Parson's Nine

by Noel Streatfeild

  Freesias and mimosa. Catherine looked out at the grey winter landscape, at the sheets of fine silver rain blowing through the bare cold trees, and drifting across the dun-coloured fields. She had always known winter was like that, cold, wet, and unpleasant, but until this moment she had never thought of running away from it, of running to where there were freesias and mimosa. But now she knew suddenly, and quite definitely, that she was going to the South of France. David would think her mad, if not a little sinful, but then David hadn’t been having babies for nine years. True, he’d been anxious about her, and done a lot of praying for her, but just having to pray didn’t, she thought, give one a right to go to the South of France, whereas having babies did.

  All the children were on the station to meet her. Nannie pushing Maccabeus in the perambulator, and Minnie, the nurserymaid, with Manasses in the mailcart. There was a tremendous outburst of shrill conversation as she stepped from her carriage: “Daddy has played bears with us each night.” “There are simply thousands and thousands of parcels in the hall.” “Nearly all square, and however much you pinch them you can’t feel what’s in them.” And at intervals in the babel Catherine caught fragments about a puppy.

  “Who has been given a puppy?” she asked.

  They all explained at once. Through the noise she gathered that there was a boy outside selling a teeny weeny puppy, and might they put all Grandfather’s Christmas shillings together and buy it? Catherine, touched by, and glowing at, the warmth of her reception, and hating herself for planning to leave her babies to the mercies of schools and governesses, was glad to find something she could do to atone.

  “If it’s a nice puppy, I’ll buy it for you,” she said.

  This was greeted by screams of excitement, and she was propelled into the station yard, where a boy was sitting on some steps feeding a small, grubby, brown and white spaniel with a piece of meat. Though dirty, he was an exceedingly engaging little dog, with large feathery feet. Catherine negotiated for him, and for an incredibly small sum, so small that she feared he had been stolen, he became theirs, and after a wrangle, the string attached to his collar given to Esdras to hold, on the understanding it was only for five minutes, and then was to be handed on to Tobit, and so down the family. This matter of who should hold the string settled, and the indignant twins sent home with Nannie, Minnie, and the babies, she succeeded in squeezing the rest of the party and the puppy into a fly. The puppy was promptly sick on the floor.

  “ ‘Out of the eater came forth meat,’ ”said Esdras, cheerfully.

  “Don’t be so horrid,” Catherine answered crossly, hurriedly searching in her dressing-case for a piece of paper.

  “But, look, mummy, he’d been having—”

  “Be quiet, Esdras.” Catherine fixed a stern eye on him.

  “Well,” he said, determined to have the last word—”I think it’s a very good saying—for he is strong, and he’d been eating—” He caught his mother’s eye again. “Well, anyway, Samson said it, and Samson’s a very good name for a dog. Bags we call him Samson.”

  Catherine raised a flushed face from her labours on the mat.

  “You know a lot too much of the Bible. I believe you know the whole of it by heart; it can’t be good for you. I’m going to send you to a boarding school next term.”

  “Why? Is it a bad thing to know the Bible?” asked Judith.

  “If it is, daddy must be a very bad man,” remarked Tobit.

  Catherine deeply regretted that she had let her feelings get the better of her, for she was painfully conscious that not only had she suggested that school was a punishment for too much knowledge of the Bible—an idea it would take months to eradicate—but that the children would certainly repeat the conversation to their father, who would ask her about it, wearing a hurt, puzzled look, while she tried to explain. So she abruptly changed the subject by observing that Esdras was quite right, Samson was a very good name for a dog.

