Bewildering Cares

by Peck,Winifred

  These reflections, and the Archdeacon’s face as he saw nothing but one small ration of bacon (cold boiled, this week) and three eggs of doubtful quality, led me to a rather indiscreet criticism of the hours and nature of Anglican services.

  The Archdeacon naturally dislikes criticism as much as he dislikes having his desk tidied; it disturbs his scheme of things.

  “I can’t help thinking”, I said, “that some changes might be made. I imagine that the times were planned for an agricultural population which usually rose at five o’clock and felt eight o’clock a dissipatedly late hour of the morning. And those people who spent all their week-days in the fields must have revelled in a nice stuffy church on Sunday, whereas nowadays men and women who are shut up in stuffy factories and offices all week naturally want to spend their mornings in the open air. It’s their only chance.”

  “Sundays”, said the Archdeacon, giving up his egg and I didn’t blame him, “should surely be a day of self-denial and spiritual exercise rather than a day of enjoyment.”

  “Oh, that sounds much more like a Jewish Sabbath,” I protested. “Surely in the Medieval Church Sunday was a happy, jolly holiday with people dancing on the village green, though I must say the weather must have been very different then!”

  “My wife is a critical rather than a constructive thinker, I’m afraid,” said Arthur, carving the bread, for my toast had not been a success. “We never seem to agree on the ideal hours for church attendance.”

  “Well, to begin with,” asked the Archdeacon, “where is the sacrifice of getting up a little early one day in the week?”

  “The one day a knocker-up or siren doesn’t wake you,” I protested. “Arthur’s mother used to say that the weak part of the English Church was that it wedded the Catholic Friday to the Puritan Sundays but the one great relic of the Puritan Sabbath is the conviction that you should lie in bed as late as you want to.”

  “Those young people seem to be up early enough,” said the Archdeacon, austerely, as the sound of bicycle bells came in at the window. “These cycle clubs are early enough on the way! What is to prevent them from attending church before they start?”

  “They’ve got to get breakfast,” said Arthur, temperately, “and then my boys and girls tell me their dress isn’t suitable.”

  “I should think not,” said the Archdeacon, horrified, as a row of girls in dark shorts and long purple legs passed by, ringing their bells violently.

  “Some of them were at the seven o’clock service,” Arthur pointed out, “and I’ve an arrangement with Stead at Harley that they should be welcomed there if they get as far—it’s a good stopping place for the moors, and after the service his verger’s wife provides cups of tea for them very reasonably.”

  “Very good, very good,” said the Archdeacon, “but I fear they probably feel absolved from any necessity to attend Matins. No, no, I cannot condone with the break-up of the dear old English Sunday, when whole families attended church at eleven o’clock together and found their happiness in their homes.”

  I just managed not to murmur, “Did they?” sceptically, while Arthur pointed out that many of them attended Evensong after all, as very few of the wealthier in the congregation do, and that nothing gave him more pleasure than to see whole armies of cyclists and hikers strolling in to see over our great churches and cathedrals, as they do every Bank Holiday.

  “I know you do a wonderful work amongst the factory people,” said the Archdeacon, sinking into an arm-chair at my request, and feeling for his pipe and becoming suddenly kind and human. “And it may be that there is something to be said for the nine or ten o’clock Choral Celebration so many of you younger men hold in your parishes; but one is so afraid that they may be a loophole for non-fasting Communions!”

  He looked tired, and I was so ashamed about the breakfast that I held my tongue about my opinions on this point. They are entirely out of date, and ruled only by expediency; but it is so frequently the lot of a parson’s wife to help a fainting girl out of Early Service and escort her on the way home, to the loss of her own devotions, that we may be forgiven if we feel that whoever first insisted on Fasting Communions—and I believe there is some doubt on the point—had some limitations as regards common sense. I always remember finding dear Dick, who was confirmed fairly young and evinced a curious combination of real childish faith and charming naturalness, in fits of laughter over a holy book sent to him by an aunt. “Look at this bit about not swallowing tooth-water by accident, he said. Don’t you think it must make God laugh?”

