“Do put him to bed and take his temperature, Mrs. Strang,” I urged. “It was so wet last night, he should have got home quickly.”
“There was a good deal of horse-play, and I mislaid the key,” said Mr. Strang between his shivers, and I made haste to say good-bye and get away, promising to ring up the doctor for Mrs. Strang at once, as she escorted me to the door.
“He looks so ill,” she said, with frightened eyes, “and I really know nothing about nursing, Mrs. Lacely.”
By great good luck I met Dr. Boness on my way home, as one may often seek for him in vain in these busy days, and he agreed with me that it might be a good plan to ask the District Nurse to look in.
“You know what happened, of course?” he asked. “Tell it not in Gath, but two of the big lads who are waiting to be called up got hold of some story that he’d preached against the Army in church. There was a rowdy gathering, and the little brutes locked poor Strang into the hall at the end of the evening and went off with the key. I got all this from my gardener this morning. He heard his boy and another laughing over it when they got home, and he walked them back to let Strang out. He says he’s going to report ’em to your husband, though he doesn’t hold with that Strang all the same. Well, well, I’ll have every opportunity to give the poor fellow cooling draughts now, anyway. How’s my friend Dick?”
“Very well, thanks. But you know,” I couldn’t help adding, “what seems to me so pathetic about the whole business is that I can’t help feeling this is the first sermon which ever attracted any attention in Stampfield!”
“True, O King!” said Dr. Boness, who combines his sister’s love for clichés with her indefatigable devotion to duty, and drove off at once to the curate’s little house. I rushed off to the shops with my string bag, gave Arthur the news about Mr. Strang, rang up Colonel Greenley and got a grumpy promise about the Convalescent Home, did the other odd jobs I’d undertaken yesterday with the Food Control and the Post Office, and arrived, a little out of breath, at the one meeting before me this morning, that of the Parochial Guild Committee in the church hall at 11.30.
The Parochial Guild was instituted in the dear old days by our predecessor, with the object of bringing the congregation together socially in friendly meetings, and encouraging the laity to work in the; parish. It is, I think, an excellent institution for drawing lonely strangers into a circle of friends, and awakening a sense of responsibility for the Church among the laity. Arthur and John Hay did their best to encourage it and make it a self-governing body, and though the difficulties of the black-out, and the dispersal of many of our members, have curtailed its activities, we are hoping that it will do something in the summer. As a result of the Guild meetings, Mr. Elgin and Miss Croft started a Musical Club; there is a Hiking Club for young people; members with cars undertake to drive the elderly or invalids to church services, and it is extraordinary how popular this form of vicarious churchgoing proves to be. The members used to organize all the various choir and club outings, and took a lot of work off the shoulders of the clergy and their wives. Sometimes it seems almost as strange to think that distant continental crimes and aspirations should crush out such little institutions, as that youth should march away from us in uniforms. The Guild seems so remote from, so innocent of, the whole world tragedy, yet already the loss of John Hay and his many young friends in this town has meant that this committee, too, has fallen into the hands of old hacks, like Miss Boness and myself. As energy and enthusiasm will probably be wanting, the Guild itself will lose its old character. I have persuaded Miss Henly to take an interest in it, but of course she cannot get off on morning committees. Miss Croft and Mr. Elgin will struggle to preserve the Musical Society. For the rest, there in the parish hall sat Miss Boness, Miss Cookes and Miss Grieve. Not Mrs. Weekes, I was relieved to see, as I feared she might wish to probe me about Dick’s friendship with Ida. Mr. Strang naturally could not attend, and dear Miss Croft, who has enthusiasm and energy enough to make anything a success if only she were a little less eccentric and muddle-headed, was of course away at the cousin’s funeral.
I was glad to realize, from the expressions on the faces of the committee, that the Strang affair had already been discussed pretty thoroughly before my appearance. “And I say it serves him right,” Miss Grieve was saying with the ferocity which sits so strangely on her gentle pussy face, while Miss Cookes, in a blue dress with a slightly soiled Armenian lace collar, was shaking her head.
“But, as Livingstone said,” she was beginning, when Miss Boness interrupted her.
“Youth will be served,” she enunciated drastically, as they all turned to me. “Ah, welcome wanderer at last! We hoped you would come soon, as we were all saying we must look in at the Mid-day Service to-day. Now that clouds hang so heavy about the parish, all of us are ready to rally round the dear Vicar with a cheer!”
