The Book of Ebenezer le Page (33 page)

The inside of the little Mission was as good as the Flower Show in the Market Halls. The gas was lit, though it was light outside yet, and there was flowers everywhere of every shape and size and colour beautifully arranged, and ferns hanging from the gas-brackets. There was offerings of fruit and great marrows and pumpkins around the Communion Table, and long loaves of bread on the window-sills and sheaves of corn against the pulpit. I noticed there was tomatoes on the ledge against the pipes of the organ, and was afraid they might roll off from the vibration; but they didn't. Reg Underwood was playing Handel's Largo when we walked in. When we put our heads down for a minute, the way you do when you sit in Chapel, I whispered to Hetty, ‘Are you all right now?' ‘That girl!' she said. She had seen Christine Mahy in the choir.

Christine was in the Capelles Chapel choir as a rule, unless she was invited to some other chapel to sing; so Raymond must have invited her especially. She was dressed like nobody else. Christine liked to say of herself ‘I am a simple soul.' She was in a plain white dress with a tight bodice and a full skirt, and wore over it a pale grey silk cloak lined with blue. She had no hat on, to speak of. For a moment, I thought she had dared to come in chapel without a hat; but then I saw she had a small, round white cap on the very top of her pale yellow hair. She was a simple soul. She might have been the Virgin Mary in person.

Hetty half got to her feet and I thought she was going to walk out, as she had done from the sinking of the
Titanic
; but just then Raymond came in from the vestry and she sat down again. He didn't look to me at all nervous. I know if I had been going to hold forth to all those people, I would have been shivering in my shoes. He walked up the steps to the pulpit and sat with his head bent; then he found the place in the hymn-book and stood up to announce the first hymn. I thought how much he looked the young minister. He was wearing black, tight for him, I thought; but it made him look very slim and very young. His white cuffs was showing, and he had a white handkerchief in his breast pocket. His hair was neatly parted on one side; and brushed down flat, as far as it could be. There was something about his face set him apart from the rest of us; and I thought perhaps after all, up there in the pulpit he was in the right place. The first hymn was ‘We plough the fields and scatter'. It was the right hymn for the occasion, and I suppose everybody sang it without thinking what it meant. I know I did. I noticed Raymond didn't sing; but now I come to think of it, I never heard him sing or whistle. Christine sang, but she was careful not to be heard above the others. Her turn was coming. She was another who knew what she was doing.

I hadn't been in Chapel for years: not since I had been with Jim, when we was doing the rounds. It was the prayers got my goat. In Church you know what is coming, and for how long; but some of the ministers in Chapel would pray and pray and pray, and really be preaching God a sermon while they was praying. Jim and me would look at each other and wink, and long to be able to sit up and straighten our backs and stretch our legs. I don't know if Raymond had remembered, but I had probably told him at some time or another. Anyhow, for the first prayer he only asked us to say the Lord's Prayer with him, and the second was the shortest I have ever heard in Chapel. For the Lesson, he read the Parable of the Sower. I thought what a good speaking voice he had. He spoke the English well; yet not quite like an Englishman. He was of those who for generations it had been more natural to speak French. His voice had more in it than an Englishman's. There was nothing missing. It had all the colours of the rainbow in it, from dark to light.

I don't remember what the second hymn was. It had something to do with the Holy Spirit; but I didn't understand it, and I didn't know the tune. The hymn after the Lesson was a hymn he said was sung by the Manx fishermen. ‘Hear us, O Lord, from heaven Thy dwelling place.' It was one of my favourite tunes; and I can well imagine that hymn being sung by fishermen on just such another shore as Birdo Harbour. I could see through the open doorway some fishermen in guernseys sitting on the grass listening, and a boat was drawn up on the shingle and others moored to the cauchie. The sky was as clear as a pearl, and the tide was out and the butt-end of Herm seemed so near you would have thought you could step on it. It was after that hymn Raymond said his short prayer. ‘I ask you to pray with me in silence,' he said, ‘for us to be honest in our minds ... and tender in our hearts ... and true in our secret places ... so the love of Christ may dwell in us ... and unite us one with the other.' There was a long silence; and then he said ‘Amen'. It is the only prayer, except the Lord's prayer I learnt at the Vale School, I have never forgotten.