  When I tried to explain the beautiful conception of reaching the King’s Court in reverence—and it was easier to feel in those days of a comfortable household—Dick involved me in a long hypothetical discussion of the probable hours of meals, and wanted to know if it would matter about the tooth-water if you swallowed it going to bed at one minute past twelve. Now I know that all I wish is that far, far more might meet at that service where Divine Love comes to the heart of each individual, and that it doesn’t matter to me much how they have been employed domestically beforehand. But this, as I say, is only the view of one parson’s wife, who thinks not only of those comfortably in the Anglican fold, but of all those young people outside who do want to find some religion but would think advice of that sort so strange as to be grotesque.

  Anyhow I held my tongue and didn’t shock the Archdeacon, until, as he and Arthur culpably refused to go off to the study, I really had to begin to clear the breakfast things. Then the dear little man was almost beside himself with contrition and leapt up to help me, though it was all I could do not to laugh as he pranced majestically round the room carrying an egg-cup and asking, “Now to what department do I remove this?” He refused to be appeased, even when at last Mrs. Sime rang the back-door bell and came up to the pantry to wash up. Later on, I laughed helplessly when I found, from the extraordinary condition of the bedclothes, that the kind man had obviously set about making his own bed. But the worst of it is that now Mrs. Pratt will discover that I had let Kate out yet again! No country woman with a reservoir of village girls to draw on can ever understand how weakly we cherish anything like a passable maid in a manufacturing town where they hardly exist. Arthur, dear innocent, had never realized the absence of Kate at all, and he was so overcome with penitence that I found him in the kitchen later, flinging coals on to the stove with the zeal and extravagance of a stoker, with Mrs. Sime in the background.

  “I know I have read”, he said, “in American stories, that it is the duty of the husband to look after the stove, the sacred warmth of the hearth!”

  “Come, come, what about the Vestal Virgins?” I asked, while Mrs. Sime stared in speechless stupefaction.

  “And that reminds me,” said Arthur, putting down the scuttle. “What is this about Lily, Mrs. Sime? I do trust this new step meets with your approval, and that she is really determined to make a fresh start.”

  If Alf Byng were one of Arthur’s friends, I am sure my husband would risk the undying hostility of the Simes by urging Alf against the step he contemplates. But Alf has been a stranger for so long, and our relief to have the immediate scandal of Lil removed is so great, that I imagine Arthur, after some very straight talk, will allow her first love to right the wrong, and to put up the banns. “For she’s his wife, if anyone’s, in Gawd’s eyes,” Mrs. Sime hastened to point out as I left the kitchen, hoping that Arthur’s return to his professional duties would save any further inroads on our coal-cellar. When I next met him in the hall, he was still so conscience-stricken that he urged me to go and lie down at once, but by this time I was dressed for church, and the Archdeacon was ready with his bag.

  I had an inward struggle as to whether I should tell him that a pyjama-string was hanging out or not, but I was so thankful that he was catching a bus home, instead of returning to lunch, and he had been so kind all morning, that I felt I could not bear to convict him of any lapses from decorum or method.

  There was quite a good con
gregation, I was glad to see, either to hear the Archdeacon’s sermon, or to join in prayer for Mr. Strang. Dr. Boness had rung up while I was below stairs to give a guardedly hopeful report, and as Mrs. Weekes was not in her pew I knew that Mrs. Strang was in good hands. Mr. Weekes was pacing the aisle with the stealthy tread of a first-class churchwarden and no hint of a suggestion that he had even thought of seceding to the Old Church; Colonel Greenley and Mr. Chubb were each settled in their pews. My thoughts turned to Miss Croft, who was walking up the aisle with a beaming face, and I realized with surprise that instead of the severest Fugue of Bach, in which I should have expected Mr. Elgin to express his joy, we were being treated to a positively treacly bit of Mendelssohn, with the vox humana calling out the melody.

  “My favourite tune,” whispered Miss Croft, as I made way for her to share my seat to-day. “Peregrine is playing his favourite as a voluntary at the close!”

