His astonished admiration was genuine. He was one of those parents who are completely bowled over by capability in their offspring. It was to him incredible that the creature who once had been just a small white bundle held between his hands could develop into this paragon of beauty and brilliance. . . . For he was also one of those parents who think their children beautiful, no matter how plain. . . . Nadine had been born the other kind of parent, setting for her children, because they were hers and she loved them, an intensely high standard that in future years would help them immensely in achievement, but was a sore trial to them now. . . . And she did not think them beautiful if they were not. . . . She and George combined made a very good aggregate of parenthood.
Caroline was not a vain child. She was not puffed up by her father’s admiration, only sweetly warmed and comforted by the unconscious knowledge that to one human being on this earth she mattered supremely. She closed the case and smiled at George, sharing to the full his profound wonder at the miracle of achievement. It surprised her as much as it did him. Two years ago she could only make cross-stitch kettle holders.
“So you’ve got her back again? Good.”
With an effort George and his daughter wrestled their attention from each other and blinked at the figure beyond the window. It was Hilary, planted squarely in the gutter and beaming at them through his thick glasses, his hat planted unbecomingly on the back of his head, and the collar of his disgracefully shabby overcoat turned up to meet his cold, pink ears. They smiled at him. They were both very fond of him. He was a simple person, like themselves. He was made supremely happy by the sight of their reunion and did not mind letting them see that he was.
“Give you a lift?” asked George.
“No, thanks. I’ve some business to do and I’ve got my old Ford at the garage.” He lowered his voice. “Malony back?”
“No,” said George.
“H’m,” murmured Hilary. Then he raised his voice again. “Glad to see you back, Caroline. We miss you.” He raised his hat to her (he too always treated her like a grownup) and stepped back onto the pavement. They called good-bys and slid off down the street.
“Is Malony away?” asked Caroline.
“Just for a day or two,” said George. “Now we’ll soon be home. Warm enough?”
“Umm,” murmured Caroline in utter joy, and nestled as close to him as she could.
It was wonderful driving home with the last glow of the sunset lingering in the west and the hedges black and mysterious on either side. There were lights in the cottage windows, and sometimes they had forgotten to draw the curtains and one saw the flicker of firelight, the bright heads of children sitting round a table munching their “cooked tea,” a man reading a paper with a pipe in his mouth, or a woman with head bent over her darning. This, too, was new to Caroline, used to the years of blackout. It was lovely and most magical, like turning the pages of a storybook, each fresh window a fresh story.
“The Hard,” murmured George, and she sat bolt upright and saw the uneven roofs of the old cottages black against the still glowing sky, and the rosy light from red-curtained windows. The street sloped steeply to the pale gleam of the river beyond. There was a dance of light upon the water, shed from an unseen lantern, and as the car slowed down before the gate that led to their own special lane she heard a faint chiming of heavenly music. Perhaps it was only a wireless in one of the cottages, but it was so unearthly that she half expected to see Ben’s herd of red deer galloping up the street, with the one white deer among them.
They were in their own lane now, and the car’s headlights showed her the steep banks covered with gorse bushes, with the oak trees arching overhead. They turned the corner, and the lights lit just a little of the mystery of Knyghtwood upon the one side and the old orchard upon the other. An owl hooted softly from the depth of the wood, and at the bottom of this lane, too, light danced upon the water, shining from the lanterns set out in welcome upon the river wall.
They stopped at the foot of the stone steps leading up to the blue gate; the front door was wide open, and from it light streamed out, and Mother was coming quickly down the garden path wearing her fur coat because it was so cold, treading the broad band of light that shone from the front door as though it were cloth of gold spread for her queenly feet. And after her came the twins, shouting at the tops of their voices, and Mary barking wildly, and Jill and Annie-Laurie. After that she scarcely knew what happened. She was in Mother’s arms, cuddled against soft fur, sniffing the lovely violet smell, feeling Mother’s smooth cool cheek against hers. She was hugging the twins, nearly deafened by their yells. She was hugging Mary and having her face licked all over. She was hugging Jill and kissing Annie-Laurie. She was inside the Herb of Grace, with the door shut and the firelight gleaming on the paneled walls, and it was warm and safe inside, and she was home.