He then came down to earth and read the notices. There was to be a week-night meeting in the Mission Hall on the Wednesday and a meeting of the Y.L.U. in the schoolroom on the Thursday and a jumble sale on the Friday. While the collection was being taken, Reg Underwood played a voluntary. It was the piece by Beethoven I liked so much. I don't know if Raymond had me in mind when he chose it, but I do know he himself arranged every detail of that service as he wanted it. After the collection, he said, ‘Christine Mahy will sing the next hymn.' She stood up by herself in the choir. I can see her yet. She let the cloak she was wearing fall off her shoulders on to the chair behind her, and you almost heard the shudder of horror from many in the congregation; for her frock had no sleeves and her arms was bare.

I have pondered and wondered over Christine many times. She was, I think, the most callous and cruel person and the most vain and selfish woman I have ever known. Was she a human being? Or only a female? I don't know. I do know when I think of Christine Mahy, I love old Liza. For all her wickedness and vanity, Liza was human through and through. Dudley Waine choked me off once for criticising Christine. ‘Christine is beyond criticism,' he said. ‘She is a force of nature.' That may be, but a force of nature can be a great nuisance, if it isn't kept in order; or if you don't find some way of dealing with it. There is nothing holy about a force of nature. Christine seemed to think everything she did was holy because it was Christine Mahy did it. I will go so far as to grant she may have been what she thought she was, when she was singing. It wasn't only every note was pure and every word clear, it was as if she wasn't singing words she had learnt from a book, or to a tune was being played on the organ for her to sing to, but as if she was making up the words and the music for the first time as she went along, and pouring it out of her full heart as she sang:

and as I write down those words I have heard sung so often, but have only heard sung truly once, I know they are the words of Raymond's religion and of the whole of his religion. He came to turn against it and deny it and try and tear it out of himself; but I know he didn't ever quite tear the roots from his heart. When she sat down there was not a sound in the chapel. Raymond stood up and read the text: ‘Lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world.'

Raymond was a clever boy. He was the clever one of the family. I am not clever; and I am glad I am not. It didn't do him much good. I remember he began, ‘According to the Scriptures, those were the last words uttered by Jesus Christ before He ascended into heaven.' He didn't say it was so: he said ‘according to the Scriptures'; and it was not the Gospel of Jesus Christ Raymond preached that night. I knew the Gospel of Jesus Christ. I couldn't help it. I had heard it all my life. Here was me, or anybody else, alive on earth; and, when we died, we was going either to heaven, or to hell. If we had accepted Jesus Christ as our Saviour, we would go to heaven. It was our only chance. It wasn't going to be the reward for our works; but for our faith. It is true, if you was saved, you didn't smoke, or drink, or fornicate except in the marriage bed; and you didn't rob from your neighbour, unless you could do it by law; but if you didn't believe Jesus Christ died for your sins, none of that would get you into heaven. Church wasn't so hard and fast; and it suited me better. I didn't bother my head about it much; but I did think if I got what I deserved, I would go to hell for sure.

Raymond's argument was reasonable, I thought. He said it wasn't much use arguing about what may or may not have happened on earth nearly two thousand years ago. Christ was in heaven. That was where we must think of Him as being. He was in Heaven here and now. He is in the heart of God. He is the love in the heart of God. God in the stories of the Old Testament and in the world around us as we see it and in history as we learn it is a bully and a brute; but the heart of the brute God is love. He asked where heaven was. He answered, ‘Where Christ reigns.' He quoted two texts from the New Testament to catch the good Christians in his net. The first was ‘The Kingdom of Heaven is at hand'; the second was ‘The Kingdom of Heaven is within you'. He said Christ is in every creature and every creature is in Christ. ‘The whole creation is afloat in Christ,' he said, ‘or Christ is not at all!' Reg Underwood, who didn't care tuppence about religion but was mad about music, said to me when I talked it over with him, ‘Young Martel blew the fuses and down came the house of cards!'