  Samson had fallen asleep, but on this they woke him to see if he would show approval of his name by wagging his tail. He was a friendly little fellow, and, moreover, possessed a dog instinct which led him to feel his fortunes had changed for the better, so in answer to a concerted roar of “Samson!” from all five children, he not only wagged his tail, but wagged all over, and even managed a little falsetto imitation of a bark. The children were charmed at this display of what they considered superlative intelligence, and the fly having arrived, fell into the hall shouting for their father. David’s admiration for the puppy was as great as they had hoped; he rolled him over and tickled him, and tried to make him bark. After five minutes of this, Catherine suddenly remembered that she hadn’t yet mentioned the legacy. She looked down at her husband, kneeling with the children round the puppy, and with a tolerant sigh accepted the fact that he would find the arrival of Samson far more interesting.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Catherine had a theory that if only you began by keeping it properly, Christmas Day for all your life remained something magical and exquisite. Even when you were completely grown-up, and for many, many Christmases had ceased to hang up your stocking and believe in Father Christmas, and had learnt by bitter experience that the “Peace on earth” and “Goodwill to men” spirit would fade on Boxing Day—even then, she would say, if only you’d started keeping it properly when you were very young, nothing, not even a Christmas spent all alone, to Catherine an unthinkable situation, could take the glory from the day. “It’s not what you do exactly, but how you feel it,” she would try to explain.

  When Esdras was three months old, he saw his first Christmas tree. He had stared with wide blue eyes at the fluttering flames on the candles.

  “David, I’m sure he’s enjoying it.”

  David had looked at Nannie. They understood each other perfectly. Catherine’s pleasure in her tree must not be destroyed. Even Esdras appeared to grasp the situation, for he made a pleasant little gurgle.

  “There! What did I tell you? You see, he’s simply loving it.”

  In time, the whole of Christmas Day was hedged in by customs, each custom a new bush, helping to palisade this one day from the rest of the year. As each child grew old enough to take its share in the day’s doings it looked back at the babies still in the nursery with something of compassion, for the full keeping of Christmas Day marked that boundary over which each must pass to become a separate entity, a boundary which separated them from that formless group known as “the little ones.”

  Christmas Day properly began at that moment on Christmas Eve when, kissing David and Catherine goodnight, they were told: “Don’t forget to hang up your stockings.” Their bedtimes were spaced at intervals of a quarter of an hour, and all of them, as they climbed the stairs to bed, felt that funny hot sensation inside, caused by a mixture of suppressed excitement and fright. Lovely to think of waking to find it Christmas Day, but good to know you wouldn’t be alone when Father Christmas came down the chimney.

  They always wakened a little earlier than usual on Christmas morning, and experienced that odd feeling of holding a tightly stuffed woollen stocking in the dark. They tried to guess from the shape what were the things in it, and always found their guesses hopelessly wrong when Nannie arrived with a candle. Even that boring affair, “getting dressed,” wasn’t as drab a business as usual on Christmas Day, for it was brightened by a deafening noise from all the little wind instruments found in the stockings.

  At breakfast there was the family present-giving. This meant that at breakfast you received those presents which by carefully-dropped hints you had made it quite clear that you wanted. The other presents, unknown quantities, came later, on the tree. After breakfast there was waiting about in the hall for the postman, and then church. The children cordially detested ordinary Sunday church. But Christmas Day was different. They loved the roar with which everyone sang: “Hark! the Herald Angels Sing,” and later on: “O come, all ye
Faithful”—the latter pleasantly easy to remember, for even the youngest of them could manage the “O come, let us adore Him,” bits. After church, Christmas dinner. What a function this! The table decorated with the red table-centre, holly, red crackers, and little dishes of almonds, raisins, chocolates, crystallised fruits, and figs. Then Maud almost staggering in with the turkey, and later with the plum pudding covered with flames, and with a shilling in its heart. After dinner there was the Carol Service. Nannie took them to this, while Minnie looked after the babies and Catherine trimmed the Christmas tree. The carols were beautiful. Lolling back in your pew, terribly drowsy after rather too much dinner, the choirboys, under the flickering lights, looked distant and unreal, and their voices sounded much nicer than usual, and although you knew where they lived, and how dull they looked in ordinary life, they became important, somehow, and part of Christmas. Tea was in the nursery. Catherine had people to tea in the drawing-room, “lame dogs” who had come in to share their tree. Tea in the nursery was a quick meal. Nobody wanted to waste time on just eating, with the Christmas tree waiting downstairs.

