so old-fashioned that you still believe in anything at all?” I suppose I should try to answer that somehow. And yet what sort of apologia can I make to that outside world which she belongs to, of which, perhaps, we in the church see and hear of too little, where religion is still a matter of animated discussion and excited word experiments, but the Church of England is regarded definitely as a Back Number. All of us, I think, are too much tempted to go on working up and down at the handle of our parish pump, without stopping to look up and listen to other people with their sensational tales of their water supplies and all the newest gadgets. It’s not really enough to dismiss them as flighty, foolish people outside our own sphere of interest, and make prim, shocked faces when they force their point of view upon us. It is better to realize from the first that they do include the larger class of both intellectual and empty-headed people, and to try to explain as best we can, something of the reason for our comparatively dull and primitive mode of thought.
Many of us in the church feel nearer to them now than ever we did, I expect, because there is no doubt that any old routine of religious devotion seems a little inadequate for the terrible strain on our faith which the War means to us. Let me confess at once that my old books of devotions and forms of prayer are all hard to use, not because they lacked sincerity then, but because they have too many old associations with happier days to make them endurable, and because we have to face wholly new conditions of spiritual warfare. If anyone questions that, he has only to consider the difference between praying “Thy Will be done” when he really means he wants to conquer his self-willed clamour for his family’s prosperity and health; and when, as now, he is asking to share something of the agony of Gethsemane and the death, perhaps, of all his old life and hopes in the near future; and praying, too, for something of the ultimate faith which will enable him to walk out fearlessly into the dark olive woods filled with the lanterns and scowling faces of his enemies.
That is why, since I had influenza, I do not go up to the prie-dieu in my icy bedroom, to take out my books of Devotion and the portion of the reading for the day. I go to the dining-room, and in adequate warmth by the gas-fire, embark on what is now the desperate spiritual adventure of trying to pray.
“Phew!” Lucy would exclaim at this point. “That’s just why you should try Rudolf Steiner or Christian Science, or join the new ethical group or the Church of Rome! Why do you go on trying to keep to your odd, funny old Church, with its back-stairs history and out-of-date parsons, and absurd fusses about tithes and Missions and Special Services and what not? And why, indeed, try to square life as it is, when were all ants in ant-hills all over
Europe, waiting to be squashed flat by some heavy foot, with old-world ideas of a Personal God, or a God of Love, or the Resurrection of the body or Life Everlasting? How can you fit all that into all the new scientific discoveries and modern ways of thought?”
This is no attempt at a real apologia. If Arthur were writing this, he might attempt one, but I shall simply content myself with my own humble ways of thought.
“You are too prone to visual images and analogies,” Arthur would say, shaking his head; but then this is not the apologia of a parson but of that very inferior being, a parson’s wife.
I see myself then, in my search for true Faith, as someone groping his way through a huge dark, shuttered house, in this black-out of our lives. At last I see a crack of light, and enter one room where there is an open, undarkened window at last, though the window indeed is small and high up in the wall. That there is a great and glorious view from it, if I could reach up to it, is certain; but that view, the vista of the whole truth of God’s scheme for the universe, I must leave to faith. While we must be in the house, our tabernacle of the body, we cannot hope to see the whole.
The room is cluttered up with tiresome partitions and divisions; they have been put up by former inhabitants, and no-one who enters it has the strength and courage to remove them. The division which is mine may be barer and more angular than that of the Mother of the Churches next door, and less airy, if more solid, than those of the fancy religions, as the Army calls them, in other corners. But it is allotted to me by birth and education, and by duty now, and it doesn’t seem to me that there is any real difference between the divisions when the sun shines in through our window.
That shaft of sunshine represents to me the Love of God. The room is full of dust in different layers; when the light shines in and the wind blows, every tiny speck of dust is an individual entity, irradiated and transformed. It is only really by that analogy that I can catch a glimpse of God’s love for the individual soul. To me, that moment of irradiation comes in the great Sacrament of the Church, which unites my utterly insignificant speck of being with the light of God and His great purpose in the infinite universe outside. It doesn’t matter that millions of specks through all eternity have been escaping out of that window, to be transformed into other spheres and shapes and destinies. However many myriad millions, they are, each speck of dust, individual to eternity.
Is it worth sending all this to Lucy? Arthur would say “no”, but isn’t there always a chance that a vague thought may suggest a far better and more convincing extension of an idea to another? If she went on to ask me what was in my partition in the room, I should tell her that there is a great piece of embroidery, unfinished, on a stand. It is my business to work my little piece in that great pattern, and I cannot possibly understand, beginner as I am, what the whole ultimate design will be. It may be my lot to stitch in a very dark, black bit of background, with no hint of beauty or hope; but when the whole is finished, it will be clear that those stitches were needed for the perfection of the whole. The rest of the furniture Lucy would think dull and old-fashioned; but to me, the chairs and tables and pottery my forefathers used are dear and well-tried friends, and I really prefer them to the modern, shining steel fittings across the way in the new religions, or the Italianate furniture next door. That is just my own personal choice, of course, and I can admire the others. Some day the partitions will be broken down, and then, of course, all of us will have to discard some of our furniture if we are to make a harmonious whole; so I must always remember that what is sacred to me may not be at all sacred to my children, and may not be essential; and I must never grow offensively house-proud or an inveterate hoarder, and those two failings are the temptations of all the occupants of every partition.
