Bewildering Cares Page 2
I began writing this after waking up on Monday morning with a Presentiment.
This, I admit, was often the case while I had my two Treasures, and I attributed it to the diet of cold beef and colder blancmange which they looked upon as the orthodox Sunday supper. Since they went Kate, of course, takes every Sunday afternoon off, and I cook a cosy supper myself for Arthur, so that cause for superstitious fears is removed. It was surely enough to reflect that it was a wet morning, the first Monday in Lent and the Washing. Still I felt unreasonably anxious as I took the letters out of the post-box. However, there was nothing for me but one from my old friend, Lucy Day, who may perhaps be tactless but cannot be tragic.
“It’s such ages since I heard from you,” she wrote, “but I came across Clover Field the other day, and we were talking about you, and how sad it was that you and I had drifted apart,” (Lucy has drifted to a charming little place on the Cornish coast, and we have drifted, or, I should say, been called to Stampfield.) “Do write and tell me all your news, not just outer happenings but about the inner you, the YOU that is YOURSELF.” (Has Lucy been reading Queen Victoria’s letters, I wonder?) “It’s always hard to imagine you a parson’s wife, and I long to know what you really think about our dear funny old Church. You used to write such amusing letters. Do sit down and give me a picture of yourself and of your daily life. Clover and I wonder what you look like. She’s shockingly stout and rather raddled-looking. I must say I do find myself veering to seats with their backs to the light, don’t you? But, thank Heaven, I’ve kept my figure and most of my hair. Is yours curly still, and have you bleached it? Clover and I remember that you had good bones (chin-line, etc., I mean), and I do trust you use Elizabeth Forest’s preparations—the only hope at our age. Now do write and answer all my questions …”
As Lucy went on to reflections on the War, which she finds very dull and tiresome, and inquiries about Dick, I put her letter away and got to work. Every morning I “do” the study, sacred to Arthur, while Kate bounces about the dining-room, leaving a good deal of dust, though never failing to switch every picture crooked. Having run the carpet-sweeper safely round the holes in the faded Turkey carpet (a relic from Arthur’s old rectory home) and dusted the furniture, I turned to the mantelpiece. It is surmounted by a walnut-framed mirror (also inherited from the Rectory), and, peeping over the black marble clock (presented by last Parish), the photographs of Arthur’s parents and of college friends he can hardly remember, I took a good look at my reflection, with special reference to Lucy’s queries. I should like to assure her that I have no need to bleach my hair yet, and have kept my figure; but truth compels me to acknowledge that the words “scraggy” and “grizzled” are those which leap to my mind. I shall reply candidly that my hair is still curly, most fortunately, and that no Forest preparations would make any difference to the lines on my face. But I won’t add that Dick considers “cos”, as he calls cosmetics, repulsive in any woman over fifty! I was just peering over a china cat creeping out of a vase (an early present of Dick’s) to wonder what, if any, good bones I possessed, when I found Kate at the door, and dropped some sixteen Notices (mostly of past date) out of the side of the overmantel in confusion.
“Shall I do the bacon now?” Since the War began, and my other maid went away, I have tackled the cooking myself, to prevent waste, and though I am now, really, far more efficient than Kate, she still looks upon my activities as rather a joke, and tries to forestall me. “And I got the stock-pot on already—there’s some good bones from yesterday!”
That the best use for my good bones would be to make good nourishing soup seems the only conclusion I can draw from this coincidence. My dear old mother-in-law once summed up the case for the traditional, and too often accurate, representation of a parson’s wife as a tired, plain, dowdy little lady, by saying: “Remember, my dear, what a congregation likes is that one should look as if one had seen better days!” And here and now I wish to make my protest on behalf of the dress of my sex, age and profession. Every woman knows that to be well-dressed you must either have plenty of money, and place yourself in the hands of experts; or plenty of time, in which your own skill and taste can achieve the same result; or, failing these, a cast-iron resolution to buy little and buy it really good. The last is what many of us in the Church aim at. We save for months or years so as to order a really good tailor-made coat and skirt (our badge of office), and then at the last moment, some heart-rending appeal from Chinese Lepers or Indian Blind or African Hospitals or Country Holidays arrives to cut our hearts. We send off a cheque to the good cause, and assure ourselves that a cheap ready-made will look as well and last as long. Of course the answer is that it doesn’t. Personally I am lucky just now, as I hardened my heart and got some really good tweeds for Dick’s last School Sports, so that the middle of me, at any rate, comes up to my mother-in-law’s standard, and looks as if I had seen Better Days.
