Mrs. Stead and I parted with warm promises to see something of each other this summer, and I hope we shall. But our lives are very much like those of travellers on a cruise; when we get back to our homes and parishes, we forget to make plans for our own amusement, and we don’t meet people with such identical interests often enough. She had to hurry away to her bus, and Mrs. Pratt was paying a call in the other direction; so I found myself walking off with Mrs. Jay, whom I never met before, talking as if we had known each other all our lives.
“I do hope I didn’t say anything dreadful,” she said, anxiously. “You know our parish is such a remote, lonely one that I get into the habit of saying my thoughts aloud, I really do! And my husband is so strict and reserved in his own wonderful way that I often feel afraid of just uttering my own silly thoughts to him!”
I remembered Mr. Jay then, a big, stern pompous man, Rector of Cudbury, Kate’s home village, and reported by Kate to be a tartar and no mistake. She had never spoken of Mrs. Jay, and I had vaguely imagined that the Rector was unmarried. I expect he does his best to suppress poor irrepressible little Mrs. Jay.
“It was funny, wasn’t it?” she giggled now. “I mean, of course, it was wonderful, and all the things the rest say, but it was screamingly funny too. You missed one of the queerest parts by skipping out into the garden like that.”
“Oh, you didn’t see me!” I protested, horrified.
“Only once—your blue hat behind a cedar bough. It’s such a pretty colour, if you don’t mind my saying so.” (I didn’t!) “Well, you see, it said on the board that in that interval anyone with any private anxiety about their faith could consult Father Merrion. My dear, there were two queues in the passage, if you know what I mean, and won’t think me too coarse. Well, of course, being me, I got into the wrong one and suddenly found myself in Mrs. Gage’s little sitting-room upstairs, with Father Merrion standing among quite a dozen little holy statues and photographs of bishops, asking me so kindly how he could help me and what was it that troubled me.”
“Oh, my dear, how awful!” I exclaimed with most unsuitable emphasis. For there might well be moments in life when one wanted such help and comfort as that saintly man could give. Only it would take me weeks of screwing up my mind to it, and I should have to go alone, quite alone, and in secret, and never as a member of a rival queue. I am quite sure that as a nation we are far too reserved and alarmed of speaking of spiritual things, and that the methods of the Oxford Group, which Dick calls “jollying up”, are a reaction in the right direction; but it is very, very difficult for elderly leopards to change their spots.
“Well, it wasn’t too bad. I was so sorry for him, because that little woman like a lemon stuck on a poker, you know, was just bouncing out of the door (I’m sure she’d got into the wrong queue) saying, ‘Confession is contrary to the laws of the Protestant Church of England, and if ever I wanted direction I would speak to my husband!’ (Oh, dear, I’m sorry for him, too!) ‘Well,’ Father Merrion said to me, with a very nice twinkle, ‘I do hope you don’t misunderstand me as completely as she has done!’ I nearly told him about the queues to comfort him,” Mrs. Jay continued (and I was very much surprised personally that she hadn’t), “and do you know, apart from that, I could only think of our kitchen range which is so extravagant, and that the bother we had in all the snow with a shortage of fuel nearly drove me out of my mind, but I couldn’t very well, could I?”
“No,” I agreed, “but do, do tell me, if it’s not inquisitive what you did ask him about.”
“Oh, about the Immaculate Conception,” said Mrs. Jay, blithely. “Do you know, I’ve never had the least idea what it meant, so I thought it would do quite well. But I must say,” she went on dejectedly, “he only told me that it wasn’t an Article of Faith in our Church and I needn’t let it bother me again. Well, it certainly won’t. He can be sure of that! Mrs. Lacely, don’t you think days when we could talk would be nicer?”
I nearly replied in Miss Dunstable’s words to Mrs. Proudie: “Very true, but it wouldn’t be very like a ball if you had no dancing, Mrs. Proudie,” but I only assented sympathetically. What Mrs. Jay evidently needs so badly is someone to talk to, and someone who isn’t in her parish, and with whom she needn’t remember to be tactful, reticent and discreet, “which”, Mrs. Pratt said to me once, “is the duty I always try to impress on the wives of the clergy.”
