ANDY paid one or two calls in the parish that afternoon and then went
into the church to ring the bell for evensong. Clang, clang, cling! Come
to church! So it had rung for generations of Sundays across the quiet
fields, but only for Andy had it worked upon a week-day. He had a great
argument on the subject with Mr. Thorpe, who thought that week-day
services in Gaythorpe, where every one was busy from morning to night,
would be merely an accentuation of the fact that the parson had nothing
to do. For Gaythorpe never could and never would believe that a parson’s
occupations could be truthfully called work.
It was only when Andy did finally so envelop himself in the mantle of
the senior curate as to leave not a trace of the original Andy to be
seen, that Mr. Thorpe said, “Have two a day, then, if you like. But to
my mind it’s ridiculous! And nobody’ll come unless they want to get
something out of you.”
Nobody, evidently, thought what could be got out of Andy worth leaving
work and attending daily service for, so he read the service grimly
alone each morning and late afternoon. Labourers, looking up from their
work, used to say in a morning with a chuckle, “Parson’s at it again.
Pity he hasn’t nowt better to do.” And later in the day, women,
straining the milk, would remark to one another, “Does he think we’re
going to leave all this and go up to church just at tea-time? Here—are
them eggs for Mr. Deane? Oh, he only gets twelve to the shilling. It’s
grocer gets thirteen.”
So Andy rang a quiet one—two—three, one—two—three, through the
golden light of a late June afternoon, and afterwards stood alone as
usual to read the lovely words of prayer and praise which seem to have
been written in an age when men could be poets and yet sincere. An
atmosphere of simple goodness and humanity clings like incense about the
evening service, and the close of it is—in the dullest, dreariest
place—like evening light through a stained window. It leaves such an
impression of solemn peace and beauty.
Andy forgot to be annoyed at the absence of a congregation before he
reached the exquisite prayer about the perils and dangers of this night,
and he walked home quite content. He was not, of course, a model
clergyman, or perhaps he would have gone on worrying about the absent
flock. And when he got in he found Mr. Thorpe waiting for him.
“Waste of time,” said Mr. Thorpe. “Waste of time! What good does it do?”
Here was a poser! What good _did_ it do?
“Stops me from getting slack,” said Andy, at last.
“Oh, you!” Mr. Thorpe implied that Andy ought to be able to look after
his own eternal welfare without any outside help—it was his business.
“And perhaps when people hear the bell going it reminds them of good
thoughts,” suggested Andy.
“What if they’re chapel?” said Mr. Thorpe. “There’s more chapel than
church in Gaythorpe.”
Andy ceased arguing and called up the senior curate.
“I do what I think right.”
“Well, well! Nobody can do more than that,” admitted Mr. Thorpe, and he
glanced slowly round the room for a change of subject. “I see you have
the sideboard still. Looks well there. Handsome bit o’ furniture.”
“Very,” said Andy.
“But you made a mistake, buying it in. You oughtn’t to have bought it
in. If us Thorpes had thought Mrs. Simpson required that sideboard, us
Thorpes would have bought it in for her. You meant well. But you made a
mistake. Us Thorpes would have bought it in ourselves if it had been
required.”
He straightened his chest as one who has delivered himself of a burden,
and added—
“I’m not one to bear grudges and tattle from one to another. If I have
anything to say to a man I say it to _him_. Us Thorpes are like that.”
“Thank you, Mr. Thorpe. I’m afraid I did seem officious. I didn’t mean
to be,” said Andy, with a manly simplicity and an understanding of the
point of view of “us Thorpes” which was very pleasant and was all
Andy—not a vestige of the senior curate in it.
“Naturally,” continued Mr. Thorpe in a tone that somehow responded to
Andy’s, but in words which he had previously rehearsed to Mrs. Thorpe
and did not intend to depart from—“Naturally it was narking to a
well-known family like us Thorpes, with big farms all around Bardswell,
to have the tale going about. If we’d thought she required the sideboard
bought in, we should have bought it in. We knew she didn’t require it,
so we didn’t buy it. But,” he added, unrehearsed, “all’s well that ends
well, and so it is.”
