Mrs McCree picked up Crockford.
With a careful regard for syntax, learnt from Little Mary’s Grammar, dimly remembering the calamity brought on the man in the mill-pool by a lax use of will and shall (“I will drown and nobody shall save me”) Mrs McCree lifted Crockford high in the air and declaimed in a ringing voice (which she hoped her Guardian Angel would hear): “I will make the Bishop tipsy, and nobody shall stop me!” In case of error she varied this formula by a second declaration of her intentions: “I shall make the Bishop tipsy and nobody will stop me.”
Having done this, throwing her book on the carpet, Mrs McCree to her own complete astonishment burst into tears, sobbing into the silence of the threadbare room, “Oh, Phineas! Darling! Wonderful, wonderful man! A gentleman! A scholar! A Saint! Oh, never, never was there such a kind, loving husband! Oh, Phineas! To see you so neglected! So ignored, so underpaid, so overworked! It’s a scandal, a perfect scandal! I can’t bear it any longer!”
Drying her red eyes Mrs McCree then marched in a resolute way to the laundry, where she poured a third gallon of Jamaica rum into her witch’s brew and gave Mrs Cog orders to keep a gentle fire burning in the copper for the next three weeks.
With a relentless and determined face—indeed, she looked more like Lady Macbeth than any actress ever has, before or since—the Vicar’s wife re-read her great-grandfather’s directions, to make quite certain that no vital, no necessary, ingredient was omitted; tipped yet a fourth bottle of brandy into the cauldron and dropped in a pound of ground ginger and a handful of quick-lime (in mistake for brook-lime), after which activities, and recollecting the effect of one wineglass on His Excellency (a four-bottle man as everyone knew), she buried her face in a damp sheet and laughed till she got a stitch in her side.
The day set apart for the Episcopal Visitation was one of the most perfect Mallow’s Marsh had ever known. The sun had very easily dispersed the thick mists, called locally “the pride of the morning”. Though cool, the air was not cold. Though warm, the sun was not hot. With the most discerning tact a zephyr sometimes stirred the wands of the pepper-tree, the swathes of the willows, the grey plumes of the wattles, already tasselled with buds. As if merely to display their delicate gradations of colour, ranging through buff and amber to bronze and dun, this subtle wind rustled, sometimes, the long grasses that veiled the Vicarage garden, the unending by-ways; even the main road meandering from Sydney to Picton was fringed with blue grass and red fescue, which swayed this way and that.
Was the sky blue?
It was.
The Vicarage was early astir.
The menu at luncheon was to be—
Roast Pork with apple sauce.
Beans, baked potatoes.
Summer Pudding.
Whipped Cream.
Coffee.
An oratorio of the most heartrending sounds had, two days previously, accompanied the slaughter of the best of the Vicarage pigs. A roomy flagon of Nyppa wine (or “Mrs McCree’s Liqueur”) had been lowered sixty feet down into the eighty-foot well, to cool off; the most exact calculations having been made to ensure that, though close to it, the bucket in which it reposed should not touch the water.
In the Vicarage every duty allotted to Cook Teresa, Abigail the Orphan and Mrs Cog had been faithfully performed. The garden (the bit, that is, between the front gate and the porch, over which a Marechal Niel rose was in full flower) was actually neat. A clump of polyanthus (very late) was in bloom by the front steps; there were six clove carnations out.
The service in Church had been most inspiring.
Sixteen sulkies, gigs, buggies and buckboards had brought a congregation of thirty, the Offertory (12s. 6d.) had been a record, the organ had produced sounds distinctly resembling music, neither of the choir boys had sneezed during the sermon, which, in its measured cadences, its august prose, its exact, almost poignant scholarship, in the richness of its classical allusions, in the masterly ease with which the Bishop had ironed out a crease in Deuteronomy (or was it the Pentateuch?) and in its dramatic opening sentence,
“WHERE ARE THE YOUNG MEN OF MALLOW’S MARSH?”, would greatly have impressed anyone able to take it all in. The good Bishop never gave less than his best, even to the most sparse, the most rustic congregations.
