Читать книгу The Way Home - Basil King - Страница 8

Table of Contents

Of his sister's visit to New York only two isolated details remained permanently in Charlie Grace's memory.

He recalled in the first place hearing strange voices in the study, on coming home from school one day early in December. The words that caught his attention, as he threw down his satchel of books on an old sofa in the hall were:

"Going into the Church? How nice!"

The voice was noticeably rich and caressing. He decided to listen, as he often did when there were callers in the house—waiting for a hint to tell him whether to go in or run away. Creeping down the hall, he peeped warily into the room. His father was in his favourite arm-chair near the grate, in which a coal fire was glowing. A short, plump lady sat beside him, a hand laid familiarly on the arm of his chair. Her back being towards the door the boy got no glimpse of her features; but without exposing himself to view he could look squarely into the face of a stocky, thick-necked man, with a face like that of a bull dog, whom he knew from photographs to be Osborne Tomlinson. He inferred that Sophy must have been deposited at St Margaret's School, at Tubb's Ferry, on the Hudson, before her parents had entered New York.

"It was something his dear mother had very much at heart," the rector said, almost apologetically.

"Then of course you couldn't think of his doing anything else—of course."

The lady's tone implied that all sorts of objections that might have been raised were thus overruled.

"The West is offering wonderful opportunities for young men just now," said the stocky man, in a hoarse, barking voice. "Will do it for some time to come, though it won't go on forever. Remarkable country up in the new regions of Canada."

"I've looked at Butler's book—The Great Lone Land," the rector said, by way of being up to the level of the conversation.

"Won't be a great lone land very long. Not many of us are in the secret yet, but those of us who are know that the foundations of some big fortunes will be laid there during the next twenty years. Very short-sighted policy on the part of our Government not to work up a plan by which we might get possession of that territory. Ought to do it, and do it mighty quick. D'ye see? England doesn't know yet what she's got, nor Canada either. It will be another generation before they jump to it. If in the meantime we were to put up a claim, and push it hard enough, I believe in the long run we'd make it good."

"There's such a thing as international righteousness, Osborne."

There was a short harsh laugh. "Is there? Never heard of it. At least, I've never seen it—nor anybody else."

"Oh, Noddy is a regular buccaneer," the lady explained. "He's perfectly Elizabethan, Noddy is. It's no use saying he isn't, because he is. Three centuries ago he would have been a Drake or a Frobisher instead of a civil engineer."

Mr Tomlinson accepted the compliment with another laugh. "Someone's got to go ahead and do the pioneering. If we were all stay-at-homes, like father Grace here, there'd never be any discoveries. As it is, we've got hold of a big thing. The trouble'll be in making people believe it. When I say people, I mean our people. I want the United States to have a hand in this business. That's what I'm after in New York. I want to interest some of our financial bigwigs—men like Silas Hornblower, for instance—in the Trans-Canadian."

"But the newspapers say the whole thing is going to smash."

"Not by a long shot, father Grace. The newspapers be hanged. It's like many another dream, too big for the average imagination to take in; it will seem an impossibility till it's done. And it's going to be done; you can bet your life on that."

The boy thrilled at the words. He liked this big way of talking. He liked, too, the sweeping outlook over prairies and lakes, over rivers and mountains, brought before the mind's eye as his brother-in-law went on to describe the newly-explored lands. Explored? Yes; they had been explored; and yet, as far as that went, they still remained an undiscovered country right at the doors of the United States. It was hard to get anyone to believe that a region so far in the north could be as fertile as the Garden of Eden. The Indians had a name, now restricted to one relatively small province—Manitoba, God's Meadow—which gave quite the most graphic conception of the whole vast, flowery plain, dotted with lakes, and drained by rivers, lying between Lake Superior and the Rockies. And when you reached the Rockies! Great God Almighty! Talk about Switzerland! If Switzerland were the size of the German Empire, and painted with the colours of Egypt, and the Riviera, and the Dolomites combined, and rich with the richness of California and France, then Switzerland might be comparable to the country stretching from the Selkirks to the Pacific Ocean. D'ye see? But people wouldn't believe it. There was the rub. When he said people he meant people with money, people who could supply the few millions so desperately needed to push the Trans-Canadian from coast to coast. Even a few thousands for the matter of that! If father Grace had a little cash to spare, it was giving him a tip that would mean wealth to advise investing it in a cause that was one of philanthropy almost as much as of finance. He, Tomlinson, had banked his all on it, and some ten or a dozen others—Scotchmen, Americans, Canadians, but Scotchmen in particular—who were equal to the Vision, had done the same. It meant comparative poverty for a few years, and then...!

