Pilgrim's Inn

by Elizabeth Goudge

  Pilgrim’s Inn (eBook edition)

  Hendrickson Publishers Marketing, LLC

  P. O. Box 3473

  Peabody, Massachusetts 01961-3473

  ISBN 978-1-61970-142-7

  PILGRIM’S INN © 1948 by Elizabeth Goudge. Copyright renewed 1975 by Elizabeth Goudge.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Due to technical issues, this eBook may not contain all of the images or diagrams in the original print edition of the work. In addition, adapting the print edition to the eBook format may require some other layout and feature changes to be made.

  First eBook edition — April 2013

  Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  About the Author

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  For

  Veronica

  There’s rue for you; and here’s some for me; we may call it herb of grace o’ Sundays. O! you must wear your rue with a difference.

  Hamlet

  THE AUTHOR

  ELIZABETH GOUDGE, born at the turn of the 20th century in England, was a gifted writer whose own life is reflected in most of the stories she wrote. Her father was an Anglican rector who taught theological courses in various cathedral cities across the country, eventually accepting a Professorship of Divinity at Oxford. The many moves during her growing-up years provided settings and characters that she developed and described with great care and insight.

  Elizabeth’s maternal grandparents lived in the Channel Islands, and she loved her visits there. Eventually several of her novels were set in that charming locale. Her mother, a semi-invalid for much of her life, urged Elizabeth to attend The Art College for training as a teacher, and she appreciated the various crafts she learned. She said it gave her the ability to observe things in minute detail and stimulated her imagination.

  Elizabeth’s first writing attempts were three screenplays which were performed in London as a charity fund-raiser. She submitted them to a publisher who told her to go away and write a novel. “We are forever in his debt,” writes one of her biographers.

  CHAPTER

  1

  — 1 —

  The sun shining through the uncurtained east window woke Sally to a new day. It spread a long cloak of gold over her body as it lay upon the bed and the loving warmth reached through to the very soul of her; she woke up smiling, stirred a little, rubbed her knuckles childishly in her eyes, then stretched out her long body beneath the cloak of gold and lay still again, happy and completely unafraid. She always woke up happy, because she had been born happy and didn’t seem able to help it. And she was not afraid because nothing had yet happened to her to make her afraid, and in body, mind, and spirit she was equally healthy and well balanced and saw those things that hadn’t happened yet in their true proportions. But the thrill of tranquil happiness with which she awoke was followed always by a slight sensation of guilt. Other people were not born happy. Other people were afraid. Her immunity seemed very wrong and she was ashamed of it. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” she whispered now, and she spoke to all those people who hadn’t her transcendent luck. Her arms, lying stretched out beside her, moved a little. She would, if she could, have taken them all into her arms and rocked them as a mother her child. But it couldn’t be done, and knowing it couldn’t she suddenly abandoned herself to joy like a bird to the wind, leaped from bed, her tall body in its yellow pajamas like a sword of gold in the sun, flashed into the adjoining bathroom, banged the door, stripped, sprang into the bath, turned on the shower, and broke into loud uproarious song.

  Her father had gone away yesterday to spend a night at Winchester and then two nights at Bournemouth visiting Important Personages who wanted their portraits painted, and she was alone in the flat for two days. She wholeheartedly loved her father, but he was quite extraordinarily untidy, and she enjoyed a few days on her own getting the flat straight, for she had an innate love of order that made its production from chaos one of the chief joys of her existence. The fact that everything would become immediately disordered again upon his return did not worry her. She took things as they came and knew that everything must be paid for: her father’s presence by cigarette ash on the carpet, and order by possessing nothing of him but his old coat hanging behind the door. She would miss him today, but she would be gloriously tidy.

  And she liked being alone sometimes; one discovered things. And of course she wasn’t really alone, for Mrs. Rutherford in the flat above kept an eye on her, as she was reminded by a faint remonstrance of tapping on the floor overhead. She remembered suddenly that Mrs. Rutherford’s bedroom was just above and that she made a good deal of noise when she let herself go in the early mornings, switched her glorious contralto from “Gloria in Excelsis Deo” to a Negro spiritual, and turned off the shower.

  Back in her bedroom she remembered that Mr. Rutherford, this time, was just above, and suffered from headaches, and she tried to shut her drawers very quietly and not to fall over anything. For though she was orderly she was also a bit clumsy. She was twenty-one years old but she had not yet outgrown the coltlike stage. Like all only children she was in some ways too old for her age and in other ways too young; she still fell over material things as though she were fifteen, but immaterial things, such as friendships, the griefs of little children, the desires of men and the jealousies of women, she handled with an instinctive sensitiveness that a woman of thirty-five could not have bettered.

