Bewildering Cares

by Peck,Winifred

  If I had no other duties and a small modern house, I should certainly manage without a maid, and feel opulent. I am not so sure about poor little Mrs. Strang, for I know well that the diminutive servant who answers the door, looking rather a pathetic little slut in the morning, and emerges with the pram in the afternoon, all cape and streamers as a nurse, is a mark of gentility which Mrs. Strang could not bear to forgo. And it is no use to criticize this point of view. You are born with or without it like a squint, and you must just be thankful if you haven’t got it.

  Still, my thoughts ran, Kate’s wages, insurance and food amount to a third of our income, and it is very hard to see how best to spend the rest of it.

  “We eat too much,” said Arthur last night, as he finished a fish scallop. “First that excellent soup, and now a savoury to follow, and coffee afterwards. Now a working man and his wife would be eating—”

  “Half-a-pound of steak apiece at two-and-four a pound!” I declared. “Or they’d have had that for mid-day dinner—and we have cheese and bread and fruit—and they’d have topped up their cocoa for supper with a tin of salmon, and that’s gone up from sevenpence-halfpenny to elevenpence.” (In dealing with a philosopher one should always introduce a concrete fact, date or price. It impresses them far more than their own type of generalizations.)

  As far as I can see I cannot manage the food, heating, lighting and cleaning of this wasteful house for less than twelve pounds a month, though I am sure Mrs. Weekes would tell me that I could, if only I had more Method. When I consider other expenses I always lose myself in memories of a book my Mother gave me on Keeping House. On our first income—£500 a year, I think—we were supposed to be four maiden ladies living in the country with a pony-cart, and on £600 a year we should have been a smart couple in a flat in town with a boy in the Navy. I can only recall my vivid pictures of these happy beings, living in older, happier days, and the concluding item of each budget, which ran: Newspapers, soda-water and charity—£30 a year. Unluckily, though we only take the Daily Telegraph and never buy soda-water, charity doesn’t fit into that admirable estimate.

  Arthur regulates our donations in theory. His grandmother, he tells me, had fifty pounds given her for that purpose by her husband. She disliked writing cheques—“paper is so dangerous”, she would say—and confined herself to church collections. As she was something of a miser at heart, she would dole out threepences for the first half or more of the year, and find herself obliged by the end of Advent to get rid of golden sovereigns, whether the cause was after her own heart or not. “Five pounds to the Additional Curates’ Fund, and I do so dislike curates,” she was heard to complain on the last Sunday of the year, and no consideration in the world would have made her carry on the gift to January, because it belonged to her yearly tithe. I don’t know if Arthur inherited the tithe principle, but he certainly gives away more than £30 a year, not in calculated subscriptions, but in that happy open-heartedness and sympathy from which most of us protect ourselves under the aegis of the Charity Organization Society. At best, it always seems, we have something like £70 a year left for insurance, daily expenses, clothes, presents and holidays. We have always recognized that we, too, have been extremely lucky in having relations on my side who practically paid for Dick’s education and for one or two critical illnesses. And then, too, we have no rent to pay for this house, inconvenient as it is. So we really have money enough for all our needs, I told myself, as I reached the point of all these meditations, whether I could somehow or other afford a cheap new hat. We are lunching at the Weekes’s on Thursday, to meet the Archdeacon, and not even the better days of my tweeds can conceal that worse day when my present felt hat (4s. 11d.) blew into a snow-drift.

  “I think the clergy should do a course of bookkeeping in their theological colleges,” I said to Arthur, at breakfast. (Still no letter from Dick, still a patter of rain on the window-sills, and Arthur was back from church and I had just “finished” the study and poached the eggs.)

  “You’ve already condemned them at different times to a course of astronomy to make them feel the insignificance of man,” said Arthur, “and three months as charwomen so as to understand the feminine point of view. They’d be getting on in life before they were ordained.”

  “Yes, because you want them to have a year of philosophy, so that they won’t mistake analogy for argument and avoid loose-thinking! Well, it would be all the better, darling, because middle-aged clergy are always nicer than young ones!”

