He too was thinking how little she had changed. Her dark eyes had never lost their brightness or her small determined face its clear contours. She had always been a sallow, plain little woman, her charm lying in her birdlike quickness, her vitality and humor; and the wrinkling of her skin and the whitening of her hair had changed her very little.
“The gulls are here, Harriet,” he said. “That means a storm before night.”
“I knew there was a change coming when I woke this morning,” said Harriet. “And not only in the weather.”
“Change for us all?” asked John. “How do you know these things, Harriet?”
“I couldn’t rightly say,” said Harriet. “But don’t you feel it yourself? The pause. The shuttle goes backwards and forwards, much the same year after year, and then the pause, like a new color being threaded in for a new pattern.”
“Dull old sticks like myself don’t feel these things,” said John. “Though I’ve often thought the gulls have news to tell of a pattern somewhere, when they weave in and out like that.”
They smiled at each other, remembering the nursery days when they had watched the gulls together from the manor house garden. Then they had looked down on them from a height, and seen the river winding like a ribbon through the valley, and the village so far below it looked a toy village. Sometimes a solitary gull had swept away from the others and folded its great wings on the top of the church tower, and that had always thrilled John. In those days he had insisted on calling the gulls doves, and held to his own way even when the older boys laughed at him. They had always laughed at him, and knocked him about a good deal, for he had been a weakling and they strong, but in spite of that he had always been tenacious of his own ideas. Harriet had read psalms to the children and “O that I had wings like a dove!” had been one of his favorites. Even in those days the church tower, as well as the gull upon it, had been important to him. He had spent a good deal of time in the small paved court where the sundial was, looking down upon it, and watching the birds flying in and out of the nests they had made for themselves in its nooks and crannies. “The sparrow hath found her an house, and the swallow a nest,” had been another of his favorites, for his Franciscan love of birds had been born early in him. He had not known then that the weather-beaten, sturdy old tower was one of the oldest in England but even to look at it had always given him a sense of rest and refuge. . . As it did today, though from the vicarage garden it could not be seen once the buds had come crowding thickly upon the beeches by the gate.
“What are you going to do today?” asked Harriet with a touch of bracing sharpness. She was always keeping him up to it, and so was Daphne, for his conviction that whatever he did he’d be sure to make a mess of it had a tendency to make him shrink from action. Not that he was lazy. The inertia of physical weakness was a thing he fought daily and at lonely tasks he would work untiringly. He could hurt no one’s feelings, drop no bricks, praying for them or digging potatoes for them. It was personal contacts that terrified him and a parson’s life seemed full of them. His conviction that he was a very bad priest and should never have been one he kept to himself, for it was too late now and useless remorse should not be inflicted on others; but like the worst kind of wound it bled inwardly.
“Wash up the breakfast things to save Daphne’s time,” he said. “She’s extra busy today with the Mother’s Union to tea and the church flowers to do. Cut the flowers she wants and take them to the church for her. Chop the wood. Mend Winkle’s tricycle. Talk to you. Go on writing Sunday’s sermons.”
“They say old Bob Hewitt is poorly,” suggested Harriet with twinkling eyes.
“The old curmudgeon,” said John.
“That don’t prevent him being poorly,” said Harriet.
“He hates busybodies pushing in on him,” said John.
“He’s cantankerous,” agreed Harriet. “And there won’t be any except that daft cousin of his as’ll trouble to climb up to the lodge and maybe get the door shut in his face for his pains. But old Bob likes to see a Wentworth. And he likes a drop of brandy.”
John grinned, stretching himself comfortably in his chair. “Where’ll I get the brandy?” he asked.
“In the wardrobe, behind my dressing-gown,” said Harriet. “You can take a look if you don’t believe me. If you don’t get up out of that chair you won’t get nothing done this day.”
John walked to the wardrobe, looked behind her dressing-gown and whistled incredulously.
“I’ve had it by me for some while,” said Harriet placidly. “Two years to be exact. My nephew Harry brought it to me. I like to feel I’ve something by me should I be took bad. There’s that little flask of your father’s we used to take on picnics in my top drawer. You can fill that for Bob.”
