Читать книгу Heirs Apparent - Philip Gibbs - Страница 12

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Audrey’s father arrived home in time for supper with a guest who had not been notified to his wife so that there was only cold mutton with rice pudding to follow.

This was characteristic of Mr. Nye, who was both impulsive and absent-minded, in spite of twenty-three years of protest and training from the lady whom he had married when she was a demure maid with big brown eyes, a rosebud mouth, and a strong will of her own. On more than one occasion when he had duly announced that he had invited a friend to dinner—“It all adds to the expense, my dear,” Mrs. Nye had said a hundred times—he had forgotten all about it and gone off parish-poking, as he called the visits to his flock, or had remained in prayer in the Lady chapel of his own church, or had gone for a long solitary walk so exalted by the beauty of the woods and fields and by the mystical joy which came to him in the songs of birds, the smell of the earth, and the immanence of the Divine Spirit in all living things, that he was hopelessly late for the evening meal.

This evening he appeared a few minutes before supper with a young Catholic priest whom Audrey recognised as a man she had seen bicycling about the country lanes between Haslemere and Guildford. Once or twice he had smiled at her in a simple friendly way which she had rather liked. He was introduced by Mr. Nye as Father Rivington, and Audrey noticed that when he took his seat at their rather bare board he made a little sign of the cross on his breast, as though twiddling with his coat button. He had an easy, pleasant, boyish manner, and seemed to take at once to Frank, who sloped in with the wire-haired terrier at his heels, sat at the end of the table rather noisily, and surveyed the cold mutton with hostile eyes as though regarding an ancient enemy. The two small girls, Julia and Celia, took their places opposite Audrey, flinging their flaxen pigtails over their shoulders and continuing some intellectual quarrel on the subject of home lessons.

“Not so much chatter, you kids,” said Audrey. “Cheek of you to stay up so late. I wasn’t allowed to at your age.”

“No,” said Julia, aged twelve. “But times are changing, old dear.”

It was extremely characteristic of Audrey’s father that he did not show the least surprise at her presence and had obviously forgotten that she was supposed to be absorbing the higher learning as supplied to ladies at Oxford. It was not until half way through the meal that he suddenly laid down his knife and fork and said, “God bless my soul, Audrey, what are you doing here?”

Mrs. Nye, respecting the proprieties as usual, and wishing to avoid anything like a family discussion before a stranger, answered the enquiry by saying that Audrey had returned suddenly for certain reasons which were no doubt unavoidable.

“Not unwell, sweetheart?” asked Mr. Nye, rather mystified by this explanation, and looking anxiously from his wife to Audrey.

“Never better, father. At the top of my form,” answered Audrey, ignoring Frank’s indiscreet chuckle, and his undisguised wink.

“Splendid! ... And as I was saying, my dear sir”—this to Father Rivington—“there is not the slightest doubt in my mind that modern civilisation is doomed unless there’s a quickening of spiritual influence among the masses. That’s where the Roman Church has a pull over the Anglican. You get more directly into touch with your people. I don’t know how it is, but the sacraments, the call of the faith itself, especially the devotion to Our Lady, perhaps, do away with the necessity of all that parish entertainment, whist drives, bazaar-begging, sermon advertising, and vulgar touting, by which so many of my fellow clergymen try to allure folk to attend their services.”

Father Rivington answered politely, and accepted the fact that his Church relied on authority and spiritual desire rather than on publicity. At the same time he had to confess that he had tried to raise a bit of money himself to pay off the debt on a new church in just those ways which Mr. Nye condemned. He laughed at this admission in a hearty boyish way, and then, as though wishing to avoid ecclesiastical small talk at the supper table, turned to Frank and asked if he had been in the war.

“I had a glimpse of it,” said Frank.

“Infantry?”

“Flying.”

It appeared that Father Rivington had been a military chaplain and he and Frank were soon discussing places they knew in France and Flanders, and especially, Audrey noticed, certain villages behind the lines where they had obtained good food served by girls named Suzanne, Marguérite, Yvonne, and Berthe.

“Good old days,” said Frank, lifting a glass of cold water as though pledging a toast. “Here’s to the next jolly old war!”

Father Rivington laughed heartily, but entirely disapproved of the sentiment.