“We’re a funny set, you know,” continued Mrs. Jay. “I can’t help thinking how my two daughters who are working in London in a beauty-parlour—they can’t stand the country unluckily—would have laughed at us all as a set of has-beens.”
“Oh, we’re not all so old,” I laughed. “You must have married very young, and Mrs. Holm and Mrs. Stead are youngish, too, and there was such a pretty girl in brown in a corner.”
“Yes, and she looked scared stiff from first to last,” put in Mrs. Jay.
“I’ll tell you what I really thought as I looked round,” I said, more seriously; “that there we all were, busy, rather overworked people, not very smart or amusing, and with funny little fads of our own, no doubt; and yet you could be sure, couldn’t you, that not one of us would let our husbands down, or our children or friends or servants. We haven’t time for accomplishments or graces, spiritual as well as physical, I mean, but we are all trying as hard as we can with our hopeless limitations, to bring God’s Kingdom to earth and to love God and our neighbour. So though we wouldn’t cut any ice at the Ritz or Hollywood, you can just say of us that, as a set, we do our job and keep up to our ideals as far as we can, and that if any woman in there knew that her enemy was ill she’d visit him, or that a poor person wanted her, she’d hurry out at once. And we’d go, wouldn’t we, to any parishioner who wanted us in prison, and we all do our best to help out-of-works with clothes or money, and so, I suppose, in a way we can feel that …” I grew embarrassed and finished up lamely, “… that we are hoping to hear some day, ‘Inasmuch as ye did it to the least of these my little ones, ye did it unto Me’.”
I cannot say what a fraud I felt when Mrs. Jay ran off to her bus in the Market Square saying I had helped her, really helped her, quite as much as Father Merrion. Especially, as a kind of impatience of this odd wasted day seized upon me and I broke out to Arthur on my return, “And oh, my dear, I’m so perverse that I feel I’ve a hundred theological unbeliefs in my head that I never had before; it always happens when people talk about pain and free-will! Do you know, I believe what would really do me good would be to go to a Quiet Day held by Aldous Huxley or Joad or H. G. Wells! I expect I should come home from that a militant Christian!” Arthur was most delightfully sympathetic, and said that excess of religious emotion often produced this effect on critical if untrained minds. “And I don’t know what I’d do without you to laugh things over with,” he added, “for I haven’t felt much like laughing to-day.” At one o’clock punctually, he told me, Mr. Weekes had appeared in the vestry with two of the sidesmen to present an ultimatum; that unless Mr. Strang resigned his curacy and left Stampfield they would be obliged to give up their sittings in Saint Simon’s. Fifty-nine members of the congregation had signed a notice to the same effect, and this was presented to Arthur with silent hostility.
“I made no reply,” said Arthur, “except to ask them all to come to the service when I would give them my decision in our church. They meant, of course, to come in any case, and the church was packed. All through the first hymn I couldn’t help noticing that Mrs, Weekes was whispering to her husband (you know her demure murmur that hardly sounds or shows). By the time the troops of Midian had finished prowling, the poor old fellow was looking like a convicted criminal, and I knew that Strang’s illness had done its best. But I didn’t suppose anyone else knew much about it, as I went up to the altar and offered up all our prayers for him, there, to mark the urgency of the crisis. I prayed for Herbert Strang who was dangerously ill, and then I got up into the pulpit and preached.”
“Oh, Arthur, what about?”
Arthur rose and walked about the room. “About? Oh, well, I gave them a good deal of Aristotle on the danger of democracies; I rubbed it in how the weakness of the Allies is the public gossip and cavilling and criticism of each other in the press and in ordinary speech. I told them that we in the Church should look upon Christ as our dictator, that we should segregate ourselves from grumbling in voluntary concentration camps of silence. I said that no views expressed by any free Englishman could be as subversive or detestable as the malicious gossip of his critics. It was rather a hot sermon, Dick would say, I fear, as I felt so intolerably angry to think not only of that poor fellow, Strang, but also of the hateful pettiness and spite of this place in the last few days. I have never in my life felt like ranting and scolding before, and it was a most curious sensation,” said my husband, thoughtfully.