  There were those who thought Sally Adair beautiful and those who thought her the reverse. She was tall and straight, big-boned and muscular, and perhaps when she was forty she would have to take steps if she did not want to grow fat. But there was no danger of that yet. She played games hard whenever she got the chance, she was at her happiest on a horse or rowing a boat, and there was not a scrap of laziness in her. With her big bones, and her tendency to fall over things, she could hardly be called graceful, but yet she had a sort of grace born of her complete unself-consciousness and the perfect balance of her strong young body. She had a glorious mop of unruly red-brown curls, the white skin that goes with such hair, and golden eyes like a lion’s that looked you straight in the face with a lion’s courage. Her voice was deep and beautiful, and the Scotch nanny who had looked after her through her childhood had imparted to it a Scotch lilt that increased its beauty. But she had no beauty of feature. Her face was too broad across the cheekbones and her mouth was too large, though mercifully the teeth within it were small and white and even. Her nose turned up and had freckles on it. Though her hands were big they were beautifully shaped, with long fingers, but to her shame she wore an eight-and-a-half shoe.

  Those who did not think her beautiful had a clear case, but those who thought otherwise had more than the hair and the eyes to back their opinion, for there was in Sally an indefinable quality that affected them as the hearing of a perfect piece of music affected them, or the sight of a perfect picture. It was not a quality that could be analyzed, but her
father came closest to it when he said that in Sally there was no distortion. Neither heredity, environment, accident, nor disease had played any tricks with her. She came nearer to being what she had been meant to be than anyone he had known.

  Sally’s mother had died at her birth, but that had not been the tragedy it might have been, for the fatherhood of John Adair was the best thing in him, as fine a thing as the deep innate maternity of Sally herself, and any tendency to indulgence in him had been counteracted by the stern discipline of Janet Gillespie, the Scotch nanny who had stayed with Sally until she had been packed off to boarding school at the age of fourteen. At eighteen Sally had left school, and turning her back upon all tempting offers of privileged war work had unhesitatingly gone on the land, where she had worked cheerfully and uncomplainingly at all sorts of backbreaking tasks until her extraordinary gift for handling living creatures had been discovered, when she had become a shepherdess in the Cumberland hills. Sally at the lambing season had been Sally in her element. Motherless lambs brought up on the bottle by her had not known that they were motherless.

  Sally, discharged, had been offered by her father Oxford, the Slade Art School, and the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, anything she liked to mention, but insisting that she had no more intellect than one of her own sheep she had installed herself in his flat as companion-housekeeper, to the infinite delight and contentment of the two of them. For Sally maligned herself when she said that she had no intellect. It was true that at school she had never passed any examination by anything except the skin of her teeth, but when it came to the business of living she was a clever woman. She liked everyone she met, and she enjoyed everything she did so intensely that her relationships and her activities were touched with that spark of light that men call genius. She was not an artist in the accepted sense of the word, but when she cooked a meal or tidied a room she was yet unmistakably her father’s daughter. A room arranged by Sally, a meal she had cooked, were as unforgettable as her father’s pictures. Imaginative, deft touches here and there were like the glimmer of light on water that without it would have been opaque and dull.

  An upbringing by a stern Presbyterian Scotswoman and by a father who had been middle-aged when she was born, a sojourn at school for four years only, and then a complete concentration upon lambs, had made of Sally a curiously individual person, neither of her father’s generation nor her own, and so in some ways a little lonely. She did not speak the idiom of her own contemporaries, or share their disillusionments. She had worked hard in the war, but she had not suffered other than vicariously. In the presence of young men who had faced death day after day, night after night, for years, and of girls who had worked in the war hospitals and known the meaning of human agony, she was ashamed. The men sensed her shame and loved her for it, and they loved, too, the ignorance of which she was ashamed; it rested them. But the girls misjudged her humility, her unself-consciousness, her rather devastating truthfulness; it was a pose, they thought. And so her closest friends in her own generation were men rather than girls. . . . And for this, again, the girls disliked her. . . . But none of the men were very close friends, for her shame made her withdraw inwardly a little.

  In appearance, as well as in speech and manner, Sally was individual. A dusting of powder over her distressing freckles was her only concession to make-up, her father having impressed upon her very forcibly that a mouth the size of hers did not require the emphasis of lipstick. She gave her copper curls a hard brushing every day and washed them every week, but that was all she did about them. Most of her clothes she made herself, and though she was enough her father’s daughter to make her sense of color and line unerring, their simplicity was childlike. She seldom wore jewels, and when she did they were her mother’s old-fashioned ones that lived in the old cedar-wood box in her bottom drawer. Her fastidiousness was such that it had in itself almost the quality of a dual garment; body and spirit she clothed herself in it. Yet there was nothing aloof about it. She did not mind what dirty work she did if the result was likely to be a patch of cleanliness.