  “I’m afraid that may be only a middle-aged point of view! Not that I’m feeling very friendly to youth as exemplified by Strang this morning!”

  We had been too peaceful to talk about our curate and his sermon last night. Most happily-married couples now, when the days are over and we sit by the fire, safe for one evening more anyhow,

  … strive to build a little isle of bliss

  Midway the beating of that stormy sea

  Where tossed about all hearts of men must be.

  “We’ll discuss it in the morning,” we say, and then at breakfast we read the paper and don’t want to talk, and “it” escapes discussion. But I had to ask about Mr. Strang on this occasion and find out what I had better say to his critics. Yesterday, it appears, Arthur received a letter from Mr. Weekes, who is usually as kind and good-natured a manufacturer as ever talked of the good old days, lamented the crimes of modern youth, and laughed good-humouredly at his wife’s superior refinement, to say that unless Mr. Strang’s mouth could be stopped somehow he would have to leave the church, and hadn’t these modern Bishops, who seem to think they’ve a right to wear mitres, and peacock about like the Pope, taken to excommunicating people as the Popes did? If so, I gathered, he would present Mr. Strang as a candidate and attend the service personally.

  “I got hold of Weekes, and he complains that Strang said England deserves all she can get, and is doomed to the destruction of all capitalist countries. According to Mrs. Weekes, he waved at their pew as he added a brisk little damnation of all capitalists. Later on I met old Chubb, who is quite the best fellow on the town council, and is responsible for the very decent housing movements, and he said that he had heard the Curate had described Stampfield as a warren of foul slums, and what about it? Then I called in at Hantons to ask that very nice foreman about poor Higgs’s compensation, and was asked why I allowed my young man to tell his men that they’d no business to work for the Army—they’re making rubber tyres for Army lorries, you know. In the bank, old Colonel Greenley roared at me that he heard my Curate was in the pay of the Peace Pledge Union, and that he hoped his sermon was actionable. I can tell you I was glad to get over to Marley in the afternoon to see that nice Mrs. Tonks, and christen the baby and listen to the woes of evacuees, for they don’t include Strang’s sermons.”

  At that moment the door-bell rang, and Kate looked in on her way to answer it (a habit of which I cannot cure her) to say it was that Mr. Strang again, and her boy-friend said if he came across the chap who’d spilt the beans over the Army like that he’d give him something to remember. I could only hope that Private Jenkins may get his long-expected summons to France without delay, and I was just going off to the kitchen when Arthur implored me to stay, on the grounds that we must really decide on a unified front in this crisis.

  Mr. Strang is rather like a small Irish terrier. He has rather fluffy ginger hair and eyebrows, watchful brown eyes, and the same unfortunate predilection for getting up rows wherever he goes. His father was Irish, so he is unable to see that there is more than one side to any question; his mother belonged to one of those well-known Quaker families whose descendants are ready to fight to the death for Pacifism. He picked up Labour views in his school-days, and adorned them with very advanced ways of thinking at his theological college.

  He proceeded to marry a pretty, silly little woman, who is always encouraging him to think they are wronged or slighted by their neighbours; and though he is undoubtedly brave, hard-working and devoted,
he is curiously unliveable-with. He has a very thin and—to-day—very red nose, which twinkles at the tip when he is agitated, and a way of snapping his mouth tight at the end of a remark which is only less aggravating than the remarks when it is open. “What he needs is an orange-box to preach on in the park, and a quiet duck in the Serpentine when he’s finished,” says Dick. But to-day he looked hardly capable of speaking on anything, as he was obviously tired and ill.

  I let them begin their conversation while I went off and heated up a good cup of coffee for him. He is reputed to fast very drastically in Lent, “and when he does get down to it,” Kate said, “it’s nothing but cutlet frills and entrée papers, Ireen says, for Mrs. Strang is such a one for show.”

  As I stood over the poor, tired, over-wrought little man till he put the cup to his lips, Arthur, I gathered, was able to put in a remark at last. (From the kitchen I had heard distant reverberations of pure Strang.)

