God's Sparrows

by Philip Child

  At last the third hymn, the one before the sermon. You could go out. Hats and coats. Dan’s hat mysteriously missing, to be finally retrieved from under the next pew but one.… They are out in the frosty air in the carriage going home. The children at last are quiet, for there is always something fresh to look at when you go for a ride. “The choir sings beautifully, don’t you think?” remarked Maud. “The children behaved very well considering —”

  Pen felt worn out and church always made him morose. “It’s nice,” he said, a sense of duty reasserting itself, “to get the children into the habit of going to church.” In his own ears his voice sounded thin, not from the depths of his convictions. It can do no harm to “expose” them, he thought; it might take. And any help a man can get — The end of life, sudden darkness, oblivion.

  “Oh, it is, dear!” agreed Maud warmly.

  Dan’s mouth was open, and he was engrossed in the mysterious thoughts of his age. “Father,” he said unexpectedly, “What is the kingdom of heaven?”

  One never knew what would catch a child’s attention. Pen answered carefully, for he believed in talking to children as though they were grown up.

  “It is the agreement of the heart with the will. But you are too young to understand that yet.”

  “The poor little monkey!” interposed Maud.

  “Is everyone in it?”

  “No, Daniel.”

  “Why isn’t everyone in it? Are you in it, Father?”

  Maud said quickly: “Children! What do you think we are going to have for dinner?”

  On Sunday evenings after church, all Maud’s family came to Ardentinny for high tea. The sound of talk and music floated up to the children, and often Dan and Alastair would creep out of bed and tiptoe to the edge of the stairs to listen with faces pressed to the banister, but Joanna, who was the baby of the family, was always too tired to stay awake for the singing, though she tried valiantly.… It was fun to hear their mother singing

  “Ma mère, hélas, mariez-moi,

  Puisque le temps est à plaisir …”

  when you did not know what the words meant and could not see Mother. It made her seem like a different person and yet the same. “It would be perfect,” Dan thought, “if only I could stay downstairs in the dining room with Mother and Father and listen. Grown-ups can go where they like.”

  Little knows the gosling what the gander thinks.

  At such times Pen Thatcher, sitting with Maud’s family in the dining room, felt himself an alien. The Burnets, who regarded Ardentinny as a Burnet stronghold, always outnumbered the Thatchers, most of whom lived in the States. Pen sometimes wondered whether, in marrying Maud Burnet (whom he loved), he had not really married Ardentinny. The house had been left to him because Maud’s father believed that “a man should be master in his own household.” But the Burnets still regarded it as their castle, and not even marriage had been allowed to make any difference in their family solidarity.

  The room surrounded the Burnets and Pen with an atmosphere of dignity and tradition which did not belong to the new world. It was unmistakably a room in which one dined rather than “had dinner.” In these years no modern chandelier of gas jets illumined too garishly the dark reticence of wainscoted corners; candles gleamed mellowly upon silver and upon oak panelling brought from Scotland years ago by Maud’s grandfather. Two ancestral Burnets in oils occupied panels on the west side of the room. They were Sir Murdo Burnet of Ardentinny Castle in Scotland, in the scarlet uniform and be-demned-careful-what-you-say -sir expression of a British general, and his wife, a dark, wild beauty in Gainsborough silks, bareheaded, with her hand touching the poised head of a greyhound nobly alive at her side. There could be no doubt that Sir Murdo felt at home in the eighteenth-century world upon which he stared with cold eyes. “I am a Burnet of Ardentinny,” he seemed to say, “and pray, sir, who may you be?”

  Since the general’s time, the Burnets had run true to form. They were all sure of themselves and of their place in society. They were cavaliers by instinct, even Maud who was one of the good rather than brilliant Burnets, and they loved dash, colour, tradition, in fact all those things which Pen in his private mind called “swank.”

  The Burnet ancestor irked Pen. He sometimes fancied that the general’s intolerant question was directed at none other than himself. “Pray, sir, who may you be? A demned puritan in my household, sir! ”

  Pen was by temperament and inheritance a New England puritan and by conviction a doubter. He was a puritan who had strayed from his own heritage into this tory background. Murdo Burnet, Pen’s brother-in-law , who was a medical missionary in Japan, called him a zealot in search of a conviction. At forty-five he was slightly bald, with marked furrows on his forehead, and he had the prematurely middle-aged look of a man who already eats and drinks failure for his daily fare and wakes to it in the small hours of the morning.

  One day Dan stared into the mirror over the mantelpiece at the dark little boy’s face — it might have been a stranger’s — and the thought suddenly flashed upon him: “Isn’t it queer that I’m me?”

  Dan had his times of fancy, but he was practical, too. He spent hours trying to find out how the piano worked. Aunt Euphemia Burnet, unable to explain, told him that the sounds were made by little fairies who stood on the wires and sang.

  “Shucks! Why do fairies have to have wires in order to sing?” asked Dan reasonably.