Arthur came in to interrupt these useless reflections, looking so thin and pale, and so disappointed to find no letter from Dick, that I had to read him Lucy’s letter at breakfast to make him laugh.
“And as I am trying to do without a library subscription in Lent,” I said, “and there are no evening meetings owing to this blessed black-out, I shall just write down for her what the life of a parson’s wife is like. Just one week to show her how everything happens and nothing happens!”
“And it will keep you from thinking,” agreed Arthur, and then we were both silent. For, like everyone else in Europe, we have lived for these last two years as people who know a thunderstorm is coming, and now the storm is raging all the time, though the lightning has not struck Dick nor ruined our cities yet, and the only thing to do is to turn away from the windows at odd moments and try to forget, as best you may, if you wish to keep your reason.
“And by the end of it”, I said, dragging myself away from that window again, “I may have discovered the answer to that old problem, whether the clergy should have wives or not.”
It is part of Arthur’s charm that he makes a sympathetic answer to fatuous remarks like that. Although, he added, he doubted if Lucy would really be interested in a treatise on the celibacy of the clergy.
“Oh no! One must take the clergy and Church of England as they are, a compromise like the British Constitution! Now I won’t say another word, for you’ve eaten enough to earn your newspaper!” (Yes, I have been a bully since the War, and have persuaded Arthur to eat something always before he faces the news.)
“But I only hope nothing will happen this week,” he added, as he settled down with his pipe in the arm-chair. “I gather from something Weekes said, when he passed me outside the church just now, that there is going to be some trouble over Strang’s sermon last night. I wish I’d been there instead of at the Mission. What was he talking about?”
Mr. Strang is our Curate. He only came when our dear John Hay was called up with his battalion and left us. We are doing our best to like Mr. Strang and his wife just as much, though I confess I should find it easier if he didn’t speak of the church as “the Chuch”, and wasn’t such a firebrand about Pacifism and almost every other “ism”. As I cast my mind back to last afternoon’s service (we have to have Evensong at five because of the lights) I was horrified to realize that I could remember nothing but that I thought Mr. Strang looked very ill with a horrible cold, that his text, “Can these dry bones live?” had special reference to the non-attendance at the parochial guild—and a peculiarly vivid dream which supervened immediately, in which Dick was teaching Mr. Strang an eightsome reel to the tune of “Onward Christian Soldiers”, while Arthur and I watched them from a boat, in which we had gone out to look for submarines. I only hope I did not really call, “There!” as I woke with a jerk behind my pillar. Anyhow, the sound would have been drowned as everyone was standing up. I foresaw at once that this sad failure of mine, both as a Christian and a detective, might prove very awkward if there was going to be any fuss over Mr. Strang’s tiresome e
ffort at oratory. It will be a storm in a tea-cup, of course, but then we happen to live in a tea-cup! Stampfield (pop. 60,000: Market-day Thursday) would not recognize itself as that, and only those who have lived in a northern county-town can realize how self-sufficient such a unit can be. Geographically it is quite a fair comparison, for the old town lay in a hollow, and from the market-square, with its Georgian Church and big portico, trams and motor-buses strike out through narrow, winding little streets up the hills in every direction. Our parish embraces several streets of “period” back-to-back Victorian slums, a brewery, three rubber factories, and a fringe of large residential villas in small, well-manicured gardens on the outskirts. Our aristocracy consists of the owners of the factories and businesses, and a small professional class, who are opposed bitterly in the town council by the Labour Party, supported by the Non-conformists and most of the operatives. The County, consisting mostly of impoverished hunting people, means very little to us, and London even less, though we have a slight respect for Manchester. In short, Balzac would feel at home with us, and the Montagues and Capulets would pass, in municipal elections, as kind, friendly old couples.
