“But I wouldn’t have you think Mrs. Penrose tried to stop me from coming. No. She said: ‘Well, I shan’t say a word to stop you, for your conscience has told you what’s right.’” Letty’s eyes widened. It was incredible that a friend of Adela’s could mention a conscience. Gardiner and Letty were now in the hall. Gardiner peered through the glass panels on his side of the front door, it looked nasty out, for it was raining in earnest, and growing dark. He shook his head. “I guess these cold, wet nights with the black-out are very distressing for you people.”
“We’re pretty used to them. It’s our second winter.”
Gardiner turned from the window.
“I come from quaker folk, Miss Smithson. My forefathers belonged to the county of Norfolk. They must have been very strong in their beliefs, for even now I feel wars are wrong. I’m a pacifist, Miss Smithson, through and through, but I reckon this is a war which had to be fought, it’s a war against the powers of darkness.”
“Hitler’s awful, isn’t he?” Letty agreed.
Gardiner did not appear to have heard her. There was a light above him, and by it Letty could see his face; it was shining with the fervour of his thoughts.
“To fight evil you need the machines of evil—guns, tanks, aeroplanes, men-of-war—and though I have to force myself to do it, I give my quota towards these things; but my money, which is pretty considerable, was not loaned to me without purpose. It’s to find for what purpose God intended I should use it that I’m over here now.”
Letty had been brought up Church of England. Her parents had sent her to Sunday school, and had her confirmed and had taken her to Holy Communion after the morning service on Christmas Day, Easter Day and Whit-Sunday. Except for Lady Falls, Letty’s employers had not been church-goers, and Letty had fallen out of the habit of attending herself; but she still considered she was a member of the Church of England and, as such, it made her feel awkward to hear God spoken of as if he were one of Gardiner’s relations. She tried to bring the conversation to a more everyday level.
“I expect you’ve seen plenty of ways to help, haven’t you?”
Again Gardiner appeared not to have heard her. His face shone with growing intensity.
“As I have travelled about England seeing wrecked homes, and broken lives, and as I have gone around this cruelly injured London, something is coming to me. I’m getting a message just as clearly as if it were written, and it says: ‘Gardiner Penrose, keep your eyes open, raise them above the grief and horror,’ and I’ve done that and I’ve seen a very wonderful thing. Way down in the shelters I’ve seen something blooming like a flower. At first I thought maybe it was courage, but though that’s there, it was not that which I saw.”
Gills opened the front door. He was damp but proud at having managed the feat of getting a taxi.
“Your taxi, sir.”
Gardiner neither saw Gills nor the open door, nor did he hear the taxi. He swept on, his eyes on a vision.
“No, what I was led to see was a humbler flower, almost a wayside flower. Down there in those dark tunnels and draughty cellars I found it blooming, and God laid his hand right on my shoulder and said: ‘You take a good look, Gardiner Penrose, for that’s a flower which must not be allowed to die, and your money can water it.’”
Gills looked anxiously at Letty, to remind her that taxis were scarce, and a passer-by might bribe theirs away, but Letty was staring at Gardiner and missed his appeal. She was by now so carried away that she had lost her embarrassment at the conversational terms Gardiner was on with God.
“What is the flower?”
Gardiner heard her that time.
“I just don’t know the word. It’s love in the way the Bible says ‘Love thy neighbour as thyself,’ but at home we just say that folk are neighbourly. Down below there when the siren wails, for all that’s sad and squalid, there’s a warmth coming from the people, made of just loving one another, and there’s many a lonely soul who’s knowing friendship and neighbourliness for the first time.”
Letty, who had heard from Jim of the other side of the picture—the shelter quarrels, the grasping spirit that resented the imaginary extra comforts of others, the back-biting and slander—asked gently, afraid to break his dream: “But what are you going to do?”
“God hasn’t spoken clearly yet, but it seems to me that things are shaping to show me I should try and buy land in the centre of the poor areas where so much damage has been done, and there build club-houses, beautiful buildings where, when peace comes, all folk can meet, and have their games and fun, and where the lonely can find a welcome.”