“But not in church,” I protested evasively. “I’m so sorry if I’m late, but we haven’t much to arrange this month, have we? There’s the Guild Service in Holy Week, of course, but the first Guild Meeting isn’t till Easter week, is it? As everything is so unsettled, my husband feels we can hardly suggest any definite spring programme before then.”
“I do not see”, broke in Miss Cookes, “why Mr. Strang’s views should interfere with our activities!” Miss Cookes has always suspected Mr. Strang of having no interest in missionary work as compared with British social questions, and her long-simmering hostility was on the surface to-day.
“No, no, I meant the War,” I hastened to explain.
“Or Hitler,” persisted Miss Grieve.
Miss Boness, as chairman, rapped the table violently, and we all became a committee at once. I was asked to say a prayer, with the usual disastrous result that I began on one Collect and ended with another, well as I know them all, in a discreet mumble, and we hastened through the minutes of the last meeting, and signed the accounts, with the importance and severity of a Cabinet meeting at least. It is only when we study the agenda on these occasions that femininity intervenes again.
The Easter Meeting is a gala occasion, followed by tea, and in a minute we were all discussing the attitudes of our grocers to the sugar question, listening respectfully to and, in Miss Boness’s case, writing down, a receipt for apricot and pineapple jam made with glucose. The question of Ceylon tea involved an interesting account of the adventures of Miss Grieve’s nephew’s wife’s friend on her voyage to India, and it was a quarter to one before we had done with the best way of spreading marge for sandwiches. At this moment, Miss Grieve remembered that Miss Henly had written to suggest that the Guild should make use of her new canteen for that one evening, a labour-saving device which we all hailed so warmly that no-one was rude enough to comment on the time we had wasted in planning a tea-party. “Now about our spring programme,” said Miss Boness. “I wonder if Mrs. Strang would perhaps help us to organize a little Study Circle? You’ve heard, I suppose, Mrs. Lacely, all about this unfortunate affair at the Boys’ Club?”
“Yes, indeed,” I said, as repressively as I dared. “I think if we have any Study Circle, Miss Henly should organize it, though, don’t you? She has such knowledge and experience.”
“I suppose he won’t preach as his leg is broken,” was Miss Croft’s only reply.
“But it’s not!” I said. “Why, I saw him just before I came here.”
There was a little chorus of “And is he?”—“And will he?” which made me feel rather desperate, so I asked Miss Grieve what she thought of the news from Finland. As Miss Grieve has a brother who intended once to go to Helsinki, though an attack of influenza unluckily detained him in Oslo, the minutes passed quickly, until Miss Boness seized the opportunity of a sneeze from Miss Grieve to ask eagerly, “Then will he preach to-day?”
“Oh, no. He has a very bad chill, I fear. I left your brother on his way to the house.”
“Dear, dear,” said Miss Boness. “Under-feeding, you may be sure. My Helen tells me that their butcher�
�s bill …”
“Well, we’ll all have small butcher’s bills when rationing comes in,” I said, flinging down this red herring, if you can call meat a red herring, hopefully.
“Do you approve of Pacifism, Mrs. Lacely?” demanded Miss Grieve, scattering that hope to the winds. All the rest of the committee bent forward earnestly in their chairs, and I realized that the thing which was exciting the parish even more than Mr. Strang’s gauntlet was the way in which my husband intended to handle that tiresome, mischievous glove.
“There are so many sides to every question, aren’t there?” was the best I could do, in a truly Arthurian manner. “I read”, I added with a sudden inspiration, “such an interesting book called Europe Must Unite. The motto of the New League is to be, In necessariis unitas, in dubiis, libertas, in omnibus caritas. I suppose that charity is the most important of all.” (Long, long ago I discovered the value of any quotation in any foreign language in a stormy debate. While people are translating, or not translating it, to themselves, one can change the subject, and I tried to do so rapidly in the little pause.) “We can’t really settle any more without Mrs. Weekes, can we? She is so good and helpful.”
“I suppose you know they are inquiring about sittings in the parish church?” Miss Boness’s voice implied that she might not understand Latin, or might not get anything out of me about my husband’s views, but could deal me a good straight blow if she felt I needed it.
“That would be very sad,” I answered, politely. Really, of course, it would be almost the end of every parochial charity and institution, for Mr. Weekes is one of the very few and the only generous wealthy member of our congregation. “But I think we should wait till it really happens, and now I am going to run across to church.”
