“How nice it is to have David,” said Lady Emily to her daughter after dinner. “He makes everything so amusing.”
“Something must be worrying him,” said Agnes, placidly re-threading her tapestry needle. “He is in that kind of sweetness, mamma.”
Lady Emily, occupied in counting a row of stitches which had unaccountably increased from forty to forty-three while she knitted, did not notice this comment. But Miss Merriman, who was waiting for a favourable moment to take her employer’s knitting away and get it straight, thought that Lady Graham had probably, though quite unaware of the fact, said something rather clever. A less perfect woman might have said that Agnes had the occasional moments of inspiration vouch-safed to idiots, but Miss Merriman in her quiet wisdom had taught herself never to criticise even in her secret mind the beings whom it was her appointed task to serve and protect.
On the following morning, being Sunday, Lady Graham, like a very comfortable benevolent hen, took her brood to church. Lady Emily did not accompany them because her rheumatism had been more than usually troublesome and the little church was chilly even in the height of summer, not that there had been a summer to speak of since the war began. One of the many duties which Lady Graham accomplished without any apparent effort was to find an occupation which would keep her beloved but excessively trying mother out of mischief on Sunday mornings so that Miss Merriman could attend divine service. A suggestion by Lady Emily that she should paste an accumulation of family snapshots onto bits of brown paper and make a book of them had been countered by Miss Merriman who with great presence of mind mislaid the snapshots, knowing well the scene of mess and wreckage that would result if her ladyship were left alone with the pastepot. A second suggestion by her mother of gilding some large magnolia leaves and making a wreath of them as a kind of tribute to Sir Robert Graham whose birthday fell during the following week had been put aside by Lady Graham, who knew exactly how much her husband could bear. By her own methods Lady Graham had persuaded Lady Emily that her chief duty to the world was to read Lady Norton’s last garden book, “Along My Borders,” and mark any passages that struck her, and after seeing Lady Emily established with an ordinary pencil, a red pencil, a blue pencil and a quantity of loose sheets of paper, she had been able to go to church with a serene mind, Miss Merriman and the children in her train. How Lady Graham managed to get the better of her adored but exhausting and unpredictable mother, was the wonder of all her friends, nor can we explain it except by saying that if one could imagine swansdown which combined the strength of concrete and the slipperiness of oil with its own quality of heavenly softness, it would explain a good deal.
David, who had fully intended to be elsewhere when the church party set forth, found himself drawn into his sister’s mild but relentless orbit and so into the Holdings pew, which was just behind the Hallidays, for although Holdings was a large house and General Sir Robert Graham, K.C.B., an important person, his family had only been at Holdings since Waterloo, whereas the Hallidays had lived at Hatch House for more than two hundred years and before that in the Tudor stone house which was now the bank, and had owned land thereabouts before Domesday. So Mr. Halliday had the front pew as squire and read the lessons, a position which Sir Robert secretly coveted, though nothing on earth would have persuaded him to say so. And as he had hardly ever been at home since 1939 he would not in any case have been much use.
Lady Graham’s children were dispersed suitably among the grown-ups; Clarissa the neat-fingered put coloured slips of paper to mark the hymns for the younger ones; Edith, the youngest, was shaken back into her gloves by Nannie. Uncle David, in the corner nearest the aisle, thought how like one Sunday was to another, one day to another, one year to another and idly thinking of nothing suddenly remembered with great vividness Sundays at Rushwater in past days; his father dominating the little congregation, his mother swathed in scarves, her kind hawk’s eyes roving about the church to find an opportunity for distracting her neighbours; his nephew Martin, now the owner of Rushwater, a small schoolboy in an Eton collar, and Mr. Banister, now a Canon of Barchester, always getting his eyeglasses twisted in their cord.