  He recognized vaguely that Aunt Euphemia was silly, but of course, as one of the family you “loved” her. The best thing about her was her parrot, which had once belonged to a spellbinding revivalist. When there were visitors, Aunt Euphemia had to cover the cage with a cloth because the sight of “two or three gathered together” always made the parrot cry: “Prrt. Prrt. Down on your knees, sinners!”

  The family were always in the background somewhere, so on the whole you took them for granted, though some of them you avoided as much as you could. For instance, you avoided Aunt Fanny because “she has a lot of common sense about making children behave!” Uncle Daniel Thatcher, who taught at Toronto University, did not count, though he was Father’s brother and Father always wanted you to talk to him; he was not an uncle like Uncle Charles. He lived in Toronto, and besides, he was old. Dan did not avoid Uncle Charles because he never seemed exactly like a grown-up . Uncle Charles took him to his first football game. “Now,” said Uncle Charles, “the object of the game is to batter the other side until they lie down and let you put the ball behind the goal post. We are cheering for the Tigers. They have yellow and black stockings; and mind you make a lot of noise. Enjoy yourself and, well — don’t ask me too many questions.” Uncle Charles cocked his hat at a jauntier angle and sucked in his breath with excitement; it was impossible to be with him and not have fun.

  The children did not go to school yet because Joanna was “not very well” and Pen thought it unkind to let the boys go without her. Instead they had a tutor, an old Austrian gentleman who taught them languages and the three R ’s. Sometimes they played with the Elton children who lived next to Ardentinny.

  “Do you think it is wise to encourage the Elton children?” said Fanny, the practical Burnet, to Maud. “It looks — well, people might think —”

  “Why, they’re nice children, and I feel sorry for the poor little things — no real mother.”

  The Eltons were queer. Mr. Elton’s first wife had divorced him for the most obvious of all reasons, and he had married a divorcée for his second wife. He was a successful man but his morals — everyone knew what “morals” meant — were not impeccable. Wellington was not used to divorce.… Beatrice was the clever Elton, Cynthia the pretty one, and Eustace was the general nuisance whom Joanna in particular disliked. When the boys quarrelled, as they frequently did, Joanna, who could not bear arguing, would dissolve into tears.

  “You must be careful with Joanna,” said
Pen to Dan, “you must be very careful not to excite her.”

  “Why, Father?” asked Dan, and saw his father wince.… Pen said with irritation:

  “Doesn’t it matter to you that your sister is not well?”

  Dan was what was called a difficult child. His father could never understand where Dan got his temper and his dour obstinacy, for like many irritable people, Pen thought of himself as a patient man. Dan could not bear to see suffering. Once, while he was still a baby, Maud fell and broke her arm, and Dan, shocked at the sight of his mother suffering and not knowing what to do, began to punch her. He was not a handsome, winning boy like Alastair, who made the hearts of maiden ladies melt when he was called in to shake hands at Maud’s afternoon teas. Alastair was a Burnet, and he had the faculty of never appearing in the wrong.

  “That boy has a vicious streak,” said Fanny of Dan.

  “Fanny!” exclaimed Maud, up in arms in an instant. “How can you say such a thing?”

  “Well, if it had not been for Dan’s temper, Joanna’s sickness —” began Fanny, but Maud would not let her go on.

  “That was an accident! Don’t ever think it anything else.”

  Once, when Dan was six, his parents overheard him calling Alastair a liar and locked him into his room until he should repent. He upset all the furniture, broke all the glass in the pictures, and would not come to a state of grace. “Alastair is a liar!” he screamed over and over again so loudly that the nearest neighbours down Galinée Street could have heard him. “Alastair may not have told the truth,” shouted Maud to the accompaniment of thumps from the other side of the door, “and if so, he will be punished. But you are being punished because it isn’t nice, it is not brotherly to say that about Alastair.” “He did lie. He did !” It always made Joanna sick at her stomach when Dan was unhappy. Presently, she came to the door and whispered through the keyhole:

  “Dan, I have a piece of cake for you. Please tell Mother you’re sorry.”

  “No! Go away, Joanna,” thundered Dan, so she went away and was sick. In the end it was the parents who had to give in hours afterward and invent a pretext for unlocking the door.

  “You’re a passionate child. A passionate child!” Pen would exclaim, and Maud would say: “Do you think there is something worrying the child? Sometimes when children have something on their minds that they don’t know how to tell you about …”

  Pen believed in discipline, and these tantrums somehow seemed always to develop into a personal issue between him and the boy. He was more stern with Dan than with Alastair because he had made up his mind that Dan, unlike Alastair, could be moulded into a Thatcher.

  The victoria had given place to a motorcar as the family conveyance. Going out in the “devil-wagon ,” as Pen called it, was always an adventure; the wheels never quite fitted the ruts in the narrow clay roads, and sometimes they would have to crawl along for miles behind a farmer in a gig who, pretending not to hear their honking, refused to turn out for the city folks and their newfangled contraption. Sometimes they went through the park, past the quarry where workmen had found the mammoth’s tusks, and out to Cholera Point, where years ago during a cholera plague, people had been buried five or six at a time in a great pit. Every August a gipsy caravan bivouacked on the point, now grassy and treeless.

