Читать книгу The Way Home - Basil King - Страница 7

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On the way back to New York that afternoon Charlie Grace had his first feeling of responsibility. It came to him quite naturally as, seated in the train, he noticed his father's bowed back and bent head. He had no sense of a charge being laid upon him, or of a burden to be taken up; he merely said to himself, "I must be company for papa." It had never occurred to him before that a day might come when his father would look to him as he had hitherto looked to his father, nor could it be said to have occurred to him now; but, sitting in the red plush seat, his eye roving from the green wooded banks of the Hudson on the left to the big brooding figure on the right, he felt in a dim way that the relative positions of father and son had begun to change.

After supper that evening he carried his lesson-books boldly into the study, as he had never done before, saying:

"May I sit here, papa?"

There was that in his tone which took the answer for granted. He knew it must be a comfort for his father to have him near, even though the latter only said: "Certainly, my boy. Come in whenever you feel lonely." Making himself snug in an arm-chair near a good light, he pretended to be studying, while he watched his father sort the letters that had piled up for him during the latter days of his absence.

As the rector of an important city parish Dr Grace took his correspondence seriously. He liked it to be large; he liked the sense of importance he got from being written to on a wide variety of subjects. Just now his letters were chiefly those of sympathy on his recent bereavement; but it was a consolation in itself to note the extensiveness of the circle, both clerical and secular, from which they came.

Following his father's preoccupation the boy made the reflection—with a swallowed sob—that it was still possible for life to go on. Even here in this empty house, where there was no light in the big front bedroom, and no rustle of skirts on the stair, and no sweet voice to say at nine o'clock, "Now, Charlie dear, it's time to go to bed"—even here life could go on. In the halls and the study there was a faint odour of boiling fruit and sugar, announcing the fact that at the very moment when the little black procession had been creeping up to the churchyard at Horsehair Hill Julia had been making raspberry jam.

Though he was aware that raspberry jam would be appreciated during the winter this callousness revolted him. He got up and began moving restlessly about the room. Because he grew suddenly conscious of a yearning in every nerve and an aching in every limb, he thrust his hands nonchalantly into his trousers pockets and began to inspect the framed photographs of St Paul's Cathedral and the High Street at Oxford hanging on the walls, as if he had never seen them before. It was a relief to find his father too deeply engrossed in his letters of condolence to notice him. It enabled him to slip unperceived upstairs to his mother's room, where, the blinds being raised, there was light enough from the street-lamp on the other side of the greensward to enable him to move about.

The place was oddly full of her presence. He could almost see her sitting in her arm-chair by the fireplace. He went to it, hanging over the back lovingly. He crept about the room, fingering the things she had been accustomed to use—a pin-cushion, a hairbrush, the pens and pencils on her desk. He smoothed her pillow and pressed his cheek down into its cool softness. He opened the door of the big closet in which her dresses were still hanging, and gathering an armful of them to his breast he kissed them passionately. He drew in long breaths, getting, so it seemed to him, the very smell of her person—a clean, dry, country smell like that of new-mown hay.

Rising sobs sent him downstairs again.

"Very gratifying, all this sympathy," his father said as the boy re-entered the study. "The bishop is especially kind—and the more so in that he and I haven't always seen eye to eye. I shall keep these letters for you, my boy. You'll appreciate them when you're older."

"Papa, what does 'Death is swallowed up in victory' mean?"

He stood questioningly before his father's desk. Dr Grace lifted his fine brows with that movement which left the eyes still concealed beneath their heavy lids. He arranged his letters in little piles. When he spoke he brought out his sentences with an oratorical rotundity suggesting the repetition of phrases from old sermons.

"It's the expression of an inspiration which comes out of the very earliest yearnings of mankind. The writer of the Book of Genesis probably had it in mind when he spoke of a Tree in the midst of the Garden—that is a force in the midst of earthly existence—which could make for immortality. Even the Greeks had some intimation—a presentiment one might say—of the same thing, as we can read in their legends of Alcestis, of Eurydice, and of Laodamia. I know, too, of few finer passages in literature than that in the Phædo of Plato, in which Socrates argues that death may be the greatest of all good things to men. In the life and death and resurrection of Jesus Christ the Apostles naturally saw these hopes and longings fulfilled—saw life and immortality brought to light by the Gospel, as St Paul says—and so drew the conclusion they expressed with so much ecstasy in the cry—an echo of the prophet Isaiah—that death had been swallowed up in victory. Do you understand?"

The boy hesitated. "I understand some of it, papa—I think."

"Some of it is all you can be expected to understand now. The rest will come when you're older."

