“There is a great deal to be said
For being dead.”
as Mrs. Hill rattles with her old bolt and handle of lovely Sussex iron-work.
“Well, it’s lucky you’ve come!” she declared, cheerfully. “Poor old Mrs. Hodge was asking for you this morning, and I doubt if she’ll last the night. She was taken awfully bad an hour ago, and Doctor and Nurse have both been out. It’s gone to her heart muscles, the paralysis, they say, and she’s pretty near unconscious already.”
“Poor old thing,” I ventured, hardly knowing how to treat Mrs. Hill’s loud cheerful diagnosis.
“Well, it’s all for the best, and she knows it,” said Mrs. Hill, wiping her hands on a rough towel, her smile as cheerful as ever. “I couldn’t bring myself to think of her being taken away in the van! She doesn’t really care for anything but her bits of things and her little home, and she’s enough put by for quite a nice funeral. I asked her if she’d like me to send for the minister—she’s a Methodist, you know—but he’s not one to hurry himself! She’s always had a fancy for you, Mrs. Lacely.”
It was quite true that Mrs. Hodge and I always had a bond in common. A committee takes it in turn to visit the almshouse monthly, and our friendship began when I took Mrs. Hodge half a pound of peppermints instead of the packet of tea which is the usual gift. Crunching away with her few remaining teeth, she told me that she did like the smell because it reminded her of church in the country when she was a little girl. And then she told me all about the lovely, lost little Sussex village of her childhood, and we both discovered that we liked solitary places and lonely walks, and sitting alone and cosy by a fire-side. She was quite friendly with the other old dames, and they have been very good to her during her long months of helplessness, “but you can have too much dropping in, and that’s a fact,” she confided to me, and I heartily agreed with her. I had rather a choke in my throat as Mrs. Hill and I walked along the little paved path, round the beautiful turfed courtyard, with its erect boastful stone statue of Sir Humphrey in wig and top-boots, in the centre; for Mrs. Hodge and I had a bond here I have with no-one else, and some of my happiest hours have been spent in her little room, while I’ve read her country poems or books, and she has sat gloating over the little mixed posies I brought her. I had managed to beg some scillas and crocuses and snowdrops and aconites from kind Miss Grieve on my way this afternoon, and I was sad to think she might be past caring for them.
But fortunately she was not. She could hardly move her poor hands as she lay in the funny little wooden bedstead in the low-panelled room, but she put a shaking finger on the petals and smiled a little. The room seemed very full, not only with all her queer effects, the cloak and bonnet she hasn’t worn for two years, on a peg, the china dogs and faded photographs, the old velvet chair-cushions and shrunk antimacassars. Nurse was there as well, and two old cronies had dropped in, sitting with a touch of interest in the apathetic eyes in their shrunk, shrivelled old faces, as if they were waiting to have a view of the end of a race or the tail of a procession. Nurse and Mrs. Hill turned them out on my arrival, for my sake I expect, but I was very glad to see the relief in Mrs. Hodge’s eyes.
“I’m just going to give her a dose,” whispered Nurse, “and it’s odds if she’ll come round again, the doctor says, so I’m glad you’ve come to say good-bye to her.” It wasn’t easy to say anything as I looked at the poor, tiny, wizened face, looking so oddly old and so oddly young, as people often do in the presence of death. I had to bend very low to catch the words she could hardly utter.
“They won’t take me away?”
“Oh, no, no!” I said. “You’re to stay here. That’s all settled. Don’t worry about that.”
Nurse was waiting with a professional air, which showed me that she felt some form of prayer was indicated in case the Methodist minister (a dear, kind, but sadly over-worked man) didn’t arrive; so I knelt down and picked up my little bouquet for her to see. But the only words that came to my lips must have seemed terribly inappropriate to Nurse.
“The tall trees in the greenwood,
the meadows where we play
The rushes by the water,
we gather every day.”