This reverie, which suddenly made David feel that he was very old and had wasted his life, was broken by the arrival of the Hatch House party coming into the front pew. First Mrs. Halliday, looking exactly like the squire’s wife, then the little Fielding girl wearing what David’s fastidious taste found exactly the right hat for a religious service followed by a lunch party and a pleasure party, then Sylvia more Winged Victory than ever with her burnished hair looking as if a Midas wind had fixed it in golden ripples under her little cap, George a nice boy; Mr. Halliday being the Squire so perfectly that David almost said “Bravo, Sir” as he passed.
The faint smile and slight bow of recognition suitable in sacred edifices passed between Hatch House and Holdings; Caxton, the Hallidays’ carpenter, took his seat at the organ, a war time choir of Miss Scatcherd and two wicked little boys lined the chancel, the Vicar followed hard upon, and the service began.
The Vicar, Mr. Choyce, was an old friend of Mr. Halliday’s who had given him the living (which was in his gift alternately with the Bishop of Barchester) some dozen years previously. Mr. Choyce, who had been languishing in a Liverpool parish, trying to feel that the poor were much nicer than the rich and meeting with little encouragement from his parishioners who were practically all Dissenters or total abstainers from any form of religion, was so happy to be in Barsetshire that he made it his life’s work to study his patron’s every wish, with the firm determination to live at Hatch End till his death, for retirement he did not contemplate, having nowhere to retire to. Finding that Mr. Halliday, though a staunch churchman, was apt to develop pins and needles, the fidgets and the gapes if the service went on too long, the Vicar had gradually evolved a kind of hunting mass which never lasted longer than the chime of the quarter after mid-day. Not that he in any way mutilated the service, but he had by long practice perfected a system of loud, clear and incredibly rapid speech, combined with a reverent celerity in kneeling, rising, and getting to and from the pulpit which was the envy of villages for miles round.
This speed was the more necessary that Mr. Halliday, although an intelligent man on week-days, was apt to read the lessons as if he were a backward child grappling with something beyond its comprehension. There were those who maintained that Mr. Halliday had more than once been heard to add to his reading’s such sotto voce glosses as, “Can’t understand what the fellow’s driving at,” but this was stoutly denied by the Vicar who maintained that the Squire had said quite distinctly, “Here endeth the first lesson.”
“Uncle David,” said Edith in a whisper as the service proceeded.
David, not wanting to disturb the congregation, made the motion of Hush with his mouth and tried to convey a forbidding expression into his face.
“Uncle David,” said Edith, “are they nice hymns?” and she pushed her hymn-book with its coloured markers into his hand.
“You’ve got it upside down,” said David, as ventriloquially as possible.
“But are they nice hymns, Uncle David?” said Edith, always a woman of one idea.
David realising (for he was not really stupid) that his youngest niece had a hymn-book more for the look of the thing than for any practical use it might be to her, turned the book the right way up, looked at the first marker and said, “Jerusalem the Golden.” A beatific smile overspread Edith’s fat and charming face.
“That’s the hymn Nannie’s cousin sang, Uncle David, when she was in the hospital,” said Edith conversationally.
David was quite fond of Edith in whom he recognised a capacity for selfish charm almost equal to his own, but Nannie’s eye was already boring a hole through his left shoulder and he feared that any moment she might rise, take his hand and lead him out into the churchyard and even seat him on cold tombstones to repent, so he smiled anxiously, made a Hush face again and thrust the hymn-book back into his
niece’s hand. Edith, a true woman who adored the hand that held her in check, snuggled up to her Uncle David who against his better judgment and in courageous or some may say foolhardy defiance of Nannie’s basilisk glance, put his arm round her and recomposed himself. At the same moment Mr. Halliday, who had been for the last two minutes fidgeting like a horse before the barriers go down, got up, walked rapidly to the reading desk as if to forestall any attempt on the part of his Vicar to speak out of order, straightened his tie and looked over the congregation in a way that irreligiously reminded David of Rushwater Robert, his father’s prize bull, long since a settler in Latin America, looking out of his stall at Sunday morning visitors, long long ago.
