DANIEL COME TO JUDGEMENT

by MARY HOCKING

  Dorothy said, ‘I’m sorry. Erica.’

  ‘There’s something almost – well, I can’t quite say what, but something not quite right.’

  ‘I’ve said I’m sorry.’

  ‘You don’t seem yourself at all.’

  ‘Perhaps this is the real me?’

  ‘Don’t be so silly. You’re a very nice person really.’ Erica wanted that person back, capable, reliable, above all, predictable.

  Dorothy went up to her bedroom. It was Saturday afternoon, dusk was beginning to gather; the air coming in through the open window was moist and the leaden sky promised rain. Daniel was working in the garden. He had worked out there a lot lately, giving himself employment of a kind. Dorothy sat by the window and watched him. He was collecting dead leaves and twigs to make a bonfire. As with most activities, he put all his energy into it. He was not content to scoop up a handful of leaves, but gathered them all with the care of the shepherd, going back for those which escaped the rake, and then kneeling down and burrowing diligently, seeking them in their hiding places beneath shrubs and under hedges. He gathered the twigs with equal concern, and a few branches which had fallen. The bigger branches he broke across his knees, and then sat back on his heels, holding something in the palm of his hand, puzzling over it. Perhaps the dried fruit from a tree which he did not recognise? Eventually he put it in his pocket; and then began the business of arranging leaves and twigs in a mound. A considerable business it was! Above him, unheeded, deep violet clouds bunched together and even in the short space of time that Dorothy had been watching, the cloud height had lowered perceptibly. Daniel crouched, hand arrested, while he pondered the exact position of a twig. As she watched him, Dorothy cried out, ‘Light the ruddy fire!’ and beat her fist on the window¬sill. Then she got up and paced the room. ‘Why can’t you light a fire like anyone else? Why do you have to make it seem that this is the first fire that has ever been lit?’ It was so typical of him. He behaved always as though there was a strangeness and mystery just beneath the surface of life, as though to him there was no common day, but a miracle which happened with each dawn and died with the going down of the sun and the terror of night. ‘I must go away,’ she moaned. ‘Oh, I must go away!’

  She went instead to church the next day. Her religion meant a lot to her, it was in the marrow of her bones; yet it had deteriorated into a series of clichés, God is within you . . . Gift of the Holy Spirit . . . What did it mean? How was God in her? What was the Holy Spirit? She had sat in church week after week, year after year, and it had all flowed over her with nothing to arrest her attention because, by and large, it was not aimed at her or any other adult. The vicar was old, gentle and fatherly; he regarded his congregation as his children and spoke to them on that level. During the sermon, Dorothy usually sat with her mind running over the past week’s events, making mental notes of things – administrative rather than spiritual – which she had omitted to do. Her religion had not matured because it had deceived no nourishment here and she had not gone out to seek it elsewhere. Now, when she needed Him, she could not find God. When she prayed. He was not there. God is light, she thought; and we think we can contain Him in this dark place, visiting Him once a week, bringing flowers, as if He were a sick relative. She watched light flicker along the sides of the window alcoves like flames licking the glass and she thought that if the windows were smashed, God would surge in and consume the building.

  Daniel wanted her to go away for a week-end with him. She refused.

  ‘Erica is my sister,’ she said.

  ‘But if she was dead, you wouldn’t hesitate then.’

  ‘But she isn’t dead!’

  ‘I can’t see what difference that makes. It’s not as though she has any feeling for me.’

  ‘I can’t see why there should be a difference either, but there is.’ They argued incessantly. Argument with Daniel was wonderfully exhilarating, there was not time enough left in life to argue with him! In between arguing with Daniel, Dorothy was urging Erica to think more about him. ‘He is your husband. Erica! You must think about him.’ But really, what she was saying was, ‘Come on. Erica! Don’t make it too easy for me. Threaten me, fight me; above all, make me suffer for this!’ What a miserable puritan she was!

