FOOD AND RAIMENT
The Rector gave out his text, "Is not the life more than meat and the
body more than raiment?" and proceeded to read his homily in a
monotonous, sweet-toned voice which had all the good effects of a
sleeping-draught and none of the bad ones.
Kencote church was old, and untouched by modern restoration or Catholic
zeal. The great west door was open, and framed a bright picture of trees
and grass and cloudless sky. The hot sunshine of an August morning shone
through the traceried windows in the nave, and threw a square of bright
colour from the little memorial window in the chancel on to the wide,
uneven stone pavement. But the church was cool, with the coolness of
ancient, stone-built places, which have resisted for centuries the
attacks of sun and storm alike, and gained something of the tranquil
insensibility of age.
The congregation was penned, for the most part, in high pews. When they
stood up to sing they presented a few score of heads and shoulders above
the squares and oblongs of dark woodwork; when they sat or knelt the
nave seemed to be suddenly emptied of worshippers, and the drone of the
responses mounting up to the raftered roof had a curious effect, and
seemed to be the voice of the old church itself, paying its tribute to
the unseen mysteries of the long ages of faith.
On the north side of the chancel, which was two steps higher than the
nave, was the Squire's pew. Its occupants were shielded from the gaze of
those in the body of the church by a faded red curtain hung on an iron
rail, but the Squire always drew it boldly aside during the exhortation
and surveyed the congregation, the greater part of which was dependent
on him for a livelihood and attended church as an undergraduate "keeps
chapels," for fear of unpleasant consequences.
The Squire's pew occupied the whole of the space usually devoted to the
organ and the vestry in modern built churches, and had a separate
entrance from the churchyard. It had a wooden floor, upon which was a
worn blue carpet sprinkled with yellow fleurs de lis. The big hassocks
and the seat that ran along the north wall were covered with the same
material. In front of the fixed bench was a row of heavy chairs; in the
wall opposite to the curtain was a fireplace. Mrs. Clinton occupied the
chair nearest to the fire, which was always lit early on Sunday morning
in the winter, but owing partly to the out-of-date fashion of the grate
and partly to the height and extent of the church, gave no more heat
than was comfortable to those immediately within its radius, and none at
all to those a little way from it. The Squire himself remained outside
its grateful influence. His large, healthy frame, well covered with
flesh, enabled him to dispense with artificial warmth during his hour
and a half's occupation of the family pew, and also to do his duty by
using the last of the row of chairs and hassocks, and so to command the
opportunities afforded by the red curtain.
On the stone walls above the wainscoting were hung great hatchments, the
canvas of some fraying away from the black quadrangular frames after a
lapse of years, and none of them very recently hung there. The front of
the pew was open to the chancel, and commanded a full view of the
reading-desk and a side glimpse of the pulpit through the bars of the
carved, rather battered rood-screen. Flanked by the reading-desk on one
side and the harmonium on the other were the benches occupied by the
school-children who formed the choir, and behind them were other benches
devoted to the use of the Squire's household, whose devotions were
screened from the gaze of the common worshippers by no curtain, and who,
therefore--maids, middle-aged women, and spruce men-servants--provided a
source of interested rumination when heads were raised above the wooden
partitions, and bonnets, mantles, and broadcloth could be examined, and
perhaps envied, at leisure.
Cicely had played the Rector up into the pulpit with the last verse of a
hymn, had found the place from which she would presently play him down
again with the tune of another, had propped the open book on the desk of
the harmonium, and had then slid noiselessly into a chair on a line with
the front choir bench, where she now sat with her hands in her lap,
facing the members of her assembled family, sometimes looking down at
the memorial brass of Sir Richard Clinton, knight, obiit 1445, which was
let into the pavement at her feet, sometimes, through the open doors of
the rood screen, to where that bright picture of sunlit green shone out
of the surrounding gloom at the end of the aisle.
"Is not the life more than meat and the body than raiment?" The text had
been given out twice and carefully indexed each time. The Squire had
fitted his gold-rimmed glasses on to his nose and tracked down the
passage in his big Bible. Having satisfied himself that the words
announced were identical with the words printed, he had put the Bible on
the narrow shelf in front of him and closed his eyes. His first nod had
followed, as usual, about three minutes after the commencement of the
sermon. He had then opened his eyes wide, met the fascinated gaze of a
small singing-girl opposite to him, glared at her, and, having reduced
her to a state of cataleptic terror, pushed aside the red curtain and
transferred his glare to the body of the church. The bald head of a
respectable farmer and the bonnet of his wife, which were all he could
see of the congregation at the moment, assured him that all was well. He
drew the curtain again and went comfortably to sleep without further
ado.