Mr. Halliday, having to his own satisfaction quelled a non-existent uprising of free-thinkers, heretics and supporters of the Deposited Prayer-book, announced rather angrily that this was the second lesson, from the second chapter of the Epistle to the Colossians, the sixth verse, and glared again at the congregation. Having satisfied himself that all was well, he read the portion allotted for the day. David, difficult to please, was impressed by the excellent delivery, the fine voice, the complete absence of self-consciousness or affectation in the Squire’s reading, and even thought for a moment of becoming a reformed character and leading a new life. But as the reading went on, his worse and better-informed self told him in no uncertain voice that the Squire had, on the whole, not the faintest idea what it was all about. He glanced cautiously about him. The congregation had disposed itself in such attitudes of comfort as wooden pews with very low backs at wide angles can provide, and were quite obviously taking advantage of this respite to reflect in some cases upon next week’s ration problems, in some upon whether that hay was coming along nicely and yet again in other cases upon such a jumble of things that it might as well have been nothing at all.
Mr. Halliday, reaching the end sooner than he had expected, shut the book with an injured air and rejoined his family. The moment for the first hymn approached. Mr. Caxton played two lines of the melody. Miss Scatcherd with a quick and masterly scuffle placed herself between the two wicked little boys who had been inciting each other to giggle, and everyone suddenly burst out singing thought David, and then blamed himself for being too literary.
Jerusalem the Golden is emphatically a Good Hymn. There is no need to argue the question. The united voice of church-going England says it is, the united intellect of that body knows that it is. David remembered how he used to cry whenever it was sung at Rushwater because of its exquisite nostalgic beauty, and how he felt free from all sin, and even made resolutions never to tease his sister Agnes again, for at least five minutes after its conclusion. He was touched, more than he would have liked to admit, to find that his niece Edith shared his feelings and was singing with a fervour hardly recognised outside the Salvation Army, her charming fat face irradiated by the light of another world.
It was at this moment that David practically made up his mind to buy some land, marry, and settle down to produce cheap wheat for the millions and a large healthy family who would increase and multiply like Job’s, without the initial disadvantage of all having to be killed by the house falling on top of them so that their yet unborn brothers and sisters could take up the burden. In this heavenly frame of mind he remained (so swift is thought, so are a hundred years mirrored in the ink-pool each of us possesses) for at least twenty-five seconds, at the expiration of which eternity two things suddenly recalled him to earth.
The organist, followed and in some cases slightly preceded by his congregation (for Mr. Caxton held strong secret views as to the relative positions of Organist and Vicar during the hymns, and the nullity of the latter official) had pulled out a number of peculiarly saccharine and revolting stops and led his flocks into very high altitudes where only a true soprano, or those who had the good sense suddenly to sing an octave lower could survive. The voices of praise had died, as they always do at that point, into batlike squeaks or bass rumbles, when to David’s amazement a bird’s soft effortless notes rose on wings from the pew in front. For a moment he thought the golden Sylvia also had a golden voice. Then he heard her grappling determinedly with the hymn in a muffled way and realised that the lark ascending was the little Fielding girl. It only lasted for a moment. The congregation returning from the unscaleable heights or the silent depths, joyfully crescendoed into “What radiancy of glory” and the bird vanished. David, too susceptible to beauty, though he often looked at it and left it, waited in almost unbearable suspense for the next verse. The small miracle was repeated, and, he felt, for his special benefit, for no one appeared to notice it.
Rapt by this unexpected treat, it was not till the fourth verse of the hymn was well on its way that he realised what anyone less susceptible to exquisite sound would have noticed long before, that his niece Edith, holding her hymn-book upside down and open at the wrong place, was deliberately singing gibberish. He looked nervously round to see if Nannie had heard, but that excellent woman, who was chapel and only went to church in her official capacity, was occupied in disapproving silently of the whole service, item by item. He breathed again. The hymn came to an end, the service proceeded. The collection was made by Mr. Halliday and the other churchwarden, a farmer; the congregation were blessed and dismissed. Nannie pounced upon the children, but Robert escaped and ran back to his uncle.
