Читать книгу The Way Home - Basil King - Страница 6

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Charlie Grace could never be induced to tell the tale himself, chiefly because his mother saw in it more than met the eye. It made him uncomfortable to be taken as an "inspired instrument" when he knew himself to have been only a wilful youngster. Nevertheless, the understanding that he was one day to be a clergyman grew out of this set of circumstances. It was clear to the mind of Mrs Grace that a child so singularly chosen as an infant Samuel must be destined to a sacred calling, while to her husband his own profession appeared better than any other. The fact that he himself had made a success of it was an argument in its favour when it came to a question of his son. There was no such thing as a decision on the point either on the boy's part or that of his parents. The processes by which they came to take it for granted were imperceptible to all three minds. The nearest approach ever made to a discussion of the subject was on an occasion when the lad was nine or ten years old. His mother had begun a sentence with, "When you're a clergyman, darling—"

Into this his father had thought it well to interject, "If he ever is one."

"Oh, but he will be," Mrs Grace said eagerly. "You mean to be, don't you, dear?"

The question—if it was a question—was put so confidently that the boy could only murmur, "Yes, mamma." He did "mean to be," but he would have preferred a less direct way of declaring his intentions. Even so, he knew there were loopholes through which he might have crept back and changed his mind, if his mother hadn't died.

Charlie Grace was never very clear as to how she died or why she died. In after life he could not recall that she had been ill—exactly. She had been delicate. Everyone said that. There was some anxiety about it. Julia had even gone so far as to throw the blame for it on him. "If it hadn't been for you, you rogue, she'd be as well as anyone. She's niver had the look o' health since you come along."

He was so sensitive to this injustice that he laid Julia's accusation before Remnant. Remnant listened judicially, his eye cocked, his head to one side.

"It isn't you, sonny," he said at last; "it's the whole thing."

It was perhaps this summing-up which enabled Charlie Grace, years later, when he was old enough to understand, to piece together his mother's story out of all sorts of scraps, seen, and heard, and hinted at. It was so simple a story as to make no appeal to any heart but his own.

He saw her as the youngest child of a country lawyer who had been his father's chum at college. The two men had maintained an intermittent intercourse through years in which life had carried them to different spheres of action; but when chance took the New York divine on a holiday to the "up-state" village of Horsehair Hill, something of the old friendship was renewed. Enough of it, at least, was renewed for the seven years' widower to see much of Milly Downs, and for a few infatuated weeks to think her the companion destined to console his loneliness. It was that moment of danger to an elderly life—the season of the autumn violets—when youth seems to hold out the impossible promise of a returning spring. A month sufficed to show the reverend man his error, but before it passed the mischief was done. To the sweet girl whose life had always been too retired to be gay, and whose spirit was so gentle that it never could have been really young, the honour of kind looks, kind words, and perhaps some tenderness from a great man from a great city was overwhelming. To Charlie Grace's mind—when, as a young man, he thought it over—there were not wanting signs that his father must have been on the verge of withdrawing, perhaps with a little dismay, when he saw that withdrawal was too late.

The sequel was natural enough. It was not surprising that the man who, according to Remnant, could have had Miss Smedley and all her money—- the man who was the admiration of one of the most distinguished religious circles in New York—should have come in for comment when he stooped, in this sudden manner, to gather a wayside flower. An elderly man, too, who might be considered to have out-lived the days of poetry! Since, his children were grown up there was really no reason why he should have married again at all; and if he chose to exercise his right in this respect—why, there was Miss Smedley and her money.

And yet, when young Mrs Grace actually came to the rectory she was very well received. That was not to be gainsaid. If St David's had received a shock, it had that savoir vivre which enables well-bred people to surmount disturbances. St David's was undoubtedly kind to Mrs Grace. Miss Smedley, with a tact which all admitted to be perfect, showed her a special friendship, while Mrs Hornblower was heard openly to express the intention "of forming her for her place."

The difficulty was really with Mrs Grace herself. More than the most exacting parishioner she was convinced of her insufficiency for her new life and her husband's station. New York bewildered her; St David's appalled her. The society into which she was thrown was so intricate, so complex. When she came to see, as by the mere process of living with her husband she had to come to see, that their marriage had caught him at a disadvantage, there was but one way for a soul like hers to take. Charlie Grace could look back and see her taking it; he could see her taking it through the very years when he had been clinging to her skirts and lisping at her knee. There was probably some physical or temperamental weakness, too. He was never sure about it. He never cared to go into it. He could not remember that she was ever ill. She only grew more delicate, and then more delicate. He recalled hearing Mrs Hornblower say one day to his father:

"Mr Rector, you won't think me interfering, but you should take Mrs Grace away. I think you should take her away. If you don't, I shall not answer for the consequences. She needs change and rest. She needs a great deal of rest."