Mrs. Clinton, at the other end of the row, sat quite still, with no more
evidence of mental effort on her comely, middle-aged face than was
necessary for the due reception of the Rector's ideas, and that was very
little. Joan and Nancy sat one on either side of Miss Bird, Joan next to
her mother. They looked about everywhere but at the preacher, and bided
with what patience they possessed the end of the discourse, aided
thereto by a watchful eye and an occasional admonitory peck from the old
starling. Dick had come in late and settled himself upon the seat behind
the row of chairs. Upon the commencement of the sermon he had put his
back against the partition supporting the curtain, and his long legs up
on the bench in front of him, and by the look on his lean, sunburnt face
was apparently resting his brain as well as his body.
"Is not the life more than meat and the body than raiment?" The
technique of the Rector's sermons involved the repetition of his text at
stated intervals. Cicely thought, as the words fell on her ears for the
third or fourth time, that she could have supplied a meaning to them
which had escaped the preacher. Food and raiment! That represented all
the things amongst which she had been brought up, the large, comfortable
rooms in the big house, the abundant, punctual meals, the tribe of
servants, the clothes and the trinkets, the gardens and stables,
well-stocked and well-filled, the home farm, kept up to supply the needs
of the large household, everything that came to the children of a
well-to-do country gentleman as a matter of course, and made life
easy--but oh, how dull!
No one seeing her sitting there quietly, her slender, ungloved hands
lying in her lap, prettily dressed in a cool summer frock and a shady,
flower-trimmed hat, with the jewelled chains and bracelets and brooches
of a rich man's daughter rousing the admiring envy of the
school-children, whose weekly excitement it was to count them up--nobody
would have thought that under the plaited tresses of this young girl's
shapely head was a brain seething in revolt, or that the silken laces of
her bodice muffled the beatings of a heart suffocated by the luxurious
dulness of a life which she now told herself had become insupportable.
Cicely had thought a great deal since her visit to London and Muriel's
wedding, and had arrived at this conclusion--that she was suffocating,
and that her life was insupportable.
She raised her eyes and glanced at her father, wrapped in the pleasant
slumber that overtakes healthy, out-of-door men when they are forced for
a time into unwonted quiescence, and at her brother, calm and
self-satisfied, dressed with a correct elaboration that was only
unobtrusive because it was so expensively perfect. The men of the
family--everything was done to bring them honour and gratification. They
had everything they wanted and did what they would. It was to them that
tribute and obedience were paid by every one around them, including
their own womenfolk.
She looked at her two young sisters. They were happy enough in their
free and healthy childhood; so had she been at their age, when the
spacious house and the big gardens, the stables and the farm and the
open country had provided everything she needed for her amusement. But
even then there had been the irksome restraint exercised by "the old
starling" and the fixed rules of the house to spoil her freedom, while
her brothers had been away at Eton, or at Oxford or Cambridge, trying
their wings and preparing for the unfettered delights of well-endowed
manhood.
She looked at her mother, placid and motionless. Her mother was
something of an enigma, even to her, for to those who knew her well she
always seemed to be hiding something, something in her character, which
yet made its mark in spite of the subjection in which she lived. Cicely
loved her mother, but she thought of her now with the least little shade
of contempt, which she would have been shocked to recognise as such. Why
had she been content to bring all the hopes and ambitions that must have
stirred her girlhood thus into subjection? What was the range of her
life now? Ruling her large house with a single eye to the convenience of
her lord and master, liable to be scolded before her children or her
household if anything went wrong; blamed if the faults of any one of the
small army of servants reached the point at which it disturbed his ease;
driving out in her fine carriage to pay dull calls on dull neighbours;
looking after the comfort of ungrateful villagers; going to church;
going to dinner-parties; reading; sewing; gardening under pain of the
head gardener's displeasure, which was always backed up by the Squire if
complaint was brought to him that she had braved it; getting up in the
morning and going to bed at night, at stated hours without variation;
never leaving her cage of confined luxury, except when it suited his
convenience that she should leave it with him. She was nothing but a
slave to his whims and prejudices, and so were all the women of the
family, slaves to wait upon and defer humbly and obediently to their
mankind.
