Essential Stories (13 page)

“Indigestion,” said her son.

“Is it? Well, through this door there’s another room, just the same, but it’s filled with commoner things—crockery, ironmongery, furniture—just like a second-hand shop, but thousands, dear, and I think, ‘Oh, let me breathe,’ and I hurry out of it by the door, and beyond that door,” said the mother, holding his hand, “is another room. Ted, it’s full of everything decaying, filthy. Oh, it’s horrible, dear. I wake up feeling sick.”

“What is that?” asked the son, nodding to the ceiling. “Up there.”

“On the ceiling?” she said. “Oh, that’s our crack. It’s getting bigger,” she said. “It’s a bad one.”

“That was the land-mine, dear, the one that broke the windows. The one that killed old Mrs. Croft . . .”

“I know, Mother, don’t . . .”

“I thought we had gone and I said, ‘Oh Dad. We’ve gone.’ Ted, dear, the dust!”

They looked at the ceiling. Beginning at the wall by the window, the crack was like a cut that has not closed.

“And perhaps it would have been a good thing if we had gone,” she said, narrowing her eyes and searching her son’s face with a look that terrified him. “We’ve had our life. What is your life? I watch that old crack and I say, ‘Let’s see. Are you getting larger?’ But he sits there, quiet at his table, and says ‘Remember Daniel. There’s nothing to be afraid of.’ It’s wonderful, really. He believes it. It does him good. There’s just ourselves, dear, you see. You’ve all grown up, you’ve gone your own ways, you can’t be here with me and it wouldn’t be right if you could be. I always feel I’ve got you. I think to myself, I’ve got something, I’ve got you children. But he’s got nothing. You mustn’t take any notice of the things I say. I expect you know women just say things and don’t know why they say them . . . When I see him sitting there under the lamp, praying for me and you and all of us, I think, ‘Poor old Daddy, that’s all he’s got—his faith. But I’ve got him.’ ”

“Ssh, Mother, don’t cry. He’s coming now,” the son said. Quickly she sat on the stool by the fire and put her head forward so that the disorder of her face should be hidden in the glow of the flame.

The father tapped his fingers comically on the panel of the door.

“May I come in? Sure I’m not interrupting? Thank you. Mother and son,” he smiled, nodding his head. “The old, old story, mother and son.”

A flush of annoyance and guilt passed over the son’s body and came to his lips in a jaunty, uneasy laugh.

The father frowned.

“I say, old girl,” he said. “I’ve just been outside. There was a chink of light showing in my room. We must be careful . . .”

“I was just showing Ted round,” said the mother.

“Showing me round the estate,” Ted said.

“I’ve switched it off,” the mother said.

“Switch it on, old girl. Let’s have that tea.” He settled himself innocently on the edge of his chair with his legs tucked under it, and his pleased fingers joined over his waistcoat.

“It’s a good thing I know your mother. How old are you, my boy— forty? In forty-five years I’ve got to know her,” the father smiled.

The old lady nodded her head as she went over his words, and then she got up from her stool to make the tea.

“I don’t think they’ll come tonight, dear,” she said with spirit.

“I’m here,” the son laughed.

“Run along, old girl. Of course they won’t,” the father said, ordering and defending his own. “I just
know
they won’t.”

THE SAINT

When I was seventeen years old I lost my religious faith. It had been unsteady for some time and then, very suddenly, it went as the result of an incident in a punt on the river outside the town where we lived. My uncle, with whom I was obliged to stay for long periods of my life, had started a small furniture-making business in the town. He was always in difficulties about money, but he was convinced that in some way God would help him. And this happened. An investor arrived who belonged to a sect called the Church of the Last Purification, of Toronto, Canada. Could we imagine, this man asked, a good and omnipotent God allowing his children to be short of money? We had to admit we could not imagine this. The man paid some capital into my uncle’s business and we were converted. Our family were the first Purifiers—as they were called—in the town. Soon a congregation of fifty or more were meeting every Sunday in a room at the Corn Exchange.

At once we found ourselves isolated and hated people. Everyone made jokes about us. We had to stand together because we were sometimes dragged into the courts. What the unconverted could not forgive in us was first that we believed in successful prayer and, secondly, that our revelation came from Toronto. The success of our prayers had a simple foundation. We regarded it as “Error”—our name for Evil—to believe the evidence of our senses and if we had influenza or consumption, or had lost our money or were unemployed, we denied the reality of these things, saying that since God could not have made them they therefore did not exist. It was exhilarating to look at our congregation and to know that what the vulgar would call miracles were performed among us, almost as a matter of routine, every day. Not very big miracles, perhaps; but up in London and out in Toronto, we knew that deafness and blindness, cancer and insanity, the great scourges, were constantly vanishing before the prayers of the more advanced Purifiers.

“What!” said my schoolmaster, an Irishman with eyes like broken glass and a sniff of irritability in the bristles of his nose. “What! Do you have the impudence to tell me that if you fell off the top floor of this building and smashed your head in, you would say you hadn’t fallen and were not injured?”

I was a small boy and very afraid of everybody, but not when it was a question of my religion. I was used to the kind of conundrum the Irishman had set. It was useless to argue, though our religion had already developed an interesting casuistry.