“This is the first time you’ve suggested I should encourage the parishioners in secret drinking,” said John. But he did as she told him, subduing the revulsion that the smell of brandy invariably gave him. He always did as Harriet told him. She had a shrewd knowledge of human nature and an almost uncanny instinct for knowing just the thing to say, the thing to do, that would open a door and not close it.
“Bob’s no drunkard,” said Harriet. “Too near. But he likes comfort if another pays for it, I used to notice in the old days, and when a man’s taken against religion he’ll maybe change his mind if it brings him a bit of what he fancies.”
“Worldly wisdom, Harriet,” said John, slipping the flask in his pocket.
“I’ve no other,” said Harriet briefly, but she gave him a delightful smile as he picked up her tray. It was a smile he had known well since his boyhood. Harriet had never praised a child in words, but with that particular smile she both recognized merit and rewarded it. He had the other sort of wisdom, her smile told him now. He did not believe her but her smile was the balm it had always been.
“Anything I can do before I go?” he asked.
“You can turn the radio on,” said Harriet. “And when Mrs. Wilmot comes tell her to put that traycloth to soak before she comes up to me. I’ve spilt tea on it.” Their eyes met involuntarily, for both of them dreaded an annoyed Daphne, but loyalty did not allow the glance to be long enough for mutual sympathy.
John carried the tray down the dark stairs and across the hall to the kitchen. It was a dreary stone-flagged place where an aroma of mice fought daily with a smell of cabbage and fish. However much Daphne opened the window she could never quite get rid of the smells, for the damp of the kitchen imprisoned them. The walls were stained with the damp, for the kitchen got no sun, the house had no damp-proofing and there was an old disused well under the kitchen floor. It had been improved as much as possible, with a modern cooking stove and electric light, and Daphne had bright copper pots and pans on the mantelpiece and pots of scarlet geraniums on the window sill, yet it remained a dreary cave, a symbol somehow of the whole house that was too large, too dark, too damp ever to make a comfortable home. And he and Daphne were not as happy as they should have been, though they loved each other and their children. It couldn’t be altogether the fault of the house and he refused to admit any fault in Daphne. It must be his fault. He had made a failure of marriage, as of everything else. A feeling of hopelessness welled up in him and he put the tray down at an angle, so that the sugar basin rolled off it and was smashed on the floor.
The crash restored him and for very shame he battened down the depression that had caused it. If he could not measure up to the big demands life made upon him, if he were a poor priest, an unsatisfactory husband and father, he might at least endeavor to be competent as a hewer of wood and drawer of water. He took off his coat, rolled up his shirtsleeves, lifted up to Almighty God the magnitude of his failure and the triviality of his task, and applied himself to the latter. The hot water warmed his cold hands and the pile of cleansed china grew satisfactorily on the draining board. There was a pleasure in getting things clean. Small beautie
s slid one by one into his consciousness, quietly and unobtrusively like growing light. The sinuous curves of Orlando the marmalade cat, washing himself on the window sill, the comfortable sound of ash settling in the stove, a thrush singing somewhere, the scent of Daphne’s geraniums, the gold of the crocuses that were growing round the trunk of the apple tree outside the kitchen window . . . What in the name of wonder had happened to the apple tree? He knew its fantastic beauty of old, and he thought by heart, but he had never seen it quite like this. He went on with the washing up deftly and surely, for the rhythm of the work had taken charge, but quite unconsciously, and joy leaped up in him again, joy even greater than when he had seen the gulls.