  Easter came, cold and grey. Good Friday was particularly bleak. As she walked to church for the three-hour service, Dorothy watched a plume of smoke rising into the sky from a near-by chimney; the smoke looked white against the ashen sky. In the distance, the Downs had lost their substance and were reduced to a grey-green shadow thinly stencilled on the sky. People passed in the street, coats buttoned to the throat, closed faces. It was all hateful, hateful! Everyone was saying, ‘We shall have no spring this year.’ The world was drained of hope. But the light had more penetration than winter light, it probed dusty corners, revealed the cracks in the fabric, showed the thin patches where belief had rotted away. The church was bare. Gone was baby Jesus in his crib, the candles, the dancing shadows, the lighted tree, the eager faces upraised. Here was darkness and gloom, agony beyond understanding, disillusion beyond bearing; right would not triumph nor good be rewarded, and death would have dominion over all. All else was a dream, a tale told to simple men who had been too credulous.

  As she knelt, trying to fix her mind on suffering, Dorothy said to herself, ‘I cannot do this thing to Erica.’ But the words carried no more conviction than anything else she said on the subject. Whatever show of repentance she might make, whatever confessions she might utter on her knees, her feeling for Daniel grew stronger and stronger: the sheer energy of it amazed her.

  In the library at Knocke Hall, Daniel was writing yet another letter of applications. He now applied not only for jobs which seemed to be suitable, but for any vacancy which was not demonstrably outside his scope. At the moment, he was answering an advertisement for the manager of a chemist’s shop. It was a demoralising process, but he was no longer aware of the effect which it was having on him. He had ceased to react. There was a mechanism in his system which now seemed to operate automatically in an emergency, like fire doors sealing off a danger area from the outside world. He read the letter through, signed it and reached for an envelope. At that moment, the door of the library opened and he turned eagerly, hoping to see Dorothy. It was Emma who came into the room. She looked at him very directly as though taking aim between his eyes and said, ‘Are you coming to the prayer meeting with me? We have one at three o’clock this afternoon.’ She stood facing him, breathing heavily through parted lips as though she had climbed a particularly steep hill instead of running down a flight of stairs from her bedroom; he could tell that this was something she had forced herself to do and he could imagine her, seated in her room, suddenly putting down her pen and saying, ‘This is the moment when I have to do it.’

  He felt guilty and confused because his mind had been on Dorothy, and he said hastily, ‘Yes, all right, Emma.’

  She said, ‘I’ll tell you when to get ready’ and left the room hurriedly.

  Daniel stuck down the envelope and addressed it. Then he sat gazing out of the window at a fat thrush pecking for worms on the lawn. He thought about the prayer meeting. He was a scientist. He had contemplated the universe with its millions of galaxies, its great cauldrons of inter-stellar gas from which new galaxies would eventually emerge, its exploding stars from which new planets would be formed, and he had been aware that his own world was no more than a grain of sand in all this vastness. As for man, he saw him as part of the evolutionary process, and not as its peak, and he could look without dismay to a time when by a process of random selection a creature infinitely more sophisticated than homo sapiens would emerge. He was able to do all this without fear or experiencing the need to cry out for supernatural help. It was annoying, therefore, that he should find his own resources so inadequate to cope with the ordeal of accompanying his daughter to a prayer meeting.

  What did it mean? What was Emma expecting of him? Was she trying to inv
olve him in an emotional experience from which she expected one or other of them to emerge altered in some mysterious way? Was that it? When Emma came to collect him, he had provided no answers to these questions and was in a state of funk.

  ‘The sun has come out,’ she said. ‘We can walk there.’ Emma liked to have a long run before she jumped her hurdles.

  All that was happening was that he was going to a prayer meeting with his daughter: it was not much to ask of him as a father. Yet it seemed, as he walked beside her, that this was the worst of all the things which had happened to him recently. He remembered how as a child he had stayed with an aunt who had taken him to prayer meetings; he had walked through the streets in a state of utter incredulity, refusing to believe that nothing would intervene to save him, no fire, flood, earthquake, each of which seemed to him more natural and bearable than the hour he would spend in the quiet, bare chapel. He had been repelled by the personal confessions, the probing of the soul, the lust for salvation. The very thought of this now brought him out in a sweat. He glanced at Emma who trudged beside him, head bent.