Feeling himself dismissed he went back to his book with a little sigh. The haunting phrase had become curiously disappointing when historically explained. He hoped it might have had some bearing on what had happened to his mother; but apparently it had none—or very little.

His father broke in on these thoughts with the observation: "Here's a letter from your sister Emma. She had just received the sad news, and writes very feelingly. She says, too, that she may be able to make us a little visit before the winter. You'd like that, wouldn't you, my boy?"

He answered dutifully: "Yes, papa," but in reality the prospect of a visit from this grown-up married sister whom he had never seen stirred in him all sorts of jealousies on behalf of his mamma. He knew well enough that if his mamma hadn't died his sister would not have come, and while he owned to some curiosity with regard to the person of one so nearly related to himself he resented a sympathy that took this form. He was a little indignant that his father should not resent it too, though he had long ago seen by intuition that the latter, inwardly at least, justified the children of his first wife in their stand toward his second. It was as if he admitted that in marrying again he had wronged them.

"Is Mr Tomlinson coming too?" he felt moved to ask.

The rector answered absently, while running his eye over another letter. "Osborne will come if he gets back in time from Canada. He's been exploring in the new regions they seem to be opening up in the north-west. Emma writes that he's interested in this railway business they're exploiting there. Rather a wild scheme, it seems to me. Yes, he hopes to come, and they will bring Sophy too. You'll like that, won't you?"

He said "Yes, papa," with the same air of dutiful assent.

"They want to find a school for Sophy in New York," the father continued, still scanning his letters. "I shall suggest St Margaret's. Hilda Penrhyn is there, and Mrs Penrhyn finds it very satisfactory. There's a distant relationship between Mrs Penrhyn and Osborne Tomlinson which will make it pleasant for the two girls. I want you to know the Penrhyns some day. You'll find them useful acquaintances when you're older. Very distinguished family. No better blood in New York."

His heart swelled again. It was as if a lot of new people were entering on the scene just because his mamma had left it. They would fill up her place so that even her memory would be crowded out. She had been buried only that afternoon, and yet his father was looking forward with pleasant anticipation to a future with people who were strangers to her. He wondered if grown-up men could feel grief with the desolating intensity of boys of eleven. Perhaps they couldn't. It was doubtless sheer incapacity for sorrow that enabled his father to give himself to his letters, and the prospect of Emma's return home, with a preoccupation he himself couldn't bring to bear on the third Latin declension. Having been charged to master it during the summer, he had tackled it to-night purely because he recalled an occasion when his mamma had told him not to forget it; but it was study only in name. Problems of life and death rendered grammar even duller than it had a right to be.

He rose when the clock struck nine. It was what his mamma would have reminded him to do had she been there. With some awkwardness he approached the desk, which stood in the middle of the room, to say good-night. His father had begun to write—probably to acknowledge the more important of his letters of condolence. The boy could read the words, My dear Bishop, as he followed the tracings of the pen upside down.

For some obscure reason he felt that this prompt response to sympathy buried his mother deeper. It forced home on him that sense of loss against which he had been fighting for the last four days. He was shocked to hear himself saying, in a voice sharp with rising tears:

"Papa, you're sorry mamma is dead, aren't you?"

Fortunately the father saw in the question no imputation of callousness. He stretched out his right arm, and the boy slid round the corner of the desk to take refuge within its embrace.

"We're both sorry," the widower said gently. "You must always remember your dear mother, my boy, and try to do all she ever told you."

"I will, papa," he sobbed, "I promise you I will."

He took this engagement so seriously that when, one day in the autumn. Freddy Furnival said, suddenly, "I'm going to be a doctor; what are you going to be?" Charlie Grace took his courage in both hands and replied, "I'm going to be a minister."

Though he was aware of difficulties in making this confession to one who knew him so intimately as Furny, he was not prepared for the mingled laughter and amazement in the latter's honest freckled face, nor for the incredulity of his response: "You! A minister!"

Charlie Grace could only toss his head—his hands thrust into his trousers pockets—and say defiantly: "Well? What of it?"

"You're not good enough," was the natural retort.

"Well, I guess I can be good enough."

"I guess you can't."

Thus contradicted the lad was silent. He pretended to be inspecting the long gaunt arms of the incipient Brooklyn Bridge, reaching toward each other from the opposite shores of the East River, but in reality he was delving in his mind for an explanation of his shyness in acknowledging the profession to which he meant to give himself. In Furny's presence, at any rate, he would rather have said that he wanted to be a lawyer or a doctor or a man of business. It required a strong appeal to his mother's memory to keep him staunch to his purpose, and yet he wondered why.

