All his life! He was only thirty-five — and probably — taking all the chances for and against, there were several years before him. Long years too — for in Shadbrook the time lagged on with a most extraordinary slowness. Yet who could wish for a more peaceful way of passing the days than the work of ‘curing’ Shadbrook souls? There was no prettier old village church in England than the one in which it was his duty to officiate, and as for his personal environment, there was no better house anywhere than his — no lovelier wife — no more beautiful child. What more then could he desire? How was it that a sudden cloud — small yet perfectly perceptible — had crept into his sky?
He asked himself the question many times — angrily and with a keen self-reproach. But he kept his own counsel as to his inward condition of mind — and not even to that dazzling creature of sunshine and gossamer, his adored Azalea, whose bewildering fairy beauty and gayety of heart were a perpetual amazement to his mind, did he confide what he gravely decided was ‘a matter between himself and God.’
On this day of dull rain and sweeping mist, when even the Vicarage garden looked dreary, the spring not having yet made up its mind as to whether or no it meant finally to dethrone a long and obstinately reigning winter, and when Shadbrook in both its ancient and modern parts presented its worst and most forlorn aspect, there was something more than usually depressing in the atmosphere, and the Reverend Richard felt it poignantly. He sat in his study, at a round oak table profusely strewn with letters and papers, holding a pen listlessly in his hand, and trying to fix his mind on his next Sunday’s sermon. Opposite to him the spacious latticed window gave him an open view of his garden — a dream of beauty in June and July, — but just now fitting itself into his particular frame of mind as somewhat like a well-kept cemetery from which the gravestones and memorial monuments had been recently removed. Tall dark firs and evergreens waved their hearse-like plumes solemnly to and fro in the driving rain — the lawns were sodden and marked by the muddy trail of the delving worm — the flower-borders showed some meekly aspiring little spikes of green indicative of bulbs waiting to grow tall if the sun would only shine upon them — and a few’ withered snowdrops drooped towards the gravel path and shivered in the swish of the wind. Everton’s deep-set, thoughtful eyes observed all these trifles with a kind of morbid acuteness.
“Even for March,” — he said to himself gently, as though apologizing for the remark— “the weather is trying!”
He turned his pen about betwixt finger and thumb — but wrote not a word with it. A terrible conviction was forcing itself upon his mind that there w as nothing to write about. It was a dreadful fact. Nothing to write about! He, a minister of the Gospel, — with the Book of all books beside him — the exhaustless fount of spiritual prophecy, poesy and power, could find nothing to say on any subject in it. Every week he was newly confronted by this amazing difficulty. Yet it was not that he was destitute of ideas — only — and here was the stumbling-block — his ideas would not appeal to the intelligence of Shadbrook. Were he to express himself in such language as he desired to use — were he to give his heart and soul full vent, and speak with the passion and enthusiasm that inwardly consumed his being as with a consuming flame, why then, his parishioners — Well? What: of his parishioners? Would they be angry, surprised, or in any way moved to unusual emotion? No — oh no! They simply would not understand. There was the core and kernel of his trouble. They-would-not-understand! They did not understand him as it was, even when he preached the oldest and most worn-out platitudes. In fact, he was often greatly concerned as to whether they in very truth comprehended the Christian doctrine at all. He sometimes had a glimmering painful sense that they merely accepted it, because it was the particular form of approach to the Almighty which was ordained to be taught according to the laws of the country — and that if by some singular chance Buddhism were introduced in its stead as the religion of the realm, they would accept that with equal alacrity and equanimity. He had often sounded the members of his flock on the question of their belief — because he felt it his duty to do so — but the answers he had received were for the most part vague and unsatisfactory. There was Farmer Hobday, for example, — the best farmer anywhere about for forty miles — a regular churchgoer, and an excellent man in every way — yet no one could honestly say he was ‘orthodox.’ Once when the Reverend Richard had delicately touched on a certain religious matter, this very Hobday, huge-boned, red-faced and mighty of stature, had turned a pair of round expressionless eyes upon him, and with a slow smile had observed:
“Now doan’t ‘ee do it, passon! — do-an’t ‘ee do it! You minds your church an’ I minds my plow! Neither on us knaws ‘ow the A’mighty manages to work us along through a powerful lot o’ trouble — yet worked we are! — an’ if we axes no questions, we woan’t be told no lies!”
