Sister Age

by M. F. K. Fisher

  I was glad for the look of relaxation in my friend’s smooth old face—by now I could freely call her friend. At last, she had accepted me, perhaps for one of the rare times in her life, as a loyal and affectionate admirer, in spite of my lack of ancestral permanency.

  “Madame is originally from Ireland,” she would say defensively when I was the only American among her world-exhausted friends. “Her culture is obviously inherited.”

  I forgave her. She had accepted me for myself, in spite of any such protests. At last, with this adamant old woman, I was me-Mary-Frances.

  The day before my last departure, we lunched together in a beautiful old converted château. She told me with laughing cynicism how it had been declared a Historical Monument in order to reduce the taxes, and refurbished by a retired chef and his rich wife in order to profit by the armies of hungry tourists who wanted real French cooking in the proper Crane-fixtured setting. Meanwhile, we ate slowly and delightedly, and drank with appreciative moderation, and savored the reward of our relationship.

  She took my arm as we walked down the long stairway of the château-restaurant, and when she next wrote to me, in far California, she began, “Dear and faithful friend.”

  The Lost,

  Strayed, Stolen

  The few people who did not like Mr. and Mrs. Beddoes laughed, perhaps jealously, at their ambience of golden wedding, their greeting-card happiness. Even friends teased a little, half irked by the feeling that, in spite of the Beddoeses’ hospitality and warmth, all they really needed was themselves. “What is your secret?” friends would ask. “Tell us how you managed to stand it all these years!” But the Beddoeses would smile the secret smile of any long marriage and close the door gently, just as they had been doing ever since he made the trip to England, soon after the depression.

  At first, on board ship, Mr. Beddoes felt upset to be without his wife for the first time in his married life. Then he remembered Perry MacLaren, a tall Scot whom he had met ten years before on this very same ship. They had exchanged speakeasy addresses and had suddenly felt like brothers—as happens occasionally, both on and off ships. Since then, there had been a few disappointing notes, formal and forced. But impulsively Beddoes sent MacLaren a cable, and now there was a wire waiting at his hotel in London: “DELIGHTED CAN PROMISE YOU INTERESTING WEEKEND MEET YOU CARLISLE FRIDAY AFTERNOON.”

  As Beddoes unpacked his bags, he was stirred by an almost skittish thrill. Before he knew it, he had broken two appointments with representatives of his firm and one date with a lovely Swedish woman from the boat and was stepping in a rumpled, excited state onto the grey platform at Carlisle. “Mac, old boy!” he shouted heartily.

  “Beddoes, you … you son of a gun!”

  The two men stood in a sweat of embarrassment, each listening to his own attempt to make the other feel easy—and then everything was all right and MacLaren picked up the suitcase, smiling, and Beddoes said, “My God! Excuse me, Mac, but I forgot you were a minister—a priest, I mean. Or do I mean a padre?”

  “No, not padre. It’s quite all right. Come along, Beddoes. I’ve got a neat little buggy since I last wrote—a real beauty.”

  Beddoes tucked himself into the tight tiny car that stood near the station, and wondered if his legs would go to sleep. They headed into disjointed traffic and then were in the country, and he felt fine, as if time had not come between the two of them.

  MacLaren looked sideways at him, sharply. “You mustn’t bother about the clericals, will you? These collars are really quite comfortable, you know. Sometimes they help in crowds. And there are other things that are good, too.”

  “Sure,” said Beddoes. “Sure. Fine.”

  They headed north. The sun slanted over increasing hills, with great rocks and sweeps of high meadowland—moors, Beddoes reminded himself pleasurably. Mac drove hard, with a gleeful look on his bony red face. They stopped at a tavern and drank some bitter ale and ate an awful snack of cold canned American beans from the bar, and then tooled ahead as if they were pursued. It grew dark. Their talk was spotty and meaningless through the speed until the minister said, “Beddoes, I don’t plan to take you home to Askhaven tonight. Of course we could make it, and Sally hopes we will. But I’ve a job to do. I thought perhaps you’d not mind helping me.”

  Beddoes clucked and murmured. “Sure thing,” he said. He felt comfortable, spiritually if not physically, and his cramped legs and buzzing bones only heightened an inner coziness. He liked Mac, and the thought of being useful to him. He liked the almost sensual way Mac drove the silly little roadster.