  This Christmas Catherine felt depressed as she trimmed the tree. The children were so utterly adorable on Christmas Day, so bubbling with happiness, thinking the simple way in which the day was spent, so wonderful. Was she deliberately putting an end to all that? she wondered. Sending her boys away to school, bringing a stranger into the house to teach her girls. By next Christmas would they have changed? Upstairs in the night-nursery, Baruch and Susanna were having their rest. They were feeling grown-up and important, having had downstairs dinner for the first time.

  “Baruch, is turkey-bird like what you thought he’d be?”

  “He wasn’t like the turkey what I see’d before, he was all covered wif fevvers.”

  “Walkin’ was he?”

  “Yes, I see’d him at the farm.”

  “He hadn’t gone dead then,” said Susanna wisely. Baruch rolled over and faced her. “Was zat one what we had for dinner gone dead?”

  Susanna had lost interest in the subject. “Let’s play Faver Christmas comin’ down ver chimney,” she suggested.

  “Does Great-great-aunt Selina look like vat turkey?” But he could get no answer.

  “I’m Faver Christmas, an’ you’re the chile what wants his stocking filled. Shut you’s eyes,” said Susanna with determination.

  The Christmas tree was perfect.

  “Mummy, it’s the most monstrous tree we ever had,” said Esdras, his eyes shining with excitement.

  Catherine, conscious it was a little smaller than usual, agreed at once.

  “Mummy.” Sirach pulled at her sleeve, and stood on tiptoe to show he wanted to whisper. “In vis little parcel is a present for Samson. I fink he’d like it hung on the tree.”

  Cook, Maud, Milly the kitchenmaid, and old Oakes the gardener came in, and stood awkwardly against the wall. Their arrival was the signal for the present-giving to begin. The first presents were always for the servants. The children surrounded cook. They liked giving her presents. She was always surprised, and, whatever you gave her, it was just what she was wanting. This year she was tried high, for her presents included a wooden peg-doll from Baruch, and a text painted for her by Esdras. It was his own unaided work, and Catherine, looking at it over his shoulder while he presented it, could only marvel at his choice of wording. The effort was on brown paper, with a border of daisies and the lettering carefully done in white paint—“Neither thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor extortioners, shall inherit the kingdom of God.”

  “I hope you like it, Cookie?” He looked at her anxiously. “I’ve hunted and hunted, but I couldn’t find a text about a cook, and then I found this one, and there’s such lots of things in it, I thought you must be one of them.”

  “Very kind of you, Master Esdras,” said cook, giving Catherine as nearly a wink as she considered respectful. “An’ if I’m none of them things at present, one never knows what’s comin’. ‘Ung up in me kitchen it will be a warnin’ to us all.” She turned a grim eye on Maud and Millie.

  “My! He is a limb, that boy,” giggled Maud, as he turned away.

  The present-giving over, the floor a litter of boxes and paper and string, Catherine having entered the last present on her list of thank you letters for the morrow, gathered the whole party round the tree, where by immemorial custom they sang: “The First Noel,” followed immediately by dancing Sir Roger de Coverley, David and Nannie the first couple to lead off. After which the servants drifted back to their own part of the house, cook muttering something about “me oven.” Then, one by one, the guests began to go. The children hated this, for it meant that Christmas was terribly nearly over. Nannie had long ago taken Manasses and Maccabeus back to the nursery, and now Minnie appeared to fetch the twins. Feeling rather depressed, the other five gathered round the fire. Catherine sensed their mood, their feeling of flatness.

  “Tell us a story, David.”

  “Once upon a time—” he had to bring the story to an abrupt end, for Minnie had come for Sirach.

  “One more,” beseeched the others.

  When the last child had gone, Catherine turned her back, with a move of disgust, to the littered floor and dismantled tree.

  “There’s something terribly depressing about a Christmas tree that’s done with,” she said. “It makes me feel old.”

  David looked at her thoughtfully.

  “I think there must be something beautiful about growing old, so few temptations, so much time to think.”

