The Quick and the Dead (2 page)

This drama being played out so near to me did not, however, impinge upon my conscious life, except in fragments that made no meaning. Nor did the mystery apprehended serve to distract me from the intense joys and sorrows of my private universe. My mother taught me to read, and presently I became a half-day boy—nine o'clock till half-past twelve—at a High School for Girls (and Kindergarten) situated at the end of a long road of which our Adam Lane formed as it were the crook-handle. Here I went daily, hand-in-hand with two of three loving young ladies who competed with each other for the office. They seemed to me immensely grown-up persons; and indeed the eldest can have been hardly less than fifteen. They were the daughters of a neighbour several cuts above us in the social scale; and at the school door we went our several ways—they to their recondite
studies in the Senior Section, I to my parenthesis, my Kindergarten, where I was taught pothooks and hangers, the first elements of arithmetic, kings of England, Bible stories, and how many beans make five. This last is perhaps a life's lesson, and I did not begin to get much grasp of it until my translation, some years later, to Beddo's Genteel Academy at Farringay, a place six railway stations distant from our village. To be a season ticket holder at ten years old was a distinction I secretly prized, and it was nothing to me, in my man-of-the-world pride, that I must eat my lunch from a paper bag every school day, instead of going home for the meal as did the great majority of my fellows. This going to and fro in the world was very much to my taste, and life at school was full of joys and discoveries, pains and humiliations. It was (or seems so now) like a story that was broken off every Friday evening and resumed every Monday morning: a story of which the characters were more than life size, with demons at one moral extreme, angels at the other, and ordinaries in between; for melodramatic valuations are second nature in a child, as in many adults. Chief among the demons was a lad called Montifex, who was esteemed a bully and who became a nine days
horrific wonder to us all because his mother hanged herself. It was in the morning papers; the older boys had read all about it; and Montifex, wherever he went that morning, was followed by furtive admiring glances, and greeted by a lowering of voices or a sudden awkward silence. Only Rankle, among us all, had the hardihood to get a first-hand account of the affair from the bereaved boy. But Rankle was a notorious daredevil—a strange, impulsive, and not unfriendly creature. It was Rankle who once stole sevenpence from another boy's desk; or so it was whispered, for the truth of the matter was hidden behind the headmaster's discreet frown. And Rankle, whose walk to school took him through a copse, arrived one day with a pocketful of hungry nestlings, which he had carried away, nest and all, from the tree where he had found them: whereupon the hot-tempered, warm-hearted Beddo, dispensing with the form and process of school law, rushed upon him and boxed his ears with uncontrolled fury. This Rankle was small, dark, bright-eyed; and I was not alone in believing him to be the wickedest boy in the world. Then something happened that greatly puzzled and disturbed my complacency. Rankle was absent for several consecutive days, and one
morning Mr. Beddo, in an unwonted interval following roll-call and prayers, announced that the boy had died, after a short and painful illness. Yes, flushed with his crimes, at the age of eleven and a half, the monster Rankle was called to his account. We did not know what to think: I for my part could not imagine that unruly spirit at home in heaven, and I shrank from supposing him to be burning in hell. What shocked us most, I fancy, was the realization that boys, no less than grown and aged men, were mortal creatures. We made haste to forget Rankle; but I had little appetite for my lunch-time sandwiches that day.