Much in the spirit that Art students are sent to Italy, Abigail the Orphan had been “spared” by Mrs Cog in order that she might see the goffered frills on His Lordship’s lawn sleeves. She sat in the Vicarage pew beside Juliet and Donalblain. It was hardly to be expected that the ladies from the household where the Bishop was to lunch should appear, but there they were! Mrs McCree in puce surah with a rose in her “pork-pie hat”; her lovely daughter-in-law, who seldom appeared, looked quite ravishing in a Garibaldi-black, of course.
The Bishop seemed to be such a true “Prince of the Church”, and his eloquent, words so moved Mrs McCree that almost she relented; but her Guardian Angel, a good creature, not very bright, was no match for the old firm, Apollyon, Beelzebub, Mephistopheles and Co.; she refused to weaken; she would make that lordly being tipsy!
In her dining-room with its rows of Regency chairs upholstered in red rep faded to magenta, the table positively sparkled with crystal (it really was crystal, three engraved goblets were dated 1683) and glittered with mirror-like silver (it really was silver, mostly of George the First’s time).
The green fig-leaves from the dessert service, filled with grapes and hazel-nuts, the immense silver epergne garlanded with yellow roses, and a silver tazza, given to some ancestor who had been chaplain to Her (late) Majesty Queen Anne, made the table look magnificent.
Mrs McCree was proud of it.
“After all,” she thought, “only Lady Mary’s plate can rival ours”, and with infinite care she gently levered the huge glass flagon full of Nyppa wine on to the sideboard. The liqueur was chilled to that clammy yet inviting coldness that only the deep-delved earth can give. Its colour was not bright but treacherous-looking; it had the unsafe look of a bog, strangely unluminous, yet deep-toned. It did not seem to be inanimate! Continually, a kind of subterranean glow radiated from it, its surface would be sucked in, in a thousand dimples, and then, with a sort of sucking sound, released, to flow to the rim of the jug. A volcano that was not in eruption but which was brewing lava would perhaps be a simile that faintly hinted at its mysterious and peculiar qualities; it appeared to be as thick as treacle, but it wasn’t! As for its bouquet!
Juliet and Donalblain were having a meal in the Nursery with their mother, for the lovely young widow of the Vicar’s son seldom appeared, it was only the Vicar and his wife who bowed their heads when the Bishop said Grace—in Greek.
The Vicar, who was greatly enjoying the company of an old friend of his undergraduate days, had twice already capped a line from Horace with a quotation from Sallust and (let it be whispered) Catullus.
The two outdoor menservants, wearing white cotton gloves, waited at table, Cook Teresa having elected to carve. She could not bear, she said, “to see my lovely leg mucked up”. She deftly laid four pinkish, whitish, creamish, fragrant slices of pork on each Crown Derby plate, with its crispish, tannish, delectable-looking strips of crackling flanking them, each with a mound-of apple-sauce to add lustre to a perfect mouthful. The beans were strips of chalcedony and chrysoberyl. The potatoes! And the gravy! Oh, my dears!
“Ah, yes,” the Bishop murmured in his exquisitely cultivated voice, while he waited for the Vicar to be served, “I very well recall, during the early thirties, questions arising in my thoughts as to whether we could really be so cocksure in taking the absolute truth of the evangelical formula for granted. One of the great watchwords was the right of private judgment. We used, on Sundays, to have to find texts to sanction it.”
Here a slightly mystic air attested to the excellence of his first mouthful of pork.
“Side by side with our classical work we were obliged to find sanction in defence of Justification by Faith, Sanctification, Total De
pravity, Election and Final Perseverance.”
“We were taught to look on anyone who did not ag-ag-gree with us with a kind of awful dismay,” the Vicar recollected, smiling. He, too, found the pork very good.
“Of what use were all those glib quotations from the minutes of the Council of Trent?” the Bishop wanted to know.
“There was always a doubt as to whether K-K-Keeble was really sound on the more vital aspects of the Christian Faith,” the Vicar hinted.
He was quite holding his own.
As the meal proceeded Lucretius Carus wrestled with St Jerome, Epicurus attempted St Augustine, Apuleius supported by Aemilia Pudentilla confronted even St Paul himself.
It was a merry repast.
Directly the pork was in play Mrs McCree, rising from her place, the flagon held in hands that did not falter, said in gentle, confiding tones to the Bishop, “You will taste my little elixir, Bishop? It is made from a recipe left me among the papers of my great-grandfather, Major-General Willing-Toper, of the East India Company’s service.”