I always tell Arthur that I suffer far more for him than he does for himself. When I saw how full the church was, and felt to my finger-tips the attitude of expectancy and criticism my heart ached for my husband, and I longed to rise up suddenly and tell them all how I hated them for mistrusting and criticizing him, as well as his firebrand of a curate, over the burning question of the day. Could they not understand how Arthur must preserve his loyalty to a colleague in public, even if he reproved his curate in private? I hid desperately behind my pillar, only looking out again and again to mark the back views of Mr. Weekes, Colonel Greenley, Mr. Chubb and all our lady workers. Oh yes, they were all there! And they had all come hoping to hear Arthur disown Mr. Strang and pacifism and labour views in no measured terms, and well I knew they would hear nothing of the kind.
They did not. My dearest Arthur, with the most lively sympathy told us that he knew how worried we had always been by the translation in the vulgate of the Graeco-Aramaic phrase Και γαρ ουν, (or words to that effect). It would be his task this morning to try to make things a little clearer for us all.
On such occasions I always feel that the Church has not lost all its influence over the laity. Almost everyone in the congregation must have wanted to get up and go away, as Arthur traced the source of worry back to Q., and urged us to consider the apocalyptic literature of the close of the first century. Did those who knew my husband perhaps realize, I wondered, as I did, that this was no evasion of Arthur’s, no cowardly way of escape from controversy? Arthur, I could be sure, had looked over his address with the idea of exchanging it for some remarks on the epic of the day, and then had become so much interested in his theological point that he had forgotten all about Mr. Strang. Or hadn’t he? For he was now saying, “But that brings me to another point which must be occupying all your thoughts this morning—”
Everyone sat up, and I felt hot and cold shivers running up and down my spine, and then I was conscious, for a moment, of a great and absurd relief. It was the gallant struggle of Finland against Russia that Arthur was speaking of, with all his heart in his voice. And once more I felt hot and cold with shame to think how our petty parochial difficulties had absorbed me this morning, and so many of us. Nero at least, I told myself, made music while Rome was burning, while we are out making discords at our pump while Vipori is in flames. How right of Arthur to ignore it all—or was he not perhaps ignoring it all in his conclusion. … “The literature of the childhood of our nation circled round the story of the little hero, Jack, in his struggle against the giants of this world. To-day we watch that conflict in Europe, and our hearts are all on the side of the little hero against the giant cowardly bully. But let us remember that any majority is likely to unite in any of its opinions as an unwieldy, stupid giant, and that we may not always recognize the small hero, the common man, who ventures to tilt against our giant prejudices and ignorance. The moral of Jack’s tale is not only to admire the hero who stands up against overwhelming odds. It is also for us to have a care that we do not present ourselves as giants of self-sufficiency against those who raise their voices to decry what they consider to be abuses. Every stump orator on an orange-box is, in some sense, a follower of the great little national hero, and if we are still to value chivalry and freedom of speech, we must let him have his say instead of feeling for the dub at our belt.”
My thoughts wandered as Arthur finished up with a return to his original theme, and we all stood up to sing for God’s forgiveness on foes who are backward driven (so much easier to achieve than for those who are still advancing), and we all knelt down to pray. It was ominous, I felt, that he and I made our way back to the Vicarage so easily, when as a rule so many people stop us for a chat. Miss Harris, our District Nurse, alone pursued me and caught my arm.
“Do go into Number 3, Queen’s Court, this afternoon if you can,” she said. “We’ve had to arrange to have poor old Granny Hodge moved away to the Infirmary to-morrow. Yes, she’s taken a turn for the worse, as this sclerosis often does, and she can’t move herself any more, and the others aren’t up to looking after her and moving her.”
Nurse Harris is a fairy-tale Jack, pushing about briskly on her bicycle in her campaign against the giants of Dirt and Disease. It would be impossible to tell what our little homes owe to women like her, and their ceaseless, cheery efficiency. She is kindheartedness itself, and I knew she would never have Granny Hodge moved from her little room in our Almshouses unless it were absolutely necessary. For if the ten old women who live in its precincts enjoy harmless quarrels among themselves when all is well, they are solid as an army against any intruder like Death or the hated summons to the Infirmary.
“Is she minding dreadfully?” I asked.
“Yes, and she wanted to see you. She said, ‘Her’s one as’ll understand. Her’s another as likes to be left alone.’”
