The Children's Book (21 page)

Patty Dace the feminist, Theosophist and socialist sat down and argued with Patty Dace the vestigial Christian, condemned her nostalgia for the Church, and renounced it. This had led to a certain amount of embarrassment over what she felt to be duplicity in her dealings with Frank Mallett, with whom it was such a pleasure to collaborate in choosing lecturers and publicising lectures. She would, oddly, not have been comforted to know that Frank himself often felt that his faith was erected on shifting and slipping sands. She liked the Church to be
there
, like the overlarge, ancient solid mediaeval buildings in the marshes, a reality, even if she had to relinquish her connection to it.

She welcomed the young men, and gave them cups of tea, and homemade shortbread biscuits after their ride. They had, as a committee, secured a series of Thursday evenings in a community hall in Lydd, where audiences of local writers and teachers and shopkeepers were
augmented by officers and men from the military camp near the town. She put on her spectacles, and said to Frank that they should perhaps find a title for a series. Dobbin said he thought they should find exciting speakers first, and then make up a title. Although Dobbin had been shy and ill at ease at Todefright he felt in retrospect that he had been privileged and delighted to meet the glittering folk in their fancy dress. He wanted to hear them again—Humphry and Olive, Toby Youlgreave and August Steyning, the anarchists and the London professor who worked with Professor Galton on human statistics and heredity. He said that he had heard some very interesting ideas about folklore and ancient customs whilst in Andreden. Maybe she could think of those.

Miss Dace said she was interested more in
change
. She wanted lectures on
new
things, the New Life, the New Woman, new forms of art and democracy. And religion, she said, looking bravely at Frank.

Frank sipped his tea and said thoughtfully that in fact there was only an apparent contradiction. For many of the new things looked back to very old things for their strength. The Theosophists looked back to the wisdom of Tibetan masters, for instance. William Morris’s socialism looked back to mediaeval guilds and communities. Edward Carpenter’s ideas about shedding the stultifying respectability of Victorian family life looked back also, to human beings living in harmony with nature, as natural creatures. And the same was true of the vegetarians and the anti-vivisectionists, they required a wholesome respect for natural animal life, as it was before technical civilisation. In the arts too, Benedict Fludd, for instance, wanted to return to the ancient craft of the single potter, and to find the lost red glazes, the Turkish Iznik, the Chinese
sang de boeuf
. The Society for Psychical Research had rediscovered an old spirit world, and lost primitive powers of human communication. Old superstitions might furnish new spiritual understanding. Even the New Woman, he said, venturing a half-joke, sought freedom from whalebone and laces in Rational Dress but also in free-flowing mediaeval gowns. Women’s work in the world appeared to be new, but in the old times abbesses had wielded power and governed communities, as principals of colleges now did. Maybe all steps into the future drew strength from a searching gaze into the deep past. He would almost dare to propose himself as a lecturer on this theme.

There is a peculiar aesthetic pleasure in constructing the form of a syllabus, or a book of essays, or a course of lectures. Visions and shadows
of people and ideas can be arranged and rearranged like stained-glass pieces in a window, or chessmen on a board. The committee considered what it would like to hear, and how the contributions should be balanced. Dobbin proposed that August Steyning be asked to expound his ideas about the new theatre, which would go beyond realism into the ancient skills of marionettes and puppets. It was agreed that Toby Youlgreave should be asked to speak on the relations between modern folklore and the ancient fairy faiths of our ancestors. They decided to invite Edward Carpenter to speak on his hopes for men, women, and his “in-between sex,” newly described. Names were brought up: Bernard Shaw, Graham Wallas, Beatrice Webb. Annie Besant, who had spoken persuasively, intensely and successively for secularism, birth control and Fabian socialism, had taken on the disputed leadership of the Theosophists since Madame Blavatsky had, in 1891, “abandoned a physical instrument that could no longer be used,” the “worn-out garment that she had worn for one incarnation.” For two or three visionary moments the three made models of what Mrs. Besant might have to say. But Patty Dace said, reluctantly, that she felt that Mrs. Besant would be too implicated in the current problems of the society to want to come and talk in Romney Marsh.

