A Pocketful of Rye

by A. J. Cronin

  Then I examined the letter, and was suddenly set back on my heels. It wasn’t possible! The envelope was postmarked Levenford, that most distasteful, almost fatal word from which in all its connotations I hoped I had finally cut myself adrift. Reluctantly, I opened the envelope. Yes, from my old playmate, Francis Ennis.

  My dear Laurence,

  I must ask pardon for failing to write congratulating you on your appointment last summer. There was a very pleasing little paragraph in the ‘Winton Herald’. May I now, belatedly, wish you every success in your new and most worthy endeavour.

  And now I hesitate to proceed. For I am constrained to ask a special favour of you.

  You remember Cathy Considine, I’m sure, that very sweet companion of our boyhood days who married Daniel Davigan, and was so recently and tragically widowed. Yes, Laurence, theirs was a model marriage, a shining example of marital unity. It was a fearful blow when Dan was taken. You must have seen the account and obituary notice two months ago in the public press, locally, at least, it created quite a stir. And lately, alas, another affliction for the sorrowing widow. The only child, Daniel, just seven years of age, and without question a most remarkable and exceptionally clever little boy, has turned quite poorly. Very pale, glands in the neck and, not to put too fine a point on it, a suspicion of T.B. Canon Dingwall, though in retirement and still in his wheel chair following another slight stroke, has shown a great interest in the boy, has brought him along in every way – actually Daniel is two classes ahead of his age – and he has taken the matter up strongly with Dr Moore who at once suggested a spell, brief we hope, in a sanatorium. All very well to suggest, but here, with the waiting under the new Health Scheme it would be a good six months before a place could be found for Daniel. And then only in the Grampians, which I dare say bear no comparison with your sunny Swiss Alps.

  So it has been decided that Cathy must take the boy to Switzerland and devote herself to his cure. The two dear pilgrims propose leaving here on Tuesday of next week, October 7th, arriving Zurich Airport at 5.30 p.m., and as they have no contacts in that city and must feel quite lost, I am relying on you at least to meet them. If you can do nothing further, please see them on their way to Davos where they have an address from Dr Moore. But Laurence, if it is at all humanly possible, won’t you take charge of them yourself, find a place for Daniel in your clinic, get him well again? Please! For the boy’s sake. God will bless you for it, Laurence, and we, all your good friends in Winton, will never cease to thank you.

  I read it again, slowly, shuddering slightly over ‘the dear pilgrims’, then instinctively I crushed the letter, tight and hard. What a rocket! What a blasted imposition. Coming after me ‘for old times’ sake’, thanking me in advance, handing me the good old heaven will bless you. And spoiling my Tuesday in Zürich, the one day of the week when Svenska Örnflyg were normally free of regular flights.

  Yet, how could I give Ennis the brush off. My name would stink at home. I would have to do something about it and, after all, it was only on a short-term basis. I supposed I must handle it but, as always, I would do so with calm detachment and mature consideration.

  Chapter Two

  The probationer brought the tea-tray into my sitting-room, that snug little carpeted den with the easy chair before the blue and white tiled wood stove. She was a fresh country girl from the Valais, smelling pleasantly of the dairy and with well-formed milk-bars, who, as she went out, before closing the door always gave me a look over her shoulder not altogether bovine. But today I failed to respond, nor did the fragrant cheesy odour of the fresh baked ramekins break through my moodiness. Yes, the letter was a nuisance, a confounded nuisance, it had upset me, taking me back to a period in my early life that I was never unduly eager to recall.

  Personally, I cannot endure throwbacks, they interrupt the action which is dying to burst forth, but to put the picture in perspective it must be related that at the age of fifteen I had gone to live with my grandparents in Levenford. One month before, with that touch of the absurd apparent to those familiar with the beginnings of my erratic career, I had precociously won the Ellison Bursary to Winton University, an achievement somewhat dulled when it became apparent that to enter the University I must attend Levenford Academy for one year to take the Higher Leaving Certificate examination of the Scottish School Board.

