A sickening feeling of apprehension gripped Anselm.
“You don’t mean they are not valuable?”
Sir Leopold put the tips of his fingers together and leaned back in his chair in the rather pontifical manner which he had been accustomed to assume in the old days when addressing meetings of shareholders.
“The term ‘valuable,’ my dear fellow, is a relative one. To some people five pounds would be a large sum.”
“Five pounds!”
“That is what I am prepared to offer. Or, seeing that you are a personal friend, shall we say ten?”
“But they are insured for five thousand.”
Sir Leopold shook his head with a half-smile.
“My dear Mulliner, if you knew as much as I do about the vanity of stamp collectors, you would not set great store by that. Well, as I say, I don’t mind giving you ten pounds for the lot. Think it over and let me know.”
On leaden feet Anselm left the room. His hopes were shattered. He felt like a man who, chasing rainbows, has had one of them suddenly turn and bite him in the leg.
“Well?” said Myrtle, who had been awaiting the result of the conference in the passage.
Anselm broke the sad news. The girl was astounded.
“But you told me the thing was insured for—“
Anselm sighed. “Your uncle appeared to attribute little or no importance to that. It seems that stamp collectors are in the habit of insuring their collections for fantastic sums, out of a spirit of vanity. I intend,” said Anselm broodingly, “to preach a very strong sermon shortly on the subject of Vanity.” There was a silence.
“Ah, well,” said Anselm, “these things are no doubt sent to try us. It is by accepting such blows in a meek and chastened spirit…”
“Meek and chastened spirit my left eyeball,” cried Myrtle, who, like so many girls to-day, was apt to be unguarded in her speech. “We’ve got to do something about this.”
“But what? I am not denying,” said Anselm, “that the shock has been a severe one, and I regret to confess that there was a moment when I was sorely tempted to utter one or two of the observations which I once heard the coach of my college boat at Oxford make to Number Five when he persisted in obtruding his abdomen as he swung his oar. It would have been wrong, but it would unquestionably have relieved my …”
“I know!” cried Myrtle. “Joe Beamish!”
Anselm stared at her.
“Joe Beamish? I do not understand you, dear.”
“Use your bean, boy, use your bean. You remember what I told you. All we’ve got to do is let old Joe know where those stamps are, and he will take over from there. And there we shall be with our nice little claim for five thousand of the best on the insurance company.”
“Myrtle!”
“It would be money for jam,” the enthusiastic girl continued. “Just so much velvet. Go and see Joe at once.”
“Myrtle! I beg you, desist. You shock me inexpressibly.”
She gazed at him incredulously. “You mean you won’t do it?”
“I could not even contemplate such a course.”
“You won’t unleash old Joe and set him acting for the best?”
“Certainly not. Most decidedly not. A thousand times, no.”
“But what’s wrong with the idea?”
“The whole project is ethically unsound.”
There was a pause. For a moment it seemed as if the girl was about to express her chagrin in an angry outburst. A frown darkened her brow, and she kicked petulantly at a passing beetle.
Then she appeared to get the better of her emotion. Her face cleared, and she smile at him tenderly, like a mother at her fractious child.
“Oh, all right. Just as you say. Where are you off to now?”
“I have a Mothers’ Meeting at six.”
“And I,” said Myrtle, “have got to take a few pints of soup to the deserving poor. I’d better set about it. Amazing the way these bimbos absorb soup. Like sponges.”
They walked together as far as the Village Hall. Anselm went in to meet the Mothers. Myrtle, as soon as he was out of sight, turned and made her way to Joe Beamish’s cosy cottage. The crooning of a hymn from within showing that its owner was at home, she walked through its honeysuckle-covered porch.
“Well, Joe, old top,” she said, “how’s everything?”