"Is not the life more than meat and the body than raiment?" It was the
men who enjoyed the life, and the meat and raiment as well. While the
women vegetated at home, they went out into the world. It was true that
they were always pleased to come back again, and no wonder, when
everything was there that could minister to their amusement. It was
quite different for her, living at home all the year round. She was
quite sick of it. Why was not her father like other men of his wealth
and lineage, who had their country houses and their country sports, but
did not spend the whole year over them? Daughters of men of far less
established position than the Squire went to London, went abroad,
visited constantly at other country houses, and saw many guests in their
own houses. Her own brothers did all these things, except the last. They
seldom brought their friends to Kencote, she supposed because it was not
like other big country houses, at any rate not like the houses at which
they stayed. It was old-fashioned, not amusing enough; shooting parties
were nearly always made up from amongst neighbours, and if any one
stayed in the house to shoot, or for the few winter balls, it was nearly
always a relation, or at best a party of relations. And the very few
visits Cicely had ever paid had been to the houses of relations, some of
them amusing, others not at all so.
She was now rather ashamed of her diatribe to Muriel Graham about her
London visit. She must have given Muriel the impression that what she
hungered for was smart society. She remembered that she had compared the
ball at the house of her aunt, Mrs. Birket, unfavourably with those at
other houses at which she had danced, and blushed and fidgeted with her
fingers when she thought of this. She liked staying with Mrs. Birket
better than with any other of her relations, and she was still sore at
her father's refusal to allow her to spend some months with her. She met
clever, interesting people there, she was always made much of, and she
admired and envied her cousins. They had travelled, they heard music,
saw plays and pictures, read books; and they could talk upon all these
subjects, as well as upon politics and upon what was going on in the big
world that really mattered--not superficially, but as if they were the
things that interested them most, as she knew they were. It was that
kind of life she really longed for; she had only got her thoughts a
little muddled in London because she had been rather humiliated in
feeling herself a stranger where her brothers were so much at home. When
she saw Muriel again she must put herself right there. Muriel would
understand her. Muriel had cut herself adrift from the well-fed
stagnation of country life and rejoiced to be the partner of a man who
was doing something in the world. Life was more than food to her and the
body than raiment. Cicely wished that such a chance had come to her.
But the Rector had repeated his text for the last time, and was drawing
to the end of his discourse. She must slip back to her seat at the
harmonium, and defer the consideration of her own hardships until later.
The congregation aroused itself and stood up upon the stroke of the word
"now"; and, whilst the last hymn was being given out and played over,
the Squire started on a collecting tour with the wooden, baize-lined
plate which he drew from beneath his chair. The coppers clinked one by
one upon the silver already deposited by himself and his family, and he
closely scrutinised the successive offerings. His heels rang out
manfully upon the worn pavement beneath which his ancestors were
sleeping, as he strode up the chancel and handed the alms to the Rector.
He was refreshed by his light slumber, his weekly duty was coming to an
end, and he would soon be out in the open air inspecting his stables and
looking forward to his luncheon. He sang the last verses of the hymn
lustily, his glasses on his nose, a fine figure of a man, quite
satisfied with himself and the state in life to which he had been
called.
The congregation filed out of church into the bright sunshine. Dick,
with Joan on one side of him and Nancy on the other, set out at a smart
pace across the park, bound for the stables and the home farm. Cicely
walked with the old starling, who lifted her flounced skirt over her
square-toed kid boots, as one who expected to find dew where she found
grass, even in the hot August noonday. The Squire and Mrs. Clinton
brought up the rear, and the men and maids straggled along a footpath
which diverged to another quarter of the house.
Cicely left the rest of the family to the time-honoured inspection of
horses and live stock, always undertaken, summer and winter, after
church on Sunday morning, as a permissible recreation on a day otherwise
devoted to sedentary pursuits. It was one of the tiresome routine habits
of her life, and she was sick of routine. She dawdled in her bedroom, a
room at least twenty feet square, with two big windows overlooking the
garden and the park and the church tower rising from amongst its trees,
until the gong sounded, when she hurried downstairs and took her seat at
the luncheon table on the right of her father.
The sweets and a big cake were on the table, of which the appointments
were a mixture of massive silver plate and inexpensive glass and china.
The servants handed round the first hot dish, placed a cold uncut
sirloin of beef in front of the Squire and vegetable dishes on the
sideboard, and then left the room. After that it was every one help
yourself. This was the invariable arrangement of luncheon on Sundays,
and allowing for the difference of the seasons the viands were always
the same. If anybody staying in the house liked to turn up their noses
at such Sunday fare--one hot _entree_, cold beef, fruit tarts and milk
puddings, a ripe cheese and a good bottle of wine, why they needn't come
again. But very few people did stay in the house, as has been said, and
none of those who did had ever been known to object. There were no
week-end parties, no traffic of mere acquaintances using the house like
an hotel and amusing themselves with no reference to their host or
hostess. The Squire was hospitable in an old-fashioned way, liked to see
his friends around him and gave them of his best. But they must be
friends, and they must conform to the usages of the house.