“Oh dear! Poor Mrs. Hodge and Finland and shepherd’s pie!” I said when at last we sat down to lunch at two o’clock.
“Small troubles are a great help in war-time,” suggested Arthur. “They fill the foreground of one’s mind, and enable one to keep a sense of perspective. Let us grumble cheerfully over Kate’s failure and forget the rest!”
“But I read somewhere that Napoleon lost the battle of Leipzig because he ate greasy sole the day before,” I protested, trying to be as sensible as Arthur. Living in war-time is rather like skirting the edge of a bottomless pit. The least slip over some tiny obstacle may make one lose one’s footing and sink into the black gulf of despair awaiting you. “Suppose this pie makes you unable to cope with the Strang affair?”
“I’ve no coping to do till I go to the Hardy Committee after tea. I suppose I may hear some more complaints there, but the whole thing must die down very soon,” said Arthur, so convincedly that I forbore to repeat the gossip at the meeting. Anyhow, the telephone bell rang, and I found Mrs. Pratt asking, in her rich full contralto, if she might come in to tea this afternoon. As Kate will be overjoyed to find that there is a reason for using her best room this afternoon, and as I really like Mrs. Pratt, I was very glad to consent, though I must confess I should have enjoyed a peaceful solitary tea over a new library book better still. Sometimes I feel that Trappist monasteries w
eren’t really founded in any excess of asceticism, but just to fulfil a felt need, a place where the naturally silent might escape from the born talkers. The Church of England is no home for the former class. Scattered through the length and breadth of our unhappy country are those who are quite convinced that the world can be saved by lectures and meetings, discussions and re-unions. To satisfy their lust for speech there must always be an army of patient, silent listeners, seated perpetually in hard rows of chairs enduring the incessant hose-pipe of earnest addresses and talks and sermons. Mrs. Pratt means well, but she is a talker, “and didn’t the Greeks”, I asked Arthur, as I returned with really good, strong, hot coffee to the dining-room, “say that their best women shouldn’t talk?”
“Not to be talked about,” amended Arthur. “But Saint Paul suggested we should be silent and mind our own business, you remember.”
“Then I’ll go and do mine,” I said, as I finished my coffee and felt better.
V
Wednesday Afternoon
Queen’s Court is one of the few surviving beauty-spots in Stampfield. The little almshouses were built in the reign of Queen Anne by a Sir Humphrey Queyne, whose name and family disappeared when the industrial revolution blackened and ruined the countryside. Stampfield spread its tentacles out over the green fields to the village of Queyne and engulfed the Old Ladies’ Home and the park of its benefactor. Sir Humphrey’s house was pulled down half a century ago, so only his generous benefaction has kept his name alive.
“Only the actions of the just
Smell sweet and blossom in the dust,”
said Miss Croft to me once, sentimentally, but as a matter of fact Queen’s Court is so badly in need of a new sanitary system that one can only take this in a metaphorical sense.
I don’t think that the want of modern conveniences troubles the ten old ladies who live in their demure little red brick houses round a pleasant court-yard. After all, as they are mostly round about eighty years of age, they are no worse off than they were in their youth for what Miss Grieve primly calls, “toilet luxuries”. Their comfort is far more dependent on the warden, who occupies the gate-house, rent free, and receives a salary of two pounds a week for looking after the inmates. The post is one which is eagerly sought after when it falls vacant. All the families in England, one might imagine, says Arthur, look on it as a heaven-sent opening for their decrepit and disagreeable relatives. But the Cousin Janes and Aunt Evelyns who competed so vigorously for the post seldom stayed very long. Either the quarrels and sicknesses of the old women, or the rather invidious position of being half in, yet half in charge of, the almshouse was too much for them, and they always aroused the most bitter opposition by petty rules and interference. Arthur was largely instrumental, I think, in getting quite a different type of woman at the last vacancy. Mrs. Hill is a good, kind, honest widow of their own sort, and instead of brooding over the little jealousies and troubles which must arise, laughs heartily and tells them it will be all the same a hundred years hence. I don’t know why this is so soothing in the case of those who haven’t more than a tenth of that time to live at the most, but I have seen her administer this form of spiritual consolation with the best result. Should Arthur, I wondered, as I turned in at the little wicket-gate, have used that as the text of his sermon this morning? Would it be my best panacea for the War, I wonder, and murmur:
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