“Anyway I promise not to buy any more sideboards,” said Andy with a
rueful smile.
Mr. Thorpe relaxed altogether, and his black eyes began to twinkle in
his fat red face.
“She run you up, I hear. You had to pay a matter of eight pounds odd
more than you would have done if Miss Elizabeth hadn’t been there.
Appears Mrs. Simpson had been complaining to both of you, and you
neither of you knew the other was going to give it to her. Would have
been a rare good joke under some circumstances.”
What Mr. Thorpe really meant was that it would have been a rare good
joke if it had happened in the Werrit family—but he did not say so,
even to himself. He added, instead—
“Handsome young lady, Miss Elizabeth. Though most people admire Miss
Norah most. But she’s one of your clever ones—you don’t want a wife too
clever.”
“Some people don’t want a wife at all,” said Andy, with self-conscious
jocularity.
“But that’s neither you nor me, Mr. Deane,” said Mr. Thorpe with a fat
wink.
Andy drew himself up and toyed with the paperknife.
“And the school-treat?” he remarked.
“Yes—that’s what I came about,” said Mr. Thorpe, responding to the
check. “It appears that you’ve consulted Miss Fanny Kirke about the
date.”
“Yes,” said Andy. “I expected she would know all the details.”
“Everybody knows them,” said Mr. Thorpe. “They’re always the same. But
you ought to have gone to some responsible lady like Mrs. Thorpe or Mrs.
Will Werrit. I, myself, make nothing of being churchwarden. But Mrs.
Thorpe seems to think that, in the position of churchwarden’s wife, she
ought to have been asked to fix the date. Or Mrs. Tom Werrit. Or Mrs.
Will.” He rose. “I was to tell you they can’t take trays this year.”
“Not take trays!” said Andy, who had already learned what that involved.
“Why, they used to make themselves responsible for nearly all the
provisions required. What shall we do?”
“I don’t know. They said I was to let you know, and I’ve _let_ you
know.”
But it was evident he had acted under compulsion, and he added, as one
man to another—
“You go and have it out with ’em. Butter ’em up a bit and they’ll come
round.”
And Andy replied—as one man to another—
“I’m hanged if I will! I’ll manage somehow if I have to make the cakes
myself!”
Mr. Thorpe nodded.
“Just as you like, of course.”
But, oddly enough, his respect for Andy was increased by this
unreasonable behaviour, and he stood by the door, scratching his head,
and slowly evolving a means of compromise. Then he closed the door
again, advanced a few steps, and remarked with the air of a conspirator,
“I’ve got it!”
His manner was so queerly at variance with his appearance, that any one
not concerned in the serious question must have been tickled by the
incongruity; but Andy peered at him anxiously—
“Well?”
“_I’ll_ fix the date. Can’t let you have my waggons to take the children
until the 12th. You’d said the 5th. And if the date’s altered to suit
me, Mrs. Thorpe must oblige you. And Mrs. Will and Mrs. Tom Werrit’ll
follow her.”
It was Mr. Thorpe’s first effort at diplomacy, and he was fifty-one. No
wonder he glowed with the late joy of the creator and forgot everything
but the splendour of his own idea.
“My word. That’s a splendid plan. Awfully good of you,” said Andy with
eager sincerity.
“But not a word to Mrs. Thorpe. Not a word,” chuckled Mr. Thorpe, going
towards the door.
“You may rely on me,” said Andy warmly.
Mr. Thorpe paused with his hand on the door before opening it again.
“Look here,” he said. “You can’t know as much about women as I do. You
come to _me_ if you get stuck.”
He really felt, now he had started on a diplomatist’s career, that he
should like to go on. He felt all the stirring pleasure of using talents
hitherto unsuspected.
“I will,” said Andy gratefully, though he did think it rather ridiculous
that fat Mr. Thorpe should consider he knew more about women than a
young man who had been a curate in London.
“There’s a pack of women in Gaythorpe,” said Mr. Thorpe, opening the
door. “Good-bye.”
But that was not what he meant to say, nor what Andy understood. He
intended to convey to his Vicar the strange comradeship which binds all
men together against all women. And the hand-shake they exchanged was a
final expression of this bond.