“Oh, don’t give way to it, darling,” I cried. “At least, only once more, so that I can hear you doing it, and then for ever after you must hold your peace! But what happened afterwards?”
“They all came round to the vestry—the previous deputation, I mean—and they made me more ashamed of myself than I had ever been before in my life. How can people say that human nature is disillusioning? Or is it that it’s because these men are essentially Christians that love and mercy come as naturally, or more naturally, to them than prejudice and hostility? Mr. Weekes said that of course their protests were withdrawn in view of Mr. Strang’s sad illness, and in ten minutes they were all arranging a private subscription list to cover all the medical expenses for poor little Strang. I can’t tell you how touched and pleased I was. I told them straight out I wasn’t worthy to be their priest, and they rejoined …” Arthur threw back his head and laughed at the memory.
“Oh, what?”
“That they’d always known I was on their side really all the time! You see women can’t have the monopoly of unreasonableness!”
“No, indeed! But what darlings they really are. I knew Mr. Weekes would have to knuckle under anyhow. And what then?”
“I went to the Strangs …”
“Without lunch?”
“Do you know, I did forget about lunch,” Arthur confessed. “But really, that meal yesterday would last me for weeks. As a matter of fact I only realized it when I discovered how hungry I was at tea-time.”
“Well, I’ll get supper, and then run to see her,” I said, rubbing my stiff knees.
“You won’t get supper,” said Kate, beaming at the doorway. “For I’ve got it for you, and a surprise and all.” (Kate’s surprises are, alas, too often sausages and onions, and so it proved on this occasion.) “But don’t you go to Strangs, Mum. They say he’s as bad as can be, and two nurses, so what’ll be the good?”
But I did go, of course; how could I leave that poor little thing alone till I had seen how she would face the night? I only wished I were brave about the black-out and could feel, as Arthur says he does, a delight in the new eerie darkness of our strange little town—Stampfield of the Dark Ages, as he calls it.
‘ I stumbled up the steps of the bungalow with nothing in my mind but my old nurse’s tales of Jack the Ripper, and hope I did not show my relief too obviously when I met Dr. Boness in the little passage.
“Ah-ha, in at the death!” he said. He is the kindest man in the world, but under his sister’s influence he uses very odd expressions. Even he was conscious of it this time, for he amended his words hastily—“I mean to say here in time to quiet that poor little woman and make her take the dose I’ve left her and go off to sleep. Mrs. Weekes has kidnapped her baby, with the kindest intentions, but Mrs. Strang’s left with nothing to do and has broken down altogether. And I can’t stop, for I’ve got to go and sign poor old Mrs. Hodge’s death certificate.”
“Oh, she’s gone,” I said, with relief. Death does seem more of a triumph than anything else for the old and lonely in these unhappy days; and however modern one may try to be in one’s ideas about Heaven, in my mind at once I saw Mrs. Hodge, young and fair, wandering where,
“Quiet through the fields, all crystal clear,
The stream of life doth flow.”
“But tell me, how is Mr. Strang?”
“Not too good, but we’ll pull him through,” said Dr. Boness as cheerfully as ever. “I’ll look in when you’ve settled Mrs. Strang and give you a lift home. We can’t have you running into a motor in the blackout, Mrs. Lacely.”
Poor little Mrs. Strang was lying on the sofa in the drawing-room, a heap of blankets on the floor. The nurses and her husband fill the two bedrooms, and she was camping out here in spite of Mrs. Weekes’ offer of hospitality.
“They all said I should go, but I couldn’t, could I?” she asked, feverishly. All her defiance and anger had disappeared, and she only looked like a woe-begone pretty child. She was too tired to rebel against the doctor’s orders any more, and looked at me with trustful eyes when I promised he wouldn’t die while she was asleep: I would tell the nurses to wake her. So often in great misery some preoccupation like this obscures the main issue, I know. She could not think what his death would mean, only that he must not die without the comfort of her presence. I made up the uncomfortable bed and gave her her dose with the sort of soothing words you use for a child.
“Your husband came and prayed with me,” she said, a little shyly, “and he was so definitely marvellous that I won’t say any more, or I only just begin to cry again.”
