Parson's Nine

by Noel Streatfeild

  “Lord! what a day!” Susanna grunted. “Seems a damn shame,” he went on, “to dedicate the War Memorial today. If they knew what a day it was, how they’d hate not to be here. I feel almost mean to be here myself. I’ve come out of it rather well. Uncle Dan being killed, and Uncle Peter dying of pneumonia, and Esdras gone, has given me just the job I wanted. My word! Susanna, I’m doing a lot with that place; I wish you’d come over and have a look some time, you wouldn’t know it.”

  “I will some time.”

  “Grandfather would like to see you, too.”

  “What’s the War Memorial like?” she enquired, to distract him.

  “Bloody awful. Hell of a great angel with enormous bosoms, balanced on one toe, holding out a branch of leaves; hasn’t a thing to recommend it, and ruins the green, but the village think it lovely. Old Esdras would have approved of it; it’s got three texts on it.”

  They walked on in silence. Susanna watched the breeze ruffle the buttercups, so that one moment the meadow was green and the next gold. She eyed Tobit’s wreath in embarrassment, and wondered if she ought to say something; he and Esdras had always been such friends, but the right words wouldn’t come. Tobit saw the direction of her eye, and guessed her thoughts. He gave his pansies a shake.

  “This is going on the angel, but it’s not exactly in memory of what people’ll think, it’s for my leg. You’ve no idea how I miss the old friend, and after all it ‘died of wounds’; it’s only fair it should be remembered. I haven’t made wreaths for Esdras or Sirach, they wouldn’t like ’em. Esdras, if he can see what’s going on, will get all the kick he wants out of the hymns and pocket handkerchiefs and general uproar; and if old Sirach could be asked, he’d just have his name scratched beside Samson’s on that cairn he put up on the hill.”

  “Yes,” Susanna agreed nervously. “Oh, dear, I do hope he won’t talk about Baruch,” she thought to herself.

  “Do you know, a text was the last thing Esdras wrote,” Tobit went on. “Wasn’t it like him? I got a postcard from him; it was found on him after he died.” He stopped, fumbled in his breast-pocket, and out of his notecase took a crumpled postcard. He handed it to Susanna, who read, written faintly on it in pencil: “And behold at eveningtide trouble; and before the morning he is not.”

  “What did he mean?”

  “He knew he’d be dead before I got it; it was his way of telling me. I heard afterwards he was alive for about ten minutes after he was hit and he was conscious all the time. That’s when he wrote it.”

  “What a strange thing to do.”

  Tobit chuckled as he put his postcard back in his notecase.

  “But awfully like Esdras. How he must have enjoyed writing it.”

  When they reached the village green, they found Catherine, Judith, Esther, Miss Crosby, and most of the village standing round the shrouded form of an angel wrapped in a Union Jack. Susanna had barely time to greet her family and take her place before David, the Bishop, and the choir appeared in procession from the church, and the fire-brigade band, borrowed for the occasion, burst into “O God, our help—”.

  Susanna, resentful at being there at all, took as little share in the service as she could. She refused to think of Esdras or Sirach, and tried to think only of the beauty of the day and how soon she would be able to get back to London. She tried to find the stout angel of peace funny, when the Bishop unveiled her, but couldn’t when she looked at the rest of the congregation: Mr. Sales—two of his sons had been killed; old Mrs. Honeysett—she’d lost her nephew; Mr. and Mrs. Pullen—their George’s name would be carved on the Memorial; and Mr. James, from the mill—his Bert’s name would be there; he’d died of wounds. Her attention was caught by the band, who were cautiously playing a tune that was new to them. It was new to the choir, too, though they had been practising it for some weeks, and so new to the congregation that they didn’t attempt it at all. Feeling that she might help, Susanna looked at her hymn-sheet.

  “O valiant Hearts, who to your glory came,

  Through dust of conflict and through battle-flame,

  Tranquil you lie, your knightly virtue proved,

  Your memory hallowed in the Land you loved.”