Then there was Mrs. Moddley — a widow with eight young children, whose husband had been killed while working on the railway line which purposely missed Shadbrook altogether on its way to Cheltenham. She too was a regular church-goer — and when Everton was preparing some of the village lads for confirmation, one of her boys had created confusion in the class by suddenly observing: “Please, sir, mother says she don’t see ‘ow God can bear to live, watchin’ all the poor folks die what He’s made Hisself!”
The Vicar had for the time managed to elude this startling proposition by skillful handling of the truism that we are all poor sinful souls who are not expected to comprehend the ways of the Almighty — but he took an early opportunity of interviewing Mrs. Moddley on the subject of her son’s remark. Mrs. Moddley, who was washing her children’s clothes, and whose arms, half in and half out of a tub of soap-suds, presented a boiled lobster-like appearance, listened with respectful patience, while the clergyman quietly and with the greatest kindness, pointed out that the thought expressed by Master Moddley—’ Jimmy’ as he was familiarly called — was a little — yes, just a little improper, and ought not to have been allowed to find refuge in a child’s brain.
“Well!” said Mrs. Moddley, straightening herself up from the wash-tub and heaving a short sharp sigh— “You may be right, Mr. Everton, and I daresay you are, for it’s not my place to argefy with my betters, an’ I’ve never done it nohow — but as for puttin’ thoughts in a child’s brain, if you’ll believe me, sir, they don’t want no puttin’, for they comes there with no trouble at all — and whatever I’ve said to Jimmy ‘tain’t ‘arf as bad as what Jimmy says to me — which I don’t put into his ‘ed nohow — an’ if God doos everything, then it’s God as is to blame, beggin’ your pardon, Mr. Everton, but it’s the truth I do assure you!”
Here she paused, out of breath, and wrung her hands free from the soap-suds. Everton looked slightly troubled.
“But Mrs. Moddley,” he argued— “you are always in church on Sundays — and you understand—”
“No, that I don’t! — and that I should never wish you, sir, to think as I did,” — she declared, with energy— “Nor ever ‘ave I done so since I was born an’ eddicated. But I takes it as it comes, feelin’ it’s all for the best, so long as we doos our dooty in that state of life in which it has pleased God to call us.”
These last words she uttered in the tone of a stage recitation. Then, glancing at the clergyman’s kindly, clever face, she dusted a chair and offered it to him.
“Sit down, sir,” — she said, with quite a motherly air— “you looks a bit worrited — but I do make so bold as to say there’s no ‘arm in either me or Jimmy or any o’ my lambs — they’se only just curious sort o’ little creatures, wantin’ to know the why an’ the wherefore of everything — and they gives trouble to us older folk without meanin’ of it. But they all says their prayers as good as gold — and my youngest girl, Betty, she prays so hard that she’s fair wore out when she’s done, an’ rolls over like a dumplin’ into bed after the Amen — bless her ‘art! — she’s but four years old — an’ all her trouble in this life is that old Mrs
. Kibble will never get good enough to be an angel! Think o’ that! Old Mrs. Kibble that ‘as been a drunkard for these many years an’ is gettin’ wusser as she goes on, — an’ my Betty wants her to be an angel! Lord, lord! I’ve laughed till I cried over that!”
An irrepressible smile crossed Everton’s face. A picture of Betty, round, pink as an apple-blossom, and soft as a peach, praying till she was ‘wore out’ for ‘crazy Kibble’ as the irreverent lads of the village called the ancient female reprobate in question, was humorous as well as pathetic.
And surely there was something very purely Christian in the child’s feeling, if she could in her innocent heart implore the Almighty to transform an old, ugly, dirty confirmed drunkard, who was a disgrace to herself and her neighbors, into an angel!
“Good little Betty!” he said gently— “Still, Mrs. Moddley, I think it is necessary for us elders to impose a certain restraint on our speech in the presence of very young children — and Jimmy’s remark was almost — I will not say quite — but almost on the verge of blasphemy. And it appears he only repeated what you, his mother, said. Now those words—” —
“Those words was which?” demanded Mrs. Moddley.