I said that was very sensible, and I would just say my own evening prayers by her nice warm fire till the doctor came for me, and this exactly satisfied her sense of the proprieties. “You’ll pray for him, won’t you,” she said, sleeping with her tears already, “because you know he is so definitely marvellous.” As I felt I should, after all the fatigues of the day, disgrace myself by sheer hysteria if she told me anyone else was definitely marvellous, I sank on my knees (still very stiff) by the lowest arm-chair I could find. Certainly I was praying for victory now, I realized dreamily, for victory over death. Isn’t that the victory we all are praying for, in spite of all human experience? And why do we do it when death is the only escape from fear, and our old haunting dread for those we loved individually has grown into the real definite terror of the War. Oh, lucky Mrs. Hodge, I thought, even as I prayed for Herbert Strang (“And why, I wonder, my love, should we use Christian names for those who are mere acquaintances just because we are in church?” my grandmother used to ask), until my muddled thoughts faded into a dream of flowers and rivers and trees where Rossetti angels “evermore do sit and evermore do sing”. I cannot say that a motor-horn even in a dream should suggest angelic voices, but Dr. Boness’s call to me fitted in quite nicely.
“Home, John?” quoted Dr. Boness to me inevitably, and I smiled dutifully. Do we ever really care very much what happens to us on the way, I wondered, as long as we reach home at last?
Arthur had been called out, I found, to visit a dying man at the other end of the parish, so I crawled upstairs to bed, feeling a quiet night infinitely more desirable than a quiet day.
VIII
Saturday
There was a terrible bustle this morning.
Kate is an indefatigable worker in a crisis, but her energy takes odd direction. It was very noble of her to rise at five and wake me by washing out the hall, and what she always calls the Gents’ Cloaks, but I could not see why the entire basement should also be scrubbed all over again, as it was only done on Wednesday, and it seems most unlikely that the Archdeacon should penetrate there.
“Him?” said Kate, “no, but I won’t have Mrs. Sime saying I don’t keep a clean kitchen!”
This unfortunate consideration meant that I had to do Dick’s room for Archdeacon Pratt myself. I hate to put visitors in Dick’s room, but I didn’t dare to risk the black-out in the spare-room, as we have just had a new air-raid warden appointed to this district, and he is unlikely to have sunk into the easy-going ways of Miss Boness, who said candidly that if the Germans were fools enough to b
omb Stampfield in the snow she’d let them. We are, I imagine, as safely situated as any town in England, but like every other place, we bitterly resent this imputation, and point out either that Hitler knows that nothing would wear on the nerves of England like the destruction of our breweries (Gold’s Entire), or that we lie in a straight line between London and Manchester, and would be a dumping ground for his unused bombs. Arthur got himself into such disgrace with dear nervous Miss Grieve by pooh-poohing the idea, that we affect now to share the common terror, and fall over pails of sand in the house, like all good patriots, though I firmly refuse to spend 15s. 7d. on a stirrup pump.
I tried to harden my heart as I swept and dusted Dick’s room, reminding myself vigorously that he would soon be here for a week’s leave. But what use is only a week with someone who was once that absurd little creature in a minute cap and blazer at a child’s school, a round-faced, very solemn, captain of his cricket XI in his preparatory school, and an incredibly noble and earnest young VIth Former in his last house group? This I told myself was sentiment, and turned severely to the book-case; but if all the mothers all over the world united their feelings as they dusted every country’s equivalent of Peter Rabbit, Just William and, even more pathetic, the first signs of highbrow taste, in T. S. Eliot, Auden, and Huxley, how could wars go on any longer? Again I rebuked myself, only to relapse into maudlin sentiment over the discovery of the key of Dick’s roller skates (lost tragically four years ago) in a drawer of his shaving-mirror, under a pile of May Week programmes. The Archdeacon must put up with dust, I decided, unable to endure these memories any longer, and was positively relieved to hear the front-door bell. I had to go down to protect Arthur from interruption, as he was either making out lists of services, or writing his sermon, or, indeed, as was still more probable, deep in The Guardian or The New Statesman.
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