  Before she had time to realise what was happening, all the barriers she had carefully erected between her and the truth were down, and she was swept under by a great wave of bitterness as she faced Baruch’s end in all its futility. “Tranquil you lie, your knightly virtue proved.” “Knightly virtue proved.” She gritted her teeth. “Proved! Oh, God.” “Your memory hallowed in the Land you loved.” “Hallowed!”

  “All you had hoped for, all you had, you gave

  To save Mankind: yourselves you scorned to save.”

  She felt cold and furiously angry. “You poor fool,” she scolded herself. “You’ve known all this ever since it happened and very sensibly you’ve kept it decently at the back of your mind, and now, just because you hear a war hymn, you drag it all out and slobber over it.” But she was past hearing reason from the voice of her mind, and though she struggled not to listen, the words of the hymn, to their throbbing march accompaniment, beat their way into her brain. She gazed round wildly at the rest of the congregation, but there was no help for her there: her mother staring up white-faced at the larks overhead; old Pullen gazing with a puzzled frown at the obese angel, as if trying to understand what she had to do with his Georgie, with his unfulfilled dream of a fruit farm; the other fathers, mothers, wives, thinking proudly of their Toms, Henrys, and Freds.

  “O risen Lord, O Shepherd of our Dead,

  Whose Cross has brought them and whose Staff has led—

  In glorious hope their proud and sorrowing Land

  Commits her Children to Thy gracious hand.”

  With damp hands and a wildly beating heart, Susanna heard the Blessing, God save the King, The Last Post. “I can’t bear it,” she whispered to herself. “I can’t, I can’t,” and as the congregation began to disperse, she muttered something to Catherine about her suitcase, and fled back across the fields to the station as though the hounds of hell were at her heels.

  “I want to catch the next train to London,” she panted at old George as soon as she arrived.

  “Then fer why does yous run, Miss Susanna? You do know surely she don’t go for more’n half an ’our yet.”

  Susanna sat down on the bench on the platform and got back her breath. Old George pottered round her, busy labelling some crates of chickens, a faint scent of lilac drifted across the line.

  “Did you see Bishop do the Memorial?” asked old George, when he’d finished with his chickens

  “Yes.”

  “I heard you was comin’, and I thought maybe you was stoppin’.”

  “I was going to, but I find I can’t after all.”

  “Lunnon do make folks all of a rush an’ tear, never no time fer stoppin’ nowheres.”

  Susanna nodded.

  “Do you like the Memorial?”

  “Surely. I be one of them as choose she. Vicar he were all fer a plain cross, but Mr. Lamb ’e were agin that fer that young man as worked fer he were a Jew, and ’e were killed and Jews don’t ’old with crosses seemingly. Well that bein’ so we thought again and all the pichers of these Memorials was in a book, and lookin’ through I see’d our’n. ‘Now what be wrong with she?’ I ses. Well then they did all look, and they was all agreed, fer they knew the boys would have liked she, a fine upstandin’ woman. Vicar do say she be a blessed angel, but she’s a grand woman fer all that.”

  Susanna tore the unused sheet off a letter in her pocket and scribbled on it.

  “Find I must be back in London tonight. Writing. Susanna.” When the train came in, she gave it to old George. “Could you get that taken to mother?”

  “Surely, Miss Susanna, surely.”

  The whistle blew, the flag waved, the scent of th
e lilac faded.

  “I’ll never go back again,” said Susanna. “Never.”

  Arrived in London, she went to the flat, where she was greeted with undisguised gloom by the servants, and she rang up Beatrice, who made no effort to appear pleased at hearing her voice.

  “You! Good lord! I thought you were safely buried in the country for a week at least.”

  “Well, I suppose I can change my mind, can’t I? My word! I’m popular; first of all the servants look at me as though I were the cat’s dinner, and now you speak to me as though you’d got on to the wrong number. Sorry you’ve been trrr-oubled, but I want you to do something for me.”

  “What?”

  “Fix up something for tonight.”

  “What sort of something?”

  “Well, I don’t know who’s free, but we could eat and dance somewhere. I’ll pay. I don’t care what we do as long as we do something.”