Mrs. Hodge smiled faintly again, and I knew that she was far away, back again among the primroses and cuckoo flowers of a stream beneath the Downs, on her way to a little grey Sussex church, with wooden beams crossing and recrossing into the darkness of the roof. And then I found my voice a little more securely, and murmured Newman’s words: “Oh, God, support us all the day long till the shadows lengthen and the evening comes, and the busy world is hushed and our work is done. Then, God, in Thy mercy give us a safe lodging and a holy rest, and peace at the last.”
Nurse gave a loud Amen, and advanced to the bedside. It was nice to see that Mrs. Hodge did not shrink at all (and some efficient women are rough with old people) and only smiled again.
“The river running by,” she murmured very low, and drifted away among the rushes and meadow-strife, I felt, on her last journey of all.
“I expect she’ll go off in her sleep before morning,” said Nurse, packing her bag. “No good for you to stay. It was very nice of you to come, Mrs. Lacely. I’ll look in this evening again.”
“Nurse,” I said, a little desperately, “do you find that anyone is much use to people when they’re very ill, or very old, and going to die?”
“Death-beds are clean gone out,” replied Nurse, with her usual brisk efficiency, looking round for her thermometer. “That’s what medical science has done, and a good thing too. Romans make a point of it still, of course,” (Nurse is a confirmed Evangelical) “and very fidgety they are at times; but it’s not often a patient knows just when it’s coming, as they did in the old story-books. And I’ve never found myself that illness makes people specially interested in religion. It’s how you live not how you die that counts in my experience, Mrs. Lacely. Still,” added Nurse; tolerantly, “if her minister does come and pray later on, it won’t disturb her, and it’ll please the other old ladies.”
As I was at Queen’s Court I made the rounds of my friends there, reflecting, as I always do, on the sad truth that bores don’t like bores, the sick don’t like the sick, and the old don’t always like the old. It’s perfectly natural because we all do like our opposites in everyday life, and would be hideously bored to be segregated with nine other people exactly like ourselves in age, sex and circumstances. And then I don’t think that either the sick or the old ever do live quite on a level with other people. They want to be important because of their infirmities; they need someone (unlucky as that someone may be) to tell their friends either how wonderful they are, or how infirm they are, and how can Mrs. Jones impress Mrs. Smith with “my rheumatics” when Mrs. Smith has as much to tell in return about “my bilious trouble”? But, as I say, when one of them is near death or, far worse, the Infirmary, the dear old things are full of interest and sympathy, even if it is of rather a ghoulish kind. Only Mrs. Murphy was cantankerous and rude to-day, and she, I felt, had right on her side.
“I am sure,” she said, blinking very rapidly again and again, her claw-like little hands clutching her frayed skirt, “I’m sure I hopes they’ll be in time to get My Priest in for me when my time comes. It’s well enough for the likes of Mrs. Hodge to pass on with no-one but you beside her, Mrs. Lacely, but it wouldn’t suit me.”
“Indeed, Mrs. Hill would never fail to send for Father Merrion,” I protested. “She has asked Mrs. Hodge’s minister to come in, I know. I just came in as a friend to see Mrs. Hodge.”
“Mrs. Gilpin says she saw you kneeling alongside of the bed,” said Mrs. Murphy, so suspiciously that I found myself assuring her that I would never do the same for her!
“Your last Sacraments are so beautiful and impressive,” I added, anxiously. “And indeed, indeed, dear Mrs. Murphy, I was praying, as you do, that all the wonderful roll of Saints and Martyrs would intercede for her soul!”
