The Quick and the Dead (6 page)

Until this moment I had been unable to take my eyes off the face of our persecutor. But now I looked again at my mother. White-faced, incredulous, she stared round-eyed at the man swaying and mouthing in the pulpit. I gripped her hand tight and tighter. What Fleer was saying was by no means crystal clear to me, but that it was base and cruel I needed no telling. The little chapel became a nightmare, crowded with eager, curious, staring eyes. The velvet voice of malice went meandering on, though I could no longer attend to
it. But now the sound of another voice fell on my dazed senses. My heart galloped convulsively, and for a moment the spectacle before me seemed to liquefy, walls pews people all melting together. Then, my sight clearing, I became aware that Calamy had risen, from his seat in the choir, and was facing the parson with uplifted hand. I knew that it must have been his voice I had heard but a second ago. And now I heard it again, and marvelled at it: nothing so quietly authoritative had I ever heard before.

‘Be quiet, man. The devil's in you.'

Was this Calamy, my mild and diffident Calamy? Humble and self-effacing as he was, nothing more unlikely could have been conceived than that he should interrupt ‘divine service'. A new Calamy was revealed to me. His manner showed no trace of either effort or hesitation, no consciousness of having suddenly become the centre of attention. He spoke intimately, decisively, as though Fleer and he had been alone together.

Perhaps in the first instance it was astonishment that silenced the parson, making him open his eyes and glare in pious indignation at his interruptor. But it was something else, some power in Calamy I could only guess at, that made him remain silent.

‘Go home,' said Calamy. ‘You're a sick man. Go home and pray for health.'

The two men confronted each other with only a couple of yards between them: the one short, thick-set, with the face of a peasant; the other large, round-bellied, long-armed, and equine in feature. There was a moment of breathless suspense and utter silence. Even Mr Jarnders, the most overbearing of the deacons, found nothing to say. The whole congregation was appalled into speechlessness.

Mr Fleer put his hand to his forehead and turned slowly away, making for the door that admitted to his vestry. Incredulous, we watched him go.

Then at last an excited murmur arose amongst us. Mr. Jarnders, as though released from a trance, shot up like a jack-in-the-box and began protesting. But the door had closed behind Mr Fleer and Calamy had already taken his place at the lectern. ‘Hush, hush!' he said, soothingly, as to a child. ‘Sit down, neighbour. We're going to read a passage of scripture together.
Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels
…' Mr Jarnders, looking foolish and bewildered, did as he was bidden; and Calamy, in homely ingenuous accents, read that famous chapter to the end.

He closed the book and blinked at us for a moment or two over his spectacles. According to the Little Bethelite order of service, there should now have followed a hymn, the sermon, and the doxology. Calamy took off his spectacles and moved away from the lectern. He stood at the platform's edge, and we waited for him to speak.

At last he said confidingly: ‘God's love, isn't he?' His face shone, and there were tears in his eyes. ‘It's surely plain enough.' He stuffed his spectacles into the breast pocket of his jacket. ‘And now let's go home. Or should we sing a hymn first?'

No one answered him. Miss Briggs, divorced from her harmonium, made no movement towards resuming those nuptials. So after a moment's pause Calamy stepped down among us, and coming to my mother he drew her arm in his. The whole congregation was now on its feet, and a general exodus began. Not a word was spoken as we three made our way to the door; but as we were stepping into the sunshine a confused murmur of conversation broke out behind us; and above all other voices I recognized the nasal and self-important tone of Mr Jarnders, our oil and seed merchant and the pastor's right-hand man.