Gills and Letty saw his eyes behind the horn-rimmed spectacles, and they glistened with tears. Gills, appalled to see a gentleman crying in Mrs. Framley’s hall, picked up Gardiner’s umbrella and gas mask off the table and held them out. He raised his voice slightly:
“Your taxi’s waiting, sir.”
Gardiner blinked and came back to earth. He shook Letty warmly by the hand.
“I certainly have enjoyed our talk. Good-bye, Miss Smithson, I shall hope to see you to-morrow.”
Gills saw Gardiner into his taxi. Letty was still in the hall when he came back. He gave a distressed sigh.
“Not a very practical gentleman I’m afraid.”
Andrew Bishop hung about his mother’s bedroom, hoping that there was something she wanted to say to him.
Alice Bishop watched her son prowling, and wished he would go. This was one of her tired days, when her head throbbed and she awoke feeling as if she had not been to bed at all. Normally she would have made no effort, but spent the morning reading snippets out of The Times, odd sentences, and a few of the deaths, and then dozing; but with Andrew’s leave finished she felt bound to appear to give him her attention. She forced warmth into her voice.
“I know you don’t want to go and see Mr. Penrose, dear, but it’ll please your father very much.”
Andrew, having agreed to sacrifice the last day of his leave travelling to London to see a stranger, was unwilling to discuss the subject. His bags were packed and in the hall. His father had put off going to his office in order to drive him into Liverpool, and see him on to his train. It was all fixed, there was nothing in the business to talk about. He was standing by the table on which his mother kept her photographs of Michael. There were eight of them placed around a vase of flowers. He ran his finger up and down the bevelled edge of the table.
“Oh, it’s all right.”
Alice eyed his uniform.
“I wish you had been made a pilot officer, instead of a sergeant pilot. I don’t care for that cloth, it’s woolly looking. I dare say it’s all right on a tall man, but not for you: if you’d been an officer you could have gone to a good tailor, and it does help.”
Andrew’s eyes turned to the last picture of his brother. He had been what to another member of the R.A.F. he would have described as tall type, handsome job. He looked from the photograph to his wings. When he had worn them for the first time he had been so proud of them that they had seemed to blaze on his tunic, but now they were shrinking. Queer how you hoped such a lot from leaves, and when they came they let you down with a bump. Of course he knew he could never be a patch on Michael, but he had thought his wings might make his family proud. Ruth was proud, but then she never had thought him as big a fool as he was. His eyes went back to the photographs and fastened on a group of their preparatory school, the cricket eleven with Michael as captain in the centre. He himself had just managed to get a place in the eleven in his last summer term. He, too, had been photographed: in his case standing in the back row. He had thought no end of that photograph, and had brought it home, and knowing how she treasured a similar one of Michael, had given it to his mother. Michael had been dead nearly a year then, but his mother was still frantic with grief. Andrew could still see her take his photograph, and the way she stiffened, and hear th
e tone in which she said: “Very nice, dear.” She laid the photograph face downwards on her table; he and Ruth had searched everywhere for that photograph but they never saw it again.
Andrew was not surprised that he had not so far been much of a success at home. It was no joke to have had a brother like Michael; there was nothing he had not been good at, and when it came to himself there had not so far been anything he was really good at. It would not have mattered so much about the games because if he was not wizard at them, like Michael had been, he could get along at them. It was at work he had been such a flop. Michael, with his prizes and his scholarships, would have been hard for anybody to live up to, but for a dim like himself it was hopeless. Still he never had been able to see why the parents had not been proud of Ruth. She was no dim—School Certificate and Matric exemption at fifteen. Ruth had not been surprised at their lack of enthusiasm. “They aren’t interested in girls getting on,” she had said, and only to him had she confided the precious words of praise she had heard from her headmistress.
Alice tried again. “It’s wonderful your father has managed to take half a morning’s holiday; now they are doing this work for the government he’s rushed off his feet. You are very honoured.”