Joe Beamish was knitting a sock in the tiny living-room which smelled in equal proportions of mice, ex-burglars and shag tobacco, and Myrtle, as her gaze fell upon his rugged features, felt her heart leap within her like that of the poet Wordsworth when beholding a rainbow in the sky. His altered circumstances had not changed the erstwhile porch-climber’s outward appearance. It remained that of one of those men for whom the police are always spreading drag-nets; and Myrtle, eyeing him, had the feeling that in supposing that in this pre-eminent plugugly there still lurked something of the Old Adam, she had called her shots correctly.
For some minutes after her entry, the conversation was confined to neutral topics—the weather, the sock and the mice behind the wainscoting. It was only when it turned to the decorations of the church for the forthcoming Harvest Festival—to which, she learned, her host would be in a position to contribute two cabbages and a pumpkin—that Myrtle saw her opportunity of approaching a more intimate subject.
“Mr. Mulliner will be pleased about that,” she said. “He’s nuts on the Harvest Festival.”
“R,” said Joe Beamish. “He’s a good man, Mr. Mulliner.”
“He’s a lucky man,” said Myrtle. “Have you heard what’s just happened to him? Some sort of deceased Beenstock has gone and left him five thousand quid.”
“Coo! Is that right?”
“Well, it comes to the same thing. An album of stamps that’s worth five thousand. You know how valuable stamps are. Why, my uncle’s collection is worth ten times that. That’s why we’ve got all those burglar alarms up at the Hall.”
A rather twisted expression came into Joe Beamish’s face.
“I’ve heard there’s a lot of burglar alarms up at the Hall,” he said.
“But there aren’t any at the vicarage, and, between you and me, Joe, it’s worrying me rather. Because, you see, that’s where Mr. Mulliner is keeping his stamps.”
“R,” said Joe Beamish, speaking now with a thoughtful intonation.
“I told him he ought to keep them at his bank.” Joe Beamish started.
“Wot ever did you go and say a silly thing like that for?” he asked.
“It wasn’t at all silly,” said Myrtle warmly. “It was just ordinary common sense. I don’t consider those stamps are safe, left lying in a drawer in the desk in the vicar’s study, that little room on the ground floor to the right of the front door with its flimsy French windows that could so easily be forced with a chisel or something. They are locked up, of course, but what good are locks? I’ve seen these, and anybody could open them with a hairpin. I tell you, Joe, I’m worried.” Joe Beamish bent over his sock, knitting and purling for a while in silence. When he spoke again, it was to talk of pumpkins and cabbages, and after that, for he was a man of limited ideas, of cabbages and pumpkins.
Anselm Mulliner, meanwhile, was passing through a day of no little spiritual anguish. At the moment when it had been made, Myrtle’s proposal had shaken him to his foundations. He had not felt so utterly unmanned since the evening when he had been giving young Willie Purvis a boxing lesson at the Lads’ Club, and Willie, by a happy accident, had got home squarely on the button. This revelation of the character of the girl to whom he had given a curate’s unspotted heart had stunned him. Myrtle, it seemed to him, appeared to have no notion whatsoever of the distinction between right and wrong. And while this would not have mattered, of course, had he been a gun-man and she his prospective moll, it made a great deal of difference to one who hoped later on to become a vicar and, in such event, would want his wife to look after the parish funds. He wondered what the prophet Isaiah would have had to say about
it, had he been informed of her views on strategy and tactics.
All through the afternoon and evening he continued to brood on the thing. At supper that night he was distrait and preoccupied. Busy with his own reflections, he scarcely listened to the conversation of the Rev. Sidney Gooch, his vicar. And this was perhaps fortunate, for it was a Saturday and the vicar, as was his custom at Saturday suppers, harped a good deal on the subject of the sermon which he was proposing to deliver at evensong on the morrow. He said, not once but many times, that he confidently expected, if the fine weather held up, to knock his little flock cockeyed. The Rev. Sidney was a fine, upstanding specimen of the muscular Christian, but somewhat deficient in tact.
