The minister entered the house. In the hot kitchen sat a big, elderly man with a great grey beard, taking snuff. He grunted in a deep, muttering voice, telling the minister to sit down, and then took no more notice of him, but stared vacantly into the fire. Mr Lindley waited.
The woman came in, the ribbons of her black lace cap, or bonnet, hanging on her shawl. She was of medium stature, everything about her was tidy. She went up a step out of the kitchen, carrying the paraffin tin. Feet were heard entering the room up the step. It was a little haberdashery shop, with parcels on the shelves of the walls, a big, old-fashioned sewing machine with tailor’s work lying round it, in the open space. The woman went behind the counter, gave the child who had entered the paraffin bottle, and took from her a jug.
‘My mother says shall yer put it down,’ said the child, and she was gone. The woman wrote in a book, then came into the kitchen with her jug. The husband, a very large man, rose and brought more coal to the already hot fire. He moved slowly and sluggishly. Already he was going dead; being a tailor, his large form had become an encumbrance to him. In his youth he had been a great dancer and boxer. Now he was taciturn, and inert. The minister had nothing to say, so he sought for his phrases. But John Durant took no notice, existing silent and dull.
Mrs Durant spread the cloth. Her husband poured himself beer into a mug, and began to smoke and drink.
‘Shall you have some?’ he growled through his beard at the clergyman, looking slowly from the man to the jug, capable of this one idea.
‘No, thank you,’ replied Mr Lindley, though he would have liked some beer. He must set the example in a drinking parish.
‘We need a drop to keep us going,’ said Mrs Durant.
She had rather a complaining manner. The clergyman sat on uncomfortably while she laid the table for the half-past ten lunch. Her husband drew up to eat. She remained in her little round arm-chair by the fire.
She was a woman who would have liked to be easy in her life, but to whose lot had fallen a rough and turbulent family, and a slothful husband who did not care what became of himself or anybody. So, her rather good-looking square face was peevish, she had that air of having been compelled all her life to serve unwillingly, and to control where she did not want to control. There was about her, too, that masterful aplomb of a woman who has brought up and ruled her sons: but even them she had ruled unwillingly. She had enjoyed managing her little haberdashery-shop, riding in the carrier’s cart to Nottingham, going through the big warehouses to buy her goods. But the fret of managing her sons she did not like. Only she loved her youngest boy, because he was her last, and she saw herself free.
This was one of the houses the clergyman visited occasionally. Mrs Durant, as part of her regulation, had brought up all her sons in the Church. Not that she had any religion. Only, it was what she was used to. Mr Durant was without religion. He read the fervently evangelical ‘Life of John Wesley’ with a curious pleasure, getting from it a satisfaction as from the warmth of the fire, or a glass of brandy. But he cared no more about John Wesley, in fact, than about John Milton, of whom he had never heard.
Mrs Durant took her chair to the table.
‘I don’t feel like eating,’ she sighed.
‘Why – aren’t you well?’ asked the clergyman, patronizing.
‘It isn’t that,’ she sighed. She sat with shut, straight mouth. ‘I don’t know what’s going to become of us.’
But the clergyman had ground himself down so long, that he could not easily sympathize.
‘Have you any trouble?’ he asked.
‘Ay, have I any trouble!’ cried the elderly woman. ‘I shall end my days in the workhouse.’
The minister waited unmoved. What could she know of poverty, in her little house of plenty!
‘I hope not,’ he said.
‘And the one lad as I wanted to keep by me—’ she lamented.
The minister listened without sympathy, quite neutral.
‘And the lad as would have been a support to my old age! What is going to become of us?’ she said.
The clergyman, justly, did not believe in the cry of poverty, but wondered what had become of the son.
‘Has anything happened to Alfred?’ he asked.
‘We’ve got word he’s gone for a Queen’s sailor,’ she said sharply.
‘He has joined the Navy!’ exclaimed Mr Lindley. ‘I think he could scarcely have done better – to serve his Queen and country on the sea …’
‘He is wanted to serve me,’ she cried. ‘And I wanted my lad at home.’