  My shock of surprise at the name, which our organist has hitherto guarded as a secret, was so great that I forgot all about the last voluntary, though Arthur assures me it was a quite cheerful gavotte of Bach’s. Certainly the two elderly lovers had solved the problem of give and take, I thought, as I disentangled a floating wisp of Miss Croft’s hand-woven black and white scarf from my umbrella-handle. Her happy face, looking ten years younger, and a note of gaiety which kept creeping into Mr. Elgin’s accompaniment to the versicles, warmed my heart all through the service. It is extraordinary how even a commonplace love-affair touches and renews our hearts as we grow older.

  “Yonder a maid and her wight

  Come whispering by;

  War’s annals will cloud into night

  Ere their story die!”

  You couldn’t exactly call Peregrine’s beloved a lass, but nevertheless they were making the protest which all lovers make, against the drabness and death of the world, to prove that hope and joy do spring up eternally. I expect I should have included myself among the green things which I was calling upon to bless the Lord, but folly is often more inspiring than wisdom.

  But I am bound to say that my happy thoughts about the union of divine and profane love in some unimaginable eternity faded during the sermon. I had meant to have a quiet doze so that I might only remember the kind little Archdeacon pacing about, puzzled with the egg-cup, but to-day, when I needed it so badly, sleep would not come. From the moment that the clear precise little voice rapped out the text, “These ought ye to have done and not to have left the other undone”, I felt wide-awake with irritation.

  What use is it, I asked myself, to scold the people who are in church already for not coming to church? What does the preacher understand about the life of an ordinary working man or woman? (And it’s no use to quote that horrid verse of George Herbert’s, for I’m sure Mrs. Herbert never wielded a broom in her life.)

  The Archdeacon talked to us about the sacred rest of a Sabbath spent in God’s House. To-morrow morning he can come down as late as he likes to a pleasant breakfast, and half of his work will be done in a warm, spacious study; when he goes off to his appointments it will probably be in a comfortable car. I admit that most of this respectable Sunday morning congregation have leisure in the week, or don’t look upon Sunday morning as the one day when they can get out of this dark little town into the air among their fellow men and trees and flowers. But what sort of message is this for the world outside, and why that reiterated talk of going to church and coming to church? On Good Friday and sometimes on Sunday evenings in summer, Arthur and his choir process with the Cross round our mean little streets, and the sinners and publicans who lounge at the corners stop shamefacedly to listen. Don’t we need much more of this, of the Cross in the world, than perpetual requests to walk inside into pitch-pine pews? Here I rebuked myself, remembering my Quiet Day, for presumption, and counted ten and tried to listen again.