  One Sunday in August they drove there, Joanna sitting beside her mother, Pen on the seat between the two boys to keep them from fighting.

  “Mother, why do gipsies live in carts?”

  “Gipsies are like that, Dan. They live on kekkeno mush’s poov ; that means no man’s land. They are queer people, dears. They come when they like and go when they like.”

  “It must be fun not to live in a house and go where you like. Mother, do they like it?”

  “I expect they do.”

  “And do they do what they like, Mother?”

  “Well, not exactly. No one does. But they do what they like more than most people. They have the sun and stars over them, and they don’t care much what people think of them.”

  “I wish I were a gipsy. Could I be a gipsy when I grow up, do you think?”

  Maud gave Pen a queer look.

  “My dear boy,” said Pen. “You can get away from most people, but there is one person you can’t get away from. Do you know whom I mean?”

  “No, Father, who?”

  “You can’t get away from yourself. Don’t try.”

  “Why aren’t we all gipsies?” asked Dan.

  “A man maun dree his weird,” said Maud. This proverb was one of several she had inherited from her ancestors; these sayings were her only obvious link with Scotland.

  Dan could not tell when he had first realized that his father was not happy like Mother or Uncle Charles or Aunt Fanny. Father talked to you as if you were a grown-up . This was flattering, but you never felt quite as much at ease as you did with Uncle Charles. You could never be with Father without knowing you were being taught. But Dan admired his father tremendously and was a little afraid of him. His father knew everything. And he kept on pounding at people — and they listened! He was never unfair. Never! But sometimes Dan felt dimly that he was not angry at anything Dan had done but at Dan himself.

  “Well, laddie, dreaming as usual?” asked Maud with a smile in her voice.

  “I hope I don’t have to grow up,” said Dan, suddenly listless.

  “Why ever not?”

  “I don’t want to. I might have to do things I don’t want to.”

  II

  Peace reigned at the breakfast table. The children had passed the age when their attention had, figuratively speaking, to be caught and rubbed into the porridge, and they ate with silent fervour, thinking of what they would do with the summer day. The gipsies were at Cholera Point again, Uncle Charles said, and there was going to be a gipsy wedding.… Pen, whose vitality was low in the morning, had shut himself off from the world behind a newspaper. Civilized people, he believed, ought not to speak to one another until after breakfast. Maud was reading her letters.

  The psychic sense possessed by experienced husbands told Pen that Maud had ceased reading and was waiting for him to look up. With a sigh he put down the paper and asked: “What is it, Maud?”

  “Oh, nothing, Pen.”

  That sounded dangerous to his peace of mind. With apprehension he asked: “Whom is the letter from?”

  “Murdo.”

  “What does he say?”

  Maud scanned Murdo’s letter again hurriedly. It was written in his bold, impatient hand with two ink splotches from a too vigorously dotted i. … “The children must be getting past the puppy stage,” Murdo had written. “Do bring them up, Maud, with some regard for the past; anything but this grovelling mediocrity of mind, this cheap scepticism without style or quality. A man ought to believe what his parents teach him to believe. Tell my Ishmaelitish brother-in-law that I’ll christen your children yet, in spite of him!” Maud passed the raw material of this letter through the sieve of her sex, the mesh of which is tact, and began:

  “Murdo is to go to China from Japan. He thinks trouble is brewing in China.” She gave Pen a smile and a little shrug, in which Murdo’s wish to be in the thick of trouble was delicately transformed into a woman’s humorous comment on the sex in general. “Murdo says his hair is turning grey.” Maud smiled uneasily under the special quality of his look, and uttered the unspoken thought between them.

  “We are, too,” she said.

  Pen dwelt on the picture of Murdo facing the little death of middle age. “So he goes off to China to find trouble,” he thought.

  “Murdo mailed the letter at Shanghai just before sailing. He’s staying with us just long enough to do his business — less than a week. He says the West upsets him. Then he is going back by way of England.”

  “I see,” said Pen.… Out of the
corner of his eye he observed that Daniel was kicking Alastair under the table — or was it Alastair kicking Daniel? “Boys!” he said sharply. Joanna winced at her father’s tone and came behind his chair, smoothing out the frown from his forehead; she could not bear to see anyone frown. “Daddy, are you good?” she asked anxiously. He could not help smiling.

  The children clattered out of the room.

  “It will be pleasant to see Murdo again,” said Pen generously.

  “Pen, the children will be in their teens before we know it, and we’re not getting younger ourselves. Couldn’t we have them christened? Murdo could do it.” He put his hand over hers, but she stiffened it slightly against him.

  “You want it very much, Maud, don’t you?”

  “It’s right to. After all, we’re Christians.”

  “Do you think Joanna is well enough? … The excitement — you know what the doctor said —”

  “We could have it in Ardentinny.”

  “Well, since you want it so much.… But mind you, my dear, I’ll have no one for godfather but myself. That’s my responsibility!”