  My welcome by the Bruces at their semi-detached villa in Woodside Avenue was not effusive. In running off with my Catholic father, their favourite daughter had deeply distressed them. And now, fifteen years later, fulfilling their worst forebodings, they were landed with the sole surviving evidence of that ill-fated union.

  My grandfather, Robert Bruce, was an upstanding, dignified burgher of the town, retired on a pension from his position as head of the timber department in the local shipyard of Dennison Brothers, whose staid existence was transfigured by the belief, generally regarded as fictitious, that he was the lineal descendant of the Scottish hero who, after cracking de Bohun’s skull with his battle-axe in single combat, led the Scots to victory over the English at Bannockburn in 1314 – a date I was never permitted to forget.

  Do not imagine that my grandfather was either a fool or a laughing stock. He had documents, genealogical trees, extracts from meetings of the local Historical Society, and had traced his family in Levenford as far back as the fifteenth century, a record in which the name Robert was generic. Moreover, Cardross Castle where King Robert I died in 1329 stood by the river Leven on the outskirts of the town and it was from here that Sir James Douglas had set out to take the heart of Bruce to the Holy Land, only to fall, fighting the Moors in Spain. Without digressing further, it is enough to say that my grandfather’s obsession or, if you prefer it, delusion was honest, and so deeply felt, that he made every year a pilgrimage to Melrose Abbey where the casket containing the heart of King Robert was now enshrined.

  Some of this genealogy rubbed on to me and, suitably embroidered, was often socially opportune, but this apart, Bruce treated me always with decent toleration and a fine sense of justice, while my grandmother, a small, bowed wisp of a woman, devoted yet quietly resigned, her head carried patiently to one side – she was slightly deaf – addicted to the Bible, strong tea and the works of Annie S. Swan, and to the habit – to me endearing – of talking soundlessly to herself, her lips moving to the accompaniment of little nods, grimaces and other subtle sympathetic changes of expression, decidedly was, despite the worn-out look of Scottish wives who have served strong men hand and foot, a sweet person.

  Levenford Academy which, under the terms of the Bursary I was compelled to attend, was a solid, old-established institution situated in the heart of the Borough, with the excellence and all the prejudice of the true blue Scots Grammar School. My advent here was even less welcome, and it was with some relief that I discovered a co-religionist already in my form – Francis Ennis, son of Dr Ennis. As the only two Papists in the Academy we inevitably drew together, not at first from any natural affinity, but simply because we were in the same uncomfortable boat, objects of suspicion and derision to our fellow scholars.

  Frank was the only son of a painfully pious mother, a devotee who haunted the church, not merely to wear out her knees before the Stations of the Cross, but as a kind of female sacristan who dressed, adorned, and tended the altar with a holy solicitude that defied the repressive hints, discouraging looks, and even downright prohibitions from the rector of St Patrick’s, the fabulous Canon Dingwall. Unhappily for Frank, his father was a cock of less downy feather. Dr Ennis, perhaps the best and the hardest-worked doctor in town, was a big untidy man with a rough, ribald tongue, a strong addiction to neat whisky and a fondness for squeezing the dairymaids at the outlying farms he visited. Careless of public opinion, he did as he pleased, and while nominally Catholic, his views of religion were unorthodox, often spectacularly unpredictable. For that matter, using the pretext of his busy practice, he was rarely seen inside the doors of St Patrick’s. It was he who had sent his s
on to the Academy, preparatory to entering him at Edinburgh University where he would take a medical degree and join his father in practice.

  Frank was a most prepossessing boy, open and friendly in manner, and quite exceptionally good looking. Tall, slightly built, with a delicate girlish complexion, and thick chestnut hair, he had the bluest, long-lashed eyes I had ever seen. In school he was not noticeably clever, rather the reverse, and in his physical contacts with the rougher boys he was inclined to timidity. Although he never complained of this bullying, he had obviously suffered until I was able to take his part. But his one outstanding quality which set him apart was simply this: in the strict sense of the word he was good.

  One morning during our first week together he was late coming to school and was given an imposition.

  ‘What happened, Frank?’ I asked him. ‘Did you sleep in?’