I don't remember half he said. Once he had cleared the decks, he said whatever came into his head. He made us laugh, I know; and that wasn't often done in Chapel. The Reverend Whetnall of St Sampson's, who was a very popular preacher at the beginning of the War, used to make his congregation laugh, but only at the P.S.A.; and he always made it all right by preaching retribution in the end. There was no spirit of retribution in Raymond. He delighted in the scamps he told us stories of. I remember his story of Jurat Theodore Montpelier, also of the Hook Chook. I knew and everybody else knew there was no such Jurat and no such place; but it was very near the bone. The Jurat came of a good old Guernsey family which, in the Middle Ages, always had the sense to fight on the side paid best; and later on, when they became smugglers, they smuggled both ways, from France to England and from England to France. When smuggling was made illegal in Guernsey and they took to privateering to be respectable, they captured French ships for the English and English ships for the French. The present Montpelier, the Jurat Theodore, who was a very important person on the States and a model of all the virtues, was a staunch Wesleyan; but Raymond wouldn't say which chapel he belonged to.

It was no use looking to the States for the Kingdom of Heaven. If you work on the roads for the States you work from seven in the morning to six at night, and are paid accordingly. If you work only from five in the afternoon, you don't get paid much. In the Kingdom of Heaven you get paid just as much if you start at five in the afternoon, as if you start at seven in the morning. I didn't follow him there. I didn't follow him after. I listened more as if to music, or to the waves of the sea. ‘The Kingdom of Heaven is at hand' was the text he really preached from. He spoke of everything being changed. He said, ‘In the twinkling of an eye a veil is lifted; and you see with other eyes and hear with other ears and are given another understanding.' I didn't understand then, and I don't understand now; but I know he brought me near to believing in the promise of a happiness I have only known in dreams.

He ended quietly and there was not a movement in the chapel until he announced the last hymn:

and we sang it softly, Christine too, yet her voice was heard over us all. He pronounced the Benediction; but I noticed he said ‘keep our hearts and minds in the knowledge of the love of God' and not ‘of Jesus Christ, Our Lord.' I was among the first out and asked Hetty if she wanted to wait for Raymond, or go round to the vestry. ‘What, and meet that girl?' she said. ‘Not me!' The chapel was emptying and I noticed the small groups of people standing around saying little, but smiling kindly at each other. I said to Hetty, ‘He was good, you know.' She said, ‘I notice he got a lot to say to strangers. He don't have so much to say to his own mother.' She hadn't understood a word.

I expected Raymond to catch us up, but he didn't, though I had to stop several times on the way for Hetty to have a rest. She couldn't get her breath and complained of her heart. When we got in, my Cousin Mary Ann had laid the table for supper in the front room, and was cutting bread and butter. I thought myself there seemed to be a lot of places laid. Hetty said, ‘Goodness, is it all the parish is coming then?' My Cousin Mary Ann said she thought perhaps Raymond would be bringing a friend home. Hetty said, ‘He didn't say nothing about bringing a friend for supper.' She went upstairs to take off her hat and get out of her tight boots. She always wore boots a size too small, so as to have small feet like Prissy; but they made walking for her an agony.

Harold was sitting by the fire without a cap, reading the
News of the World
. He was allowed to sit in the front room without a cap, if it was only some of the family was expected. ‘The boy remember to say his piece?' he said. Harold's idea of a sermon was the preacher learnt it by heart out of a book beforehand and stood up in the pulpit and spouted it. ‘I don't think he forgot much,' I said. ‘He got his head screwed on right,' said Harold. It was the only time I ever heard him say a word in praise of Raymond. ‘Was there many there?' said my Cousin Mary Ann. ‘It was full,' I said, ‘and sitting on the steps.' Hetty came down in a blouse and skirt with slippers on her feet. ‘Are your feet easier now, my ducks?' said Harold. She didn't say nothing but sat on the other side of the fire. ‘Tired?' he said. She sighed and put a hand under her heart. ‘Shall I make the tea?' said my Cousin Mary Ann. ‘Might as well,' said Hetty, ‘if that Raymond would rather stop and talk to those I wouldn't be seen dead with than come home for his supper with his people, he can go without.'