For it is ridiculous to pretend that spoken words are so tremendously
important, and that they alone bridge the blank space between one soul
and another; they cast a line, as it were, but souls cross always in
silence. The intrinsic part of every conversation is without words,
which, if you think of it, becomes very comforting. It shows that our
souls are not so lonely as we feared, and that they have a language
which even death need not cause us to forget.
So Andy went back to his study full of the things that Mr. Thorpe had
never said, and the churchwarden plodded sedately down the road mentally
patting his Vicar on the back for remarks he had never made; and they
both felt pleased with themselves, and each other—which is not a bad
result for any conversation to have.
Andy pulled out a few sheets of foolscap, and began to write one of
those articles which were sometimes accepted, when Mrs. Jebb came in to
apologise about the asparagus.
“I’m sorry,” she said with mournful dignity, “but it is my misfortune
and not my fault that my youth was not passed in circles where asparagus
can be afforded.”
“Never mind,” said Andy. “I’m sure they enjoyed the party.”
Mrs. Jebb pursed her lips together and approached mysteriously.
“One thing,” she said in a low voice, “strikes me as very strange. The
bones!”
“What bones?” said Andy, bending over the foolscap. “I’m rather busy
just now, Mrs. Jebb, so if——”
“I and Sophy have searched the dining-room. Then a cat occurred to our
minds.”
“The poor old cat looked hungry,” said the Vicar after a pause.
“Ah, I _thought_ you must have given them to the cat,” said Mrs. Jebb.
“But at a luncheon party—however, in a bachelor’s establishment——”
She evidently felt that Andy had not known how to behave, and that made
the next step easier.
“I fear,” she continued, “that Mrs. Thorpe is to blame for what might
have been a catastrophe if the fowls had been—er—entirely dismembered.
I forget if it is larks, or a woodcock, or what, that you do cook in
that way, though I never thought it really _nice_. However, as
everything went off all right——” She paused for Andy’s reply, having
put the matter, it must be confessed, with some delicacy.
“Oh, excellently,” said Andy. “You must have heard us laughing.”
“Yes. If there had been champagne—but there wasn’t——”
Again the point of a conversation passed unspoken, and then Andy pulled
his paper towards him with such determination that Mrs. Jebb fluttered
from the room.
Ten minutes later she tripped back, bearing a vase of roses.
“I always think a man’s room looks so desolate without flowers. As if he
had no woman to care for him,” and she placed the vase close to Andy’s
elbow.
He thanked her briefly without looking up. But when she had gone out
again he stared blankly at the print on the opposite wall.
“Blest if the old girl isn’t gone on me! How unpleasant!”
The attentions of certain elderly-young church workers in his late
parish had paved the way for comprehension, and he comprehended. But
though it was intensely annoying he did not feel it to be unnatural.
He was, of course, an attractive fellow.
That he had learned, too, in his late curacy, for before that he had
been exceedingly doubtful of his own charms.
He went in to supper feeling annoyed with Mrs. Jebb, but rather sorry
for her all the same. And after supper he strolled out into the garden,
where twilight was falling and the young moon was rising above a bank of
cloud. A feeling of loneliness drove him to the front gate, where he
could watch the distant houses being lighted up, one after the other.
Homes—thought Andy. Places where people were trying—trying——
He could not get hold of the tail of the flying thought.
Then an oldish man passed, worn with long labour, most patient in the
twilight.
The thought came near again, but not near enough, and Andy called out a
friendly ‘Good-night.’ Then he added impulsively, because he somehow
wanted to do something—he somehow felt ashamed before that plodding
figure—“I say, will you have a cigar?”
The man stopped, stared, and replied bluntly—
“I never smoked a cigar.”
“Then take these,” said Andy, emptying his case of that portion of his
aunt’s last Christmas present with which he had stocked it in
anticipation of the luncheon-party.
“Thank you, sir,” said the man, stuffing them into his bag with a bit of
bread and half an onion.
Then he plodded on again, thinking the Vicar was a rum ’un, and no
mistake, and agreeing with the newspaper he took that parsons ought to
be done away with if they could afford to go about with their pockets
crammed with cigars.