  The Archdeacon had reached the seasons of Church now, and was-asking how we had kept Lent? Had we been consistent in self-denial in food and amusement and, still more important, given more time to prayer and Bible-reading and church sermons? At this indeed I hung my head. My only preoccupation this Lent has been to make rations go as far as possible, and get good nourishing food into Arthur while I distracted his attention by my conversation enough for him to eat what was before him without question. “Lent,” said a Presbyterian minister to me once, “was originally instituted to curb the Bacchic tendencies of a Mediterranean spring.” Well, certainly as far as amusement goes, Arthur and I have had no temptation to go Bacchic in Stampfield, but I suppose my invariable custom of falling into an arm-chair over a novel, when I see a clear half-hour before me, is what the Archdeacon would call amusement. I have perforce done my fair share of Lenten Services, though with little attention, I fear, but with regard to reading! “You will find this Saint John intensely interesting dear,” Arthur said on Ash Wednesday, and so no doubt I would have, if I had ever got beyond the third page. There was one long sentence in that which brought me up again and again, and most unluckily a little shelf of Jane Austen is always so temptingly at hand. I have a sad feeling that The Daisy Chain is really the most uplifting book I have got through in bed, and even in that I have always skipped the frequent and harrowing death-beds. “If this is your last Lent on earth,” the Archdeacon suggested, “what account can you give of it?” Sleep was just creeping over me as I pictured myself retailing to an angel with the quick, reproving countenance of Archdeacon Pratt, how very difficult I found Morning Prayers when I tried to get odd jobs done first, “like dusting the drawing-room, you know”, when I woke with a jerk to find that the Archdeacon was looking forward in the Church’s year. Easter, he said, would soon be upon us, but was that a reason for relaxing our Lenten efforts? Should we not carry on our habits of self-denial and self-discipline into all the rest of the Church’s year? This, I admit, does not seem to affect me very much after the sad result of my self-examination. I could resolve to follow up The Daisy Chain with The Heir of Redclyffe, of course, and buy rather more fish, as meat certainly will be awkward. But apart from my personal shortcomings, I always feel outraged with this appeal which I have heard in one form or another every Lent of my life. The listener must surely have a sense of having been lured into good behaviour on false pretences. It always makes me think of wise little Henry Fairchild who refused to learn the first declension in Latin because he foresaw that he would then eventually have to learn the whole of the book. Anyway, I think the Archdeacon must have mistaken the sermon, when he got one out of his drawer, as we are only about half-way through Lent now, and he went on to pander to our local self-consequence by suggesting that life nowadays was uncertain indeed, and who knew on what evening we might not hear the words: “Thou fool, this night shall thy soul be required of thee,”—which I could only interpret as an air-raid alarm. Do people only come to church to be offered their choice between sudden death and Lent for life, I wondered; because if so, you cannot blame the outside world for calling us joyless!

  Then I rebuked myself all over again, as the Archdeacon came to a close and I decided to stay on in church for the Litany as a corrective for my critical thoughts.

  It is only since the War that Arthur has read the Litany at this time. There is a pause before the sermon so that people can come in then, omitting Matins, and another after the sermon so that anyone can go out. (“Daddy’s the most winning kind of jailer,” says Dick. “He’s always offering you chances of escape!”) It is only in war-time, and said rather than chanted, that the Litany, I think, really comes into its own. In my childhood I was told to look upon all the petitions as requests for delivery from our spiritual enemies, but only the saints could possibly feel such urgency against the sins of sloth and greed and selfishness. To me it seems to bear the marks of a real and tangible enemy at the gates, especially in those agonized petitions near the close which you only appreciate properly when you are tired of droning out “We beseech Thees” to a dismal chant. I suppose critics say that it is instinct
with a belief in a tribal god; but not many of us perhaps are our most sensible and superior selves in war-time.

  “O God, arise, help us and deliver us for Thy Name’s sake. O God, we have heard with our ears, and our fathers have declared to us, the noble works Thou didst in their day and the old time before them!”

  “O Lord, arise, help us and deliver us for thine honour.”

  All those last petitions seem to me to unite us with all who have prayed in the past, and with the certainty that, at bottom, however weak or wandering we are, we pray to a God in Whom we do believe. It took me far away from our little parish of Stampfield and Mr. Strang’s pacifism, and our local quarrels and gossip and the Archdeacon’s family Sundays, to the long line of the desperate confessors and martyrs in every age who have faced despair and defeat, as we must face him at times, confident that we are, after all, at the foot of

  “The great world’s altar stairs

  That slope through darkness up to God.”

  X

  Sunday Afternoon

  I was very hungry for lunch.

  As Kate was away, Arthur and I had it in the kitchen. Kate has, luckily, a passion for white-washing, and as the paint is good it is really as cheerful as a basement kitchen can be, and Arthur and I feel particularly Darby and Joan as we face each other down here. I know some people would think it dreadful, but I think it dreadful to have a kitchen which isn’t nice enough to eat in yourself. And it does save so much carrying and fetching, a special consideration, as darling Arthur, with all his broad- and absent-mindedness, has one odd conservative instinct. He is quite inevitably puzzled and depressed if he does not have roast beef and fruit tart in the middle of the day on Sunday. “The last vestige of Puritanism,” I tell him even as I humour him, and indeed I cannot feel it a suitable prelude for the Catechism, which he takes in church afterwards, or for the Bible Class which I hold in our dining-room.