The talk over the luncheon table began with the perennial topic of the
breeding of partridges and pheasants, and was carried on between the
Squire and Dick, while the women kept submissive silence in the face of
important matters with which they had no concern. Then it took a more
general turn, and drifted into a reminiscence of the conversation that
had taken place over the dinner table the night before. Mrs. Graham and
Jim had dined at Kencote and brought Ronald Mackenzie with them, who had
arrived the evening before on his promised week-end visit.
Humphrey's prophecy had come true. Mackenzie had been the lion of the
London season, and now that London was empty might have taken his choice
of country houses for a week-end visit from whatever county he pleased.
His visit was something of an honour, and was even chronicled in the
newspapers, which had not yet lost interest in his movements. He was a
star of considerable magnitude, liable to wane, of course, but never to
sink quite into obscurity, and just now a planet within everybody's ken.
It was characteristic of the Clinton point of view that the parentage of
this man, whose sole title to fame arose from the things that he had
done, should be discussed. Dick knew all about him. He did not belong to
any particular family of Mackenzies. He was the son of a Scots peasant,
and was said to have tramped to London at the age of sixteen, and to
have taken forcible shipment as a stowaway in the Black-Lyell Arctic
Expedition; and afterwards to have climbed to the leadership of
expeditions of his own with incredible rapidity. He had never made any
secret of his lowly origin, and was even said to be proud of it. The
Squire approved heartily of this.
It was also characteristic of the Squire that a man who had done big
things and got himself talked about should be accepted frankly as an
equal, and, outside the sphere of clanship, even as a superior. A great
musician would have been treated in the same way, or a great painter, or
even a great scholar. For the Squire belonged to the class of all others
the most prejudiced and at the same time the most easily led, when its
slow-moving imagination is once touched--a class which believes itself
divinely appointed to rule, but will give political adherence and almost
passionate personal loyalty to men whom in the type it most dislikes,
its members following one another like sheep when their first
instinctive mistrust has been overcome. Mackenzie was one of the most
talked of men in England at this moment. It was a matter of
congratulation that Jim had caught him for a two-days' visit, though
Jim's catch had involved no more skill than was needed to answer an
unexpected note from Mackenzie announcing his arrival on Friday
afternoon. The Clintons had dined at Mountfield on Friday night, the
Grahams and Mackenzie had dined at Kencote on Saturday, and it had been
arranged that Jim and his guest should drive over this afternoon and
stay to dine again.
When luncheon was over the Squire retired into the library with the
_Spectator_, which it was known he would not read, Dick went into the
smoking-room, Mrs. Clinton and Miss Bird upstairs, and the twins
straight into the garden, where Cicely presently followed them with a
book. She settled herself in a basket chair under a great lime tree on
the lawn, and leaving her book lying unopened on her lap, gave herself
over to further reverie.
Perhaps the sudden descent of this man from a strange world into the
placid waters of her life had something to do with the surging up of her
discontent, for she had not been so discontented since the Birkets'
visit two months before, having followed out to some extent her uncle's
advice and found life quite supportable in consequence. She knew she had
waited for Mackenzie's name to be mentioned at luncheon and had blushed
when she heard it, only, fortunately, nobody had seen her, not even the
sharp-eyed twins. She would have resented it intensely if her interest
and her blush had been noticed, and put down to personal attraction. It
was not that at all. She rather disliked the man, with his keen,
hawklike face, his piercing eyes, and his direct, unvarnished speech. He
was the sort of man of whom a woman might have reason to be afraid if
she were, by unaccountable mischance, attracted by him, and he by her.
He would dominate her and she would be at least as much of a chattel as
in the hands of a male Clinton. It was what he stood for that interested
her, and she could not help comparing his life with that of her father
and her brothers, or of Jim Graham, much to the disadvantage of her own
kind.
Her resentment, if it deserved that name, had fixed itself upon her
father and brothers, and Jim shared in it. He was just the same as they
were, making the little work incumbent on him as easy as possible and
spending the best part of his life in the pursuits he liked best. She
had come to the conclusion that there was no place for her in such a
life as that. When Jim proposed to her, as she felt sure he would do
when he was ready, she would refuse him. She felt now that she really
could not go through with it, and her determination to refuse to marry
Jim rose up in her mind and fixed itself as she sat in her chair under
the tree. If he had been a poor man, with a profession to work at, she
would have married him and found her happiness in helping him on. She
wanted the life. The food and the raiment were nothing to her, either at
Kencote or Mountfield.