  ‘Oh, no.’ He smiled. ‘Canon Dingwall was held up by a sick call. You see, I serve his seven o’clock Mass every morning.’

  ‘What! You do … get up so early!’

  ‘It’s quite easy once you have the habit.’

  ‘I suppose Dingwall’s forced you into it. He puts the wind up me.’

  ‘You’re quite wrong, Laurence. He just seems terribly stern and severe. Once you know him he’s the sweetest person.’

  I glanced at him doubtfully. The Canon, a black, forbidding, hatchet-featured Highlander, six feet two tall and thin as a ramrod, an emaciated Scots Savonarola, towering in the pulpit, scourging his groundling Irish immigrant congregation with an intellectual sardonic wit that bit deeper than mere crude blastings of hell-fire, flagellations interposed with sudden ritual snuff takings during which a pin might be heard to drop in a church packed to suffocation, scarcely struck me as a fount of sweetness and light. He invariably stood at the church door before the eleven o’clock Mass, had already spotted me, and was undoubtedly aware of my dubious antecedents.

  ‘Every time I pass him he gives me the excommunication stare.’

  ‘He just has to put on that kind of act, Laurence. To get results. And he has. All the top Prots, the Dennison Brothers especially, think the world of him, the way he’s stamped out drunkenness in the town. It was mostly in our lot. But beyond that he’s terribly interesting, well read and cultured, a real scholar. He spent five years teaching philosophy at the Scots College in Rome. You’d love him.’ As I shook my head he smiled and took my arm. ‘I’ll give – you a knock down to him after Mass next Sunday.’

  ‘Some hope,’ I said, scornfully. ‘I’ll skip him by going in the side door.’

  Nevertheless, rather averse myself to morning rising, I respected Frank for this unexpectedly revealed asceticism as I did progressively for other comparable aspects of his character. He never, for example, took the slightest notice of the usual school smut, the lavatory scrawlings, the dirty jokes. And if anyone told a doubtful story in his presence his starry eyes remained fixed on the horizon, the actual meaning of the thing seemed to pass over his head.

  All this struck me as commendable, more perhaps as the indication of an original refined and superior turn of mind than from considerations of morality – since I was probably as venal as the boys he despised. One day, however, a peculiar incident occurred.

  I still had a bicycle, from my better days, an old Rudge Whitworth, and as Francis, whose mother denied him nothing, had a brand new Humber, we began on Saturdays to take rides together into the surrounding country, then quite unspoiled, still wild with the freedom of Scottish hills and heaths. Summer was coming in and as the days got warmer we went farther afield, to Malloch and along the winding shore of Loch Lomond to Luss where we bathed. It seemed slightly odd that when we undressed on the warm pebbled beach Frank always moved off a few paces to the shelter of a rock, emerging well covered by a full bathing suit. I did not remark on it, imagining that perhaps he had a mole or some kind of birthmark and was sensitive about it. One day I forgot to bring my pants and, thinking nothing of it, tore off my clothes and dashed into the Loch in a state of nature.

  ‘Come on in,’ I shouted. ‘It’s wonderful.’

  There was a pause, then he called back:

  ‘I’m not bathing today.’

  ‘Don’t you feel well?’

  He did not answer.

  I took a long swim out to the island. The water was warmer than usual and the sense of being completely naked and unhampered made it even more delicious. When I came back and had dressed Frank came out from behind the rock. He was deeply flushed, his lips set in a firm line.

  ‘You know, of course,’ he said accusingly, his voice stony, ‘ that it’s a sin, almost a mortal one, to expose yourself.’

  I stared at him in amazement.

  ‘And that you make me sin too if I look at you.’

  I burst out laughing.

  ‘Oh, come off it, Frank. Don’t be such a sissy. None of the other boys wear pants, let alone complete bathing suits, and it’s far nicer without. You must try it.’

  ‘I won’t,’ he shouted, beginning to tremble. ‘Never.’

  ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake …’

  ‘Stop it,’ he said, in a low intense voice. ‘It is for heaven’s sake. I don’t care what the others do. And I’m not a sissy. I simply want to remain pure. And you must too, Laurence. So if you don’t cover yourself decently in future I won’t bathe with you at all.’