— 2 —
Hilary, however, was not, though he wished most sincerely that he was. The cold weather touched up his rheumatism, and he disliked being out in it quite intensely. And what good did he think he was doing, he asked himself, wandering round Radford and poking his head in at all the pubs? He couldn’t run Malony to earth in any of them, though inquiries made of the landlords elicited the fact that he seemed to have been in most of them in the course of the previous afternoon. Pubcrawling. This was the second time. There had been the time when he had been to see Annie-Laurie and found Malony absent; George had told him later that Malony had arrived home at midnight that night very wretched and much the worse for wear. But this time it was more worrying, for he had been missing since the afternoon of the day before. Hilary had had lunch at the Herb of Grace and had found them all in a great flap, Malony’s absence having revealed to them not only that they were fonder of him than they had realized, but that his efficiency, humor, and unselfishness were the mainstay of the place. Without him everything seemed immediately to fall to pieces.
Hilary had always known himself possessed of a deep regard for the gallant little man. He found these outbreaks of Malony’s difficult to reconcile with his character as he knew it, for there was a whipcord strength about Malony that seemed totally opposed to weaknesses of the flesh. He supposed that Malony’s rare outbreaks were much on a par with Margaret’s when she bought the trolley and wheeled it home through the lanes and made herself those terrible unbecoming jumpers.
Those whose selflessness, through a happy accident of temperament or through long discipline, is habitual are as unaware of it as those who trade upon it. As a matter of course, without comment, like a table of well-seasoned wood that does not creak, they accept the burdens laid upon them, and as a matter of course the burdens pile up. Yet a drop of self-seeking lingers somewhere, seeking a vent, and like the flame within the volcano it must have it.
The brilliant colors of Margaret’s jumpers, her rare grabbings of some coveted possession, with its emphasis upon the importance of beauty and property, were typical of her sex and class, thought Hilary. The longings of Malony’s class (for Malony, he suspected, unlike Annie-Laurie, had his roots among the very poor) were born of insecurity and hardship; they were for forgetfulness, warmth, shelter. Different in quality but the same in essence, the result of that ridiculous illusion, so hard to mortify, that personal enjoyment is important.
Hilary’s cogitations brought him to the end of his fruitless round of visits, and he limped back to the garage. How idiotic he had been; if he had found Malony it would have annoyed the fellow intensely. He had merely wasted his time and made his rheumatism worse. So much of the work of a parish priest appeared sheer waste of time. Not that he let that worry him. He merely accepted it as one of the facts of the case, and put no reliance upon appearances. The older he became the more convinced he was that everything was more or less illusory, excepting only that flame, that motive in the soul of which he and David had talked. The rest was just smoke.
He found his decrepit Ford
, climbed into it, and chugged home, only to find it was his old housekeeper’s half day and that his study fire had gone out. It was his own fault. He had told her he would be back for tea, and then instead of returning he had set out on the idiotic search for Malony. His old Mary, he knew, was going to spend the evening at the Women’s Institute dramatic show and would not be back till late. But she had done what she could for his comfort before leaving. His tea, the heel of a sawdust cake, and three thick pieces of bread and margarine had been set ready by the now extinct study fire, and his supper, bread and mousetrap cheese and a couple of sodden sausage rolls, had been put ready on the dining-room table, with a box of matches beside his plate with which to light the dining-room gas fire.
Hilary’s was one of those vast pitch-pine vicarages that face north and have no proper damp course, though he seldom noticed it. But tonight, somehow, he did notice it. The cold of the place struck him like a blow and made him feel oddly depressed, a sensation to which he was not accustomed. And when he carried the sodden sausage and the mousetrap cheese in from the dining room and set them beside the sawdust cake, it being his intention to combine tea and supper and make one meal of them, he was conscious of a sudden sensation of nausea in his stomach. And this sensation also was unfamiliar, for as he had told Annie-Laurie, he had as a general rule the digestion of an ostrich. . . . For which blessing he daily thanked God, for few things are more inimical to prayer than indigestion. . . . It was the cold, he decided, and not the sausages, and lowering himself cautiously to his rheumatic knees he set about relighting the fire.