  “Oh.” Beatrice thought quickly. She was fixed for the evening and didn’t especially want Susanna tacked on, but then neither did she want to annoy her Aunt Anne, which she might do if she left Susanna in an hour of need. “All right,” she said ungraciously. “Lucia and I and Freddy and Paul were being a four; get a man and you can come too.”

  “You ring up Paul or Freddy and tell them to bring somebody.”

  “Don’t you care who?”

  “Not a damn.”

  Having dealt with the extra man problem, Beatrice put a call through to her aunt’s cottage.

  “Do you know your baa-lamb has escaped back to town?”

  “I’d heard.”

  “She sounds in one of her more hectic moods. I’m taking her out with me tonight.”

  “Do keep your eye on her, Beaty. She must have been feeling pretty desperate to dash off like that.”

  “I’ll guard her till she’s safely in her virgin bed.”

  “Good. But do consider the morals of the local telephone lady who is probably listening-in.”

  The party of six started soberly enough with dinner at a small place in Soho, but from the beginning Susanna was in a hopeless mood, and by the time dinner was over she had drunk too much, and was becoming noisy, and since she wouldn’t be silenced, they agreed to her suggestion and all went to a music hall, where she grew noisier than ever and nearly got them thrown out by her shouts of mirthless laughter and loud criticisms of the turns. When the performance was over, the effect of her drinks was just beginning to wear off. The others suggested bed, a thought that terrified her. “No, no,” she exclaimed. “Bed! Why, the night’s a pup,” and pushed them all into a taxi, and ordered the man to drive to a small club of which they were mostly members. Once there, she settled down to whisky after whisky, growing wilder and sillier with each one she swallowed. She attempted to lay the ghost which haunted her by giving a vigorous and rather blasphemous account of the unveiling of the War Memorial. She started to sing “O Valiant Hearts,” but was stopped by Lucia.

  “Why did you go to the service?” she asked.

  “Because, darling, I’ve two brothers’ names on the thing.”

  All the party eyed her in silent, shocked amazement; even Susanna, drunk as she was, felt she’d said the wrong thing.

  “Oh, come on,” she exclaimed, jumping to her feet. “It’s bloody boring in this lousy hole; let’s go to someone’s flat.”

  In the end, after some argument, they went to Lucia’s. This time they didn’t go alone; three other taxi-loads of people came with them.

  “This is something like a night,” murmured Susanna contentedly, as they poured into the flat.

  Hours later, she found herself in a taxi with Beatrice. The effects of any drinks she had taken had long worn off Beatrice, and she was cold, tired, and bitterly angry.

  “Are you sufficiently sober to listen to me?”

  “Sober! I was fearfully sick about an hour ago, and when I came back with nothing left inside me, you devils had finished all the drinks.”

  “A damn good job you were sick.”

  “Don’t nag at me; you don’t know how ghastly I feel.”

  “I bet you do, and I’m not a bit sorry for you. You’ll kill yourself one day the way you go on, and how you can let yourself be mauled about like that in a roomful of people, beats me.”

  “Mauled about?”

  “Do you mean to say you don’t remember? Don’t you remember lying with Tony on that divan, and how we separated you, and then you vanished into the bedroom?”

  “With Tony?” Susanna looked disgusted. “That little worm!”

  “I suppose you enjoyed it at the time.”

  “I suppose so.” Susanna leaned back and shut her eyes. “Oh, Lord, how sick I feel!”

  “Well, open the window before you are.”