Miss Dace proposed a lecture on prostitution and the injustice in the differing ways in which women and men were treated. It was not, on reflection, a good idea to give such a lecture to an audience including so many military men. Maybe Mrs. Wellwood could talk about modern children, and modern children’s literature; that was safer. It was agreed, rapidly, that Mr. Fludd was not temperamentally suited to lecturing. Maybe someone from the South Kensington Museum could speak about crafts and their future.

All of them knew, even Dobbin, that no lecture series conforms to its ideal elegance and depth, as first mooted. Lecturers refuse, lecturers fail. The same people, who can be relied on, turn up, and say the same things. There would have to be a lecture on vegetable-growing, and Mrs. Wolsey would have to give it. Bernard Shaw would be replaced by some thin and nervous student, who would have no idea how to speak to soldiers. They went on to the second stage of planning, which is the secondary list of reliable performers.

Patty Dace said she thought they should ask Herbert Methley. He had decided opinions and was an inspirational speaker. She had heard
him, once, in Rye, which was an indication that he might be willing. She could not remember exactly what he had said, but she remembered it as being mesmeric. It had been to do with freeing the instinctual self, something like that. Everybody present had been stimulated and excited.

Frank said that he had never met Mr. Methley but he had been very impressed—very impressed indeed—by the copy of
Marsh Lights
which Miss Dace had kindly given him. He had gone on to read
The Giant on the Hill
, and
Bel and the Dragon
, which he had also admired. He would be delighted both to meet Mr. Methley, and to hear him speak.

Patty Dace looked searchingly at him. He smiled mildly back. He was unaware that the gift of the novel had been a test of his faith on her part. It had tested his faith. But he felt obliged not to reveal to Miss Dace how much it had done so. In fact, he thought about it, quite hard, every day. It had given him solid images of his doubt.

It was a novel about someone in his own position, the solitary priest in a made-up Marsh church, with a dwindling congregation. The priest in the book, who was called Gabriel Medcalf, had been bewitched by, or had fallen in love with, or had deceived and disappointed, a woman called Bertha, whom he met mostly when he was walking along the brook in the countryside. There was a kind of
greenness
about this character, which was rather cunningly done by flickering references to the lights in her pale hair, or her eyes, or the shadows on her fine skin. Frank was not very responsive to female charm, and Bertha corresponded to no fantasy of his own. He rather thought she might be an embodiment—symbolic or actual—of a kind of elder-tree witch, a guardian of flowers and berries. She had no blemishes, and was evasive. What Frank responded to was a something in Methley’s description of the relations between the church building and the landscape. In this world, the church was gaunt and skeletal, a solid shell around a lifeless space. The spiritual energy had leached into, or returned to, the earth and the marsh and the water around the church. Trees appeared to walk, and moved angry arms, or spoke in inhuman voices, creaking and groaning. The marsh lights flittered and gathered in dancing circles, and split again into snakes of light, running errands across the evening darkness. Frank had been impressed as a boy by Wordsworth’s sense of the ancient force—not measured by human time—in crags and boulders. Methley had learned from him—huge stones lurched like primeval scaled beasts, from the lips of brackish lakes to dry land and back.
Hillocks heaved with slow, slow energy. Cracks opened into traps. The whole earth was possessed, and either indifferent or inimical, unless the inadequate Bertha was meant to be a way to enter it, or find harmony in it. Gabriel Medcalf failed the test, and ventured less and less frequently outside his church, and its walled graveyard. Gabriel in the novel lost his sense of the divinity of Christ, and saw him as “a kindly Jew, slaughtered long ago in Palestine.” This phrase had got under Frank Mallett’s skin. He recognised it, and resented his recognition. At times he felt his own church, like the one in Methley’s novel, to be surrounded by inimical elementals, crowding in, peering through keyholes, muttering and waiting. He wasn’t sure he wanted to meet the author. But he didn’t like failing tests. He suggested that he and Arthur should call on Mr. Methley and discuss their project with him.

Patty Dace said that that was an excellent idea. She thought for a moment or two, and then said that the Methleys were very keen on their smallholding and were enthusiastic gardeners. If they didn’t answer the doorbell, they could usually be found by walking round into the garden at the back.