They turned away from the spectacle of the giant bridge to take the Elevated back in the direction of Vandiver Place. A trip on the Elevated was still novel enough to be an economical outing to schoolboys in search of adventure. Charlie Grace reverted to the topic he had at heart while they were climbing the stairs into the station.

"Anyhow I don't have to be good for a long time yet. You can't be a minister till you're over twenty."

"That doesn't make any difference," Furny sniffed.

"A doctor has to be good too," Charlie Grace argued.

"But he hasn't got to be better than other people. My old man's a doctor, so I know. But if a minister isn't better than other people what's the good of him?"

"You'll find that out."

The assertion expressed Charlie Grace's defiance of Freddy Furnival's opinion. It implied that he, Charlie Grace, might be wounded by that opinion, might even suffer from it, but in so far as it was a criticism on himself it could only make him the more dogged in his intentions. It was the kind of thing that put him on his mettle, whatever he might feel inside.

This effect was confirmed when a week or two later he walked home from Sunday-school with Hattie Bright. He did this now and then, partly because he was vaguely aware that his father disliked it without venturing to say so, and partly for the pleasure of the young lady's conversation. Freddy Furnival indulged in the same bit of gallantry in direct opposition to parental commands. To both young men, as to others in Vandiver Place, the knowledge that Miss Bright was regarded by their elders as the apple in Eden added zest to her company. Not that her society needed this charm to give it spice, for already, at the age of twelve, Hattie Bright, with her demure manner, and long, soft, slanting regard, was, in a measure, mistress of the arts that captivate. No little girl ever went out of church more properly, nor, with her prayer-book and hymn-book in her hand, walked up the wide pavement of Vandiver Place toward the turning into the unattractive street in which her mother kept a boarding-house, with less apparent thought of being accompanied, or even followed by a glance; and yet no poor child ever drew attention to herself more prophetically. "Now, Freddy dear, go right home," Mrs Furnival would order, perhaps with no clear idea of why she became suddenly so strict; while Mrs Hornblower would oblige Reginald to climb into the barouche beside her, telling the coachman to drive off in the direction contrary to that which the little minx was taking, though Fifth Avenue lay that way.

After Sunday-school there was, however, less surveillance, and young gentlemen, free of the oversight of their mamma, would find themselves, in the most natural way in the world, strolling beside Hattie Bright as they might stroll beside anybody else. On this particular afternoon she conversed genteelly with Charlie Grace on the respective merits of spelling and geography as studies till they were well out of Vandiver Place. The binding of the copy of The Dove in the Eagle's Nest she had taken from the Sunday-school library made a spot of olive-green and gold against the scarlet of her autumn dress. It was quite without provocation that, shooting at him a sidelong glance from her soft, mischievous eyes, she said:

"I heard something about you."

The tone was meant to rouse curiosity. "What is it?"

"I'm not going to tell."

"That's mean," he declared.

"No, it isn't. I said I wouldn't."

"Then you shouldn't say anything about it."

"I can say something about it so long as I don't tell you what it is. Anyhow, I'm going to."

The boy reflected. "Who told you?" he asked at last.

The tip of a teasing little tongue became visible between two cherry lips. "Shouldn't you like to know?"

"I do know. It was Reggie Hornblower. I saw him running over and whispering something to you, when Miss Smedley wasn't looking."

Miss Bright tossed her head. "You're quite mistaken. It wasn't him at all."

"Well, then, it was Furny."

"That's just like you. You think everything has to be Furny."

"Anyhow," he swaggered, "I don't care. My sister Emma is coming home. She may arrive any day now. My old man says so."

Miss Bright preferred to keep to the original topic. She allowed some minutes to pass in silence before saying:

"It's about what you're going to be."

As though some shameful secret were being dragged to light the boy felt himself reddening all over. For the moment his imagination was too busy avenging this betrayal on Furny's head to allow of his finding anything to say. Hattie Bright could, therefore, continue, with the sane taunting display of the tip of her sharp little tongue.

"I heard you were going to be a minister."

The incongruity between any such career and Charlie Grace seemed to get emphasis from the rich colour in her cheeks and the roguery in her eyes. She was the Scarlet Woman in miniature. It required no small amount of moral courage to enable the boy to brace himself and say:

"Well, so I am."

"You're not!"

This repetition of Furny's incredulity would have been harder to bear had it not been for the obstinate element in the boy's character. "You'll see," he replied, holding his head proudly.

Hattie Bright covered her mouth with The Dove in the Eagle's Nest in order to call attention to the fact that she was smothering her laughter. She controlled herself at intervals, only to burst out with a renewed "Pf-f!" of suppressed merriment, bringing the book again into use, while she charged him with her eyes.