That was in the early summer of 1880, when he was eleven years old. She went to Horsehair Hill. She wanted to take him with her, but the doctor said No. She was to go back to her father's house, and renew her strength by becoming a girl again. He retained no very clear recollection of the sequence of happenings after that. At first she was getting better; then she was not so well; then she was able to take a drive; then she was confined to bed. News came spasmodically and inconsequently, as though there were no definite progress either up or down. In August, when his father's holiday began, he, too, went to Horsehair Hill. The boy was left in town to spend a desolate school-vacation in charge of Remnant and the servants. Now and then Mrs Furnival or Mrs Hornblower would take him for a night or two to their places on Long Island.

Then there came a time of which all his memories were blurred. A strange farmer-uncle, the husband of a married sister of his mother's, came to fetch him from Vandiver Place. At Horsehair Hill nothing was as it had ever been before. His grandfather was mooning over the place half dazed. Uncles and aunts on the mother's side whom the boy scarcely knew were in attendance. His father rarely left his mother's bedside. When he, the boy, was admitted to the darkened room he hardly knew her. She was propped up on the pillows, and seemed neither awake nor asleep. She smiled faintly, though, and as he leaned clumsily across the bed to kiss her, she tried to lift her hand and lay it on his head. It was a long minute before she spoke.

"Did Bridget get all your clean clothes from the wash, darling?"

"Yes, mamma."

"That's good." It was all she had strength to say.

His father nodded toward the door, and he tip-toed from the room.

For the rest of the afternoon he was uncomfortable. The attentions of so many uncles and aunts bored him. Queer cousins turned up, looking for recognition. "Don't you know me?" was a question of which he grew tired. He could remember distinctly saying to himself that he hoped it wouldn't go on very long like that. He made no attempt to define what he meant by "it." On one point he was clear—that "it" had nothing to do with his mother. That was not his mother, that still, white form in the dim room upstairs. He had been called to Horsehair Hill on some heart-breaking errand, the nature of which was a little vague; but his mother wasn't there.

He had the same feeling about the funeral. He remembered its taking place after an interval of a few days in which he had grown accustomed to his surroundings. He had begun to follow the daily drama at Horsehair Hill, into the interests of which he was initiated by Cousin Bob Gunnison, also eleven years of age, with whom he slept. He heard about grandpa's horse, and his two cows, and the number of hens, chickens, ducks, geese and turkeys on the small estate. He got much valuable data, too, as to the habits and character of Stores, his grandpa's "hired man." He grew intimate with Stores, and helped him select the broilers which the presence of so many uncles and aunts made it needful to broil. Once when a green goose, which should by rights have lived another month, was chosen to supplement the broilers, Stores allowed him to take the axe and cut off its head. Of all the incidents of those days at Horsehair Hill none remained more painfully in the memory of Charlie Grace than that decapitation.

The funeral was scarcely painful at all. It was rather an occasion of solemn stir, of awesome novelty, imposing and strange, but infused with that cruelly interesting quality inherent, to the mind of eleven years, in "something going on." A great deal was going on. There was a large assembly of people in black, both men and women. Downses and Gunnisons gathered from all over the county. His father moved among them benignly, shaking every hand, calling most of the connections by name. He was noble, like a prince. No one could question his grief, and yet he did little or nothing to show it. Some of the lady cousins, indeed, thought that a trifle more in the way, of demonstration might have been becoming; but the lack of it was ascribed to his being a New Yorker and an "Episcopal." It was well known that an "Episcopal" could be formal and cold in circumstances where an "Orthodox" would give way to feeling.

It was a foregone conclusion that the ceremony would take place in the little Episcopal Church; but that again was something to be borne. Most of the relatives made no secret of their preference for a "home-funeral" with a eulogy. "What's a eulogy, mamma?" Charlie Grace heard himself mentally asking; and a lump rose in his throat. The impossibility of putting that question brought home to him his first real sense of loss.

But it passed. As, side by side with his father, he followed the coffin, so shiny and new, out of the stuffy parlour, he had but little feeling that his mamma was in it. His father walked with head bared and bowed, while he could feel himself moving along sturdily and erect. In the village street he noticed the signs of sympathy, blinds down or shops closed, and was even a little proud of the effect. It showed the honour in which the Downses and Gunnisons were held; but it had nothing to do with his mother.

The Episcopal Church stood slightly aloof from the village. The white steeples of the Methodist and Congregational places of worship shot straight up out of Main Street, with a conscious right to the soil. The small, inexpensive wooden building dedicated to All Saints, quite correctly Early English, with its lancet windows, and its spire jauntily rising from a tower at the conventional north-west corner, came shyly, as it were, over the hill from Dallinger Gap, to perch itself barely within the limits of a community where it was not entirely welcome. Everyone knew that if there had been no summer residents at Dallinger Gap there would have been no Episcopal Church at Horsehair Hill—a circumstance which was said, in the language of people who chose their words, to have "created feeling."

