Bewildering Cares
Page 7
I was the less sorry for my long visit because it left less time for Mrs. Sime, and as she comes in to oblige there are often opportunities for seeing her. She is a sad, portentous woman with a large bow-front, which makes her a poor worker; but we do anything we can to help her because we are all so sorry for her troubles. Mr. Sime is a good steady worker in the brewery, and a violent teetotaller, and they are both regular church attendants; but their lives are darkened by their daughter “Lil”. It would only be possible, alas, to describe the poor girl in terms of the farm-yard, or with the help of Havelock Ellis, and the use of the word a-moral, which has now reached the provinces, is plentifully employed at the monthly meeting of our Magdalen Home (which does not, fortunately, occur this week). The relation of the church to the new Health Clinic, which was started here two years ago, is one of terribly involved controversy; but, let me state crudely, the subject does not enter into Lil’s calculations. “Out of one trouble into another”, is Mrs. Sime’s gloomy epitome of the situation, which has now become a routine. Each affair begins with the report, through Kate, that Mr. Sime says he’ll finish off that girl this time if he swings for it, followed by a hitherto fortunately falsified report that Lil’s put her head in the gas-oven this time. On the first occasion, I remember, the Magdalen Home took her in, and there was so fierce and prolonged a committee on the question of making the boy in question, Alf Byng, Right the Wrong, that Mrs. Weekes and Miss Boness would have cut each other indefinitely had it not transpired that Alf had, perhaps luckily, run off to Manchester, leaving no address. Since then the Salvation Army and a neighbouring convent have dealt in turns with Lil, who has the face of a rather grimy El Greco saint, and the most beautiful little family of offspring any Dictator could wish to see. Every denomination, however, now fights shy of her, as her scruples about attributing paternity grow less and less, and Kate’s surmises make me feel that no Galahad could escape without suspicion in Stampfield.
“Ho, yes, it’s the old story,” said Mrs. Sime to-day, as she stood at the open door, ironing the nappies of the last intruder, “I tells her her father won’t half kill her this time!”
“Is she living at home, Mrs. Sime?” I asked helplessly.
“Ho no! My madam has a furnished room with that Sue Brace, since they both went into munitions. It’s all fun and games for them now, and me to mind the babies all day, and no-one to look after the little innocents at night. ‘I’m through with you,’ I tells her, ‘and just you keep out of your father’s sight.’ No’m, don’t you go trying to see her. You can’t even catch ‘old of her now and nothing’ll do ’er any good. I don’t know how Sime and I came to ’ave a child like that, I don’t, us as allays kept ourselves respectable.”
“Where is she? Perhaps I could catch her sometime?”
“Don’t you’m. She’s in 7, Hall Road, next to Mrs. Maw where the Horganist lodges. Making ’erself all the more of a disgrace in a respectable neighbourhood like that, I tells ’er. No, madam won’t say who it is, and if you ask me I don’t suppose she knows. Shutting up, that’s what she wants, more than a poor woman who gets run in for shop-lifting by a long way, I says. I expect she’s accusing anyone who comes into her head, and you tell all the clergy gentlemen to keep away from her!”
Lil is of course an extreme case of the problem which faces us all perpetually, and for which we have no satisfactory solution. On the whole question I always feel sadly like Arthur’s mother, who declared once in a rectory crisis, “Really, six is beyond me”, though Arthur was one of a family of seven. As, however, the attention of psycho-analysts and modern novelists is so firmly concentrated on these points, I try to avoid generalizations, and helplessly get tickets for the Infirmary, and bags of baby-clothes as the need arises, and leave it at that. We shall have trouble enough, I know, at the Magdalen Home next Tuesday over the question of unmarried dependents. “And a gentleman in The Times saying, ‘Why not call them concubines?’” said Matron. “A pretty fool I’d look ordering tea and marge to be sent to the Concubines’ Home!”
On the whole I decided to leave the whole problem to more modern minds and to finish my immediate duties.
All these houses, in Bill Bowes Lane are of that low, wizened, cheap-bricked, back-to-back type which are the hateful legacy of Mid-Victorian England. They were on the condemned list of the Town Council for its next programme, but there they must remain now, I suppose. As a matter of fact, Mr. Strang’s generalities don’t fit in with my district, for all their owners keep their dwellings reasonably clean, and the two new and superior houses which I forced myself to call upon, on my way home, are far greater blemishes on civilization. Number 1, Acacia Villas, is one where the mother drinks, and the children are dirty and verminous. She was cringingly polite to me to-day, because she has lost her ration-book, and needed my reassurance that she could easily get a new one. Next door belongs to a hateful couple who come to church and look respectable, but let out their rooms furnished at exorbitant prices to any unhappy couple who start married life without furniture. (“Fifteen bob a week, and a smell of cats and gas, and put myself on one of her mattresses I would not,” says Kate.)