Andrew did not need to be told he was honoured. Travelling home on leave he had let himself fall into an old fault of his; building a fancy picture of his homecoming. He had done this for the first time that autumn term after Michael had died. Michael had been nine years older than Ruth, and eleven than himself, and they had admired him from a distance; he was as it were the prince in the fairy tale, and they the woodcutter’s children, to whom he threw occasional kind words and gifts. Andrew had been shocked by Michael’s death, but more because he had been so important and so glamorous, that a world without him seemed a world without the sun, than from a sense of personal loss. It was when the shock was wearing off that he had begun to see how his brother’s death could affect himself. He would be important now. He was the only boy. His mother and his father would be counting the days until the holidays began. This idea made him feel giddy, it was turning his world upside down. Counting the days for him! They couldn’t be, and yet they must be, for they hadn’t Michael now. In bed at night, and at odd moments during the day he followed this thought. It brought great dreams in its train. If he was going to be important at home, he must make them proud of him. He always had worked as hard as he could, but he was not very bright, but of course people expecting things of you might make you brighter. His reports weren’t up to much compared with what Michael’s had been, but everybody said that he tried. Of course it had been natural that his father had read them and snorted, and his mother had not bothered to read them at all, when Michael had been alive; but now they would read them and they would see that there were improvements. “Works hard and shows some aptitude,” was better than just: “Tries hard.” As the holidays drew nearer his belief in the change he would find at home grew, until actually in the train, travelling homewards, it reached its climax. There wouldn’t be just the chauffeur to meet him, but his mother and his father would be standing on the platform. His mother would say: “Don’t let’s worry about stupid things like reports,” and his father would say, as he had once heard him say to Michael: “It’s grand to have you home, old boy.” Then when the report-reading did come, there would be no contemptuous sniff, and no feeling that his work was not worth discussing because he was such a hopeless ass.
There was only the chauffeur on the platform, and only Martin, the parlour-maid, in the hall. Martin watched his boxes taken up with a grim eye on the stair paint and then said: “Your tea’s laid in the dining room, Master Andrew.” Andrew was eleven, and at eleven dreams die hard; he had said: “Where’s mother?” his body at the alert ready to dash in any direction. The vibrant note in his voice rang oddly in that tear-soaked house. Martin, though sorry for the children coming home to such a gloomy Christmas, felt that it was better to strike the right note at once and so accustom Andrew, who could, when she arrived, accustom Ruth. Her voice grew tragic. “Your mother’s lying down, poor dear.” “But she’d like to see me.” The “me” rose on a confident, almost triumphant note. Martin gave him a surprised look. “No, she won’t.” She put her hand behind his elbow and gave him a gentle push towards the stairs. “Now you run up and wash, and be quiet, there’s a dear.”
Andrew’s dream had been with him long enough to grow roots, which had gone too deep for frosts to reach and shrivel them, though they had cruelly hard frosts to suffer. Far from taking even a little of Michael’s place, Andrew was pushed by both his father and mother farther from them. Every time they saw his shrimp-like build, and plain, rather stupid face, they felt as if acid were being rubbed into their wounds.
Ruth and Andrew had always been detached from the household, but now, though both their father and mother would have been shocked had they realized it, they only joined it as visitors. Thrown back on each other the children grew close together and shared everything, including their worries. Andrew was just as distressed as Ruth when neither parent showed any sign of going to her school to see her confirmed.