“Well just to this effect,” hesitated Everton— “That you wondered how God could live watching all the poor folks die that He made Himself.”
Mrs. Moddley’s eyes twinkled curiously.
“Well, I ain’t goin’ back on it,” — she said— “It’s ezackly what I thinks — though I’ll freely own my tongue often gets the better of me. But there, Mr. Everton, take me myself, if I sees a fly a-drownin’ in the milk I picks it out an’ gives the poor know-nothin’ inseck a chance for its life, though flies is a nuisance in the summer-time as everybody knows, but seein’ God made ’em I daresay if they thinks at all they wants their lives as much as we do ours. And though I’m told in church as God ‘ad only one Son, an’ killed Him in order to wash out our sins in the blood, I can’t never believe ’twas meant that way—”
“Mrs. Moddley!” gasped Richard— “You — you — excuse me — you don’t know what a terrible thing you are saying—”
“Look ’ere, Mr. Everton,” and Mrs. Moddley leaned her wet arms argumentatively across the wash-tub— “I ain’t goin’ to b’lieve for a moment that the Almighty is a worser person than ourselves. Not a bit of it! Now I wouldn’t kill a son of mine to save anybody — there! An’ I’m only Martha Moddley. An’ our wretched little sins, sich as they is, all comes through our not knowin’ better — wherefore I says, the blessed Lord Jesus came down from heaven to show us how to live patient and die quiet without complainin’, an’ trust to the Father of us all to do right by us in this world, seein’ we’ve been brought ’ere without our own wish, an’ got to suffer a deal o’ woe. That’s my view of religion — an’ a bad one no doubt it is — but Lord love ye, Mr. Everton!” — and here her round face beamed smilingly at him— “Don’t ye worrit over me one bit! — you’ll never see me miss a Sunday out of church, for the singin’ an’ the prayer^ doos us all good, even if we can’t make it all out — and you’re a real gentleman born, which is what we allus wanted for this parish, ‘avin’ ‘ad a man previous what lived with his cook, — quite a fine gel — on the sly, an’ all of us knowed it an’ couldn’t say nothin’. For says my pore dear ‘usband as is gone, ‘We must ketch ’im in the hact’ — an’ that you will realize, Mr. Everton, was impossible — so that when he died of a ‘plexy fit, ’twas a good riddance for all round. An’ I’m sure we couldn’t wish for a better parson an’ wife than you an’ your lady — so now, sir,” — and she nodded consolingly at him— “you’ve no need to worrit, as I says, for you doos your dooty, an’ to the best o’ my powers I’ll do mine, an’ I’ll bite my tongue ‘ard before I let it talk over Jimmy’s ‘ed ‘bout what he’s a bit too young to see for his-self proper.”
With this most uncertain and entirely unprofitable explanation, Everton had to be content — and never afterwards saw Mrs. Moddley in church without a nervous qualm. He began to be afraid of getting on religious subjects with his parishioners at all, and found that it was safer to utter vague prognostications about the weather and the crops than to mention the doctrines of original sin and divine redemption. Pigs furnished a more appreciated subject of discourse, — the birth, growth and fattening of these interesting animals being more important to the inhabitants of Shadbrook than any other event which an industrious press might chronicle in any part of the world. There was no one, in fact, to whom he could impart the growing sense he had of his own incompetency to deal with this rough human material, which though undoubtedly endowed with the ‘spirit which maketh for righteousness,’ yet had no means of manifesting its real trend of thought. He was a scholarly man — and he had no other of his class with whom to exchange ideas. True, there were two ‘great’ houses, so-called, — the one of his patron, Squire Hazlitt, who had selected him for the living of Shadbrook, and who was hardly ever in the place, his wife and daughters preferring to drag him about in the wake of mischievous modern society, which elects to spend its money on foreign resorts rather than to help forward the equally beautiful and much more healthy pleasure places at home — the other the ‘commodious villa,’ to use auctioneer parlance, of the brewer of the district, whose hideous brewery-buildings disfigured the landscape some eight or ten miles away. With the Squire, Everton and his pretty wife were on terms of pleasure and intimacy whenever that gentleman was at home; with the brewer, he was at open feud. For Shadbrook had two public-houses — a criminal superfluity for so small a place, — and both were ‘tied’ to Messrs. Minchin and Co., who kept them well supplied with the direst poison in the shape of beer that ever went down the throats of poor laboring men. Minchin himself was a pompous, self-satisfied commoner who had allied himself for his own advantage to the daughter of a pauper baronet, in order that he might claim to be ‘connected with the aristocracy.’ He was a persistent church-goer, and a publicly proclaimed teetotaler. That is to say, he drank nothing but water, and gave his friends nothing but water, while he made his money out of the working-man’s drunkenness, or rather let us say the working-man’s delirium, brought on by the consumption of his manufactured poison. With such characteristics as these, every one will admit that he was a good and righteous man. But he hated the Reverend Richard Everton, — and the Reverend Richard Everton, so far as it was possible for a Christian minister with human blood in his veins to hate, hated him in return. Mrs. Minchin, a somewhat ‘horsey’ lady, with a strident voice and an aggressive manner, ‘detested,’ to use her own expression, ‘that odious little woman, Azalea Everton.’ It was a case of simple cause and effect — Mrs. Everton being pretty and Mrs. Minchin plain, — Mrs. Everton being the mother of a boy whose beauty was the wonder of all who beheld him, and Mrs. Minchin having produced alarmingly ugly twins, boy and girl, who might for all the good temper and intelligence they showed, just as well have never been born. These, and other equally cogent reasons, kept the two families well apart. Mrs. Everton, indeed, though as a rule the sweetest of sweet creatures, could not altogether refrain from giving her pretty head a slight, very slight, toss of indifference, when she happened to pass Mrs. Minchin on the country road — and Mrs. Minchin made no attempt to restrain the very unmusical snort which affected her nose and throat at the merest side glimpse of Mrs. Everton. Such being the position of things, it followed that there were no real ‘neighbors ‘in the true sense of the word, for a man of learning and refinement such as the Vicar was, for even Squire Hazlitt, his patron, was scarcely to be called cultured, though he had plenty of good-humor and shrewd common-sense. Yet the years of his life at Shadbrook had so far been spent in such happiness that he had never thought it possible or likely that he might, with a growing, broadening mind, some day need a growing and broadening environment. That afflictive cramp which nips the intellectual spirit when it finds itself hemmed in on all sides by provincial nonentities, had not as yet seriously troubled him — and it
s first twinges were only now beginning to pinch him in a warning, and not to say undesirable and undesired manner.
“Are you going to pass all your life in Shadbrook?”
The question, put as it were by the mocking voice of some interior demon, was asked of him again on this cold March morning when he sat trying to write what he felt could never be written. And yet — what burning thoughts were in his brain, longing to communicate themselves to his motionless pen! — thoughts of the goodness and majesty of the Creator — thoughts of the daily discoveries of science — thoughts of the inexhaustible millions upon millions of solar systems in limitless space — thoughts that were like lightning-poems, singing themselves to his inner consciousness and declaring him to be a living Soul — a part of God — a spark of the Divine, sent to evolve itself through experience and difficulty from the imperfect to the perfect state of being. The daily papers brought him news of the world’s unrest — and realizing the paltry ‘sensationalism of religion’ worked up by certain followers of antichrist, who saw no shame in associating themselves with the notoriety-hunting proprietors of a cheap and degraded press, he recognized the wrong that was being done to the pure teaching of Christ, and the havoc that was wickedly wrought among men by the spread of infidel doctrine. He longed to be up and doing — to don the spiritual sword and buckler, and go forth with the armies of the Lord — to preach with no uncertain voice, but with a true note, clear as a clarion call, and to help draw back the social world from the abyss whither he, and all deep-thinking men could see it visibly hurrying — and yet — his ‘cure’ was merely Shadbrook. Shadbrook was his business; with the rest of the world he had no need to concern himself.
Delphi Collected Works of Marie Corelli Page 700