“I
would
say so,” I replied with coldness and some vanity. “And my head would not be smashed.”

“You would not say so,” answered the Irishman. “You would not say so.” His eyes sparkled with pure pleasure. “You’d be dead.”

The boys laughed, but they looked at me with admiration.

Then, I do not know how or why, I began to see a difficulty. Without warning and as if I had gone into my bedroom at night and had found a gross ape seated in my bed and thereafter following me about with his grunts and his fleas and a look, relentless and ancient, scored on his brown face, I was faced with the problem which prowls at the centre of all religious faith. I was faced by the difficulty of the origin of evil. Evil was an illusion, we were taught. But even illusions have an origin. The Purifiers denied this.

I consulted my uncle. Trade was bad at the time and this made his faith abrupt. He frowned as I spoke.

“When did you brush your coat last?” he said. “You’re getting slovenly about your appearance. If you spent more time studying books”—that is to say, the Purification literature—“and less with your hands in your pockets and playing about with boats on the river, you wouldn’t be letting Error in.”

All dogmas have their jargon; my uncle as a business man loved the trade terms of the Purification. “Don’t let Error in,” was a favourite one. The whole point about the Purification, he said, was that it was scientific and therefore exact; in consequence it was sheer weakness to admit discussion. Indeed, betrayal. He unpinched his pince-nez, stirred his tea and indicated I must submit or change the subject. Preferably the latter. I saw, to my alarm, that my arguments had defeated my uncle. Faith and doubt pulled like strings round my throat.

“You don’t mean to say you don’t believe that what our Lord said was true?” my aunt asked nervously, following me out of the room. “Your uncle does, dear.”

I could not answer. I went out of the house and down the main street to the river where the punts were stuck like insects in the summery flash of the reach. Life was a dream, I thought; no, a nightmare, for the ape was beside me.

I was still in this state, half sulking and half exalted, when Mr. Hubert Timberlake came to the town. He was one of the important people from the headquarters of our Church and he had come to give an address on the Purification at the Corn Exchange. Posters announcing this were everywhere. Mr. Timberlake was to spend Sunday afternoon with us. It was unbelievable that a man so eminent would actually sit in our dining-room, use our knives and forks, and eat our food. Every imperfection in our home and our characters would jump out at him. The Truth had been revealed to man with scientific accuracy—an accuracy we could all test by experiment—and the future course of human development on earth was laid down, finally. And here in Mr. Timberlake was a man who had not merely performed many miracles—even, it was said with proper reserve, having twice raised the dead—but who had actually been to Toronto, our headquarters, where this great and revolutionary revelation had first been given.

“This is my nephew,” my uncle said, introducing me. “He lives with us. He thinks he thinks, Mr. Timberlake, but I tell him he only thinks he does. Ha, ha.” My uncle was a humorous man when he was with the great. “He’s always on the river,” my uncle continued. “I tell him he’s got water on the brain. I’ve been telling Mr. Timberlake about you, my boy.”

A hand as soft as the best quality chamois leather took mine. I saw a wide upright man in a double-breasted navy blue suit. He had a pink square head with very small ears and one of those torpid, enamelled smiles which were said by our enemies to be too common in our sect.

“Why, isn’t that just fine?” said Mr. Timberlake who, owing to his contacts with Toronto, spoke with an American accent. “What say we tell your uncle it’s funny he thinks he’s funny.”

The eyes of Mr. Timberlake were direct and colourless. He had the look of a retired merchant captain who had become decontaminated from the sea and had reformed and made money. His defence of me had made me his at once. My doubts vanished. Whatever Mr. Timberlake believed must be true and as I listened to him at lunch, I thought there could be no finer life than his.

“I expect Mr. Timberlake’s tired after his address,” said my aunt.

“Tired?” exclaimed my uncle, brilliant with indignation. “How can Mr. Timberlake be tired? Don’t let Error in!”

For in our faith the merely inconvenient was just as illusory as a great catastrophe would have been, if you wished to be strict, and Mr. Timberlake’s presence made us very strict.

I noticed then that, after their broad smiles, Mr. Timberlake’s lips had the habit of setting into a long depressed sarcastic curve.

“I guess,” he drawled, “I guess the Al-mighty must have been tired sometimes, for it says He re-laxed on the seventh day. Say, do you know what I’d like to do this afternoon,” he said turning to me. “While your uncle and aunt are sleeping off this meal let’s you and me go on the river and get water on the brain. I’ll show you how to punt.”

Mr. Timberlake, I saw to my disappointment, was out to show he understood the young. I saw he was planning a “quiet talk” with me about my problems.

“There are too many people on the river on Sundays,” said my uncle uneasily.

“Oh, I like a crowd,” said Mr. Timberlake, giving my uncle a tough look. “This is the day of rest, you know.” He had had my uncle gobbling up every bit of gossip from the sacred city of Toronto all the morning.

My uncle and aunt were incredulous that a man like Mr. Timberlake should go out among the blazers and gramophones of the river on a Sunday afternoon. In any other member of our Church they would have thought this sinful.