“I hope there aren’t many like you.... I’m a pacifist and a League of Nations man, out and out.”

“Oh, Lord!” said Frank. “That tosh?”

Mr. Nye intervened in the argument that followed when Frank reiterated his bloodthirsty desire for another Armageddon which he thought would relieve the strain of peace.

“My son is feeling a bit unsettled still. Can’t find the right career. Eh, Frank?”

“Not in a city Bank,” said Frank. “I’d rather be riddled with machine gun bullets in a bloody little scrap.”

“Hush, my dear,” said Mrs. Nye. “I wish you young people wouldn’t be so violent in your expressions. Especially in the presence of a guest.”

“He doesn’t mind,” growled Frank, with a whimsical glance at the young priest. “He’s been a padre at the front. He’s used to violent expressions, of a sanguinary colour.”

“Frank, I beg of you!”

Father Rivington laughed again, in his high, ringing way.

“I’m not easily shocked, Mrs. Nye. In fact my own language sometimes, in moments of irritation, is of a most military character.”

“It’s the spirit of a man that counts,” said Mr. Nye. “Give me a man with love in his heart, and he can swear like a trooper as far as I’m concerned. Why, I knew a coster once—a regular saint—with every other word an oath. One of the most Christlike men.”

“John dear, your tolerance is sometimes extraordinary.”

“Where Love is, there God is also,” said Mr. Nye heartily.

Audrey smiled to herself, and then shared her smile with Frank when she caught his eye. The dear old Dad was incurable as a cheerful mystic. How he managed to retain his faith was a mystery to them, in the face of so many knocks and disillusions. Not even their irreverence and scepticism had shaken his simple faith in the miracles of the Old Testament, including Jonah in the whale’s belly, Balaam’s ass, and the stopping of the sun in favour of Joshua. Not all their patient or impatient allusions to the destructive criticism as developed by Oxford undergraduates with the help of Matthew Arnold, Anatole France, and H. G. Wells, could alter his profound belief in the efficacy of prayer, and in the communion of saints. He was an absolute mediævalist. However, for once in a way they were grateful for this. It avoided the necessity of painful explanations and further worry in Audrey’s case, because Mr. Nye retired into his study for private conversation with Father Rivington—something to do with the parish, no doubt—and remained there until nearly bedtime. This was accepted as providential by Frank, who had arranged to meet a friend at the Wheatsheaf and strolled out of the house immediately after supper for that purpose—after a little tug at Julia’s pigtail and a friendly tweak of Celia’s nose and a noisy scuffle in the hall.

Unfortunately for Audrey her mother was a lady who never delegated her duties to servants unless under her immediate supervision, and this led to a discovery which Audrey considered perfectly ridiculous when Mrs. Nye came downstairs after a prolonged absence with an air of extreme uneasiness, approaching dismay.

“Audrey, dear, I’ve been looking for your luggage to unpack. You don’t seem to have brought a thing with you!”

“No, mother,” said Audrey, looking up from the pages of Punch. “It’s all being sent on from Somerville.”

“But your night things, dearest? How did you manage last night?”

“Oh, Lord, yes!” said Audrey. “I forgot. Julian Perryam shoved them into his knapsack. I left them with him.”

A faint flush crept into the pale cheeks of Mrs. Nye, and there was a look of something like terror in her tired eyes.

“Audrey, have you no shame?”

“Not much, mother dear. It’s an old-fashioned habit. But why?”

“Your night things in a young man’s bag!” said Mrs. Nye breathlessly.

“There was plenty of room in it,” said Audrey.

“A young man with whom you stayed in a country hotel! This is beyond words. I shall have to tell your poor father. I am horrified—terror-stricken.”

“Look here, mother,” said Audrey with a savage little laugh, “please spare yourself all such ridiculous horrors and terrors. They make me rather tired. They belong to the High School in Clapham Park thirty years ago, and not to Somerville and the twentieth century. Tell father by all means. He has far too much trust in me to worry his head about it. And meanwhile I’m off to bed. I can’t stand all this morbid suspicion any longer.”

She took Punch with her and went past her mother with an angry light in her eyes, for the second time that day.

It was just about the time when Julian shouted out to his mother, “For heaven’s sake, give us credit for a little decency and self-respect!”