“But, my dear Lady! It is not for you to wait on me!”
Jumping up, and gallantly possessing himself of the jug, the Bishop poured himself out a full glass, using, not the goblet dated 1683, but the hearty Georgian tumbler, with a capacity of one pint.
Returning the flagon to the sideboard, and smiling a faint, almost terrified smile, Mrs McCree went back to her chair.
“My memory is as good as ever,” the Bishop remarked, in parentheses as it were, “and for years, if I am not mistaken, I have addressed you as Jessie—yet, if my ears do not deceive me, I have today twice heard Phineas address you as Lucretia?”
“That is my middle name,” Mrs McCree answered, throwing a warning glance at her husband.
Here the Bishop tossed off half a glass of Nyppe.
“Of course, in those days, after the appearance of Tract No. 90, the chief points held out for our consideration were Scripture, the Church, General Councils, Justification by Faith, Purgatory, the Invocation of Saints, Masses, Homilies, the Celibacy of the Clergy and—er—er—other matters of importance.”
The Bishop finished his glass and in an absent-minded way got up and refilled it at the sideboard.
Mrs McCree became anxious.
Neither of the menservants had reappeared to take away the plates and dishes. Cook Teresa, ably assisted by Tabitha, was, in rather a flurried way, performing these offices.
“Where are the men?” Mrs McCree whispered, as Cook Teresa removed her empty platter.
“Lorst to the worrld, Mum,” Cook Teresa whispered back. “They must have sumpled the Nyppe. We managed to drag theer buddies into the scullery. I’ve covered thim with a blankut, and they look very, very happy theer. Very happy indade! Abigail is after climbing into a clane gown, and she will be here immejit.”
When the second course made its appearance, Abigail proving herself a treasure, the Bishop poured himself out a third tumbler of Nyppe.
“Your elixir, dear lady,” he said, turning with a smile (the smile known to the ladies of his Diocese as his smile) to Mrs McCree, “has the three qualities necessary to a good drink. It is cool, it is subtle, it is stimulating.” And he resumed his interesting discussion with the Vicar. “It was Tait of Balliol who entrenched himself so ably behind the Thirty-Nine Articles. Did you ever meet Tait?”
“No. No.”
“Nor Pugin ? Bloxham’s ‘umbra’?”
“No, no.”
“The Master was not pleased with Pugin. He considered he had humbugged Bloxham.”
“Ah, yes, so Gooch told me. Did you ever run across Gooch?” “No, no. But in the May Term of 1836 I ran across Bowyer in Athens, and he told me about Gooch. That is, he mentioned him.” Because in their day Englishmen went to Greece much in the same spirit that the crusaders went to the Holy Land, Athens led to Delphi, Thebes to Helicon; there for the next ten minutes they rambled.
“I found the Boeotian plains very striking.”
“Ah, yes! As I came down from Cithaeron on the way from Eleusis, they lay before me, rising beyond Asopus into reddish, gentle heights!”
“Helicon, the grey, distant summit, not unattainable!”
“The dim, huge, majestic mass of Parnassus!”
From Mallow’s Marsh they looked back on their Heaven.
Mrs McCree, who had been waiting in vain for the return of Cook Teresa, noticed with a failing heart Tabitha’s agonized face appearing round the door, and obeyed her beckoning finger.
She was hardly at all astonished, on being led to the kitchen, to find Cook Teresa sitting stiffly on a deal chair, and gazing into space with extraordinary concentration.
“There were a drop or two left in the cauldron,” Tabitha explained.
“I brought this on myself,” Mrs McCree told herself, beginning to get a little alarmed. Should anything (as she put it) happen to the Bishop how could she deal with him? Dear Phineas certainly could not lift him. She peeped into the scullery at the recumbent forms of the two menservants, and remembering a maxim of her great-grandmother’s, went across to unfasten their collars; neither stirred, yet they looked happy! She was reassured by reminding herself that a note in her great-grandmother’s hand, written in the margin of the recipe had stated: “This Nyppe is good for diseases of the head and for cold stomachs, and nobody can pine away when embalmed in so powerful a preservative.”
Not a little comforted she returned to the dining-room. She circulated dessert.