He walked along uneasily. "I don't see anything so funny in it," he protested. "My old man is a minister, and he's all right."

"Pf-f!" was the only answer, while once more The Dove in the Eagle's Nest hid all but the little Scarlet Woman's glances.

On the way homeward his heart burned within him, not so much from a feeling of affront, as because his friends thought scorn of a project dear to his mamma. While Hattie Bright had not made the charge in so many words it was obvious that she thought him, as Freddy Furnival had thought him, "not good enough." He meditated a little on the standard of goodness required. He ran over the list of the different clergymen he knew, including his papa. It occurred to him that he wouldn't have put goodness pure and simple as the leading characteristic of any one of them—unless he made an exception of Mr Legrand. A good many of them came to the house in the course of a year. He knew them as a jolly, kindly lot of men, who smoked a great deal, and told amusing stories, and enjoyed them. Undoubtedly they were "good," and yet with no such ideal of sanctity as to make him despair of ever reaching it. Even his papa had lapses—chiefly in matters of temper—from the highest conceptions of merit, for which the boy himself had all his life been accustomed to make allowances. Mr Legrand was different. He could not have explained wherein the difference lay, but he was aware of a quality in the assistant at St David's which gave him a standing of his own in their little world. He had heard his father speak of it, too, sometimes with a touch of impatience.

And yet it was this singularity, whatever it consisted in, that emboldened the boy to bring his difficulties before the tall young ecclesiastic.

"Mr Legrand, do you have to be very good to be a clergyman? I suppose you do."

They were walking up Vandiver Place in the direction of the rectory, late one November afternoon. Though there was still a dusky glimmer in the western sky, the street-lamps were lit, and a silvery crescent moon hung above the spire of St David's. Charlie Grace was on his way home from choir-practice. The yearning retrain of a mediæval melody, which, in view of the approaching Advent season, he had just been rehearsing, kept humming in his memory:

"Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel

Shall come to thee, O Israel!"

When, through the influence of Rufus Legrand, and somewhat to the irritation of the rector, St David's suppressed its famous quartette in favour of a surpliced choir, it had been found necessary to rent a small hall in a neighbouring street for the boys to practise in. It was from this hall that the boy was now on his way home, whistling the Veni Emmanuel under his breath, when at the turning into Vandiver Place he ran across Mr Legrand.

During the six or seven years in which the latter had been assistant at St David's there had sprung up between the two the same sort of matter-of-fact intimacy, on another plane, as existed between Charlie Grace and Remnant. They came closer together in proportion as the boy grew up and Legrand himself, in the rough-and-tumble of parochial life in New York, lost something of the spick-and-span habits acquired at Oxford and Cuddesdon. Even Charlie Grace, catching sight of the tall spare figure in the lamplight, could discern, in the carelessly-hanging clerical jacket and the battered round felt hat, a falling away from former standards of perfection. He knew, too, that Mrs Legrand complained more in earnest than in fun of her husband's indifference to social requirements, of his zeal for working among the poor, and of his dislike of making calls in Fifth Avenue. He had once heard her declare with tears in her eyes that after thinking she had married not a clergyman, but a man, she found she had only got a clergyman.

In response to the boy Legrand said nothing for a minute or two. "It isn't, in the first place, a question of goodness at all," he answered then. "No one becomes a clergyman because he's good."

"What does he do it for then?" the lad asked, in astonishment.

Legrand reflected again. "Primarily, because he's willing to be used as an instrument in a great cause—in a large movement. Before anything else it's a question of willingness."

"Could he be used as an instrument in a great cause if he wasn't good?"

"He couldn't be as good an instrument, of course; but I fancy he could be used. From what we know about God we infer that He can turn any means to account. Do you remember the queer story of Balaam's ass?"

The boy nodded.

"Well, don't you think that that may be what we're to learn from it?—that what we consider a very feeble and inferior thing can become the medium of God's power?"

"And you don't have to be good to be a minister?"

"I must repeat what I said—that it's chiefly a question or willingness. If anyone is eager to serve—a minister, you know, is only a servant—it will generally be found that other things adjust themselves. The desire to serve comes first."

At the rectory door they said good-night, and Charlie Grace went in. He was quite clear in his mind, as he said to himself: "That wouldn't be my reason at all—not the desire to serve, it wouldn't be. I should do it because mamma wanted me to. But there couldn't be a better reason than that."

Nevertheless it was a relief to know that "goodness" was no terrifying essential. As he hung up his cap and overcoat, and went toward the kitchen to ask Julia what there was to be for supper, he shrilled again the mediæval refrain:

"Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel

Shall come to thee, O Israel!"

It was the first time there had been such happy singing in the house since his mother died.