Mrs. M
urphy sniffed, obviously feeling that this would be unlikely in the case of a heretic, and that I had obviously, so to speak, been gate-crashing at the portals of Heaven. But she unbent as far as to say that she was sure I meant well, “though when my time comes”, she began, and again and again I reiterated my assurances. It was no business of mine to point out that all the priests in the world could not have called back Mrs. Hodge’s mind from those Sussex meadows, or the great yews in the churchyard with the snow- drops below. Or to suggest that our Lady and the Archangels are not perhaps as obsessed by the unhappy division of the Church on earth as Catholics of Mrs. Murphy’s persuasion. At the back of my mind was a story of Dorothy Whipple, as a Protestant child at a Convent school, demanding, “Sister, is God a Catholic?” and Nurse’s tolerant phrase, “fidgety”. Meanwhile, I diverted Mrs. Murphy’s interest to her pain in her windpipe, a friend of old-standing, which does not, I fear, receive all the attention it deserves from Mrs. Hill. “For she’s the worst grumbler of the lot,” said Mrs. Hill, briskly, as I said good-bye, “and when she goes on and on about sending for the priest for her, it’s all I can do not to say, ‘Well, I wish he would come and be done with you!’”
The worst of a busy life is that you have so seldom time to think things out. I walked home with thoughts of new model almshouses, including young people who would, however, have their freedom; on death, and whether our church doesn’t insist enough on intercession for a perfect death just because, at the Reformation, a boisterous young England rejected the monkish insistence on it; and on beauties of the Church of Rome, degenerating into the problem of whose son Dick would have been if Arthur had been a Catholic priest and I had married someone else; of the wonderful kindness of the poor to the poor in trouble, and their equally surprising gossip and spite in everyday affairs. All these problems, however, faded before the market clock which showed me I was late for tea, and reminded me that I had still to see about the man for the kitchen washer.
Mrs. Pratt was in the drawing-room when I arrived, and I was glad to see that Kate’s work this morning had not been wasted. In the firelight, and that strange dim radiance which often lights up the end of our dull northern days, the white drawing-room, with its rose-coloured curtains and big chairs and shimmering marquetry, really looked, like my tweeds, as if my home had seen better days and was still, to me, best of all.
“But don’t you find all this white paint dirties very quickly in a town?” asked Mrs. Pratt, after assuring me, with what I felt unnecessary accuracy, that she had only been waiting thirteen and a half minutes.
“We don’t use this room much,” I said, trying not to notice, as Kate came in with the tea-pot, that her feet, straight from the coal-house no doubt, were making marks on my matting.
“Of course I think that’s such a mistake,” said Mrs. Pratt. “I do think it’s our duty to our country, especially just now, to keep up our standards of living.”
As I couldn’t be bothered to ask how the use or disuse of my drawing-room would affect our Forces, I let that pass. My eyes had fallen unfortunately on a sheaf of paper obviously containing flowers, and unluckily Mrs. Pratt caught my glance.
“Those are just a few cyclamens and snowdrops for poor Adela Weekes,” she said. “She has had such an anxious time lately. And I know, my dear, that you must be far too busy to have time to arrange flowers.” Mrs. Weekes may have had an anxious time (over Dick or Mr. Strang? I asked myself) but she has also plenty of money, a gardener and a hot-house. And I am never, never too busy to do flowers, as Mrs. Pratt knows quite well. So I averted my gaze, and as I rebuked myself for envy, asked with unnecessary sympathy what was wrong with Mrs. Weekes. It was an opening for Mrs. Pratt, of course, but she would find an opening in a steel wall anyhow.
“Poor dear, she says Mr. Weekes can hardly sleep at night for worry. My dear Mrs. Lacely, what is your husband going to do about this dreadful young man?”
“Which?” I asked, very busy with the tea-things. “Do have some sugar—we really have plenty.”
“Never in Lent, or at any other time,” said Mrs. Pratt severely, if a little inconsistently. “You know quite well, I expect, that I mean this Mr. Strang. You remember, my dear, I always told you that married curates are a mistake!”
“But no-one is objecting to his marriage, surely!” I said, playing for time. “My dear, a curate who marries is one who is going against the advice of the bishops and diocesan clergy, and that makes it certain he will be one of those tiresome people who have views of their own.”
As I looked at Mrs. Pratt’s firm, brisk long face I felt that the Dillney curates probably have their own views about Mrs. Pratt, if about nothing else.