Mr. and Mrs. Weekes are undoubtedly the leaders of this aristocracy for us, for he is our churchwarden, and secretary of the parish benevolent fund, and she is self-appointed warden-in-chief of all our committees and charities, and it would be useless to try to describe our lives without giving them a ceremonious introduction.
“Pa Weekes”, says Dick, “always reminds me of a grumpy, kind-hearted walrus, and Ma Weekes of a rather arrogant cod-fish,” and I can see the justice of both descriptions. For they are both stout and inclined to baldness, but there the resemblance ends. For Mr. Weekes atones for want of hair on the top by a drooping white moustache, and Mrs. Weekes by a vast erection of white curls from the Manchester hairdresser, known rather unfortunately as “my coiffurze”; and while Mr. Weekes long ago bade good-bye to the carpet slippers (which live under the coalscuttle in his “den”) Mrs. Weekes entrusts her figure to the sort of corsetiere who only allows any exuberance above the waist in front, and below it at the back, lo that her ankles and small feet seem little less likely to support her weight than a fish-tail.
I believe walruses are fundamentally amiable creatures and so, we well know, is Mr. Weekes if he is taken in that tortuous way described as “right”. He has worked his way up from the smallest beginnings to the ownership of the big rubber factory, of which he is the kindest and most generous master. He has therefore a proper sense of the value of money, and would look at a stranger very coldly if he tried to borrow half-a-crown or interest him in an investment; but if he once trusts anyone, as he does trust Arthur, his generosity is wonderful. I can’t say boundless, as he has very definite political views and disapproves of most of the social legislation of the last thirty years as molly-coddling. Sometimes we feel that such people are the real obstacle to social progress, for he is convinced that anyone with thrift and initiative can succeed as he has done, and the thought of free milk or meals for school-children, and even workmen’s compensation or housing-schemes, drives him to fury. At the same time, given an Agag-approach, he is kind-hearted to the point of sentimentality over any individual misfortune, or any charity which his wife urges him to rescue from want of funds.
His Church views were adopted for life at the Sunday School of his youth, and his ignorance of Church affairs and theology is so great that Arthur always says he could preach the Immaculate Conception to him without a protest, in a black gown, whereas the introduction of the Cross into Arthur’s processions with the choir round our streets on Sunday evenings in summer proved indeed a stumbling-block. “It’s not that I mind a Cross as such, mark you,” he said, “but I call it the thin edge of the wedge.” I am afraid I choked slightly over this novel view of the Symbol of our Redemption, but luckily he only asked if “the wife felt that window”. Nothing in the training of the clergy helps them to make contact with this type of mind, so alien to our universities, and I think, if I may humbly say so, that diplomacy rather than sacerdotalism is greatly to be desired. On this occasion, Arthur said so warmly that he would rather sacrifice his own wish to remind our less Christian streets of the great sign of Christianity than offend so true a Churchman as his Vicar’s Warden, that Mr. Weekes hummed and hawed, and eventually presented a new Cross to the church. There must be points of conscience always where the clergy cannot yield, but on all others I do believe in compromise. The mind of a Weekes moves slowly and, in the lightning reforms of the last fifty years, too many of such old, suspicious, true-hearted people have been alienated, and when they lost the habit of church-going their children lost it too. “Just for a handful of ribbons they left us”, is the obituary of too many honest, narrow-minded, invaluable laymen in the Church of England.