  “Quite so,” said my husband, soothingly. “I am sure any offence you gave was unintentional, but—”

  “Mrs. Lacely can bear me witness that I preached nothing but pure Gospel!” cried Mr. Strang. (I wished I had let the milk curdle on the top a little, as that interrupts a man’s utterances so effectively!) And who, alas, was I to bear witness one way or the other?

  “Then, of course, that is all right,” said Arthur, looking more affectionately over the top of his glasses than ever. “As Our Lord never criticized the government of his own day, nor interfered with a political system, no-one should criticize you. It was all some odd misunderstanding.”

  “But there I differ from you!” cried Mr. Strang, bolting down his coffee. My idea was a failure, I fear, for his drink seemed to give him fresh strength for a declamation on those views which we all know so well. We know, and we all feel the hopeless impasse to which they bring our judgement. Is it, I wondered, one facet of man’s Free Will that he has to decide for himself between the Christ scourging the money-lenders and the Christ refusing military aid in Gethsemane, between the tribute-money to Caesar and the challenge to Pilate? If it is for us to make our own choice in every given instance between complete pacifism and military intervention, how can Christianity preserve a united front?

  “There is so much in all you say,” agreed Arthur, with just a shade more weariness than benevolence this time. “But if you wandered from the subject of the imperative duty of Christians to live in peace with their neighbours to the more controversial topic of war as the result of capitalist society, with all its attendant evils, may I say that I think a platform would have been more appropriate than a pulpit.”

  “When I know that my views are the views of my Master, it is my duty to proclaim them to His flock,” returned Mr. Strang, snapping his mouth shut so violently that I almost hoped it might stay shut altogether.

  “The longer I live”, said Arthur, hunting for his pipe on the mantelpiece, “the more convinced I feel that we cannot dogmatize on the application of Christian doctrine to any particular problem or crisis. We can present its ethic and philosophy, and try so to reveal the divinity and humanity of Our Lord, that He may Himself become the standard of individuals in their daily and national perplexities. But in any generalizations one must distrust human error, so large a factor in many decisions of the Church. The Church, I think, should reflect in humility on the Crusades and the Religious Wars before she can feel positive that she has any right to lay down the laws on public policy.”

  The argument was so evidently going to proceed on well-worn lines that I slipped away to do the drawing-room and make a steamed-pudding, as the joint showed sad traces of Private Jenkins’s perennial leave-takings, and to get ready for a committee at the parish hall at half-past ten. I looked in on my way to the door, with my shopping-basket, to see if Arthur had reached any conclusions. Mr. Strang had gone. He couldn’t send Arthur his sermon because he had preached extempore, but he had promised to re-write it to the best of his ability. Arthur was then to judge whether his Curate should try to make his position a little clearer in his mid-day sermon on Wednesday.

  “A little more Christian, you mean?” I asked.

  “I do, but I don’t know that he does. Militant pacifism might be a great force in the world,” Arthur added, thoughtfully. “He’s a good little man at bottom, you know, and he was most nearly touched when I pointed out how he might have hurt the feelings of those who had relatives serving their country. He’ll gladly apologize to any of them, but not, alas, to the Weekes or the Greenleys, and in a way I respect him for it.”

  “Yes, but you know our Evangelical grandparents would have said that the poor fellow isn’t even converted yet!” I answered, impatiently. “What right has he to upset everyone and worry you?”

  “Not peace but a sword, he’d reply to that,” sighed Arthur. “But I cannot believe such an absurd fuss and disturbance can do anything but die down in a day or two. What thinking man could conceivably give all this another thought at a time like this?”

  I left him to this consoling reflection, but I don’t feel sure that there are very many thinking men, or any thinking women, in Stampfield.

  At the front door I was stopped by Mrs. Tidds wearing a battered man’s soft hat and an even more woebegone expression than usual. I knew from experience that one of her children was in disgrace and that it would probably take me ten minutes to disentangle which. And it was a quarter-past ten.

  “’E’d never meant to steal the bicycle-lamp, my Jimmy,” was the point of the story when my visitor reached it at last, “but ’e was always such a one for play.” If the Vicar could be so good as to speak a word for him to the Magistrate and the Probationary Officer.