Alfred was her baby, her last, whom she had allowed herself the luxury of spoiling.
‘You will miss him,’ said Mr Lindley, ‘that is certain. But this is no regrettable step for him to have taken – on the contrary.’
‘That’s easy for you to say, Mr Lindley,’ she replied tartly. ‘Do you think I want my lad climbing ropes at another man’s bidding, like a monkey—?’
‘There is no dishonour, surely, in serving in the Navy?’
‘Dishonour this dishonour that,’ cried the angry old woman. ‘He goes and makes a slave of himself, and he’ll rue it.’
Her angry, scornful impatience nettled the clergyman and silenced him for some moments.
‘I do not see,’ he retorted at last, white at the gills and inadequate, ‘that the Queen’s service is any more to be called slavery than working in a mine.’
‘At home he was at home, and his own master. I know he’ll find a difference.’
‘It may be the making of him,’ said the clergyman. ‘It will take him away from bad companionship and drink.’
Some of the Durants’ sons were notorious drinkers, and Alfred was not quite steady.
‘And why indeed shouldn’t he have his glass?’ cried the mother. ‘He picks no man’s pocket to pay for it!’
The clergyman stiffened at what he thought was an allusion to his own profession, and his unpaid bills.
‘With all due consideration, I am glad to hear he has joined the Navy,’ he said.
‘Me with my old age coming on, and his father working very little! I’d thank you to be glad about something else besides that, Mr Lindley.’
The woman began to cry. Her husband, quite impassive, finished his lunch of meat-pie, and drank some beer. Then he turned to the fire, as if there were no one in the room but himself.
‘I shall respect all men who serve God and their country on the sea, Mrs Durant,’ said the clergyman stubbornly.
‘That is very well, when they’re not your sons who are doing the dirty work. – It makes a difference,’ she replied tartly.
‘I should be proud if one of my sons were to enter the Navy.’
‘Ay – well – we’re not all of us made alike—’
The minister rose. He put down a large folded paper.
‘I’ve brought the almanac,’ he said.
Mrs Durant unfolded it.
‘I do like a bit of colour in things,’ she said, petulantly.
The clergyman did not reply.
‘There’s that envelope for the organist’s fund—’ said the old woman, and rising, she took the thing from the mantelpiece, went into the shop, and returned sealing it up.
‘Which is all I can afford,’ she said.
Mr Lindley took his departure, in his pocket the envelope containing Mrs Durant’s offering for Miss Louisa’s services. He went from door to door delivering the almanacs, in dull routine. Jaded with the monotony of the business, and with the repeated effort of greeting half-known people, he felt barren and rather irritable. At last he returned home.
In the dining-room was a small fire. Mrs Lindley, growing very stout, lay on her couch. The vicar carved the cold mutton; Miss Louisa, short and plump and rather flushed, came in from the kitchen; Miss Mary, dark, with a beautiful white brow and grey eyes, served the vegetables; the children chattered a little, but not exuberantly. The very air seemed starved.
‘I went to the Durants,’ sai
d the vicar, as he served out small portions of mutton; ‘it appears Alfred has run away to join the Navy.’
‘Do him good,’ came the rough voice of the invalid.
Miss Louisa, attending to the youngest child, looked up in protest.
‘Why has he done that?’ asked Mary’s low, musical voice.
‘He wanted some excitement, I suppose,’ said the vicar. ‘Shall we say grace?’
The children were arranged, all bent their heads, grace was pronounced, at the last word every face was being raised to go on with the interesting subject.
‘He’s just done the right thing, for once,’ came the rather deep voice of the mother; ‘save him from becoming a drunken sot, like the rest of them.’
‘They’re not all drunken, mama,’ said Miss Louisa, stubbornly.
‘It’s no fault of their upbringing if they’re not. Walter Durant is a standing disgrace.’
‘As I told Mrs Durant,’ said the vicar, eating hungrily, ‘it is the best thing he could have done. It will take him away from temptation during the most dangerous years of his life – how old is he – nineteen?’