To reach All Saints the little procession turned out of Main Street to follow a lane all purple and yellow with Michaelmas daisies and golden-rod. A few children picking blackberries paused in their task to look. A cow came half-way across a meadow to gaze over a fence in a dumb, pitiful stare. A mare nosing her foal glanced backward with eyes timid and wondering. Otherwise the little procession wound its way up the hill through a shrill summer stillness.

At the church door there was the usual poignant delay. Black-coated men drew the coffin with an oily ease out of the long hearse. Father and son began to follow it up the steps.

"I am the Resurrection and the Life, saith the Lord. He that believeth in Me, though he were dead, yet shall he live. And whosoever liveth and believeth in Me shall never die."

The boy slipped his hand into his father's. The voice coming out of the empty church had the effect of that mysterious call which his mother seemed to have heard and followed. She was following it now—in—in—forward—forward—while they pressed along behind.

He was startled, overawed. This, then, had something to do with her. After all she was there, in that long shiny box, with the tawdry handles, and the flowers on top. She must be, for his father was crying. That is, he was blinking his eyes and wrinkling his forehead in an effort to check more tears than the two already coursing down his cheeks. The boy himself had no inclination to cry. He was too much concerned with the Voice, which continued to roll on with a haunting solemnity:

"Lord, Thou hast been our refuge from one generation to another. Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever the earth and the world were made, Thou art God from everlasting and world without end. Thou turnest man to destruction; again Thou sayest, Come again, ye children of men."

He could follow the words the more easily because they were tolerably familiar. He was a choir boy in these years and sang them in church. He had never thought of their meaning, nor did he think of it now; but they rolled over him with a power of sonority, immensity, eternity, like the sound of the sea, or peals from an organ.

Then it was like an anthem, an anthem such as he had never heard, and yet could imagine.

"Now is Christ risen from the dead and become the first-fruits of them that slept. For since by man came death, by man came also the resurrection of the dead. For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive."

He still had no inclination to cry. He sat with his hands—on which one of his aunts had pulled a pair of black cotton gloves—folded in his lap, and his feet, which now reached to the floor, kicking a hassock nervously. His head being slightly thrown back, the long, pointed chin, inherited from his mother, had the mystic, yearning expression with which the shifting of an angle could endue it. Over the altar was a stained glass Good Shepherd all out of proportion, carrying on his shoulder a sheep that looked like a rabbit. He traced the outlines of the rabbit with his eye, while with his ear he followed the onward sweep of the apostolic strain:

"For this corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal must put on immortality. So when this corruptible shall have put on incorruption, and this mortal shall have put on immortality, then shall be brought to pass the saying that is written, Death is swallowed up in victory."

"Death is swallowed up in victory. Death is swallowed up in victory. Death is swallowed up in victory."

His repetition of the words was purely mechanical. It was but the haunting of a phrase too heavily laden with prophecy to be easily comprehensible. It had not more definiteness of meaning to him than any of the utterances of Job, Moses or Jesus Christ, which had just been sweeping across his soul. "Death is swallowed up in victory." He discovered that by repeating it in a certain way it had a sound like the booming of cannon, or was it the ringing of bells? It had a throb and a measure to it, too. One could walk to it. One could walk to it like a soldier, or a priest, or a mourner. His Uncle Frank might have walked to it when he marched towards Gettysburg; his father was walking to it now as they went down the aisle; he himself was walking to it, down the aisle, out into the daylight, and along the churchyard path to where a little mound of earth marked their goal.

But he found himself unable to listen here as he had listened in the church. There was too much to observe. There was the placing of the coffin on the bars across the open grave. There was the grave itself, so narrow and deep. There was the clergyman in his white surplice, looking out of keeping with green trees and the open air. Lastly there was Uncle Frank's headstone, beside which the new grave had been made. He read the inscription once or twice. He liked reading it. For reasons he could not fathom it appealed to him. "Francis Gunnison Downs, who, at Gettysburg, gave his life for his country and his soul to God. Aged 23. Give peace in our time, O Lord." He liked that. It was terse and manly. If he were ever to die, which seemed improbable, he would be glad of something of the sort over him.

And then suddenly he found himself clutching his father's arm and calling out wildly: "Papa! Oh, don't let them."

They had pulled away the cross-pieces, and, with a wriggling irregular motion, the coffin was going down.

Except for that one irrepressible cry he controlled himself. He knew the coffin must go down, that it must lie there and be covered up. He was a big boy now, and must have "sense." He did his best to attain to "sense," pressing his palm tightly over his mouth and keeping back the sobs while the earth was shovelled in.

It was only when they turned away from the grave, he and his father side by side, that the feeling returned to him again, that they were not leaving his mamma behind them.