Andy stood there, looking after the man as he went up the lane to the
little house where he slept at night, and where he had kept his wife,
and maintained his children ever since early youth. He smelt of earth
and sweat and was rough in his manner, and yet he enabled the Vicar of
Gaythorpe to get hold of that thought which had previously eluded him.
Andy saw.
It is pleasant to see the glory in things that are glorious, but there
is a still more intimate and exquisite pleasure about seeing glory in
things which seem sordid. It is a sort of treasure-hunting of the
soul—as fresh and full of life as a boy’s treasure-hunt in a
water-logged hulk—as full of the thrillingly unexpected.
Andy went back into the study and took down some accounts which he had
shelved. They dated from the late Vicar’s time, and were complicated,
and he stuck to them until they were done.
But he had no idea why he did it.
At last he put down his pen and stretched himself, and something he had
vaguely been keeping at bay ever since the early afternoon swept over
him like a tide. He lit a candle and went out into the silent hall where
the light was already extinguished, and unlocked the dining-room door.
It had the odd look common to all unused rooms at night—they seem to be
waiting in some uncanny and yet quite conscious way for somebody long
gone.
Andy came there to search for nearer dreams of Elizabeth. Elizabeth as
she had been in her youth and gracious kindness only a few hours before.
Elizabeth as she might be when they were married. And he found instead
the most clear and vivid memory of a man he had never seen. He never
thought much of the old Vicar, for what he had heard of him in no way
appealed to the imagination. And yet now he suddenly remembered the
years his predecessor had spent between these walls, and that he must,
too, have been young when he came—young and full of life and hope.
It was, truly, as if the old Vicar held out a hand in that still,
dimly-lighted room, claiming recognition, and the new Vicar gave it in a
half-spoken—
“Poor old chap! I’d forgotten he planted the rose trees and the holly
hedge. He must have liked the garden.”
Then Andy went to bed, but he was restless and could not sleep, for now
the dreams of Elizabeth that he went to look for in the dining-room
pressed so close around him that he remained vividly awake.
He could not have told next morning what those confused dreams were—no
one, not even a young man can describe the dreams of a young man about
the girl he hopes to marry. They are like the City of Married Love
itself, that has spires soaring into a clear heaven and little dim
places where a man may hide. And one tells of the spires and another of
the dark, but no one of the whole; for the poet and realist and true
lover all combined who can write about those dreams as they are, has yet
to be born.
And married love—that Enchanted Muddle—is different from any other
love.
For love without marriage has also the dark places and the spires
pointing upwards, but it has no battlements—and battlements keep in and
keep out many things.
Andy got up in the morning, hoping to see Elizabeth, and yet almost
afraid to see her, lest she should guess that he had dared to come so
near to her in his dreams.
* * * * *
A letter lay on the breakfast-table that seemed, even when opened and
read, to be of minor importance. But that is the extraordinarily
interesting thing about life—you never can tell what is important and
what is not.
Still, of course, “DEAR ANDY.—We are coming to Marshaven for a few days
on the 15th. Promenade Hotel. Do come over and see us.—Your
affectionate Aunt,” could hardly—any more than the sideboard—be
regarded as a likely messenger of Fate.
Andy beamed as he helped himself to fried bacon. Fortunate—most
fortunate. Just when he needed some one to back him up in demanding the
hand of a girl who might marry a duke if she wanted, here was the
fashionable Aunt Dixon with her two stylish daughters by a husband
previous to Uncle Dixon.
The gratitude which Andy had always felt to his aunt by marriage for her
kindness to him, and the admiration he had always entertained for the
Webster girls, grew stronger than ever as he sat eating his breakfast;
then his reflections were interrupted by the incursion of Mrs. Jebb.
“Excuse me interrupting,” she said, “but an extraordinary thing’s
happened. The cat buried the bones under a gooseberry bush, and Sam
Petch found them. I’ve never heard of a cat doing that before. You ought
to write to some paper about it.”
“Most odd,” said Andy, rising—Andy, who had always seen so clearly that
straight line between truth and fiction. “By the way, I want to speak to
Sam about something.” And he hastily escaped across the lawn to the
rose-garden, where he found Sam engaged in doing something mysterious
with two old umbrellas.