Tabitha and Abigail brought in coffee.
The flagon was half empty and she noticed with awe that the Bishop was not in the least the worse for liqueur. His noble countenance was decorous, not flushed, his articulation was meticulously exact; indeed, as she entered, he was, with perfect sangfroid, asking Phineas if he had “caught this new craze for the cultivation of rhododendrons”?
The word presented no difficulties. His long legs, too, in their elegant gaiters, stepped with their usual graceful precision as he went across to the sideboard and poured himself out an eighth glass of Nyppe.
Sipping at her Mocha coffee, bolstered up with cream, the Vicar’s wife, however, felt the first faint stirrings of a real alarm when (Phineas having dropped into a gentle doze) the Bishop drew his chair near to hers, and, with a kind smile, a very kind smile, laid a white hand, wonderfully kept, and given a look of sanctity by the Amethystine Episcopal ring, over hers, and said, lowering his mellifluous voice almost to a whisper, “For some months past I have been hoping to find an cpportunity of mentioning to you a subject very near my heart.”
“Great Heavens!” thought Mrs McCree, “is he growing amorous?”
It was a contingency that had never occurred to her.
The Bishop’s grey eye certainly looked beneficent.
Was his cheek, perhaps, a little flushed?
“I have not been unmindful of your devoted labours, dear Jessie,” he continued. “I have greatly admired the wonderful way you have managed the feminine, the economic, side of my dear old friend’s responsibilities in so remote a parish. You are almost, I have noticed, self-supporting! I feel that your gifts should have wider scope. Will you not, dear Jessie, accept the office of President of our Ladies’ Auxiliary ?”
Mrs McCree had been very well brought up, but she gave a little gasp—was it of relief? Was it of horror? Of disappointment?
It woke up the Vicar, who, looking at his watch, said in his usual direct way, “Th-th-three o’clock! Your man will be at the door by this, I th-th-think.”
Rising, he went to look.
Yes! There was the Bishop’s brougham.
And, after the customary ritual common to the departure from a seldom-visited friend’s house in the country; the search for the lent book; the borrowed coat; the bestowal of packets of sandwiches, of three pumpkins, two dressed chickens, a sucking pig, a dozen eggs; the assembly of the family: “And—I have added a few bottles of Nyppe wine,” Mrs McCree murmured, giving them to the groom to
stow away in a carriage already packed with gifts. “I have already sent some flagons to the Governor, and to Mr McWhistle and other friends.”
The early afternoon had not belied the morning’s promise.
The sky was just as blue, the sun was just as temperate, the zephyr as discreet; all nature was keyed to the perfection of an autumnal, a mellow, beauty, as the Vicar, his wife, his daughter-in-law (who so seldom appeared), his two grandchildren, Juliet and Donalblain (who was four), accompanied the good Bishop to his waiting brougham.
His shovel hat was like a mirror, his gaiters exemplary in cut and fit, his apron quietly orthodox, his handsome face urbane, as with precise, undeviating steps he walked down the narrow path—so sweet with cloves and thyme—and seated himself with his customary aplomb, and a gracious expression of gratitude, in his smart carriage, and was whirled away to his Palace.
“I blame myself, Jessie, I b-b-blame myself.” Mr McCree fully realized how disappointed his wife was. “One rather g-g-glosses such things over! Where an Oxford man is concerned, that is! I q-q-quite forgot that Pussy” (for so he called the friend of his youth) “had been at Wadham College. Yes! My dear girl!” the Vicar shook his venerable head. “I should have remembered that the Bishop was a Wadham man. In his day they were all six-bottle men at Wadham.”
Marjorie Barnard
THE PERSIMMON-TREE
I SAW the spring come once—only once—and I won’t forget it. I had been ill all the winter and I was recovering. No more pain now, no more treatments or visits to the doctor. The face that looked back at me from my old silver mirror was the face of a woman who had escaped. I had only to build up my strength. For that I wanted to be alone, an old and natural impulse. I had been out of things for quite a long time and the effort of returning was still too great. My mind was transparent and as tender as new skin. Everything that happened, even the commonest things, seemed to be happening for the first time and had a delicate hollow ring like music played in an empty auditorium.
Best Australian Short Stories Page 19