  Sometimes I feel that speaking words and writing lines are the last traces of the belief in the infallibility of the Church in our country. I promised to speak to Arthur, inquired after Percy’s tonsils and promised to look out a hat for Mrs. Tidds, and leave it when I was next her way, “as the other ladies who char to oblige in the Hospital pass such unpleasant remarks about me grey felt”. I can’t say how sorry I feel for all the incompetent, woe-ridden Mrs. Tidds of my acquaintance, but there is something depressing in helping oxen and asses out of one pit, so to speak, when you know they will fall into another in a day or two, and you are already late for an appointment—“But you must remember, my dear,” Arthur’s mother used to say, “that one never meets with any trace of hurry or bustle in the Gospels!”

  The annoying part of my three committees this morning was that they were all held in different buildings, though they consist of practically identical members. All clergy people must be suffering now, as we are doing here, from the complete disappearance of the comparatively young and energetic, who went off in their uniforms this summer, leaving the old hacks like myself to carry on, or to close down their activities, without one thought of them again. I used to enjoy the Committee of the Factory Girls’ Club in the hall of Stampfield Parish Church, for the Club is well-endowed by an old spinster of the parish, and we have rescued it lately from the ministrations of the old parish deaconess, who was far too tired and elderly to do anything to entertain the few depressed members, and persuaded Ida Weekes, a fine, upstanding girl, full of Roedean public spirit, to help with her friends to pep it up, as they would say. Then I retired from any active work, and heard great stories of cooking and dress-making lessons, amateur theatricals and social evenings for boy-friends. And now Ida and her friends are away in the A.T.S. or W.R.N.S., leaving Mrs. Weekes, Miss Boness, Miss Grieve, Miss Croft, and such elderly ladies, to try to adapt it to war conditions. It is needed more than ever now in the black-out, which is responsible for as many moral as physical accidents, but the attendance has fallen almost to zero, and none of us has the leisure or youth to reorganize it on new lines. My only hope is Miss Henly, the marvellous headmistress of our high school, who was co-opted at my suggestion, and was speaking as I went in.

  “I think we should get permission from the Old Church Vestry,” she w
as saying energetically, “to let us open their hall two nights a week for the militia in Brey Camp, and get the girls themselves to run it as a canteen. That would bring them back in no time, and would make them feel they were serving their country as well.”

  There is a nice story in a letter of Winifred Holtby’s about a French Commandant in the Great War who heard that our W.A.A.C.s were going to France, pure, high-minded, patriotic women who would present no problems. “Mais que feront-elles avec les bébés?” was all he asked with simple cynicism, and I could see the same thought in the minds of the committee at once, though all we heard from Mrs. Weekes was a murmur about licence.

  “Oh, nonsense! No drinks, of course! Only tea and cocoa, buns and fags!” Miss Henly is a big, vital, autocratic woman of forty or so, and even her original clothes, high colour and quick, hearty voice suggest her unbounded energy. Everyone but Mrs. Weekes is rather afraid of her, and even Mrs. Weekes has to remember that Ida was at no secondary school, but at Roedean, before she opposes her.

  “A very dangerous experiment I should say,” she volunteered now, with that curious swelling effect of her bounteous figure in the tight, elephant grey coat. “The place would be a perfect pandemonium.”

  “One of us would have to be in the background at first, at any rate,” said Miss Henly. “But I find that the more responsibility a girl has, the better she behaves.”

  “I think our brave boys should have every comfort we can possibly give them!” Dear little Miss Grieve’s brother was a Territorial Major in the Great War, so she takes a proprietorial interest in the Army, and is our chief source of military gossip (often strongly reminiscent of the tales of 1914-18). As her voice, hair and manner are as prim as her little villa, I should never have expected her as an ally, and spoke up warmly in favour of Miss Henly’s scheme, with a sneaking hope that my presence would not often be required in the background. It does, of course, give me a chance of getting to know the younger girls of the place, who don’t often frequent our church or any other, and I fully realize that the clergy must do their utmost for the Army just now, but I am often so tired by the evening! But before I could be pinned down, Miss Boness spoke, her face one portentous question-mark.