So much for the demons, though there were minor specimens as well. Conspicuous among the angels was Edward Dove, who had already begun to shave (as often as once a fortnight, it was whispered, but one must allow a discount for school patriotism). He was captain of cricket, and once chanced to see me, at practice, bring off a difficult catch; and his benign approval, that voice from Olympus saying (unless I misheard him) ‘This is my beloved son in whom I am well pleased', made me his humble if distant worshipper for a whole season. But these events and characters, as I say, were incidents in a vivid story.
My experience of them was intense enough, but less intense than the life, inner and outer, that I lived in the rural but soon-to-be suburban region of my home. Broad Green, in those days, made but little mark on even a large-scale map of Greater London, and the four or five humble shops that clustered at the top of Adam Lane served only a village community; the newcomers, the better-off city-going folk, being catered for by the smarter establishments of Hadley Rise, two miles south of us. Hadley Rise was newly transfigured: they even had gas laid on. And it was to be our turn next. Already the undulating greenness that surrounded Adam Lane was speckled with building plots. Already people pointed here and there, with ample gestures, saying: ‘That's where the new road will be—some day.' Already, sharp-featured men from the metropolis visited us from time to time, and looked us over with a speculative eye. And all this was held, and rightly, to herald the great day of redemption when gas should arrive to enlighten our rural simplicities, and the rough places be made plain. But, by some freak of chance, Adam Lane itself—or at least our part of it—remained almost unchanged in the vicissitudes that followed. I revisited the place recently, after an interval
of more than twenty years. In the cool of a summer's evening I walked down the street of my childhood and stood for a while outside the shop that had once been Calamy's, and, lost in memories, I could hardly believe that this was not indeed the past itself that confronted me. What sharply corrected this wilful illusion was the smallness of everything compared with the child's idea I had carried so long in my mind. This was a toy street, or I a giant. And as I stood and stared, consciously savouring the queer sensation of past time, and within an ace (it seemed) of surprising some ultimate secret in the nature of being, evening dusk gathered about me, and presently, to the eye of my fancy, the little private door at the side of the shop was opened and two figures emerged: the one a thick-set roundish man wearing a light fawn overcoat and a trilby hat and carrying an umbrella, the other a boy of perhaps fourteen with a large leather-bound hymnal under his arm and a school cap on his head. It is Sunday evening, and these two are playing truant; for instead of turning to the right and making their way to the local chapel, they set off sharply in the opposite direction: left, and, after passing Mr Tallent's dairy at the corner, left again, and across a fieldpath that will lead
them, in half an hour or so, to a slum region known as The Freehold. A mile or two beyond The Freehold is the district of Suthergate, and at Suthergate, in the Tin Tabernacle ('no irreverence is intended in that name, my boy,' Calamy would earnestly assure me), the Reverend Tom Latitude preaches twice every Sunday.

Tom Latitude—a name so incredibly fitting the man that I am tempted to amend history by altering it—was one of Calamy's heroes, and every three months or so he would give himself a treat by going to hear him preach. I never lost a chance of joining these expeditions. I liked the walk; I was flattered and fortified by having Calamy to myself; and I found his eagerness, his expectancy, immensely infectious. Nor was this his only truancy from the Broad Green Bethel. At this period he had an insatiable appetite for sermons, and could smell out a likely preacher with a sureness that seemed to me uncanny, so that not one could come to preach within ten miles of us but Calamy would somehow contrive to be there to listen. ‘There's a new man at the Farringay Quadrant to-morrow night. What d'ye say to that, Claud? Shall we go and hear him?' And sometimes, at the moment of our setting out, he would say to
me, confidentially: ‘He may have something to tell us—you never know.' A true romantic, he believed, more firmly than in any specific doctrine, that in the twinkling of an eye we should all be changed: changed inwardly, and by a creative word. My mother never came with us on these strange voyages of discovery. She smiled on our going and was content to be left to her own devices, which may very well—and with Calamy's spoken or unspoken consent—have included a meeting with Harry Vengeance. It may have been something that my mother had not given him, had no power to give him, that Calamy sought news of in these transcendental discourses. A word, could it but be spoken, would solve that puzzle, and all others with it; and it was in that restless unarticulated hope, I fancy, that he set out on these Sunday evening pilgrimages.

Calamy's absences from their evening service, which grew more frequent as time went on, caused a good deal of head-shaking among the Broad Green congregation. In his humble fashion he was by way of being a pillar of Little Bethelism, and his defections never went unnoticed. He was missed. Particularly was he missed in the choir, where they esteemed him, and justly, a singularly pure
tenor. I fancy it was the singing, more than anything else, that had made him an habitual chapelgoer, since music could be communably indulged in nowhere else except at Saint Mark's, which, with its surplices and altar and other popish excesses, was looked at askance by this honest son of Dissent. At home, too, we had music, nourishing ourselves on glees and part-songs and above all on copious draughts of Handel. Handel was the presiding genius of our home at its most serene. My mother, a tolerable pianist, accompanied Calamy's singing on these happy Handelian occasions, doing her part with an air of humorous pride in him, of whimsical indulgence, that was half-motherly, half-daughterly, and wholly affectionate. It is easy now, looking back on such scenes with mature eyes, to see that beneath all hurts and bewilderment on one side, and all boredness and impatience and smothered rebellion on the other, there was a deep habitual kindness between those two mismated people. It was, if you like, a makeshift marriage, a second-best for both; but there was enough generosity in each of them to make it tolerable. My mother appreciated, as well she might, Calamy's simplicity and gentleness; and Calamy took a quiet unceasing delight in my
mother's mere existence. Her youth (so marvellously retained), her candour, her wilfulness, her quick temper, her sudden change of mood, and that bubbling irresponsible vitality in her that was so unmoral, by Broad Green standards so unhuman, that it could not be argued with: these, to Calamy, were all, I surmise, integers in the sum of her enchantingness; the shape, the scent, the colour, the spontaneous sunward impulse of a personality in flower. When she was happiest she pelted him with banter of the most fantastic sort. ‘You fine bunch of boots, you!' she would cry, in mock indignation. ‘Sitting there with your books when I want the table for supper!
I'll
sole and heel you, old Leather Brains!' At which Calamy, pleased as a child, would look up from his reading and say: ‘Not a bunch, my dear. You can't have a
bunch
of boots. It doesn't make sense.' These exchanges might have been designed expressly for my entertainment, so well did they agree with my childish notion of what was funny. I will not multiply instances: the household joke, most intimate product of family life, cuts a sorry figure in any alien context. But I, as will be evident, had an additional reason for welcoming such ebullitions of nonsense: they meant that, for the moment at least, my mother, and
therefore my father (as I still thought him), was happy. An evening of Handel gave me the same warm assurance: I cannot nowadays hear five bars of that master but I am visited by a picture of my mother, gay and kind, seated at her yellow-cased cottage piano, with Calamy at her side bending and peering towards the music-book.