  Catherine gazed at the fire. She was wondering, as she had often wondered before, why living with somebody who was very good, instead of making you good too, as it surely should, made you, if not actually bad, wish you might talk as though you were. But all she said was:

  “I expect you’re right, darling.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Boxing day found Catherine faced with cross children and angry servants in an untidy house. Christmas presents that hadn’t yet found homes, decorations inclined to fall down and in any case the worse for wear, and the dismantled Christmas tree, waiting to be fetched for an infants’ treat at the Parish Room on the morrow, giving a shoddy air to the drawing-room. Maud’s voice wakened her; she put down the hot-water can with a bump.

  “Please ‘um, that dog’s made a mess all over me ’all, an’ there’s some candle grease got into the draw’n’-room carpet, an’ cook’s come over bad, got the sick ’eddick, says she can’t raise ’er ’ead from ’er piller. Never rains but it pours, does it, mum?”

  Catherine greeted this list of woes with a resigned sigh. Cook’s sick headaches took place after any gaiety, and Maud’s complaint about the drawing-room carpet suffering from the Christmas tree candles was a yearly affair, but Samson was different: his behaviour needed a real apology.

  “I am sorry about Samson, naughty dog giving you extra work, as if you weren’t busy enough already with cook ill.”

  Maud was mollified.

  “Ah, well,” she said, crashing back the curtains, “t’isn’t to be wondered at, the way those children fed ’im yesterday was enough to upset any dog. I sez to Master Esdras, ‘If you feeds that dog like that, ’e’ll be sick on you, sure as eggs is eggs.’ An ’e sez, ‘Oh, Maud, I ’ates ’im to miss anythin’, seein’ it’s ’is first Christmas.’ ”

  Catherine laughed—“Still, I am sorry, especially as it’s going to be a busy day for you.”

  “But there,” said Maud as she clattered out, “cook couldn’t choose a better day for one of ’er turns; all that cold turkey in the ’ouse an’ goodness knows what in the way of jellies and that to be eaten up—”

  David sat up, he was taking an extra hour in bed as it was Boxing Day. Catherine, as she poured him out a cup of tea, wondered if this was a good moment to broach the subject of her holiday. She decided to start by the circuitous
route of the boys’ school, from there jump to the girls’ governess, and from that foothold spring onto her holiday from the back, as it were. She was frustrated by David. The word school set him off.

  On hearing of the legacy he had said the boys must go to his old preparatory school. Catherine had agreed at once, and made him write then and there to see if they could go that term. He had written therefore without much thought. He had always intended to send Esdras to school in the coming autumn, and Tobit two terms later. He had planned to ask his Bishop about a good school which would be especially cheap for the sons of the clergy. At first he had been delighted to think his boys could go to Tomlinson’s, but since despatching his letter, his conscience had troubled him. What did he really know of old Tomlinson? He and his brothers had been educated by him, and thanks to his coaching had got into their public school. But what of his church teaching? Trying to visualise those days, he dimly remembered an atmosphere of intense cleanliness, equalling, if not coming before, godliness; of “sportsmanlike behaviour,” eclipsing in the school valuation all other virtues, and of an eternal hurry and rush and scramble, which left no time for individuality, no space in which an imaginative, contemplative soul could grow. Was this what he wanted for his sons? In anxious disjointed sentences he laid these misgivings before Catherine.

  She listened in silence, slowly sipping her tea. She wanted the boys to go to Tomlinson’s: it was where their father and uncles had been, it was suitable, and her legacy made it possible. But she knew David would never be coerced into doing a thing merely because it was suitable; he must be completely sure of the rightness of a thing in his own mind, or he would have no rest. So she said:

  “I see, darling. Well, if you feel doubtful about it you must go and see Mr. Tomlinson. As you say, it is many years since you were there, and in any case the man may have changed. It’s a pity, though, you didn’t think of all this before you wrote. Still, that can’t be helped. The thing to do is to send him a wire, and ask him to see you tomorrow.”