The apple tree was a personality, older than the house, tall and twisted and encrusted with lichen, its widely spread roots clutching the earth with the splayed feet of a giant, its trunk knobbly with knot holes, its branches flung crazily skyward like the arms of a madman praying. In spite of its fantastic skeleton it was always beautiful. In April the new green leaves were sharp and delicate, prickly-pointed with silver, a mist of pale color that became slowly studded with crimson points of fire, and then suddenly submerged by a foam of pink blossom. Then as the petals paled and drifted away in flakes of moony white the leaves reappeared, darker now, expanding into exquisite spears of glossy green, unusually thin, a shape peculiar to that apple tree alone. The apples came early, a multitude of them, round and small and deep red, with a skin so shiny that it reflected the light in sparkling points of brilliance all over the tree. Their flesh had a pink flush in the white. They were bitter to eat, but Daphne made them into a clear rosy jelly that lasted the children all the winter through. The birds loved the tree. Nuthatches and creepers, a yaffingale and a greater spotted woodpecker, attacked the trunk for grubs; tits and chaffinches brought color to the bare branches. In the spring they nested in the tree and at all seasons the thrush sang in the top branches. The snow, when it came, lodged in the intricate tracery of the twigs so that the tree seemed weighted with a midwinter burgeoning of blossom. But though the leaves had not come yet John had never seen it quite so amazingly lovely as today. The whole tree was blazing with light, sparkling yet so gentle that it did not blind the eyes. Its clean, clear silveriness washed into the dark smelly old kitchen like a wave of sea water washing into a cave, in and out again, cleansing it. Yet the light had never left the tree and was composed of the myriad minute globes of water with which the mist had spangled every twig. The sun had come out for a moment and been born, a microcosm of itself, in the heart of each globe.
“My God,” ejaculated John. It was not a profane exclamation but an acknowledgement of a miracle and a revelation.
3
“Comin’ in dirty,” said Mrs. Wilmot, referring to the weather. John turned round and met her pitying glance as she unbuttoned her coat. His extraordinarily sweet smile flashed out in welcome. He had, he knew, been gazing at the apple tree with his mouth more than usually open, like a small boy contemplating fireworks, but he was unabashed. He knew that his parishioners considered him to be a little “tootlish,” not quite so mentally on the spot as they were themselves, but he was so chronically aware himself of his total inadequacy that the awareness of others did not worry him. Indeed he was glad of it for it prevented them from placing him upon some pedestal removed from the humdrum happenings of their daily lives. He might be a complete failure but at least he was down in the dust with the other failures.
Turning his back on the apple tree he propped himself against the sink for the preliminary gossip before the morning’s work without which Mrs. Wilmot did not function. It was to her as oil to a machine and she could not get started without it. Daphne, with a multitude of tasks of her own waiting for attention, was always trying to escape, but John agreed with Mrs. Wilmot that it was ridiculous to make such a fetish of housework as Daphne did. What did a little dust more or less matter? The communing of one soul with another was really more important even if it were only on the subject of mice.
He thought to himself now that it did not much matter, in itself, what one did. It was chiefly as the vehicle of love or the symbol of prayer that action was important. Or did he only think that because in action he was himself generally such a bungler? Perhaps, if he faced the truth, he would find that one of the reasons why he spent so much time in prayer was because the results of prayer were unknown and one could indulge in the sin of wishful thinking. For it most certainly was sin for a man to sit back picturing the pleasing results of his prayer. Unless prayer was bread cast upon the waters in blind faith, without hope or desire for knowledge or reward, then it was nothing more than a selfish and dangerous indulgence of fantasy. It is difficult, he thought, for a human being to face the fact that he is really quite superfluous. He is always trying to find a loophole somewhere.
“. . . and so it’s scarcely the boy’s fault, really,” said Mrs. Wilmot, buttoning her smock. “Not with the nut working loose. ’E did feel the wheel wobble like, but as I says to ’is father, you can’t expect an old ’ead on young shoulders. Of course it’s a loss, I know, all that milk, but boys is boys, and as I says to Mr. Linkwort, boys don’t put two and two together and act according, as an older person do. You ’ad your milk?”
“Mrs. Wilmot, I do beg your pardon, but I’m afraid I was wool gathering,” said John apologetically. “Which was the nut that worked loose?”
Daphne, when she lost the thread, just made what she hoped were appropriate noises, but John, though he did most things badly, always did them to the best of his ability. Deeply ashamed he braced himself more firmly against the sink and tried to rivet his attention upon Mrs. Wilmot’s narrative. One of these days someone would be telling him something really important and a soul would be lost because he had missed the first half. Besides, how could he know that this narrative of Mrs. Wilmot’s was not important? It might, for all he knew, have a great bearing upon all their lives. Though it is true that for the power of God all things are superfluous it is also true that for the mercy of God nothing is. Every sparrow. Every hair. Every soul. Every nut.