Mrs. Weekes is a less complex character. Beneath her fat, faintly supercilious exterior lies, I am sure, a vast inferiority complex. She is afraid of her servants and her social inferiors and superiors alike, and is therefore always asserting herself. She is more socially aspiring than her husband, and has a great respect for Birth which isn’t easily gratified in Stampfield. But she too has the kindest heart in the world, and it shows their fundamental goodness that their daughter Ida, who went to a fashionable girls’ school only laughs at their oddities and adores them both. Still, in view of the Weekes’ character and position we not unnaturally felt some anxiety, this morning, about the probable effects of a Labour Pacifist address from the pulpit on Sunday night.
At this point Kate put her head in round the door to say that Mr. Elgin was coming up the steps and did the master want to see him or not before he rang the bell? This rather cryptic inquiry was quite clear to Arthur, who recognizes it as part of Kate’s plan for guarding him maternally, and he said, “Yes, that’s all right,” and I went off upstairs.
“And I hope”, said Kate, when she joined me to make the bed, “that the Vicar’ll give him a hint to have something a bit less mouldy in the way of chunes. Private Jenkins and I dropped in to church last night, and, as he says, when you want a bit of a rousing singsong, why go bleat-bleat about Mercy in fancy dress, and such like.”
Arthur has, I know, some sympathy with Kate’s point of view. Mr. Elgin is one of those rather pathetic, emaciated, long-haired musicians who began life, I feel sure, with a vision of conducting his own symphonies in the Queen’s Hall, and, after thirty years, is reduced to playing our organ (£70 a year), giving music-lessons at the High School, and writing bitter letters to the local press about the crimes of the B.B.C., and the shocking musical taste of the British public. He finds his only consolation in playing austere fugues of Bach as voluntaries, and condemning us to a diet of almost exclusively plain-song tunes to the hymns in church. And though there is nothing more beautiful than Gregorians sung in such a church as that of the Cowley Fathers, our choir is not of a nature to endear them to the congregation. For the one ambition of the six men who take the tenor and the two who roll out the very deepest bass, is to present anthems and chants of the Stampfield variety with special reference to men’s voices. The choir is paid, but a tradition of the parish makes it very difficult to look outside it for musical talent; so our eight little choir-boys are often selected rather for the church-going habits of their parents than their musical ability. Arthur has done his best to form a voluntary choir to help them, as the services of the paid choir are only available on Sundays, or, of course, at much higher rates, for weddings and funerals. The good ladies who make up the former admire Mr. Elgin, and urge him forward in his plain-song ways, while the regular choir maintain an unregenerate preference for ordinary Anglican melodies. “And I defy even a diplomat”, says Arthur, “to find a modus vivendi between J. B. Dykes and Saint Ambrose.”
At the moment, however, I was more interested in Kate’s criticism of the service, because I recognized that her unusual attendance at church was introduced chiefly to forestall any comment of mine about the lateness of her
return to the vicarage. Another sign of this was her extreme gloom when we went down to the kitchen together.
“The butter’s short,” she said, “and sugar’s low, and the greengrocer passed the remark that veg. are very awkward just now.”
“Wasn’t your bus very late last night, Kate?” I felt it my duty to ask, though well did we both know that the last bus was off duty long, long before Kate slammed the back door on her return home.
“I don’t know what happened to the time last night, as you may say,” replied Kate more gloomily than ever. “I only know I couldn’t sleep a wink for thinking of dear Master Dick and my boy friend and all our boys. Private Jenkins” (Kate has a martial love for any military title, however lowly) “says that the reports all say that they’re to be off to France next week.”
As Kate began to sniff at this point I had to yield about the bus, even though Private Jenkins had held this sword over Kate’s head (with a considerable addition to the number of her nights-out) ever since the beginning of September. As I could not contemplate being left alone again, after Saturday and Sunday afternoons, with all the work to do, I hastily suggested that she should bake a nice cake for Dick and for Jenkins this afternoon, because there is plenty of black treacle and syrup for gingerbread. This suggestion was so popular that it appeared at once that we have plenty of sugar and butter. “And that,” added Kate, inexplicably, “that’ll give me plenty of time to peel the potatoes and manage the bedrooms and the breakfast, if you’ll give a hand to clearing ’em.”