  ‘What is the procedure this afternoon?’ he asked cautiously.

  ‘What do you mean, procedure?’ The word twanged on raw nerves. ‘What a silly word! We’re not going to a board meeting.’

  ‘What goes on, then?’

  ‘We pray.’

  ‘Who is “we”?’

  ‘Anyone who is moved.’

  It was warmer now. There had been no rain for some time and dust came up from the pavement and made his throat dry. He wished he had had a glass of water before he left the house.

  Emma said, ‘They won’t expect you to pray.’ Her tone made it quite clear that she neither expected nor desired it. He realised that she, too, was dreading what lay ahead. She was embarrassed for him in the way in which we are often embarrassed for our dear ones when we see them in the company of people whom we regard more objectively. Had Daniel risen to his feet and delivered the most moving and intellectually satisfying prayer ever heard in North Street chapel, Emma would have been embarrassed for him. Daniel put his arm round her shoulders and gave her a quick hug.

  ‘Cheer up! Or aren’t we allowed to be cheerful?’

  She laughed nervously and then resumed her grim contemplation of the pavement as though there might be some courage lying about which she could scoop up. She was at the age when to make herself conspicuous was a physical torture and she was about to make herself very conspicuous.

  They were coming towards the centre of Yeominster now; Daniel could see the cathedral spire straight ahead and he knew that when it was to the side of him, rising above the roof of the old Corn Exchange, they would be nearing North Street.

  ‘What happened about that Hampshire Trust job?’ Emma asked abruptly.

  ‘They didn’t think I would be suitable.’

  ‘Then why did Sir Charles Raines ask you out to lunch?’

  ‘He knows me. I think he felt that was the way to deal with it.’

  ‘But you were suitable! Much better than they deserved!’

  ‘That was what he said.’

  ‘Stupid old man!’

  Over the last week, she had been easily roused to anger and he guessed that his action, which at one time she had thought so beautiful, was beginning to weigh heavily on her. Was that why she was doing this? To prove she had not deserted him? Oh, Emma! Emma! he thought; even if you have your doubts, I can forgive them. Couldn’t you settle for forgiveness and let me go home?

  It was too late. They had turned into North Street. The chapel was just ahead of them, a drab yellowstone building which opened straight on to the pavement, its harsh appearance a little softened by forsythia which hung over the wall of the neighbouring garden. There were a few people outside making the most of the unexpected sunshine; a young girl at the age at which it is impossible to be still for one moment, balancing on one leg on the kerb, occasionally teetering over into the gutter, two teenage girls with long hair cloaking solemn faces, a group of plump, comfortable-looking middle-aged women talking animatedly and sometimes bursting into laughter, two men standing back, giving the impression they were letting the women get on with it. It was a glance into someone else’s life, very orderly and reassuring, a cameo glimpsed while passing on one’s way to another place. Nothing to do with him. Even as they moved towards the group of people and someone waved to Emma, he could not believe he had arrived. Emma put her hand in his; he squeezed it.

  As they drew nearer the little group of women broke up. One of them said cheerfully to Daniel, ‘Hullo, Mr. Kerr. Nice to see the sun again, isn’t it?’ She spoke as though she knew him well and his presence in their midst occasioned no surprise. Emma was talking to one of the men. She was trying to appear self-possessed, but spoke with breathless rapidity as though the words emanated from a source which might dry up at any moment. Another woman said to Daniel, ‘Emma takes her exams next term, doesn’t she? We all hope she will do well. She works so hard.’ Daniel said, ‘Yes, indeed.’ The woman said, ‘You must be very proud of her.’ Emma looked at him, her eyes transmitting a distress signal. Daniel said, ‘Well, I suppose . . .’ and followed Emma into the chapel.