Towards nightfall, however, Anselm found a kindlier, mellower note creeping into his meditations. Possibly it was the excellent round of beef of which he had partaken, and the wholesome ale with which he had washed it down, that caused this softer mood. As he smoked his after-supper cigarette, he found himself beginning to relax in his austere attitude towards Myrtle’s feminine weakness. He reminded himself that it must be placed to her credit that she had not been obdurate. On the contrary, the moment he had made plain his disapproval of her financial methods, conscience had awakened, her better self had prevailed and she had abandoned her dubious schemes. That was much.
Happy once more, he went to bed and, after dipping into a good book for half an hour, switched off the light and fell into a restful sleep.
But it seemed to him that he had scarcely done so when he was awakened by loud noises. He sat up, listening. Something in the nature of a free-for-all appeared to be in progress in the lower part of the house. His knowledge of the vicarage’s topography suggested to him that the noises were proceeding from the study and, hastily donning a dressing-gown, he made his way thither.
The room was in darkness, but he found the switch and, turning on the light, perceived that the odd, groaning sound which had greeted him as he approached the door proceeded from the Rev. Sidney Gooch. The vicar was sitting on the floor, a hand pressed to his left eye.
“A burglar!” he said, rising. “A beastly bounder of a burglar.”
“He has injured you, I fear” said Anselm commiseratingly.
“Of course he has injured me,” said the Rev. Sidney, with some testiness. “Can a man take fire in his bosom and his clothes not be burned? Proverbs, six, twenty-seven. I heard a sound and came down and seized the fellow, and he struck me so violently that I was compelled to loosen my grip, and he made his escape through the window. Be so kind, Mulliner, as to look about and see if he has taken anything. There were some manuscript sermons which I should not care to lose.”
Anselm was standing beside the desk. He had to pause for a moment in order to control his voice.
“The only object that appears to have been removed,” he said, “is an album of stamps belonging to myself.”
“The sermons are there?”
“Still there.”
“Bitter,” said the vicar. “Bitter.”
“I beg your pardon?” said Anselm.
He turned. His superior of the cloth was standing before the mirror, regarding himself in it with a rueful stare.
“Bitter!” he repeated. “I was thinking,” he explained, “of the one I had planned to deliver at evensong to-morrow. A pippin, Mulliner, in the deepest and truest sense a pippin. I am not exaggerating when I saw that I would have had them tearing up the pews. And now that dream is ended. I cannot possibly appear in the pulpit with a shiner like this. It would put wrong ideas into the heads of the congregation—always, in these rural communities, so prone to place the worst construction on such disfigurements. To-morrow, Mulliner, I shall be confined to my bed with a slight chill, and you will conduct both matins and evensong. Bitter!” said the Rev. Sidney Gooch. “Bitter!”
Anselm did not speak. His heart was too full for words.
In Anselm’s deportment and behaviour on the following morning there was nothing to indicate that his soul was a maelstrom of seething emotions. Most curates who find themselves unexpectedly allowed to preach on Sunday evening in the summer time are like dogs let off the chain. They leap. They bound. They sing snatches of the more rollicking psalms. They rush about saying “Good morning, good morning,” to everybody and patting children on the head. Not so Anselm. He knew that only by conserving his nervous energies would he be able to give of his best when the great moment came.
To those of the congregation who were still awake in the later stages of the service his sermon at Matins seemed dull and colourless. And so it was. He had no intention of frittering away eloquence on a morning sermon. He deliberately held himself back, concentrating every fibre of his being on the address which he was to deliver in the evening.
He had had it by him for months. Every curate throughout the English countryside keeps tucked away among his effects a special sermon designed to prevent him being caught short, if suddenly called upon to preach at evensong. And all through the afternoon he remained closeted in his room, working upon it. He pruned. He polished. He searched the Thesaurus for the telling adjective. By the time the church bells began to ring out over the fields and spinneys of Rising Mattock in the quiet gloaming, his masterpiece was perfected to the last comma.
Feeling more like a volcano than a curate, Anselm Mulliner pinned together the sheets of manuscript and set forth.