“. . . and then, of course, ’e ’ad to swerve or ’e’d ’ave run the poor chap down,” said Mrs. Wilmot, opening the back door and looking outside. “And that must ’ave jolted the nut, like. No, the milk ain’t there. Short they’re bound to be this morning. But ’e’ll bring a drop by lunch time, never fear. ’E’s a good boy. As I ses to ’is father, ’e may be careless-like but ’e’s a good boy. But there’ll be none for elevenses. Well, we must be thankful there wasn’t no serious accident. Only the milk. Dreadful thing, drink. I will say for Ted ’e don’t drink. Nor the boy. ’E’s a good boy, Bert is. Staggered right across the road, ’e did. Where’d ’e get it, so early in the morning? Serve ’im right if ’e ’ad been run over. But it sobered ’im up, poor chap. Tried to ’elp get the spare wheel on, ’e did, till ’e come over queer. The boy couldn’t stop, and ’im late already. Just by Pizzle bridge, it was. Well, sir, I’ll be going up to Harriet. I’ll see ’er comfortable and then ’tis me flues.”
John put away the clean crockery and carried the broken sugar basin out to the bin, where he hid it from Daphne’s sight beneath a couple of empty tins, and then, ashamed of such deception, fished it out again and placed it where it would be sure to catch her eye when she next went to the bin. Then he went into the garden to cut the flowers for the church vases but on his way to the daffodils was deflected by the sight of a dead hedge sparrow lying on the lawn. Shame upon Orlando. Well fed though he was he did occasionally forget himself and kill from wanton cruelty. A stab of pain went through John as he bent and picked up the small body, still warm. . . . Not a sparrow falls to the ground. . . . The little bird wore a sober livery and in the company of a bullfinch or a yaffingale one would not have looked at him twice, yet lying there in his palm he seemed to John incomparably beautiful. The back and wing feathers were of different shades of brown, tender, warm colors, the throa
t and soft breast a silvery slate color. The bill was slender and exquisitely curved and the little legs glowed bright orange. A short while ago the eyes had been as bright as the drops of water on the apple tree but now they were filmed. He would not again utter his thin pretty little song, and the children would not this year find his nest of moss and roots with the eggs of pure bright blue. John had what Daphne considered a ridiculous, inordinate love of the creatures. When he came to himself he was out in the lane, the small corpse still in his hand.
His idea, he believed, had been to carry it right out of the garden, so that Winkle should not find it and grieve; for Winkle felt like her father about the creatures. He glanced round for somewhere to put it, and then his eye was caught by the lovely loops of the river, winding away down the valley. Through a break in the trees that bordered the lane he could see it clearly, and Pizzle bridge, the boundary of his parish upon the west, spanning the water with its beautiful triple arches. Now what had Mrs. Wilmot been saying about Pizzle bridge? Some narrative about a drunken man whose staggerings had caused young Bert to have an accident with the milk van. Probably Bert’s fault, for he never looked where he was going. His mother considered him a good boy but John did not. A thoughtless heartless young limb who had once kept a lark in a cage. Almost John’s first action upon becoming vicar of Belmaray had been to lose his temper and liberate that lark. Just like Bert to leave the drunk who had tried to help him with the wheel to “come over queer” without assistance.
John stood still in the middle of the lane and fought one of the familiar dreaded battles that came upon him almost daily. The sweat came out on his forehead and his fingers clenched upon the dead bird. He was too ashamed of these paltry battles to speak of them. Since his boyhood he had been plagued by ridiculous obsessions, inhibitions, childish fears and torments of all sorts, but in maturity he had been able to keep them firmly battened down; it was only since the war that they had thrust themselves out again in new forms but with all their old strength. But this particular obsession, the dread of a drunken man, was not much altered since his childhood, when he had been shut in the nursery out of his father’s way. Yet it had been altered. Its present edge of intensity had been given to it by some appalling months during the war when he had fought his father’s demon in himself. How it had happened that he had come out victorious he had no idea. He had no idea, either, how he came out upon the other side of these ridiculous contemptible struggles. It was rather like a particularly painful sojourn at the dentist. You endured, apparently for an eternity, and then it was over, but not due to any action of your own.