Those two homes weigh terribly on my conscience, while round the corner again is an odd little spot called Dogberry Close, which rejoices me, though it must make Mr. Strang see even redder than usual. Three dilapidated little half-timber cottages hang together behind tiny front gardens, with tinier gardens and lean-to sheds of the most primitive description at the back. They are to be pulled down, of course, as reconditioning is too expensive, but each of their inhabitants will be sorry to leave. ‘
“This war’ll do a good turn to I,” said crotchety old Mr. Bimus, spitting with wonderful accuracy into one of the huge cockle shells in his front patch. “They say that there Council won’t pull us down now. How’d I get another house and garden like this?”
“The new Council houses have nice little gardens,” I suggested, for Mr. Bimus is said to have enough put by to afford a higher rent.
“And what’d I do for manure?” asked Mr. Bimus, with startling outspokenness. “Plugs here, plugs there, says I to that whippersnapper young parson of yours. Plugs don’t help my roses!”
Mrs. Leaf, next door, is the sort of woman who would have turned Hercules out of the Augean stable with a sniff, and transformed it into a model dwelling in a few hours. Her son, who has been called up, would have liked to move to something more up-to-date, but, like so many spotlessly clean women, Mrs. Leaf distrusts and dislikes any new neighbours. She and Mr. Bimus have reached some sort of tacit truce after years of enmity, “and a man don’t go nosing out how many times a year you washes your blankets”, she says, though I feel sure no-one in Stampfield washes them as often as she does. She welcomed me very warmly to-day, as she wished to make out some War Office papers about her position as a Dependent (a word which annoyed her), and I am sure did not mean me to see her wiping my footprint carefully off her immaculate hearthstone, as I knocked at her neighbour’s door. She does not quarrel with dear little Mrs. Smith because nobody could. Mrs. Smith is too small and white and gentle, and so wholly preoccupied with her anxious little efforts at dress-making. The cheap guinea frocks, which all the factory girls purchase now, threatened her trade sadly a few years ago. She belonged to the old school which liked fancy buttons and bits of black lace over white satin, and a nice bit of jet somewhere on the corsage, and the only subject on which she grows a little bitter is the rise of the ready-made. But as stout figures inevitably strain cheap frocks, she has her niche now in letting-out, mending and taking-up gowns, and just makes a living for herself and her daughter, May. May is a charming, clever child who has recently won a scholarship at the High School, and Mrs. Smith was pathetically anxious to ask me to inquire privately if she might make May’s uniform at home instead of getting it at our big draper’s. “Such a save, and I’d reproduce the effect exactly, Mrs. Lacely,” she assured me in her tired, refined little voice; so, adding that to my l
ist of messages, I turned to go home. “And if her new teacher could put in a word about not encouraging May to take a prejudice against our little home,” added the anxious mother, “I’d be ever so glad. Of course, this is a poor little place, but if they’re not to be pulled down, I’d be thankful to stay. I should never get such a retired little house at such a moderate rental anywhere in Stampfield—and such a central position too, and nice neighbours.”
I promised to make Miss Henly suggest to May that it was interesting to live in such an old-world historic little home, and walked back, with the old question at the back of my mind, the question which worries all parsons’ wives, I am sure: “What use am I to any of these people? What do we really do to help them or make them happier?”
We clergy have, as I said before, a certain use as go-betweens, between official England and its alarming circulars, and the uneducated who view their efforts with a mixture of bewilderment and distrust. Like the wholly admirable employees in the Post Office, we can translate and explain and we can also grease the wheels of those charitable efforts, like Convalescent Hospitals where a little influence goes a long way. We can, in short, aid in the great social effort of the last thirty years or so, to make their lives more certain and more comfortable. Do we do any more? None of those who, in the flush of youthful philanthropy, did a little mild slumming in our second or third Seasons can possibly under-value that work. Everyone must believe in the progress of the social conscience who remembers what it was like in those days to visit families where accident or illness meant a grim prospect of starvation or the House, where medical advice was shirked, or only gained by presuming on the kindness of the surgery doctor, where Clinics and free milk and nursery schools were unknown, and sweated labour in the home evaded all Government restrictions. In those days the houses in Bill Bowes Lane would have seemed nice, respectable little homes, and it shows an advance that Mr. Strang, however tiresome he may be, really views them as a warren of slums. All of us rejoice that the standard of living has improved, and mourn over the check to progress which is one of the hideous side-lines of the War.
But the difficult side of the question is this: does one make people happier necessarily by making them more comfortable? Because it is our business, presumably, as servants of Heaven, to inspire not only comfort but serenity and hope in the lives around us. A century ago our forefathers had no doubts on this point. They had no measuring-tape for themselves or “the Poor” but spiritual values. I just remember great-aunt Louisa who, even though she gave up dances, theatres, cards and wine in her youth, lived in a vast comfortable house in Stanhope Gate, whence she descended on the slums of North Kensington. On the other side of the family was’ a brisk, fiery, military great-uncle, retired from the Guards who, besides hunting two days a week, put in innumerable hours at Saint Alban’s, Holborn, commanding and dragooning men and boys to services and processions. Neither of these two predecessors of mine worried about the differences in their circumstances from those among whom they worked. They were infinitely charitable, I am sure, but their hearts were set on souls to be saved rather than on bodies to be comforted. Confident in their faith of another world, where inequalities would be forgotten, they spoke of and saw only the immortal spirit of God and man in their labours. They saw happiness as a possession quite independent of external circumstances, whereas we see happiness as dependent upon comfort. I don’t mean that this entirely represents Arthur’s real point of view or mine. Certainly he views the things of the spirit as on a higher plane than anything else, and yet, in my efforts to help people, the thought that I, with my comparative comfort, have no right to preach to them in their poverty and anxiety makes me shamed and tongue-tied.