  “You see,” Mac said, “I told some people—a very nice simple woman, as a matter of fact—that I’d come to help her. And since she’s on our way home from Carlisle and I was meeting you …”

  The country grew mountainous. Beddoes swayed sleepily with the skillfully violent cornering of his driver, and was half aware of bare steppes and sudden shouting streams and long heady straight stretches where Mac let out the little car like a demon. Then they pulled up before a dimly lighted inn. “The Queen’s Head,” it said in a small box with a light in it, the black paint cracking off and blurring the letters.

  “Here we are, then.” Mac’s voice sounded falsely hearty, like an echo in a cave. “That’s the village, over there.”

  Beddoes looked into blackness, and then hopefully back at the dour tavern sign. He untwined his prickling legs. He felt tired and vaguely peevish, and yet there stirred in his mind a strange excitement: he, son of the wide Midwestern prairies, stood at last in the heart of an English village, on a green. “God, it’s wonderful to be an American—to have this heritage, to come back to it,” he told himself solemnly.

  Mac walked toward the black closed door, and slapped at it. The peremptory sound echoed across the darkness and settled thinly down. Somewhere a toad croaked. Mac pounded again. “Mrs. Protheroe,” he said. His voice was sharp but low, almost secretive. “Mrs. Protheroe, are you there?” His voice was still low but now deeply urgent.

  Then the door clanked open and warm light poured out, and Beddoes, who had begun to feel uncomfortable, blinked and staggered into it, with bags in either hand.

  “Here, sir. Let me help you.” A short woman with dark eyes took the bags. He followed her up a flight of narrow stone steps harshly lighted, to a small bedroom. The woman poured water into a basin, and left him.

  He sat for a minute on the side of his bed. He was dog tired. His hands dropped between his legs, and his lips felt as if they were made of feathers. Mac is quite a driver, he thought wryly. There was a banging on his door. He jumped up, and then laughed at his nervousness as he recognized MacLaren’s quiet, full voice calling him to open. Soon, washed and slicked, Beddoes felt better—strong and in an odd way excited.

  The two men went down the stairs, which seemed friendly now, and into a small parlor. There was a fire burning in the tiny grate. It caught with gold the corners of the fussy antimacassared chairs and the ugly piano and the round table laid with silver and plates. A lamp on a chain hung over the table.

  “My God, Mac, it’s like a fairy tale! You can’t possibly know what this means to me.” He saw MacLaren looking at him remotely, and he stopped, choked by a thousand conditioned reactions, from Christmas cards and history in school to his own mother’s saccharine reminiscences of her “trip through the Lake Country.” He wanted to tell Mac what England meant to a middle-class, sentimental, moderately sensitive American salesman. Instead, he gulped awkwardly, feeling young and naïve before the minister’s tired friendliness, and said, “Well, Mac, I’m certainly glad to be here!”

  “So am I, Beddoes, glad you’re here. It’s been too long. I asked Mrs. Protheroe—Ah! Here she is!”

  Before he knew it, Beddoes had slipped back in his chair under the delightful impact of a double Scotch and was watching Mrs. Protheroe’s black shadow come and go in the lamplight, and then was tucking into two chops and some crisp pickles and pretty plum tart with cheese. He felt like
a million dollars. Almost at once, it seemed, he was in bed, and comfortably, to his mild surprise. He had meant to talk with Mac—what about Chamberlain, and this business of Hitler or whatever his name was, and L’Entente Cordiale, and …

  Then Mac was sitting on the edge of his bed, with a candle. It seemed quite natural.

  “What’s up?” Beddoes asked.

  Outside in the dark of the village green, the toad honked and gargled. Mac sat for a minute. His eyes were shadowed, but Beddoes felt the trouble in them. His head was clear as a bell. Nothing like good liquor, he thought.

  “Beddoes, I need your help.” Mac’s voice did not sound solemn, but at the same time it was not light. He looked down at the candle in his hand, which flared and sputtered in the window’s draft and lighted the bony solidity of his good Scottish face. “I meant to tell you before—Mrs. Protheroe wrote me to come. She’s had to close the Queen’s Head, and she needs my help.”

  As Mac talked quietly, his friend thought of the silent dark-eyed woman who had unlocked the inn door for them and led them to their rooms and served them.