The boy thrilled again. He wanted his papa to be rich, for his papa's own sake. He had got the idea of late that money was scarcer than it used to be in the rectory, where it had never been abundant. He had heard whispers that the income of St David's was falling off, largely because of a tendency on the part of the parishioners to move farther up town, and to attend St Bartholomew's or St Thomas's. He knew there had been arrears of late in the monthly instalments of his father's stipend—a thing that had never been known in the old days—and he gathered that there was to be a hurried, but rather belated, movement to guard against further calamity by raising an endowment. He had even gone to the pains of asking Remnant what an endowment meant—getting the information that it was a fund to enable the rector and himself, Remnant, to snap their fingers at all the bosses in New York, and to get their pay whether anyone came to church or not. Remnant was all for an endowment, and so was Charlie Grace, till now that his brother in law's offer promised a more effective relief. He was disappointed, therefore, to hear his father say, perhaps with some bitterness:

"I'm afraid you're looking to the wrong quarter, Osborne. I've never been able to save more than a few hundred dollars in my life. It's been no easy matter to keep up a position like mine on four thousand dollars a year, which is the highest point my salary has ever touched. And now, even that—"

The rector broke off with a sigh. The boy sighed too. His father's words confirmed half-formed suspicions to which he had never yielded. They inspired also an immense desire to be rich himself, to be safe from the kind of anxiety he had always felt hanging over the household, to shelter his father from it, too. It was a second disappointment that brother in-law Tomlinson should not press his point. He gave in rather weakly, saying merely:

"Oh, well. I'm only telling you. It's a chance that won't come again. D'ye see?"

Charlie Grace's second recollection was of a few words exchanged with Emma as he came home with her from church one Sunday morning after Mr Tomlinson had finished his business in New York and gone to carry his message to other cities of the Union. Up to this time Emma had stayed with her husband at the Fifth Avenue Hotel, but now she took up her abode at the rectory with her father. To Remnant and Julia she became again Miss Emma, a personage they had been accustomed to love and fear.

Remnant in particular was emphatic in his admiration. "There, sonny," he observed to Charlie Grace, "is a woman for you. Talk about Mrs Hornblower. She's a boss; Miss Emma's a general. A man'll kick against the one, when he'll be proud to serve under the other."

The boy himself acknowledged by this time the justice of Remnant's analysis. Beginning with some prejudice against Emma, chiefly on his mother's behalf, he was compelled to admit that she made a pleasant addition to the family. "Seems as if she's always been here," was the confidence he made in return for Remnant's enthusiasm.

Remnant shook his head. "Pity she couldn't stay, sonny. St David's 'ud be another kind o' church with her on deck. She'd soon put a stop to this here work of parson Legrand, bringing in all the tag-rag-and-bobtail the way he is. I don't hold with parson Legrand nohow. I tell you, there's people I have to show into seats on a Sunday that I wouldn't want to sweep out with a broom. I'd take a pitchfork to 'em. And yet there I am, having to look at them polite, and make 'em think they're welcome, or else lose my job. Religion is a holler thing, sonny. If ever you're a sexton you'll find it out. And I partly blame your pa. He's too good. He don't put his foot down severe enough on this here parson Legrand, and make him keep the church respectable, like what it used to be. Now, there's Mrs Legrand. She's another thing. Me and she has wept tears together, like, to see the low crowd he'll get in. Sometimes I think he ain't in his proper senses. Well, anyhow, we've got Miss Emma back, and I hope she'll settle him. I call it a pity to see religion going to pieces when there's been as much money put into it as there has here."

It was natural that approval from such an authoritative quarter should have its effect on Charlie Grace. In a very short time he found himself giving Emma her due. She on her part treated him with distinguished consideration, taking an interest in all that concerned him, and giving an attention to his private affairs, his boots and his clothes, the brushing of his teeth and the cleaning of his nails, such as they had not received since his mother died. He made no inward objection, therefore, when, as they crossed the greensward from Amiens Cathedral that Sunday morning, Emma said, in her warm contralto:

"So you're going into the Church?"

He answered timidly: "I—I was thinking of it."

"It's a lovely career," Emma said, with gentle heartiness. His soul leaped within him. To be supported by one so strong would in itself be strength. A minute went by before she said again:

"It's a lovely career—for anyone who can make the sacrifice."

He felt a sudden spiritual drop. He knew what she meant. Nevertheless he made bold to say:

"What kind of sacrifice?"

"Well, money sacrifice, in the first place. And, of course, that entails the sacrifice of freedom, and power, and self-respect. No one who's poor can be really self-respecting. It's no use saying he can be, because he can't. His time is fully taken up with respecting those who are rich, and doing what they tell him. It's a beautiful thing in its way—for those who have the meekness to accept the rôle."

"Lots of people are poor," he ventured, "who aren't clergymen at all."

"That's true. They're poor because they can't help it. But in a good many cases a clergyman is poor when he could help it. That is, he needn't have been a clergyman. There's very little doubt that if papa had been a lawyer or a man of business he would have been rich. Do you see?"

He pondered. "If I were a lawyer or a man of business should I be rich?"

"I can't say that, you know. But you'd have a chance. A clergyman has no chance. That's all I mean. He decides to abandon the chance when he chooses to be a clergyman. He takes a very high stand—if he can keep up to it."

That was some comfort, at least. A high stand was what his mamma would have approved of. He was sure of that.

"She wanted it—mamma did," he faltered.