Calamy sang, as he did all things, with single-minded attention to the matter in hand and without self-consciousness. So it was that we carried our hymnal with us—hymns, chants, and anthems, all with full score—when we went adventuring in quest of a miraculous illumination. As for the Broad Green Bethelites, they must manage without him. In this matter, if in no other, Calamy was wayward. He was wayward and wilful, but not defiant. He could not deny his fault; more than once he remarked to me sadly that his duty lay at home; but, time and again, the lure of a new preacher, or the attraction of a tried favourite like the Reverend Tom Latitude, proved irresistible. In his heart he must have known that his conduct needed no justification, for he was a man incapable—no matter what the inducement or what the threat—of acting against his heart's intuition; but at least it suited his humour, perhaps
added a spice of naughtiness to the experience, to refer to these blameless and often arduous outings of ours as though they had been a form of dissipation, a piece of youthful wildness. ‘We're old enough to know better, Claud my boy,' he used to say (and if it is hard to believe him quite serious, it is more than hard, it is impossible, to credit him with an ironical intention), ‘but I dare say,' he would add, wistfully excusing himself, ‘I dare say it does us good to get out and about a bit sometimes.'

He was not a talkative man, but I found his silences richly companionable; and sometimes, on these walks of ours, he would draw me into a discussion of the problems that agitated him. ‘D'you know, Claud,' he said once, ‘I sometimes wonder whether it isn't a bit lonely for God up there. Being so much better than everybody else, I mean. He knows everything that goes on, everything we think and do and are going to do to-morrow, next week, whenever you like. There's no surprise for him in the world, and never can be. Now that can't be very interesting for him, can it, Claud?' He asked the question as if hoping to be instructed. ‘Did you ever think of it that way?' I had in fact thought something like it, but my way of thinking had been more
egoistical, being concerned less with God's point of view than with my own. From earlier childhood I had always been faintly repelled by the idea of spending my life-after-death in the uncomfortable presence of a personage so unimaginably greater than the greatest of his creatures that there could be no possibility, I thought, of ease between us. It was all very well for them to talk of that personage as our Heavenly Father: the phrase was false and did not deceive me. A father and his child are of one kind, I argued; the child may grow to the moral and intellectual stature of the father. Their inequality is temporary, and a fundamental equality underlies it. Calamy from the first had behaved to me more as a brother and a contemporary than as a conventional father; he had not, since my baby years, exercised arbitrary authority over me; and our friendship had developed with the development of my own mind. But between man and God, it seemed, there was an eternal disparity, an absolute difference; and it was in my mind even then, at the beginning of my adolescence, that love, friendship, any sort of vital and fruitful relationship, is impossible except on a basis of real equality, a real identity in kind, underlying all surface disparities and differences. I had therefore no use for
this God they talked about, though I did not as yet question his existence. And now that Calamy had produced for me a variant of my own secret fancy, I saw that the disability cut both ways. Abject worship on the one side, infinite condescension on the other—it was a lonely and barren business; and God was doomed, by the logic of the situation, to spend eternity in solitude, with only the dubious alleviation of peering in upon his universe, as through a nursery window, to judge and condemn and forgive, and receive a chorus of childish adulation. Yes, I agreed with Calamy, and as best I could, in my boy's fashion, I enlarged on the subject. Delighted at being understood, he grasped my arm affectionately and said: ‘There's a puzzle here, Claud. Perhaps they haven't got it quite right yet, not even Mr Latitude.' This last was a tremendous admission. I felt that a new epoch was beginning.