  “… and I knew that as a man of God it was my duty. And you, Beddoes …” Perry MacLaren hesitated, and looked full into the other’s eyes. He sighed sharply. “Your coming was an answer to my prayer. I need you—your good, honest, unspoiled soul—for company. Come along.” The candle flickered as he stood up.

  Beddoes, confused but keenly awake, pushed his legs into his trousers, feeling almost virtuously sane and sensible.

  They walked in their stocking feet down a cold, silent corridor. It seemed longer than Beddoes remembered—or were they going into another part of the inn? He was bewildered. He put his hand on MacLaren’s strong thin shoulder and felt comforted and indirectly hilarious, as if he were a character in a French comedy in a dream. The candle lit numbers on dark, heavy-looking doors. The corridor turned, and grew even colder.

  “Here we are,” Mac muttered. “It’s this one.”

  As they stood for a moment while the candle wax formed slowly into a burred tongue over his fingers, MacLaren turned irrevocably into a priest. Beddoes, facing him before the closed door in the guttering light, knew probably for the first time in his life that he was in the company of a vessel of the Lord. He felt overwhelmed, not with shyness as at the railroad station but with an inchoate terrible respect, as before a great stone or a sudden inexplicable light.

  “Yes, this is the door,” the priest muttered again. He stared calmly at Beddoes. “Are you ready? You can help me, perhaps. We can try.” He turned the handle of the door.

  The bed in the room was like something in a movie—tall, with a flat tent top, and curtains half pulled around its high mattress. Queer, but even in the candlelight, steady now though feeble in the cold, still air, the curtains were pure blue, with silver threads woven here and there through their stiff folds. MacLaren set the candle on a table and stood at the foot of the bed. His face was long and dreadful. He raised his hand.

  Beddoes’ heart seemed to flop like a trout against his ribs, and his breath moved cautiously over his dry lips.

  “Thomas and Martha Gilfillan!” The priest spoke earnestly, entreating someone named or something unnamed to listen to him.

  Beddoes’ eyes saw more and more clearly: the fluted lines of the panelling and of the chimney, and the soft impenetrable blueness of the bed curtains; his old friend, straight and thin, standing with head bent into his hands; the bedspread, dimly white; and at last he saw the things beneath the bedspread. There in the blue-hung bed lay two people. Or were they dead bodies? Or were they shadows? They made sharp mounds, surely, under the coverlet. The lengths of their thighs, the sharp peaks of their feet and pelvic bones pushed up the cloth and shifted in the candlelight. But over their two still skulls it did not move.

  Beddoes put out his hand again, like a child, for his friend’s shoulder, but MacLaren stood away from him, tall and stern. His hands hung now at his sides. His head dropped like a ripe fig from the stem of his spine. “Remember not, Lord, our iniquities,” he prayed, “nor the iniquities of our forefathers … neither take thou vengeance …”

  Beddoes looked wildly at the ridges and mounds and hollows under the counterpane and then at the emerging shell of the room. There was an electric clock on the wall. He could see it, round and plain as a piepan, and it said twelve-twenty and then whirred tinnily, so that he wondered why he had not heard it before. It made him feel almost real again.

  “… and be not angry with us forever,” MacLaren went on, and then answered himself, “Spare us, good Lord. Let us pray!”

  Beddoes kneeled, peering up into the well of light around the candle on the table. He watched MacLaren now with trust and a kind of hypnotized belief, and thought, This isn’t the Burial Service. For prisoners, is it? Or dead murderers? “Christ, have mercy upon us,” he heard himself responding.

  The two men prayed there by the bed, as unselfconscious as savages, and after they had said the Lord’s Prayer, MacLaren went on in his flat, sombre voice through all the Visitation of Prisoners and the mighty words for those under sentence of death, and Beddoes sweated beside him, knowing that he was wrestling with the Devil. The electric clock whirred occasionally, and outside on the black village green the old toad croaked. “O Saviour of the World, save us and help us.”

  Beddoes held his hands before his face now, and his eyes were shut, but still he saw like fire on fire the outlines of the two ghosts beneath the coverlet. They lay there, finite and evil, resisting him and MacLaren and all the words of God. “No!” he cried out. He could stand no more.

  The priest stopped his supplication. He seemed not to be breathing. “Save us and help us!” he cried toward the dreadful bed. “Save us and help us!”