“Always one comes, and sometimes both,” Ruth moaned. “It doesn’t matter about their never coming to prize-givings or anything, but confirmations are different. I’m afraid the girls will think they’re Roman Catholic or something like that.” It was Andrew’s idea that Ruth should ask her headmistress, Miss Parsons, for help. “You say she’s nice. I bet she wouldn’t mind writing a letter asking one of them to promise to turn up.” Ruth was at one of the largest girls’ schools in the country, and her eyes were scared at the very idea. “Gosh, I wouldn’t dare, people only see her when they pass exams, or somebody’s dead. I saw her when Michael died; she was marvellous then in a way.” But Andrew over-persuaded her and Ruth did reach Miss Parsons’ study, and in a scared whisper breathed her request, and started a friendship which lasted for all her schooldays. It was the custom at the preparatory school the boys had attended for those who could afford it to give something to the school on leaving. Michael, as head boy and captain of both cricket and rugger teams, had given an electric clock of great magnificence. Andrew, having screwed himself up to going into his father’s study to ask for money for his gift, was overcome by his own unworthiness. “Of course they won’t expect anything from me like they had from Michael, and they’ve put a stand under his clock now, and for anything special it has flowers under it, like under the war memorial board, but I do think I ought to give something.” His father watched the boy and thought what an oaf he was. Nearly fourteen and unable to make the simplest request without stuttering and confusion. He slammed down a ten-shilling note and went back to his papers. Ruth and Andrew were equally appalled. “It’ll look as if father’s mean,” said Ruth, “because everybody knows he’s rich. I bet you told him badly.” Andrew nodded miserably. “I did. Of course there’s all my five bobs’ pocket money. I can save those.” “And mine,” Ruth agreed. “But we shall need some of that because of buses and things.” It was Ruth who found the solution to that difficulty. She had some old-fashioned gold jewellery left her by an aunt. “We’ll pawn it,” she said firmly. Neither of them had ever been near a pawn shop, but their horror of a ten-shilling gift standing as a permanent memorial to their father’s apparent meanness gave them courage. They went to Liverpool, and found a shop with three balls over it, and easily got the four pounds ten shillings they asked; then they went to a jeweller’s and sent the school a handsome if repulsive inkstand, with Andrew’s name and the dates he was at the school engraved on it. “It’s just right,” Andrew said, giving Ruth’s arm a grateful squeeze, “and nobody could think a man mean who spent five pounds.” They discussed the future together. “I don’t mind what I do,” said Andrew, “if only it’s something I can do well. Do you think father would mind awfully if I went in for dirt-track racing? Of course I’ve only ridden Michael’s bike inside our own gates as I’m not old enough f
or a licence, but it’s a pretty stiff test up our field, and I do think it’s a thing I could do.” “I’d like to be a doctor,” said Ruth. “Miss Parsons says I ought to get a good degree. She takes it for granted they’ll let me go to college, but I can’t feel sure.” Before Ruth was ready for college they learned their fates. “You’ll leave school next Easter, Ruth,” her mother told her. “I’ve arranged for you to stay for a year in India.” “I don’t want to go,” Ruth gasped. “I want to go to college, and what’s Andrew going to do when I’m away?” “College is no place for women,” said her father, “and you won’t be seeing much of Andrew anyhow.” He turned quite kindly to his son. “They tell me I’ll have to have you coached if you’re going to be any good in the business.”
Ruth did not take her fate lying down, but Andrew accepted his. “You’ll never be any good at it,” Ruth railed, “and you’ll be simply miserable.” But Andrew would not complain. “I don’t know why I never thought of it. Of course I’ll have to go into the business. After all, I’m father’s only son.”
In spite of the friendship between the brother and sister, Andrew never spoke to Ruth of his certainty that, though they might not know it now, one day his parents were going to depend on him, and be proud of him, prouder even than they had been of Michael. That’s why he had day-dreamed before this leave. People were proud of having their relations in the R.A.F. Of course it had not been so hot at first. It must seem to outsiders to take so long to train any one; they couldn’t know all there had been to learn. Of course he had probably sickened them by the rot he had talked when he first joined the mob. He had been so crazy at his luck. What the war had saved him from! Oxford! If he’d slaved all day and all night he would never have got a degree. After the war people wouldn’t have the money to go to universities, and then the firm would have to cut out that stuff about all their men having degrees, and so it wouldn’t matter his not having one. He couldn’t hope that with or without a degree he’d do much good to the firm, still he could be poked into jobs where he couldn’t do much harm, and if by then he had the war record that he hoped, his father would be too proud of him to mind.
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