“What on earth——”
“I’m sheltering some fine blooms that’s coming out, sir,” replied Sam.
“I thought you’d maybe like ’em sheltered. They’ll be ready to cut by
to-morrow. Fit for a queen they’ll be.”
“Beautiful,” said Andy.
“I rayther fancied you might want ’em, sir,” said Sam.
“The grass in front of the study window requires cutting,” said Andy. “I
should like it to be done at once.”
“Yes, sir—certainly, sir,” said Sam, with deep respect.
But there passed between the two men an unspoken conversation, thrilling
and full of point, which left Andy greatly annoyed. How had a fellow
like that learned a secret that he had told to no one in the world?
It enraged him to think that Sam Petch should know he loved Elizabeth
before he had told even her. Mrs. Petch’s apron could not have been so
opaque as it appeared during that exquisite moment when he held
Elizabeth’s arm in the cottage kitchen and they laughed together.
However, the memory of that moment thrilled him to a bravery that made
him care naught for fifty Sam Petches. He returned to the rose-garden.
“You can keep those roses sheltered. I may want them, after all.”
“Yes, sir,” said Sam solemnly, without looking up. “I’ll see to it,
sir.”
But when his Vicar had passed out of sight he straightened his long
figure and looked towards the house with a queer mixture of scorn and
affection on his handsome face.
“Why doesn’t he ask me how to go on? I could let him have a tip or two.
There isn’t enough of the ‘Give us a kiss, me lass, first, and talk
after,’ about him.”
Young Sam Petch smiled pleasantly as he moved to another rose bush—a
vista of happy occasions not neglected rose before his mind; anyway, he
had had nothing of the sort to reproach himself with at twenty-five.
But it was not worthy of Andy—either as a beneficed clergyman or a
lover—that he should sneak into the rose-garden next day during Sam’s
dinner-hour and cut the blooms surreptitiously, afterwards secreting
them in his bedroom washbasin. Nor did it do any good. For when Mrs.
Jebb went there with a fresh pat of soap she put the roses and a young
lady together and made matrimonial intentions out of the combination. On
the day of the luncheon-party she had suspected, and her suspicions had
fallen on Elizabeth for the reason—unflattering both to Andy and the
Beloved—that Norah was certain to look higher.
So there was another person in it; and one quite wanting in the sympathy
felt by Sam Petch.
There is a saying that everybody loves a lover, but, though it sounds
nice, it is not true; anyway, it does not go far enough. Everybody loves
a lover in some one else’s household.
And, of course, Mrs. Jebb did not want Andy to marry, because she would
then certainly lose one of her titles and be only lady-cook, and
possibly she might lose her place altogether. Therefore she was anxious,
and, being a nervous person, she was also irritable, and being human,
like all the rest of us, she felt inclined to pass on some of the
discomfort to the cause of it.
So she waited about the hall after luncheon, dusting and rearranging,
until Andy’s bedroom door opened and she heard him coming downstairs.
She knew he would have the flowers in his hand and that he would prefer
to escape unobserved. If not, why had he put them in his washbasin
instead of asking for a proper receptacle?
She kept very quiet, holding her breath and looking up. Andy, also very
quiet, craned his head far over the banisters and looked down.
Now there is no reason in the world why a gentleman should not lean over
his own banisters if he so desire, and there is equally no reason why
his lady-cook-housekeeper should not look up towards the first landing;
but the fact remains that when the two pairs of eyes met they both
blinked with conscious guilt.
“Oh—er—I was just wondering if you were there,” said Andy. “Could you
give me a bit of string?”
Andy—who was still boy enough always to have string in his pockets!
And Mrs. Jebb said, almost at the same moment—
“I was just looking at that crack in the ceiling. I often wonder if it
really is safe.”
But she remained in the hall, having procured string from the hall-table
drawer, and she busied herself in polishing doors and skirting-boards
with such an air of having eternity at her disposal, that Andy, after
two or three noiseless sorties upon the landing, was reduced to the
necessity of facing her with the roses in his hand or going down the
back stairs.