I had meant to discuss all this with Arthur, because he always sees some side of any given question which I have ignored; but as I entered the cold, darkened hall I heard voices in the study, and, I feared, angry and protesting voices. While I stood hesitating, Kate’s head popped up at the basement stairs, her cap well on the back of an agitated perm, and her voice came in a dramatic stage-whisper.
“They’re at it in there, all of them, over the Strang business. That shufflé you meant to make of the rabbit won’t do. I’ll stew it up and keep the pudding hot, though if you ask me I’d say those apples were more fit for a pig-tub than for apple-charlotte.”
So a meal of some sort anyhow was ready, and over-ready, when I at last heard the sound of people rising and chairs scraping back in the study, and voices exchanging curt and chilly farewells. Two calls at the door had filled in the time, as one man was drunk and wouldn’t go, and the other in search of a job which asked apparently no skill and no credentials.
Arthur came in looking so exhausted that I went to the book-shelf and took out Mr. Mulliner Speaks. I propped this against the water-jug for him, and Wild Strawberries by Angela Thirkell, which I have read thirty times already and will probably read thirty more, against the loaf for myself. There is nothing so good for worried people as to read at their meals, and funny books if possible; for laughter grows so rusty in war time. It wasn’t till we were settled by the study fire over coffee that he looked up at me and laughed a little. “We are to be martyrs for our opinions, Camilla dear! Mr. Weekes brought a message from Mrs. Weekes that, all things considered, we had better not go to lunch with them on Thursday. They want to consult with the Archdeacon alone!”
“What a good thing I didn’t get myself a hat!” was all I let myself say, though I could have said much, much more. “Tell me what happened at your meeting.”
“Nothing, or nothing that brings us any nearer a decision,” said Arthur, rumpling his hair. “Do you know, I sometimes think this drama, or something like it, must be going on all over Europe. Personally I believe we have all reached one of those points where political and religious thinking can’t be separated. When the Emperor Julian said, ‘Thou hast conquered, O Galilean!’ when the Middle Ages saw the twin keys of Saint Peter in the care of the Empire and the Papacy; when the French mob cast down the Cross and raised the goddess of reason, you get such moments. The soul and the political instinct of man are for the moment identified; though, of course,” added my cautious husband, “I use those terms very loosely.”
“But surely people do always put their religion into politics,” I said. “When I was small I know I always imagined from my father’s breakfast-table talk that Gladstone was a sort of devil. My nurse used to leave me in the dining-room while he and grannie had breakfast, and one day grandfather threw the paper down and cried, ‘My God, he’s in again!’ and I thought he meant the devil was inside the house, probably, I imagined, in the grandfather clock!”
“Yes, yes,” said Arthur, sighing a little. I knew he wished Dick were back so that they could laugh at me together for always bringing the general down to the particular.
“Politicians have always differed; the Churches have fought their un-Christian battles; but it is only at certain moments, it seems to me, that every thinking man is dragged into their disputes, and has to see himself on one side or another of an impassable gulf. Can a man call himself a Christian and a Bolshevik to-day? How long can the Papacy tolerate totalitarianism? Can we turn the left cheek to Germany, and let it smite us and our Colonies, as Strang holds Christ would bid us, and trust that, not only the Church but Christianity and the Christian ethic, will survive? It’s that which is really at the bottom of this Strang business,” he added, turning to me affectionately. “Like you, dearest, I must leave the general principles to consider the particular case in point.”
“What does Mr. Weekes want you to do?” I asked, encouraged thus to descend to the details I wanted to know. “He wants me to report Strang to the Bishop through the Archdeacon, and to repudiate his views very strongly to the whole congregation on Sunday morning. And when I went round to see Strang, to have yet another talk with him before I see Pratt, I was told he was very far from well and could see no one.”
“Did you see Mrs. Strang?”
“I must run in to-morrow morning to see if I can be of any use, I suppose,” I said, with some depression.
“No, no, I met Boness on the way home, and he says he’ll probably send in a nurse and it would be wrong for you to run any risk of infection after the fright you gave me last year.” (Arthur always refers to my fairly sharp attack of ’flu as if it had been a critical illness.) “I wish I could have seen him and persuaded him that, though he was perfectly right to urge peace upon us all, if he felt it his duty, he really had not thought out his political position seriously enough. Is that the telephone?”