  Susanna woke up suddenly two hours later. Her head was steadier and she felt less sick, but her mouth was as dry as though it had been scrubbed with sandpaper, and tasted like the sweepings of a dirty floor. The sunlight was flickering through her curtains; she closed her eyes from it and from the torn, sordid heap of her clothes which lay on the floor. She didn’t think of the past night, and indeed remembered very little about it. Instead, yesterday’s service drifted back to her. “ ‘Your knightly virtue proved—All you had, you gave—Splendid you passed, the great surrender made—’ ” She tossed and turned. “Shut up, you fool,” she scolded herself, but in her semi-drunken, wholly hysterical state, she had no control over her mind. “Oh, Baruch, Baruch, why did you? Why?” Unable to bear her thoughts any longer, she went to the window to try the effect of some air. The street at this hour looked incredibly quiet and clean; nothing moved save a maid polishing some brass and a black cat busy with some private business. The pavements were golden with sunlight, and in a garden opposite a little laburnum tossed its yellow beauty at the staid red houses near it. The cat vanished round a corner, the maid finished her brass, and the street was empty. “ ‘Through dust of conflict.’ Oh, Baruch, if only I didn’t feel ashamed for you,” she whispered, and as her whisper faded, it seemed to her it was answered, not by anybody, but by the essence of the quiet street. “Ashamed? Why? Have you done any better?” She dropped the blind, startled, and got back into her bed; she didn’t lie down, but sat up hugging her knees, and deliberately thought back over last night, and many other nights, and as her memory cleared, a flood of crimson swept slowly over her cheeks and down her neck. She dropped her face in her hands.

  “Oh, God! what a slut I am!”

  She didn’t spare herself. Coldly and dispassionately she studied the person she had become in these last months. “And I was ashamed of Baruch,” she marvelled. Then she did a thing she had only done twice since his death: she took out the brown paper parcel of his books and photographs. Though it gave her an actual physical stab of pain, she forced herself to look at his face, then standing the photo on the table by her bed, she opened the first of the exercise books and began to read. The early ones, full of childish scribblings, she remembered, could remember the places where they had read them and the tones of his voice as they discussed them, but the later books were new and amazed her; he had written so much. It was all so alive, so pulsating with a passion for space, for physical freedom. She closed the last book with a sigh, and lay on her back thinking, then suddenly she sprang up. “I believe I could,” she exclaimed, “I believe I could.” Then eagerly she snatched up the photo. “Oh, Baruch, let’s finish your book together, you and I.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Having slept most of the day, Susanna came down at teatime none the worse for her night and in very good spirits. To her surprise she found Mrs. Cary in the drawing-room.

  “Good heavens! I thought you were away for a week.”

  “If I may say so without sounding an ungracious hostess, that’s exactly what I thought about you.”

  “Have I brought you
back?”

  “You have.” Mrs. Cary patted the chair next to her. “Come and sit here, darling, and you’d better light yourself a cigarette, for I’m going to risk our friendship with a little plain speaking.”

  Susanna lit a cigarette.

  “One moment,” she said, and put her dead match carefully on an ashtray. “If it’s about my loose living you’re too late.”

  Mrs. Cary looked at her in dismay.

  “What on earth do you mean?”

  “It’s all over. The rake’s reformed. I’ve been behaving like every sort of a fool, but it’ll never happen any more, at least not like that; you’ve been an angel to put up with me.”

  “Do you mean it?” Mrs. Cary’s eyes searched her face. “It’s really finished?”

  “Yes, wine, men, and song. I wouldn’t lie to you. As a matter of fact I’m loathing myself for it all now. I wish to heaven I’d never let any of it happen. I can’t think why I did; I haven’t liked it.”

  Mrs. Cary heaved a sigh of relief. Even without her words she would have seen that Susanna was feeling different by the mere fact that she was willing to sit and talk. Of late she had shied away wild-eyed from any consecutive conversation.

  “Well, I must say, I’m glad. I won’t ask you how you ‘Done got salvation,’ but it’s a great relief to my mind that you have. I was worried to death about you.”

  “Nobody will believe I have reformed except you. Leopards don’t usually change their spots in a night.”

  “Well, don’t fuss about your past now; it’s over. Most of us have sordid and silly things in our lives which we try and forget, and usually remember each time we have indigestion. But life’s odd; each of us has to work out her own salvation in her own way, and only people with no sufferings to bury criticise the interring methods of others. You’ve probably collected a startling reputation with un-understanding fools, which would cling to you if you took to good works from now to your death, even if you married the Archbishop of Canterbury. Always remember the opinion of those sort of tittle-tattling idiots doesn’t matter.”