  — 2 —

  Dressed in a clean green overall, with her hair brushed to flame, and singing snatches of a hymn tune alternately with snatches of the latest musical comedy, Sally moved about her shining kitchen getting her breakfast. The spring sun glinting on the fittings of her electric stove, lighting up the scarlet geraniums on the window sill, made her utterly happy. The smell of the coffee made her feel happy too, and the smell of toast. She laid her breakfast tray daintily, and sat down to the kitchen table to eat and to review the coming day. After breakfast Mrs. Smith would come, and they would start the housework, and then, while Mrs. Smith was having her eleven o’clock cup of tea, she would go to the greengrocer’s and perhaps she would meet the five children there and talk to them. They were usually there about eleven on holidays, buying lettuce for their mother, and sometimes they brought their mother’s Pekinese with them. She loved the children and she loved their Pekinese, and she wished they were hers. And then she would come back and finish the housework, have lunch, go for a walk by the river, and watch the sun on the water and hear the sea gulls crying. After that she would come home and read a while, then put on her new frock and go to Jan Carruthers’ cocktail party. That would be fun. Parties were always fun. And then she would come home and bake some cakes, and after supper she would listen to the radio and go on with the sweater she was knitting for her father, then go upstairs and help Mrs. Rutherford with her patchwork quilt for a while before saying good night to her. She hoped that not too many people would come in to see her, thinking she was lonely. She was never lonely.

  The morning worked out according to plan. Leaving Mrs. Smith to wield the broom in the rest of the flat, Sally tackled her father’s studio. Their Chelsea flat was a lovely luxurious place, the home of a rich and famous man who loved beauty. To Sally’s mind it was a bit too full of Things, but then it was not John Adair who had given to Sally her love of order, simplicity, and space. Providing everything he ate out of, trod on, or sat on was a thing of beauty, he did not mind how jumbled up they were. His studio was so jumbled up that Mrs. Smith, when first required by him to clean it up a bit, but not on any account to move anything, had been taken with the palpitations and gone home. So now Sally dealt with it. It took her a good two hours, but clumsy though she was she had never yet smashed anything, and had never yet failed to restore everything she moved to the exact place where it had been before. She passed through the studio like light, making new without commotion, her long fingers touching bottles and tubes, canvases, palettes, and rags with the reverence of a sacristan at work in a holy place.

  She did indeed reverence her father’s art. Fame and the perfecting of his technique had not dimmed his discernment. In every beautiful woman, in every famous man who came to him, he could still see and portray what Sally called the patient angel. For a long time she had been at a loss as to how to describe the invisible presence that in some miraculous way her father’s genius could present to one’s consciousness as one’s eyes looked upon the visible form. Then one day she had found a battered old volume of Sonnets from the Portuguese fallen down behind a bookshelf, opened it at random, and found the words she wanted leaping up at her from the page.

  Because thou hast the power and own’st the grace

  To look through and behind this mask of me,

  (Against which years have beat thus blenchingly

  With their rains), and behold my soul’s true face,

  The dim and weary witness of life’s race,—

  Because thou hast the faith and love to see,

  Through that same soul’s distracting lethargy,

  The patient angel waiting for a place

  In the new heavens. . . .

  Angel seemed the right word. Yet now and then, very occasionally, Sally had seen something in a portrait that had made her turn cold with horror. . . . It was as though the angel
had two faces, and only one of them of light.

  She never questioned her father about his work. Aware of her abysmal ignorance she was afraid to hurt him by clumsy misunderstanding. But she thought she knew how it was that consciously or unconsciously he came to see the patient angel. He was not content merely to observe his sitters in the studio; whenever he could he strolled unobtrusively into their lives and watched them entertaining, being entertained, working, eating, reading, perhaps even sleeping. They were for the most part unaware of his scrutiny, for his entrances and exits were very cleverly contrived. There was a big portfolio in the studio full of lightning sketches that he had made, sometimes upon a scrap of paper, sometimes upon the back of a menu or a concert program, the subjects for the most part the men and women whose portraits he was painting, but quite often just some stranger’s face that had caught his fancy. They were so nakedly revealing that the first time she had opened the portfolio Sally had immediately shut it up again, as one shuts the door of a private room opened inadvertently. Then, longing to look again, she had gone to her father and asked his permission.

  “Certainly,” he had replied, his clever ugly face creased with delight at the honesty of this young daughter of his. “There is nothing in the studio that you may not examine to your heart’s content . . . provided you leave everything exactly as it was before.” And so now, when she had finished cleaning the studio, she always rewarded herself by sitting down with the portfolio and looking at the latest sketches.

  There were quite a batch of them today, and she chuckled with delight at the audacity and insight of the hasty scribbles. But there was one that was not so hasty, and at sight of it Sally had the oddest feeling, as though someone had given her a violent shove in the back that made the world turn upside down for a moment. It was larger than usual, and had evidently been drawn at leisure. At the bottom of the sheet of paper John Adair had scribbled “D.E. at Rehearsal.” Evidently he had sat unobserved in the auditorium of a theater or concert hall and drawn this man as he worked upon the stage. Sally put the other sketches back in the portfolio, and taking just this one, went to the window seat and sat down there, laying it on her lap and studying it intently. She had never seen this face before, she was quite certain, and yet she knew it and would always know it. If she were to meet this man twenty years hence in the street she would know him. It was ridiculous but it was true.