The conditions could not have been happier. By the end of the pre-sermon hymn the twilight was far advanced, and through the door of the little church there poured the scent of trees and flowers. All was still, save for the distant tinkling of sheep bells and the drowsy calling of rooks among the elms. With quiet confidence Anselm mounted the pulpit steps. He had been sucking throat pastilles all day and saying “Mi-mi” to himself in an under tone throughout the service, and he knew that he would be in good voice.
For an instant he paused and gazed about him. He was rejoiced to see that he was playing to absolute capacity. Every pew was full. There, in the squire’s high-backed stall, was Sir Leopold Jellaby, O.B.E., with Myrtle at his side. There, among the choir, looking indescribably foul in a surplice, sat Joe Beamish. There, in their respective places, were the butcher, the baker, the candlestick-maker and all the others who made up the personnel of the congregation. With a little sigh of rapture; Anselm cleared his throat and gave out the simple text of Brotherly Love.
I have been privileged (said Mr. Mulliner) to read the script of this sermon of Anselm’s, and it must, I can see, have been extremely powerful. Even in manuscript form, without the added attraction of the young man’s beautifully modulated tenor voice, one can clearly sense its magic.
Beginning with a thoughtful excursus on Brotherly Love among the Hivites and Hittites, it came down through the Early Britons, the Middle Ages and the spacious days of Queen Elizabeth to these modern times of ours, and it was here that Anselm Mulliner really let himself go. It was at this point, if one may employ the phrase, that he—in the best and most reverent spirit of the words—reached for the accelerator and stepped on it.
Earnestly, in accents throbbing with emotion, he spoke of our duty to one another; of the task that lies clear before all of us to make this a better and a sweeter world for our fellows; of the joy that waits those who give no thought to self but strain every nerve to do the square thing by one and all. And with each golden phrase he held his audience in an ever-tightening grip. Tradesmen who had been nodding somnolently woke up and sat with parted lips. Women dabbed at their eyes with handkerchiefs. Choir-boys who had been sucking acid drops swallowed them remorsefully and stopped shuffling their feet.
Even at a morning service, such a sermon would have been a smash hit. Delivered in the gloaming, with all its adventitious aids to success, it was a riot.
It was not immediately after the conclusion of the proceedings that Anselm was able to tear himself away from the crowd of admirers that surged round him in the vestry. There were churchwardens who wanted to shake his hand, o
ther churchwardens who insisted on smacking him on the back. One even asked for his autograph. But eventually he laughingly shook him self free and made his way back to the vicarage. And scarcely had he passed through the garden gate when something shot out at him from the scented darkness, and he found Myrtle Jellaby in his arms.
“Anselm!” she cried. “My wonder-man! However did you do it? I never heard such a sermon in my life!”
“It got across, I think?” said Anselm modestly.
“It was terrific. Golly! When you admonish a congregation, it stays admonished. How you think of all these things beats me.”
“Oh, they come to one.”
“And another thing I can’t understand is how you came to be preaching at all in the evening. I thought you told me the vicar always did.”
“The vicar,” began Anselm, “has met with a slight…” And then it suddenly occurred to him that in the excitement of being allowed to preach at evensong he had quite forgotten to inform Myrtle of that other important happening, the theft of the stamp album.
“A rather extraordinary thing occurred last night, darling,” he said. “The vicarage was burgled.”
Myrtle was amazed.
“Not really?”
“Yes. A marauder broke in through the study window.”
“Well, fancy that! Did he take anything?”
“He took my collection of stamps.”
Myrtle uttered a cry of ecstasy.
“Then we collect!”
Anselm did not speak for a moment.
“I wonder.”
“What do you mean, you wonder? Of course we collect. Shoot the claim in to the insurance people without a moment’s delay.”
“But have you reflected, dearest? Am I justified in doing as you suggest?”
“Of course. Why ever not?”
“It seems to me a moot point. The collection, we know, is worthless. Can I justly demand of this firm—The London and Midland Counties Aid and Benefit Association is its name—that they pay me five thousand pounds for an album of stamps that is without value?”
“Of course you can. Old Beenstock paid the premiums, didn’t he?”