He gave his hair a final dose of brilliantine to subdue an objectionable
curl on his forehead, and came down the front stairs, armed with a bunch
of roses and an air of unapproachable dignity.
After all—so far as she knew—he might be going to take them to some
invalid.
“How beautiful!” murmured Mrs. Jebb as he passed. “How it brings things
back. I well remember Mr. Jebb presenting me with just such a bunch when
he proposed; but his was surrounded with maiden-hair fern. It seems a
pity, Mr. Deane, that you haven’t a little maiden-hair to put with
them.”
Andy made no reply, and marched out of the front door.
But as he walked along the pleasant field-paths that lead to the
Attertons’ house he began to lose his sense of irritation, and to wonder
vaguely if Mr. Jebb could by any human possibility have felt for Mrs.
Jebb anything at all like he was feeling then.
It seemed incredible.
And yet, Andy reflected, the longer you lived the more you found out
that people did think and feel the most unsuspected things. For love and
nature together were opening Andy’s eyes, and he began vaguely to see
how very different people are from what you think. Perhaps Mr. Jebb had
felt something the same, after all.
However, when he neared the small park which surrounded the Attertons’
house, he dismissed the idea as ridiculous.
He was quite sure no one at all had ever loved any girl in just the
wonderful and particular way that he loved Elizabeth. He had invented
it, and it would die with him.
And, of course, if he had not felt like that, he would not have been a
real lover.
During the last quarter of an hour before he rang the bell he was
preparing phrases to use in presenting the flowers.
“I just saw some fine blooms as I came away, and I thought you might
like them, Miss Elizabeth. I remember your saying you were fond of
roses.”
No. That was too casual.
“I saw these roses in the garden and they reminded me of you. So I
brought them to you.”
No. That was too pointed.
But he _wanted_ to be pointed.
Then he saw a motor before the door and a cart going round to the
stables and was thus made aware of a possibility that he had quite left
out of his calculations. There were other visitors in the house.
His throat grew quite dry with nervousness and annoyance and
disappointment, and he thought he would hide the roses in a bush; but a
certain doggedness made him cling to them, and as he stood undecided the
Stamfords passed him in their motor and he had to go on or look like a
fool.
So he went on, and was ushered into a room half full of people, where
Elizabeth sat laughing in a distant window-seat with Dick Stamford and
her brother Bill, and he had to account for the roses in his hand.
“How-do-you-do, Mrs. Atterton?” he heard himself saying in a voice that
sounded queerly unfamiliar.
“And you’ve brought me those roses? How sweet of you,” said Mrs.
Atterton in her good-natured way, thinking he was shy and wanted helping
out. “I love roses!” She glanced round with the eye of the born hostess.
“Will you take Miss Banks in to tea? Mr. Deane of Gaythorpe—Miss Banks,
the daughter of Mr. Banks, the Rector of Millsby.”
“Oh, Mr. Deane and I are _quite_ old friends,” said Miss Banks with
animation.
“Delighted,” said Andy.
And half an hour later he came back to the room to find his roses
wilting on a side-table and Elizabeth absent.
“I hope your daughters are quite well?” he remarked wistfully to Mr.
Atterton, whom he encountered on the lawn.
“Oh yes. Norah’s away and Elizabeth is playing tennis in the lower
court, I expect,” said Mr. Atterton carelessly, as if he were speaking
of any ordinary girl.
“Miss Elizabeth plays very well, doesn’t she?” said Andy.
“No ... rotten service,” said Mr. Atterton, and Andy felt he did not
deserve to have such a daughter.
“I suppose the lower court is over there?” suggested Andy.
“Yes. I say, would you like to come and see my pigs?”
Now pigs were, next to red villas, the main interest of Mr. Atterton’s
existence, and an invitation to visit them in his company was a great
honour. What was a possible prospective son-in-law to do?
“Thank you very much,” said Andy, following his host, and endeavouring
to take an intelligent interest in queer-looking and precious animals
that rather resembled a wild boar than the domestic porker. He must have
succeeded, for on leaving to be in time for evensong, he received an
immense compliment.
“You’re like me,” said Mr. Atterton. “Pigs more in your line than girls
and tea-drinking, hey?”