‘Twenty,’ said Miss Louisa.
‘Twenty!’ repeated the vicar. ‘It will give him wholesome discipline and set before him some sort of standard of duty and honour – nothing could have been better for him. But—’
‘We shall miss him from the choir,’ said Miss Louisa, as if taking opposite sides to her parents.
‘That is as it may be,’ said the vicar. ‘I prefer to know he is safe in the Navy, than running the risk of getting into bad ways here.’
‘Was he getting into bad ways?’ asked the stubborn Miss Louisa.
‘You know, Louisa, he wasn’t quite what he used to be,’ said Miss Mary gently and steadily. Miss Louisa shut her rather heavy jaw sulkily. She wanted to deny it, but she knew it was true.
For her he had been a laughing, warm lad, with something kindly and something rich about him. He had made her feel warm. It seemed the days would be colder since he had gone.
‘Quite the best thing he could do,’ said the mother with emphasis.
‘I think so,’ said the vicar. ‘But his mother was almost abusive because I suggested it.’
He spoke in an injured tone.
‘What does she care for her children’s welfare?’ said the invalid. ‘Their wages is all her concern.’
‘I suppose she wanted him at home with her,’ said Miss Louisa.
‘Yes, she did – at the expense of his learning to be a drunkard like the rest of them,’ retorted her mother.
‘George Durant doesn’t drink,’ defended her daughter.
‘Because he got burned so badly when he was nineteen – in the pit – and that frightened him. The Navy is a better remedy than that, at least.’
‘Certainly,’ said the vicar. ‘Certainly.’
And to this Miss Louisa agreed. Yet she could not but feel angry that he had gone away for so many years. She herself was only nineteen.
III
It happened when Miss Mary was twenty-three years old, that Mr Lindley was very ill. The family was exceedingly poor at the time, such a lot of money was needed, so little was forthcoming. Neither Miss Mary nor Miss Louisa had suitors. What chance had they? They met no eligible young men in Aldecross. And what they earned was a mere drop in a void. The girls’ hearts were chilled and hardened with fear of this perpetual, cold penury, this narrow struggle, this horrible nothingness of their lives.
A clergyman had to be found for the church work. It so happened the son of an old friend of Mr Lindley’s was waiting three months before taking up his duties. He would come and officiate, for nothing. The young clergyman was keenly expected. He was not more than twenty-seven, a Master of Arts of Oxford, had written his thesis on Roman Law. He came of an old Cambridgeshire family, had some private means, was going to take a church in Northamptonshire with a good stipend, and was not married. Mrs Lindley incurred new debts, and scarcely regretted her husband’s illness.
But when Mr Massy came, there was a shock of disappointment in the house. They had expected a young man with a pipe and a deep voice, but with better manners than Sidney, the eldest of the Lindleys. There arrived instead a small, chétif man, scarcely larger than a boy of twelve, spectacled, timid in the extreme, without a word to utter at first; yet with a certain inhuman self-sureness.
‘What a little abortion!’ was Mrs Lindley’s exclamation to herself on first seeing him, in his buttoned-up clerical coat. And for the first time for many days, she was profoundly thankful to God that all her children were decent specimens.
He had not normal powers of perception. They soon saw that he lacked the full range of human feelings, but had rather a strong, philosophical mind, from which he lived. His body was almost unthinkable, in intellect he was something definite. The conversation at once took a balanced, abstract tone when he participated. There was no spontaneous exclamation, no violent assertion or expression of personal conviction, but all cold, reasonable assertion. This was very hard on Mrs Lindley. The little man would look at her, after one of her pronouncements, and then give, in his thin voice, his own calculated version, so that she felt as if she were tumbling into thin air through a hole in the flimsy floor on which their conversation stood. It was she who felt a fool. Soon she was reduced to a hardy silence.
Still, at the back of her mind, she remembered that he was an unattached gentleman, who would shortly have an income altogether of six or seven hundred a year. What did the man matter, if there were pecuniary ease! The man was a trifle thrown in. After twenty-two years her sentimentality was ground away, and only the millstone of poverty mattered to her. So she supported the little man as a representative of a decent income.