But Hilary was not a practical man. Twenty minutes later he was still relighting the fire. The bell rang. He heaved himself to his feet, dusted his dirty hands, and went to the front door. On the doorstep, hunched up in a shabby overcoat and shivering in the cold, stood Malony, speechless, and looking exactly like a sick monkey.
“Come on in at once, man,” said Hilary cheerfully. “Forgive the mess I’m in. My housekeeper is out and I can’t get my study fire to go.”
If Malony had seemed to hang back, the plight of Hilary’s study fire made him instantly change his mind. He stepped in briskly and shut the door behind him. Glancing at him Hilary saw that the outbreak was over; he was dead sober, though obviously in the grip of the exhaustion and depression of the day after. Spiritually, too, he was back in his usual state, shouldering with alacrity the burden of Hilary’s study fire. He was in the study almost in a flash, and almost in a flash he had it blazing.
“Malony,” said Hilary, “you are the most efficient man of my acquaintance.”
Malony rose and eyed the food upon the table with contempt. “Were you thinking of having a meal, sir?”
“If you’ll share it with me.”
“With your permission, sir, I’ll take these out to the kitchen and dish up something hot,” said Malony, and swept the unappetizing morsels together on the tea tray. Then lifting the tray with one hand, he pulled Hilary’s battered old armchair to the fire with the other. “You look as though you needed a rest, sir. . . . All well at the Herb of Grace, sir?”
Hilary sank gratefully into his chair. “Yes, very well, I think. They’ve just got Caroline home.”
“I asked, sir, because my pal, the landlord of the Crown, said you’d been asking for me when I popped in there just now.” His sad dark eyes were anxious in his puckered monkey face. “So I just called in to ask you—”
“Yes, they’re all right. It’s you we’ve been anxious about.”
“You were looking for me, sir?” asked Malony incredulously.
“You’re part of the family, you know, Malony; you can’t go off like that and not have us all in what the children call a flap.” He stretched out his hand to the telephone on his desk. “Now you go and dish us up something in the kitchen and I’ll ring up and tell ’em you’re safe. Second door on the right. Hot coffee might be a good idea only I don’t know where Mary keeps it.”
“I’ll find it, sir,” said Malony gently, and immediately disappeared with that slick deft noiselessness that was part of his stage training.
Hilary got George on the phone, told him to expect Malony when he saw him, and then lay back in his chair and stretched his feet luxuriously to the blaze. The room was becoming gloriously warm, and already the scent of coffee was creeping in, and the delicious smell of something frying. Hilary sniffed with appreciation, and just for the moment yielded to the pleasurable idea that he was one of those old coves who before the war used to live in luxurious chambers in town, waited on hand and foot by a faithful manservant. Then he thrust the notion from him in horror and remembered that he hadn’t said Evensong. He pulled his office book from his pocket, recollected himself and made a start, but the increasingly appetizing smells from the kitchen kept insinuating themselves between him and his God, and he put the book back in his pocket and gave it up as a bad job.
He was deeply humiliated. He had thought in his younger days that increasing age would mean increasing freedom from the weaknesses of the flesh, and yet here he was with his soul apparently at the beck and call of a frying pan. However, the humiliation was salutary. That was the best thing about old age; it didn’t leave you with much upon which to congratulate yourself.
Malony came back with a loaded tray. He had brought a second plate, and set it rather tentatively upon the table. “You said, sir—?”
Hilary got up and pulled another chair forward. “Of course I did. And drop the sir, will you, just as you’ve dropped your Irish accent. Chuck all the disguises for a little while. It’ll rest you. You do me a great honor. It’s not every day that I entertain a famous comedian to supper, still less have him waiting on me hand and foot. Gosh! What a superb fry! What on earth did you put in it?”
He bent boyishly over the dish before him. Malony had fried spoonfuls of powdered egg to crisp little fritters, had added the sausages, disinterred from their coffins of sodden pastry, onion, parsley, and potato, and had made of the dish a work of art. He had made crisp toast, too, and superb coffee. Hilary’s thick glasses were misted by the steam from the hot dish, and he took them off to wipe them, smiling across at Malony as he did so.