I have failed altogether in my portrait of Calamy if you begin to see him now as some kind of hypnotist, a ‘magnetic personality', or indeed as anything but a generous-hearted man remarkable for nothing but his simple goodness. The word goodness raises, no doubt, a tremendous issue; but I leave it to moralists and metaphysicians to dispute about that. Whatever may be the theory and logic of the matter, for me there is no practical problem; for me, who grew up within the circle of his vital irradiation, the nature of goodness is sufficiently apparent; Calamy himself is its definition. But the Little Bethel-ites had been bred in a different school. In the moment of crisis he had in some degree won them over; in his presence they had found themselves silenced, if not responsive; light had shone in the darkness, and the darkness had overpowered it not. But the sanctified squalor and cruelty by which they had learned to obscure the religion of Jesus was not to be destroyed in any one moment of illumination; and, once quit of him, they were
quick, I fancy, to revert to their former mind. Behind his back, both Jarnders and Fleer became extremely active, especially with their tongues. Calamy had been guilty, they agreed, of brawling desecration; he had interrupted God's minister and insulted God himself; he, who ought to have hidden his head for shame of his wife's sin, had had the wicked presumption to turn his spiritual pastor out of the pulpit and conduct the service himself; he had told the Chief Deacon to sit down (and the Chief Deacon, with true Christian meekness, had obeyed him rather than allow the scandalous incident to develop into a wrangle in God's own house). As for ‘that woman', it was evident that she had bewitched her husband. The age of witchcraft was in theory over, but more than one enthusiast was heard to cast doubts on my mother's humanity: surely she was devil-possessed, or she could never have so fooled and subjugated a man so much her senior, so well regarded in the neighbourhood hitherto, so honest and godfearing. These latter words could no longer, alas, be used of him. He was now a blasphemer, an encourager of sin, a corruptor of the young. (These things reached me in stolen interviews with Bertie Wiccombe, who was now forbidden by his mother to associate with
me.) It was bruited freely abroad that Calamy was a man of loose morals, and a confessed atheist: the inevitable verdict on one who had had the hardihood to pretend that there was anything more than pious cant in the statement that God is love. By his effrontery in supposing that statement to have any real meaning, he had condemned himself past hope of forgiveness in the eyes of people who, being debauched by their gloating sense of sin, shrank from any idea that threatened to deprive them of their dearest indulgence, the masochistic submission of themselves to the whims and lusts of an imaginary monster.

The ostracism to which we were now as a family subjected must have seemed to Mr Fleer like an answer to his prayer. Mr Tallent continued to supply us with milk, but his womenfolk revealed an unexpected genius for avoiding us without resort to the cut direct. Mrs Wiccombe, our next-door neighbour, adopted less delicate tactics, contriving to catch Bertie in conference with me over the garden fence, and making good use of this happy chance by publishing her view of my mother in a loud strident voice. But there were significant gaps in the general boycott. Mr and Mrs Latti, being aliens and infidels, were perhaps beyond reach of Christian
rumours; for they continued to greet us with their usual odd mixture of kindness and formality when any of us chanced to meet them. And then there was Mr Wiccombe, who after a lapse of but three days visited the exiled Calamy, bringing with him a pair of most ancient and dilapidated boots. It was in the early evening, and Calamy sat as usual in his shop, working at his trade, and glancing from time to time at the sunlit street.

‘I've brought a pair of boots along,' said Mr Wiccombe nervously. ‘I wondered whether you could do anything with ‘em, Mr Calamy. In the mending line, I mean.'

Calamy took the boots on his knee and turned them over. He looked up with a smile. ‘These are long past mending, Mr Wiccombe. You'll never walk again on these, do what I may to ‘em.'

Mr Wiccombe nodded with mournful understanding. ‘I daresay you're right. Can't argue with a pair of old boots like that, any more than you can argue with a woman.' Pleased with his own finesse, he shot at Calamy a shrewd look that was very nearly a wink. ‘See my meaning, Mr Calamy?'

Calamy was puzzled.

‘My meaning is,' said our neighbour, ‘that arguing with a woman is so much waste of
good breath. And crossing her, when she's set her mind on a thing, doesn't make for peace and quiet in the home. Believe
me.'

‘Ah,' responded Calamy, vaguely.

‘Well, I mustn't stay gossiping, I suppose,' said Mr Wiccombe, with a furtive sidelong glance in the direction of his own house. But when Calamy was for handing him back the boots he waved them aside. ‘No, you keep ‘em for a bit. They don't eat much. I'll call another time and see if you think they're worth troubling about. It's a pretty fine thing,' he added, with apparent irrelevance, ‘if a man can't take his boots to be mended when he likes. Well, good day, Mr Calamy. My respects to your good lady.'

As for me, I was left to choose between Arthur Vay and Jackman, Bertie being now denied to me. Arthur I did not like. And Jackman? I was morbidly afraid of retaining Jackman's companionship, or any other, on false pretences. I was prepared to attack, at sight, anyone who presumed to disapprove of my mother. Indeed I was in danger of becoming like one of those tiresome knights of chivalry who went about demanding praise of their ladies from chance-met strangers. So at my first encounter with Jackman out of school I walked with him into a lonely field and
there faced him with a question.