His most irritating habit was that of a sneering little giggle, all on his own, which came when he perceived or related some illogical absurdity on the part of another person. It was the only form of humour he had. Stupidity in thinking seemed to him exquisitely funny. But any novel was unintelligibly meaningless and dull, and to an Irish sort of humour he listened curiously, examining it like mathematics, or else simply not hearing. In normal human relationship he was not there. Quite unable to take part in simple everyday talk, he padded silently round the house, or sat in the dining-room looking nervously from side to side, always apart in a cold, rarefied little world of his own. Sometimes he made an ironic remark, that did not seem humanly relevant, or he gave his little laugh, like a sneer. He had to defend himself and his own insufficiency. And he answered questions grudgingly, with a yes or no, because he did not see their import and was nervous. It seemed to Miss Louisa he scarcely distinguished one person from another, but that he liked to be near her, or to Miss Mary, for some sort of contact which stimulated him unknown.
Apart from all this, he was the most admirable workman. He was unremittingly shy, but perfect in his sense of duty: as far as he could conceive Christianity, he was a perfect Christian. Nothing that he realized he could do for anyone did he leave undone, although he was so incapable of coming into contact with another being, that he could not proffer help. Now he attended assiduously to the sick man, investigated all the affairs of the parish or the church which Mr Lindley had in control, straightened out accounts, made lists of the sick and needy, padded round with help and to see what he could do. He heard of Mrs Lindley’s anxiety about her sons, and began to investigate means of sending them to Cambridge. His kindness almost frightened Miss Mary. She honoured it so, and yet she shrank from it. For, in it all Mr Massy seemed to have no sense of any person, any human being whom he was helping: he only realized a kind of mathematical working out, solving of given situations, a calculated well-doing. And it was as if he had accepted the Christian tenets as axioms. His religion consisted in what his scrupulous, abstract mind approved of.
Seeing his acts, Miss Mary must respect and honour him. In consequence she must serve him. To this she had to force herself, shuddering and yet desirous, but he did n
ot perceive it. She accompanied him on his visiting in the parish, and whilst she was cold with admiration for him, often she was touched with pity for the little padding figure with bent shoulders, buttoned up to the chin in his overcoat. She was a handsome, calm girl, tall, with a beautiful repose. Her clothes were poor, and she wore a black silk scarf, having no furs. But she was a lady. As the people saw her walking down Aldecross beside Mr Massy, they said:
‘My word, Miss Mary’s got a catch. Did ever you see such a sickly little shrimp!’
She knew they were talking so, and it made her heart grow hot against them, and she drew herself as it were protectively towards the little man beside her. At any rate, she could see and give honour to his genuine goodness.
He could not walk fast, or far.
‘You have not been well?’ she asked, in her dignified way.
‘I have an internal trouble.’
He was not aware of her slight shudder. There was silence, whilst she bowed to recover her composure, to resume her gentle manner towards him.
He was fond of Miss Mary. She had made it a rule of hospitality that he should always be escorted by herself or by her sister on his visits in the parish, which were not many. But some mornings she was engaged. Then Miss Louisa took her place. It was no good Miss Louisa’s trying to adopt to Mr Massy an attitude of queenly service. She was unable to regard him save with aversion. When she saw him from behind, thin and bent-shouldered, looking like a sickly lad of thirteen, she disliked him exceedingly, and felt a desire to put him out of existence. And yet a deeper justice in Mary made Louisa humble before her sister.
They were going to see Mr Durant, who was paralysed and not expected to live. Miss Louisa was crudely ashamed at being admitted to the cottage in company with the little clergyman.
Mrs Durant was, however, much quieter in the face of her real trouble.
‘How is Mr Durant?’ asked Louisa.
‘He is no different – and we don’t expect him to be,’ was the reply. The little clergyman stood looking on.
The Penguin Book of the British Short Story, Volume 1 Page 69