  The electric clock whirred. The toad belched again in the weeds outside. Sweat started from the men’s armpits and foreheads and spines. And from the bed rose such a wave of hatred, such foul resistance, that they backed away, Beddoes still kneeling, until they touched the stone of the hearth.

  Hurriedly, MacLaren raised Beddoes to his feet. “I have failed,” he said softly. With his left hand he pulled the American after him. His right he raised high, and his voice shouted out, stern, flat, awesome, “In the name of the Father … and of the Son …” From the bed rose a horrible feeling—like a stench, like a shriek. But the bony shapes still lay under the coverlet. The curtains were unruffled. The clock whirred. “… and of the Holy Ghost.”

  Beddoes never knew how he found his way back to his room. The priest followed him blindly, his hand on Beddoes’ shoulder, and then lay on Beddoes’ narrow bed. His face looked like a death mask. Beddoes covered him with an ugly, lump-filled quilt, and went to the washstand and stood for a long time in the dark, listening to the priest’s exhausted breathing, forgetting England and his friend and even himself in the abysmal realization that some souls are lost souls.

  The next morning, Beddoes felt bright as a dime, although he had spent the remnant of the night sitting in various agonized positions on a prickly black horsehair chair. Mac had lain like a snoring corpse on the narrow bed, and only once did Beddoes feel any of the earlier horror, when his friend’s raucous breathing suddenly beat in his sleepless ears with the same whirring as the clock. He straightened in the discomfort of the armchair and pulled his topcoat sensibly over his knees.

  Now, as the little car roared out through the dim, dawn-bound village, the struggle of the night seemed misty. He made himself forget it. He listened to the engine with fresh ears, and smelled the brightening air delightedly. “That was a good breakfast!” he shouted, grinning.

  Mac laughed and drove faster. “You’re right there, old boy. Mrs. Protheroe—poor woman, I failed her. She knew my father, you know. She’d never let us creep out, as I wished, without waking her.”

  The silent woman with tear-reddened eyes had lighted the lamp in the sitting room and blown on the warm coals and set before them such a breakfast as Beddoes had never
had. Tea, and a round fat loaf of country bread with a great knife stuck in it, and butter in a pat! And bacon as thick and lean as ham. They ate, and as the fire mounted and Mac’s face took on its usual ruddiness and his eyes looked less pained, Beddoes felt exhilaration creep like smoke or some strong wine into all his intimate corners. “That little lady admires you, all right,” he said now, his belt snug and his mind serene. “You say she knew your father? Was he a—that is, have you followed in his footsteps?”

  Perry MacLaren let out a good yell of laughter, tightened one arm on the steering wheel to bang Beddoes roughly on the back with his other, and said, “Old boy, you’re wonderful! Sally will love you. Yes, by damn, she will!” He laughed again, and the little car swerved upward merrily into the mist. As the sun touched the hills with a thin light, bluish and pure, snippets of fog caught on the occasional oaks in the glens, and on the bushes, and then, like music or perfume, disappeared. Once, a lark sang, startlingly near and clear above the impertinent racketing of the car. And then suddenly they went through a kind of gorge and Mac stopped the car. “Askhaven,” he said.

  Below them, in a narrow valley, lay a village so much like all the things that meant “village” in Beddoes’ somewhat muddled Anglophilic mind that he almost shouted. The wee houses, rosy brick and tile, straggled along a grassy street, and smoke rose from their doll-like chimneys, and there was a tiny church with a steeple, and there was a green in front of it, with a fountain and a cross—and then, miraculous and perfect, in the still air rose the jewelled, dream-familiar notes of a hunting horn. Beddoes drew in his breath sharply. “God, Mac,” he said softly. “It’s—it’s England!”

  “Yes, yes, it’s a decent little spot. Bad drains, of course.”

  Mac started the car, resolutely British, and Beddoes felt silly. Then, as they coasted down into the valley and the houses became sturdy reality, he peered keenly about him. He saw children and old people at the windows, and once a woman flapped her apron in the doorway to scare away three pecking hens. There were early-summer flowers everywhere. The church door was open. They were off the street now, and wheeling into a lane behind the small buttressed chancel of the church. Then Mac stopped violently, sprang out of the car, and ran up the path toward a small ugly house, his face young and dazzling with love. “Sally!” he called.