“Oh, Uncle David,” he said, “how much did you put in the bag? I put in sixpence. Nannie gives us each sixpence to put in the bag. Miss Merriman said there was some Latin that says anyone who gives quickly gives twice, so I always put mine in very quickly. Do you think it turns into a shilling, Uncle David? Oh, Uncle David, how much did you put in?”
“A pound,” said David.
“OH! Uncle David!” said Robert. “Did you put it in quickly so that it would turn into two pounds?”
David said he did, hoping by this means to keep the light of faith burning in his young nephew.
Nannie then approached.
“Come along, Robert,” she said, “and don’t bother Uncle David.”
“He’s not bothering me a bit,” said David. “We were talking about the collection and he tells me he has sixpence to put in the bag. How nicely Edith sang her hymns.”
But if David hoped to placate Nannie, he had for once quite miscalculated the effect of his charm.
“When I was a little girl, sir, Father gave us a penny for chapel,” said Nurse, making David feel that he was rapidly qualifying for the Rake’s Progress. “Not that Father couldn’t have afforded more, but he always said to let your light shine before men didn’t mean showing off.”
David, now morally convinced of hell-fire gaping for him and that at no distant date, said weakly that it was a pity there weren’t more parents like that.
“Of course,” said Nannie severely, “with Lady Graham’s children it’s quite different. All my young ladies and gentlemen have had sixpence. Besides, Father died thirty years ago. Come along, Robert.”
“Nannie! Uncle David put a pound in the bag,” said Robert. “He said it would turn into two pounds.”
“Now come along at once when Nannie tells you,” said his guardian ignoring Robert’s remark, though David could see quite plainly what she thought of it, and dragged him away to join the nursery party, leaving David convicted of ostentation, deliberate lying and general immorality. Added to which, he felt secretly convinced that Nannie knew quite well that Edith was singing nonsense words and looked upon David as a liar who hadn’t even the wits to make his lies sound true.
Clarissa, who was allowed to belong to the grown-ups on Sunday, now approached him.
“Oh, Uncle David,” she said, “what did you put in the bag? I put in sixpence of mother’s and sixpence of my own money.”
Her Sunday self-righteousness, coming on the top of so many shattering experiences, was too much for David, who said almost crossly that he had put a pound in the plate because he believed in making large contributions to charity when peo
ple could see how generous he was.
“Like our ‘Give and Lend, For Hatch End,’” said Clarissa. “I put a half-crown that I was very fond of into Miss Scatcherd’s collecting box, just to show her I didn’t like her.”
This unexpected light on a niece whom he had hitherto looked upon as just one of Agnes’s children interested David.
“You mean you wanted to impress Miss Scatcherd, but you wouldn’t have wanted to impress someone you liked?” he said.
Clarissa nodded violently.
“When we had the ‘Lend all you can, For the Fighting Man’ week,” said Clarissa, hooking her arm affectionately into David’s, “dear old Mrs. Hubback at The Shop was collecting, so I put a penny in and she said, ‘That’s right, miss. Do as you would be done by. I’d like to see them boys putting anything in a box for us.’ So right, don’t you think, Uncle David?”
“How old are you, Clarissa?” said David.
“Fifteen in June, Uncle David,” said Clarissa. “On the nineteenth. Will you be here then?”
“I don’t know. I shouldn’t think so,” said David. “But I’ll send you a present. Good Lord! I thought you were about twelve.”
“Do I look twelve?” asked Clarissa anxiously.
David, seeing that she was slightly wounded, hastened to reassure her. She really, he said, looked like sixteen, but one was apt to think of one’s nephews and nieces as the ages they used to be, not the ages they were. Clarissa appeared satisfied. She had taken her gloves off now that Nannie was gone and was fingering some wallflowers that grew in a crevice between two time-worn tombstones.
“Do you know you have charming hands?” said David.
Clarissa spread her hands and looked at them, then at David, enquiringly.
Peace Breaks Out Page 9