The man opposite, divided between anger and relief at the stripping away of his defenses, his nerves jangling, was taken utterly aback by the extraordinary beauty of Hilary’s eyes without their glasses, and by their keen straight glance, by the enveloping warmth of his utterly happy yet rather deprecating smile. The immense power of his good will, together with his personal humility, made a sudden unexpected appeal that got right under Malony’s guard before he knew where he was. He wasn’t out to do you good, this chap—he didn’t think enough of himself for that—he was simply out to jog along beside you for a little and pass the time of day, knowing you were down on your luck, and thinking a bit of companionship might not come amiss. And he was straight. He wouldn’t say what he didn’t mean. When he’d said that about an honor he’d meant it. He’d got sense, too. Anything you told him would be in wise keeping.
“I don’t say it’s not a bit of a relief to be Jim Harris for a bit,” he said suddenly, helping himself to fry. “Though, mind you, I’ve worn so many disguises in my time that I slip ’em on and off like suits of clothes. And as for the sir, that comes naturally—I’m not like Annie-Laurie, who comes of good yeoman stock. I was born in a back street in Clerkenwell. My father kept a pub there. That’s where I got the taste for drink that’s been a curse to me all my life.”
Hilary readjusted his glasses and attacked his supper. “Goes with you like a dead hen tied around a terrier’s neck,” he said sympathetically. “Trips you up when you’re down in the mouth about something, or so dog-tired you don’t know how to drag along another step. Don’t I know. With me it’s a sort of luxuriating in the detestableness of myself, inverted pride. I take to it as you to the drink, when my faith fails me.”
“Failure of faith,” said Malony.
“That’s a queer thing, surely, for a man like you to suffer from. I thought faith was what a parson lived by.”
“So it is,” said Hilary. “It’s what every man lives by. But you know how in the black moments it’s always the apparent failure of what you live by that gets you down. Only apparent, of course, for the mere fact that you’re wretched because you think your faith’s gone really means that you’ve got hold of it pretty firmly. If you had no faith you wouldn’t care one way or the other, would you?”
“I wouldn’t know,” said Malony with gloomy self-satisfaction. “I’ve no faith myself.”
“You’ve all the marks of it. About the most selfless chap I ever met. Without faith in the possibility of something divine existing in humanity it beats me how you can slave for it as you do. What made you first take to the drink in Clerkenwell?”
“General ugliness of things. I was a romantic youngster. Thought life ought to be a lot different to what it was. Then a pal of mine let me down.”
“There you are then,” said Hilary comfortably. “You believed in beauty, in loyalty. Drunk, you still believed in them. If you hadn’t, you wouldn’t have been drunk. Have some more coffee. And push the fry this way.”
Malony suddenly laughed delightedly. He had been so desperately cold, but now, with the coffee and the fire, he was warm. And he had been so utterly wretched, beyond the reach he thought of any laughter, but the droll appearance of Hilary, scanty gray hair rumpled, glasses misted by steam, elbows squarely out as he frankly and joyously attacked his meal, tickled his comedian’s sense. Not that he was laughing at the fellow; that he would never do after that glimpse of the man’s essential quality that had been his, Malony’s, when Hilary took off his glasses, but he unexpectedly found himself laughing with him at the absurd pomposities of human nature. Of course faith and life were synonymous, and Hilary had been right to explode his conceited assertion that he could possess one without the other, even as he was delightfully right in making no secret whatever of the fact that a man of God can enjoy his food. Reserve, though life had forced it upon him of late years, was not natural to Malony. It ebbed from him as he helped himself to more coffee, stretched his boots to the fire, and leaned back in his chair with a movement of exquisite relief, almost the relief of a man released from pain. Hilary, reaching for the coffeepot and praying for guidance, recognized the signs. He was about to be told the story of Malony’s life, and from the recitation of bare facts he must build up the framework, and out of his own experience and insight clothe it with the flesh and blood of the living man, or else fail to help the man. He did not eat any more and he poured his coffee black.