I have a little book-case all my own, and everyone, of course, has his own, and would not feel much interest in the others. Mine contains “The Historical Geography of the Holy Land”, because in my youthful doubts, the great Scottish author gave me some picture of how that barren passage way between three continents and three civilizations, with its tribe of fierce monotheists, was the fittest meeting-place for the great Revelation of God to the world. There is Illingworth’s Divine Personality, because, reading it under Arthur’s direction during our engagement, my unphilosophic mind caught some glimpse of God as the revelation of Will, Love and Power to our little human personalities with their own trinity of these which guide our lives.
“I won’t say the Bible,” said Dick, stubbornly, when he was asked to name his seven favourite books. “I won’t, just because I’m expected to.”
I am not sure that I would include more than the New Testament now, for if I hear the great prophecies of Isaiah in church, my feeble intellect is only too likely to imagine Hitler thrown to the dogs and Goering’s children dashed against stones, and what is the use of hate and revengeful feelings in a world which is dying for want of Christian Love?
I won’t bother Lucy with my other choices in Holy Vols., as Dick calls them; they wouldn’t be many, but I should certainly have The Spirit of Man, so that voices from other worshippers across the way may reach me with their beauty.
So this is the sort of vision I conjure up before I kneel down by the fire, and face the questions which beset us all about the love and omniscience of God in this world of apparent cruelty, and the impossibility that my tiny atom of being can be of any interest or service to an Almighty God. And then—well, I remember Dick saying, when I remonstrated with him on the uselessness of a mere gabble—“Well, look here, I’ll pretend I am talking to God down the telephone, shall I, and see if that helps?” I think the analogy was quite a good, if a funny one, because it implied both something urgent to say and listening for an answer. “I’ll pretend”, said Dick, “that it’s a Spiritual Store, and then I wouldn’t be asking for sweets or a new bicycle, of course.” And that, in a way, has always helped me too. I am afraid Lucy may think all my meditations are on the same low intellectual plane, but what, oh what, is the use of pretending that we can really see out of that high window of my dream? For we must be content to be rather small and humble if we are to try one day to escape from it into the larger love of God.
And I may as well confess that after this I go to bed and read a novel! As I’ve given up my Times subscription for Lent, I am re-reading with infinite pleasure of the clergy ladies of fiction, Mrs. Elton and Mrs. Proudie, Nancy Woodforde and Mrs. John Wesley. As I say, Faith is a desperate spiritual adventure, and one cannot go to sleep with a drawn sword at one’s side. I still have a childish vision of four angels round my bed, I know, and I leave my soul to them while I let my mind sink into sleep, fancying what sort of address Mrs. Elton gave to the Mothers’ Meeting (if any), and how Bishop Proudie ever found the courage to propose to Mrs. Proudie.
II
Tuesday Morning
It is horrible to wake up now.
When we married, after the last War, Arthur was ordained, and we had so little money that we were very grateful to Aunt Selina who offered to present us with a bed. Her Victorian modesty made any hints on the subject impossible, and so we rejoice, or rather don’t, in a vast double bedstead with elaborate brass bars, scrolls and knobs at the head and foot, the last of which Dick used to unscrew (in his thriller days) in the hope of finding strange Eastern potions and lethal daggers. It is hateful to dust, and I used to tell Arthur that it was one of my crosses to think that I should be the last woman of my acquaintance to expire on a wire mattress almost wholly surrounded by brass. That was three years ago, and I used to worry about the patch of damp on the ceiling over the fireplace with its miniature (and seldom lit) gas-fire, and the mark where Dick had spilt methylated spirit all over my very nice Chippendale dressing-table. I used to remember, too, how the sun had shone on the old heart-shaped mirror and tallboys, in my old home in Sussex, and wonder how I could afford new matting and how long the old striped green and white chintz curtains would hang together, and, in short, take a morning dose of
that self-pity which Stevenson calls the meanest of the emotions. And now, of course, looking back I see I was the happiest wife and mother in the world, though I still owe Aunt Selina a grudge about the brass bedstead, as I usually have to dust it myself!
The first tram always wakes me at half-past six, so it was too early to get up, and my thoughts passed unprofitably, from what Dick calls “holy moments” to the ever-recurring question of finance. Any worry is better than thoughts of Europe.
“If”, Arthur always says, “you were a working woman and were told your husband was going to get seven pounds a week, you would cry with joy! Think of the Apostles!”
“If”, I retort to him, “you were in a prosperous tent-making business and frequently absent on missionary journeys (see Maps I, II, III, IV, and V), I should probably feel well off!”
“Even the Strangs,” Arthur proceeds, “on four pounds a week, with one baby, are better off than half our congregation!”
“But most of them don’t pay a maid’s wages,” I protest.
I am glad to say that even Arthur doesn’t any longer ask why I should need a luxury which Saint Paul’s wife did without—(or was his wife’s extravagance in having a female slave his thorn in the flesh, asks Dick). At my age I cannot manage this house with its basement and ten rooms, with no help at all, and give half my working day to the parish as well. It is no use, as he knows, to protest that a clergyman’s wife should not be an unpaid curate, because in a place like this, with a minute leisured class, one has to take up the white woman’s burden of committees. Here Arthur always advances his views about self-government in parochial management, but till that ideal is nearer of attainment (which, as the Commination Service says, is greatly to be desired) someone has to put her hands to the plough—(and the fact that I have used two analogies in two sentences proves that I have anyhow not always failed in one duty of a parson’s wife, that of listening to sermons).
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