"And that's a reason in itself, isn't it? That's what I want you to see. It isn't as if you were choosing this career just because you like it, is it? In a way it's chosen for you. Of course it will keep you from doing what other boys do—and later on, from doing what other young men do. Clergymen, and people who are going to be clergymen are always so restricted. Everybody's shocked if they're not. But you wouldn't mind all that, would you, dear? You'd simply decide to—to give up, so to speak, from the start. Once you'd really decided, it wouldn't be so terrible, would it?"

He tried to come up to the expectations implied in her tone by saying "No," but his tongue clave to the roof of his mouth. He could only appeal once more to the capacity for dogged determination he knew to be within him. He would have despised himself less for a downright meanness than for being frightened away from fulfilling his mother's wish, just because it was going to be hard. It was kind of Emma to warn him, but he felt himself fortified in advance.

They had reached the door of the rectory when Emma made a new move. "Are there never any more people in church than there were to-day?"

This was something he had never thought of noticing. He said, "I don't think so," purely from inadvertence.

"Then the congregation must be falling off."

He would probably not have thought of this remark again, if that night, at supper, after the evening service, Emma hadn't said to her father:

"The congregation keeps up pretty well, don't you think?"

The rector fell into her little trap. "H'm. Ye-es. Considering."

"You mean, considering—"

"How people are moving away. Do you notice how many houses in the neighbourhood are to let? Business creeping in, too. I must confess, however, I don't dread business so much as the boarding-house. There are two already in Vandiver Place, and I hear the Pemberton house is likely to make a third. That to me is perfectly appalling."

"I did notice," Emma said, gently, "that the complexion of the congregation seemed—well, rather changed."

"Oh, that's Legrand's work, and it worries me. It's something I hardly know what to do about. It isn't that the poor aren't welcome in God's House. Not at all. Of course you know it couldn't be that. Only we've provided the Mission Chapel on purpose. I fail to see what's to be gained by mixing people up, when all experience shows they get along better apart. He's very radical, Legrand is. It is all the more surprising, too, when you think of the family he comes from. I supposed that in getting him at St David's we'd secured a man who'd—who'd continue the traditions. But I'm disappointed in Legrand that way. Not that he isn't a worthy fellow. He is—a perfect saint, of his kind—but it's not what I've tried to make the ideal of St David's."

"It seems to me there's a great deal of democratic feeling in the Church of late years."

"Quite so, quite so. And it doesn't do. It's what I've tried to impress upon Legrand. Democratic feeling, I tell him, is all very well, but you've got to take the American people as you find them; and with the American people it's been proved over and over again that where the poorer sort come in the better families will move away. You may regret it, but so it is. There's a sense in which they're more aristocratic than any Europeans. Everyone knows that. Where the lower classes come the upper classes go; it's a law of the American temperament; and that's what I tell Legrand."

The rector spoke with animation. One could see it was a subject on which he had reflected. Emma was sufficiently of his opinion to say:

"Since the character of Vandiver Place is changing, and likely to change more, wouldn't it be a good idea, father, when another bishopric is offered you—?"

She stopped, because the rector, who was helping himself to cold veal-and-ham pie, paused in the act, and lifted his eyes on her rather piteously. The boy was not sure that he had ever seen this particular look in his eyes before. It led him to say to himself, "Perhaps papa thinks they won't offer him any more bishoprics."

It was possible that Emma perceived something of the same sort, for she hastened to say:

"Naturally, after you've declined Southern Arizona, and the missionary diocese of Mesaba, wasn't it? they may think you don't want—"

"My dear," the father said wistfully, "I'm sixty-three years of age, and they look for bishops now among the young and vigorous. For that sort of thing I'm—" he swallowed hard—"I'm out of the running. I'm out of the running for anything you may call promotion. For a rector of St David's there is no promotion but a bishopric—and now they consider me too old. I'm not; but it's the impression that has got about. No, my dear," he added, with lofty calmness, "we will not cherish illusions or vain hopes. As rector of St David's I've lived for twenty-seven years, and as rector of St David's—now—I shall die."

Emma had the tact to smile, and to say briskly, "Well, that's pretty good as it is," after which she turned the conversation on the school at Tubb's Ferry.

But the consciousness of failure in his father's tone did not escape the boy. It surprised him, too, since he had always supposed that whatever limitations his parent was subjected to, he could command anything he liked in the way of churchly honours. It was painful to think of one so Olympian as the victim of hopes blasted and ambitions unfulfilled. Charlie Grace could bear his own troubles, and fight his own fights; he could endure to look upon his soul as a seething-pot of sin, and a hotbed of incipient adolescent vices; but he hated to think that his papa couldn't have any bishopric he wanted, or should have to consider himself the object of humiliation or ill-luck. It roused his instincts of championship, of protection. He wanted to be powerful—to be in a position to defy or command. As he went on munching his veal-and-ham pie, while Emma and her father talked of the advantages that would accrue to Sophy from daily association with Hilda Penrhyn, the boy fell to wondering whether or not, if he gave up the idea of being a clergyman, and started out frankly to make money, like Noddy Tomlinson, he could be of more help to his papa.