  I saw that he was in dead earnest and was wise enough to let the matter drop. We were both rather silent on the way home and I caught myself glancing oddly at him from time to time, but when we got back he stopped, straddled his bicycle, and seemed to want to talk.

  ‘We are still friends, aren’t we, Laurie?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘More than ever in fact. I do wish I was coming with you to Winton instead of being shoved off to Edinburgh.’

  ‘Then talk your father into it.’

  ‘Oh no.’ His face clouded as it usually did at the mention of Dr Ennis. ‘ I’ve tried it before. In fact I’ve often tried, and had no luck, talking him out of shoving me in for medicine. You know, I’d far rather take an arts degree.’

  I was silent, wondering if some unrecognized or at least undeclared aversion to his father had put Frank off the idea of medical practice, and with the incident of that afternoon still in mind I said suddenly:

  ‘What surprises me, Frank, is that you haven’t plumped for the priesthood. It’s so … so obvious. Not only would it delight your mother, you’re the one person in the world who ought to have a vocation.’

  He looked at me for a moment then, to my amazement, he burst into a fit of laughter, very boyish and natural.

  ‘You won’t have to wait long for the answer to that one, my boy. Next week I want you to meet someone very special.’ Before I could question him he smiled over his shoulder and started to pedal off. ‘ Come on, let’s hurry, or we’ll miss our half hour with your friend the Canon.’

  Yes, the impossible had happened, and to Frank’s amusement, tinged perhaps with a little chagrin, Dingwall had practically adopted me. One day on the way from school I had come upon a depressing tableau. Frank, frightfully pale, on his knees in the gutter with two of our chief tormentors, the Buchanan brothers, bending over him, the younger of the two holding a can of liquid mud.

  ‘Confess your sins, Ennis, or we’ll baptize you with this. Come on, begin: holy father I killed a cat …’

  Intervention, however unpleasant, was the only possible course of action. I snatched the mud can, put the younger Buchanan out of action with a direct hit, then sailed into his big brother. Heavy damage was done on both sides but I had the worst of it and was undoubtedly due for a bad beating when a sudden apparition obscured the daylight: Dingwall himself, dressed ‘for the town’ with his invariable priestly precision in long black overcoat, black umbrella held upright, and his famous tall top hat, that made him look a mile high. A terrifying spectacle, a veritable spectre of Popery, before which, to my gasping relief, even before
the umbrella went into action, the Buchanans wilted, and took to their heels.

  For a moment the Canon did not speak, then turning to Frank, who, still pale, had collapsed against a convenient wall, he said, sadly:

  ‘Go home, my boy, and lie down till you recover.’

  Then, taking me by the arm, he led me to the presbytery and upstairs to his study. Still in silence he set about repairing me. I had a badly cut lip, a fat ear, and the inevitable black eye, not to speak of skinned knuckles and a fearful hack on the shin where the younger Buchanan, free of mud, had weighed in towards the end.

  ‘Stout lads, these Buchanans,’ the Canon murmured, engaged with cotton wool and iodine, and still wearing the hat. ‘Thank God you have some of that same good Scottish blood in you.’

  When he had finished with me I had to sit down. He gave me a look, went to a cupboard, brought out a thistle-shaped wine glass and a bottle.

  ‘A tablespoonful of this won’t hurt you. It is the genuine Glenlivet.’

  It tasted extremely genuine.

  ‘Well, Carroll,’ he went on, ‘you’ve been dodging me rather skilfully for some weeks but I’m happy to have made your acquaintance. And in such not unfavourable circumstances, too.’ He turned on me his smile of infinite charm. ‘Since we are no longer strangers I invite you to come here, to my study, with your friend Ennis, on every Friday afternoon, after school, to discuss the affairs of the day, literature, even theology. You accept?’

  My head was still ringing with that bash on the ear. I accepted.

  ‘Good.’ He took out his watch. ‘As I must go to a School Board meeting, for which I am already late, may I ask how you intend explaining your present appearance to your grandparents?’

  This, indeed, was a problem already worrying me.