‘Have you heard any stories about my mother?'

Jackman reddened, but held his head high.

‘Have you?' I insisted angrily, clenching my fists.

‘My pater,' answered Jackman, after a painful silence, ‘my pater says that gentlemen don't listen to stories about other chaps' mothers.'

The prig. The beautiful prig. How I loved him for it!

I Cannot with any exactness recall for how long our affairs remained in this posture, but I fancy that it was not until rather late in the autumn of the same year that my mother and I went off to Lutterthorpe for the change of scene she so much needed. In the main it was a miserable summer for all three. As week followed week, with no perceptible relaxation of the general hostility, it was borne in upon us that our estrangement from social life was likely to be permanent; that the cloud in our sky, so far from lifting, had already become a fixture. In conversation we avoided the subject, or, if it were forced upon us, made light of it; my mother kept up, so long as she could, the gallant pretence that it was something to
be laughed at and forgotten; and Calamy gave no outward sign of discomposure. But there was a spectre at our feast, and we none of us liked the look of him. It irked us, my mother especially, to be on bad terms with our neighbours. I suppose the people of Broad Green were no more disposed to censorious-ness, and no less, than the rest of the world; and it may be that their vicious sentiment against us abated somewhat as the weeks and months went by. But by then they had dug themselves into a position from which only dynamite could have dislodged them. They had replaced one habit by another: the habit of being neighbourly by the habit of cold-shouldering us; and there was little or no chance of friendly relations being re-established. An hysterical self-righteousness had sentenced us to exile; but, the sentence having been duly carried out, it was largely, perhaps, a kind of public inertia that prevented any reprieve.

There were compensations, however; and we made the most of them. Islanded as we were, cut off from the outer world, the loyalty that made us one became an intense flame giving warmth and illumination. In spirit we clung together more closely than ever before. The Broad Green Bethel saw us no more; we
spent our Sunday mornings at home, and too often (I suspect) spent them in recalling our last morning at the Bethel. But on Sunday evenings we walked abroad as of old, my mother now being also one of the party. Mostly we went to the Tin Tabernacle at Suthergate, whose yellow-brown interior seemed, to my fancy, to welcome us more warmly than the Little Bethel had ever done. I felt at home in that place; the smell of the varnish pleased me; and I always experienced a little premonition of excitement—perhaps communicated to me by Calamy—when, just before the sermon, the lights were lowered. At that point our eyes—mine and Calamy's—became fixed on Tom Latitude. What would he give us to-night? What had he brought with him from that enchanted country of the spirit in which, as we surmised, he spent the most part of his time? For it was as if he came among us from a celestial kingdom, his boots still caked with starshine, his eyes glowing with an unearthly light. There was something, indeed, of the angelic about his mere physical appearance—too much, no doubt, for a sophisticated taste. Though still in his early thirties, he possessed a large shock of almost white hair. His eyes were large, his eyebrows dark. He had a high forehead, a broad nose, a wide
generous mouth; and he was clean-shaven. So much by way of catalogue—but the secret of his peculiar power over our imaginations is not to be read in such things as these, nor in anything that I know how to name. Seeing him through the eyes of romantic boyhood, I almost despair of making him a real and credible figure in this haphazard chronicle. He was perhaps a bit of an actor and a bit of a poet, and I think there was a spark of genius in him. He had a copious stock of quotations from the English poets, which he used with great effect. His taste was not highly critical, but his enthusiasm was infectious, and I cannot write disdainfully of a man who was incidentally the cause of my first reading Wordsworth. His own favourite, inevitably, was Tennyson: ‘Flower in the crannied wall' was much in evidence, and
In Memoriam
provided the peak of many a peroration. But I must not suggest that his discourses were a mere patchwork, artfully contrived, of other people's thoughts. Mr Latitude had a lyrical vein of his own; and he had, moreover, a voice that made music of anything he chose to use it on. I idolized him then, and I respect him now in recollection; for if he was not the great man I thought him, he was at least sincere enough to devote himself to his dingy
little flock, with no thought of the larger public which his knack for showmanship, had it been that and nothing else, might have conquered. But even in those days I did not think of him in terms of human greatness: I merely accepted him as ‘different' from the rest of us, an explorer, a seer.