“Arthur is meeting Mr. Weekes and a few friends after his Confirmation Class to-night,” I temporized. “I’m sure he feels that all this unlucky excitement will soon die down.”
“He is not helping it to die down, I fear,” rejoined Mrs. Pratt, looking suspiciously at Kate’s sturdy slices of bread-and-butter. “Nor can he be supposed to be doing so when he refers to poor John Weekes as Giant Blunderbore in the parish pulpit.”
“But he didn’t!” I had to pretend to choke over a crumb at this majestic accusation. “I don’t know who’s been talking to you about the sermon to-day, but he or she got it all wrong. Arthur was only referring to prejudice and bigotry as giants in Europe to-day. He really didn’t mention giant—giant Weekes.”
“I always thank Heaven that I have a sense of humour, but it should not be applied on the wrong occasions.” Mrs. Pratt looked at me severely. “We all know you are flippant, dear Mrs. Lacely, but how can you laugh over an affair which is, I gather, causing serious anxiety in your parish? You know the Archdeacon is lunching with the Weekes’s to-morrow, and he is very much afraid that there may be some real trouble over all this if your husband is not very careful.”
“I know Arthur is hoping to talk things over with the Archdeacon before lunch to-morrow,” I said, notwithstanding that terrible inclination to giggling which besets you when you are tired and have once let yourself go. “Of course he’s worried, dear Mrs. Pratt, and of course all he wants is to see his duty clearly on this occasion. But it’s not all so simple, is it? I mean, in the abstract, you’d never approve of the laity dictating to the clergy, would you?”
That was, perhaps, a little rash, but it brought Mrs. Pratt up short for a minute.
“Not in an ordinary way, of course, but in this case Mr. Strang was not speaking as a priest, I consider. Not one of our clergy is a pacifist!”
“My dear!” I cried. “What about the Bishop of X? What about dear Dick Sheppard, and …”
Mrs. Pratt raised her hand to stop me. “None of the clergy in this Archdeaconry!” she said, firmly. “Or at least they ought not to be. Why the Archdeacon most beautifully referred to our fighting forces as Crusaders some time ago, you may remember, and said we too were Crusaders when we followed them in prayer.”
I do remember, because Dick was at home and said at lunch that he’d give anything to see the dear Old Arch, in armour on a palfry, and Mrs. Pratt as a camp-follower behind, and that they’d quite enough equipment to lug about without being issued with a Government Red Cross apiece. (“And that’s right, Master Dick,” chimed in Kate most unsuitably. “Jenkins passed the remark ‘No bl—, I beg your pardon—Cross for him,’ he says.”) Arthur always says that the few months he passed in the ranks, before he would consent to a commission, gave him a view of the average lay mind which no parson should be without, and my mind wandered now to the happy possibilities of an interview between Mrs. Pratt and Private Jenkins, while she went on:
“It’s not as if Mr. Strang preached peace as a duty of all Christians, I gather. He obtruded all his dreadful Radical views.” (Mrs. Pratt still refers to the Labour Party in this way.) “And spoke in praise of Russia too, I gather! Russia! If he had been the Archdeacon’s curate—”
What a Sunday supper there would have been at the Rectory! The picture of Mrs. Pr
att’s oratory over the cold blancmange dazzled me again, but still I tried to throw oil on the waters.
“He’s very young, you know, and very earnest, and if his views are mistaken, it’s all the more important not to let him feel like a martyr if he’s taken the wrong way.”
“Taken the wrong way! As Adela Weekes says, I wonder you did not rise and walk out of the church!” protested Mrs. Pratt.
“Do you know, you’ve had nothing to eat,” I said, as I could not possibly explain that I would have had to walk in my sleep. “I think I must leave the whole question to my husband, Mrs. Pratt. I have been very careful to say nothing about it so far, for indeed I don’t think it’s any business of mine. I suppose the objection to married curates is partly that their wives may make trouble in a parish, and it’s the same with vicar’s wives, isn’t it?”
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