  A man standing at the side door handed Daniel a hymn book and said, ‘Glad to see you here.’ Inside the chapel, a man in a pew near the back stood to one side to make way for Daniel and Emma, he nodded his head at Daniel and smiled. Undoubtedly, they were all glad to see him and wanted to make him feel that he was one of them. They were concerned about him and showed it openly, there was no doubting their goodwill. One must never sneer at this kind of thing, Daniel thought as he sat beside Emma and bowed his head. It was cool in the chapel, his shirt clung clammily to his back. People were filing into the pews now, chatting to one another; it was not assumed that a reverent attitude should be adopted, God would not take offence if the commerce of daily life spilt over into His house. The atmosphere was quite different to that at All Saints’. There was a sense here that God was suffocatingly near, perhaps he would take His place at the back with a hymn book in His hand. The meeting began with a hymn, ‘Be Thou my vision, oh Lord of my heart’. Then they sat down and there was a silence which seemed to Daniel to go on for an unconscionably long time before an elderly man got up and said, ‘We thank Thee, Lord Jesus, that Thou art present in our midst this afternoon . . .’ Daniel glanced sideways at Emma, who was sitting with her hands clenched on her knees, her eyes closed. The flaming hair failed to warm her face which was very pale, the freckles on nose and cheeks were like cinnamon on milk. What was it she wanted God to do this afternoon? he wondered. He loved her so much and yet he had no idea what it was that she wanted. Was it something simple and explicit – ‘Please find my father a job’? Or something more despairing, ‘Don’t let him go away again now that he has come home’? Or did she want a sign, for herself as much as for her father – a blinding light on the Yeominster road? What would it mean to her for prayer to fail? It seemed, as he looked at her, that there was desperation in the set of her mouth, as though she knew she had already lost. But what had she lost? The fight for absolute belief? She came to this chapel because her parents had failed to provide her with stability at home and this had driven her to a quest for certainty. He hoped she would be able to disengage herself from it without too much pain; she needed a god to whom she must always reach out, not one who had been pinned down like a butterfly on a board.

  The old man, who had rambled a bit, sat down. There was silence again, and then a younger man began to speak. Daniel sensed a certain ease of timing in his delivery, an unfaltering turn of phrase which suggested that he was not unaccustomed to extempore prayer. It was relaxing to listen to him, there was no fear that he might slip beneath one’s guard. But why should one be on guard? Why did other people’s convictions seem so abrasive? Was it possible that Erica felt this need to defend herself when he propounded the second law of thermodynamics? When he and Emma talked about the genetic code, did Erica feel th
reatened, as he felt threatened now? Erica: how little he had thought of her over the years; and indeed, how little he had thought of her since he came home. He tried to think of her now, but with no success. She was a stranger. In fact, she was more remote than a stranger. When one meets a stranger, the very strangeness makes an impact and one is left with a definite impression. He could think of people whom he had met only once of whom he had more understanding than he had of his wife. He worried about Emma’s needs: when had he given a thought to Erica’s needs?

  The young man sat down. The silence lingered on. A shaft of sunlight slanted through one of the side windows and somewhere out of sight a blackbird was singing. No doubt the blackbird, too, was passing a message, but to Daniel his song was pure joy and he wished it might continue undisturbed by any other testimony of grace. Then a woman to his left rose to her feet. She put her hands on the pew in front of her and he saw that they were trembling. ‘Dear Lord Jesus,’ she said in a voice so low it could not have reached the front of the chapel, ‘we pray for those in our midst who are in distress of mind and spirit. For those who answer the call of conscience and find they are forsaken and abused of men . . .’ Emma drove one clenched fist into the palm of the other hand, the knuckles showed white. She is praying for me, Daniel thought, this old woman who knows nothing about me, is praying for me. He was angry as though he had been abused. He looked down at his big, bony hands and saw the fingers knotted tight, the bones gleaming brutally while the old woman talked tremulously of love. He reminded himself that he was here because Emma loved him. He gritted his teeth and suffered their prayers. There was no doubting their sincerity; the words might form themselves into clichés, but the feeling behind the words was intensely real and it bore down on him heavy with hope. Sweat trickled between his shoulder blades, he felt exhausted as though all his strength was being sweated out of him. He contrived not to hear much of what was said by the last two speakers, although he heard a reference to the strengthening of family ties and the renewal of love which filled him with longing for Dorothy. The meeting closed at a quarter to four. The congregation rose to sing the final hymn, ‘Immortal love, for ever full, for ever flowing free . . .’