“Waal, what say?” said Mr. Timberlake. I could only murmur.

“That’s fixed,” said Mr. Timberlake. And on came the smile as simple, vivid and unanswerable as the smile on an advertisement. “Isn’t that just fine!”

Mr. Timberlake went upstairs to wash his hands. My uncle was deeply offended and shocked, but he could say nothing. He unpinched his glasses.

“A very wonderful man,” he said. “So human,” he apologised.

“My boy,” my uncle said. “This is going to be an experience for you. Hubert Timberlake was making a thousand a year in the insurance business ten years ago. Then he heard of the Purification. He threw everything up, just like that. He gave up his job and took up the work. It was a struggle, he told me so himself this morning. ‘Many’s the time,’ he said to me this morning, ‘when I wondered where my next meal was coming from.’ But the way was shown. He came down from Worcester to London and in two years he was making fifteen hundred a year out of his practice.”

To heal the sick by prayer according to the tenets of the Church of the Last Purification was Mr. Timberlake’s profession.

My uncle lowered his eyes. With his glasses off the lids were small and uneasy. He lowered his voice too.

“I have told him about your little trouble,” my uncle said quietly with emotion. I was burned with shame. My uncle looked up and stuck out his chin confidently.

“He just smiled,” my uncle said. “That’s all.”

Then we waited for Mr. Timberlake to come down.

I put on white flannels and soon I was walking down to the river with Mr. Timberlake. I felt that I was going with him under false pretences; for he would begin explaining to me the origin of evil and I would have to pretend politely that he was converting me when, already, at the first sight of him, I had believed. A stone bridge, whose two arches were like an owlish pair of eyes gazing up the reach, was close to the landing-stage. I thought what a pity it was the flannelled men and the sunburned girls there did not know I was getting a ticket for
the
Mr. Timberlake who had been speaking in the town that very morning. I looked round for him and when I saw him I was a little startled. He was standing at the edge of the water looking at it with an expression of empty incomprehension. Among the white crowds his air of brisk efficiency had dulled. He looked middle-aged, out of place and insignificant. But the smile switched on when he saw me.

“Ready?” he called. “Fine!”

I had the feeling that inside him there must be a gramophone record going round and round, stopping at that word.

He stepped into the punt and took charge.

“Now I just want you to paddle us over to the far bank,” he said, “and then I’ll show you how to punt.”

Everything Mr. Timberlake said still seemed unreal to me. The fact that he was sitting in a punt, of all commonplace material things, was incredible. That he should propose to pole us up the river was terrifying. Suppose he fell into the river? At once I checked the thought. A leader of our Church under the direct guidance of God could not possibly fall into a river.

The stream is wide and deep in this reach, but on the southern bank there is a manageable depth and a hard bottom. Over the clay banks the willows hang, making their basket-work print of sun and shadow on the water, while under the gliding boats lie cloudy, chloride caverns. The hoop-like branches of the trees bend down until their tips touch the water like fingers making musical sounds. Ahead in midstream, on a day sunny as this one was, there is a path of strong light which is hard to look at unless you half close your eyes and down this path on the crowded Sundays, go the launches with their parasols and their pennants; and also the rowing boats with their beetle-leg oars, which seem to dig the sunlight out of the water as they rise. Upstream one goes, on and on between the gardens and then between fields kept for grazing. On the afternoon when Mr. Timberlake and I went out to settle the question of the origin of evil, the meadows were packed densely with buttercups.

“Now,” said Mr. Timberlake decisively when I had paddled to the other side. “Now I’ll take her.”

He got over the seat into the well at the stern.

“I’ll just get you clear of the trees,” I said.

“Give me the pole,” said Mr. Timberlake standing up on the little platform and making a squeak with his boots as he did so. “Thank you, sir. I haven’t done this for eighteen years but I can tell you, brother, in those days I was considered some poler.”

He looked around and let the pole slide down through his hands. Then he gave the first difficult push. The punt rocked pleasantly and we moved forward. I sat facing him, paddle in hand, to check any inward drift of the punt.

“How’s that, you guys?” said Mr. Timberlake looking round at our eddies and drawing in the pole. The delightful water sished down it.

“Fine,” I said. Deferentially I had caught the word.

He went on to his second and his third strokes, taking too much water on his sleeve, perhaps, and uncertain in his steering, which I corrected, but he was doing well.

“It comes back to me,” he said. “How am I doing?”

“Just keep her out from the trees,” I said.

“The trees?” he said.

“The willows,” I said.

“I’ll do it now,” he said. “How’s that? Not quite enough? Well, how’s this?”

“Another one,” I said. “The current runs strong this side.”

“What? More trees?” he said. He was getting hot.

“We can shoot out past them,” I said. “I’ll ease us over with the paddle.”

Mr. Timberlake did not like this suggestion.

“No, don’t do that. I can manage it,” he said. I did not want to offend one of the leaders of our Church, so I put the paddle down; but I felt I ought to have taken him farther along away from the irritation of the trees.

“Of course,” I said. “We could go under them. It might be nice.”

“I think,” said Mr. Timberlake, “that would be a very good idea.”

He lunged hard on the pole and took us towards the next archway of willow branches.