They pedalled the East Guldeford road in a companionable silence, and found their way to Wantsum Farm, which was hardly large enough to be called a farm, but supported a few sheep, some ducks, a pair of goats and a small orchard. The farmhouse was squat, with small windows and an ill-fitting door. They rang the bell, and when no one answered, did as Miss Dace had suggested, and went along the path round to the back of the house, across a rough lawn with a diminutive duckpond, and through a gate in a wall into the kitchen garden.

They made their way to the centre of this space between high rows of peas and beans, growing up poles with supporting netting. These screening plants explained why they came upon the Methleys, quite suddenly, in a sheltered spot at the centre of the radiating paths. They were sitting side by side upon the grass. Herbert Methley was holding up a book and Phoebe Methley was shelling peas and broad beans into a colander on her lap.

Both of them were naked. Both wore spectacles.

Everyone stared.

Neither Arthur Dobbin nor Frank Mallett had seen a naked woman
during his adult life, though Frank had visited sweaty sick or dying ladies in dishevelled nightgowns.

Both Methleys had sun-roughed and reddened noses, necks and wrists. Both were otherwise lean and pale. Herbert Methley was dark, with flopping fine hair, and a luxuriant black growth under his armpits and round his relaxed member. He was quite sinewy, with thin but muscular arms and legs, and a spattering of wiry hair on his chest. Phoebe Methley had sandy hair tied up in a knot with a broad band. Her breasts—they saw her breasts first, to the exclusion of the rest of her—were flattening mounds, hanging over her rib-cage, with nipples the colour of dog-roses, not sticking out, but retracted. They saw that she too had a lower bush of hair, a brighter ginger than her head, and averted their eyes. She had a long neck, and the skin on it was just beginning to crease into folds. She had big eyes—very big behind the glasses—which if she had been clothed might have been the first thing they would have noticed. They startled her into upsetting the colander, which had been resting on her thighs, so that hard bright green spheres of peas, and grey-green kidney-shaped broad beans rolled everywhere on flesh and earth.

Neither Frank nor Dobbin, curiously, felt urged to back off, or retreat in disorder. Herbert Methley said, easily,

“You have caught us taking the sun. Sun-worshipping, in fact. It is our habit, when we can, and this is truly flaming June.”

Frank Mallett murmured that he had been told they would find them in the garden. Innate caution led him not to say by whom he had been told. There had been a glitter in Miss Dace’s eye.

Phoebe Methley rolled on her hip to gather up the peas and beans. Dobbin felt impelled to help her with this task, and impelled to turn his head away. He did neither, but continued to study her naked flesh. Frank Mallett said

“Perhaps we should return another time. We came to ask about a lecture series in the autumn. We hoped you might…”

Herbert Methley stood up, stolid on his naked feet, and reached from a camping stool some folded garments that turned out to be two embroidered gowns in the form of kimonos. He held one out to his wife, who stood up, in a practised movement, and held out her arms for the sleeves. She did up her sash, and went down on her knees to continue the gathering of the peas and beans. Herbert Methley said

“The original couple in the original garden were in a happier state
before they learned shame. Come into the house. Tell me about your lectures.”

His voice had a northern tang, which Frank, a child of the Home Counties, could not place. Dobbin knew it came from somewhere quite a way north of his Sheffield.

They padded back in single file, into the house through the back door, Phoebe Methley in the rear with the colander, like some saint’s attribute in a painting. She went into the kitchen, to make tea. Herbert Methley offered the two friends seats in low, slatted Arts and Crafts armchairs. The room was full of a smoky darkness, after the blaze of light in the garden. There was a vase of field flowers on a carved table. Dobbin explained the lecture plan to Herbert Methley, and Frank withdrew into his own mind for a moment, wondering whether to thank Methley for
Marsh Lights
, or at least to tell him how it had moved him. He decided against this. He found he was annoyed that this robed person, with his electric black hair, was more the owner, so to speak, of the imagined rocks and stones and elder bushes than he, the reader. Readers ought not to meet writers, he thought. They are
meant
not to.