Читать книгу Imagined Selves - Willa Muir - Страница 29

ELEVEN

On the same Friday Ned Murray was sitting over his midday dinner, which, as had become his custom, he devoured alone after his brother and sister had left the room. The manse cat, a large black-and-white creature cherished by Teenie the maid, was sitting on the floor beside him, receiving portions of fish which Ned laid down with his fingers on the carpet.

The meal was usually conducted in silence. Teenie brought in the dishes, set them dumbly on the table, and forced herself to walk back to the kitchen instead of running. On this day, however, when she saw him feeding the cat so kindly she ventured a remark as she set the pudding down.

‘Tam’s in luck to-day.’

Ned looked at her hastily. There was still a remnant of fish on his plate, which he had intended to give to the cat, but he now crammed it into his own mouth, without a second glance at Teenie who was waiting to remove the plate. Thomas, a wise cat, knew that the piece of fish should have been his, and laid a paw on on Ned’s knee with an inquiring mew. Ned flung his knife and fork down with a clatter, pushed the cat away and started to his feet crying: ‘Self, self, self! That’s all you think about, is it?’ Thomas, in amazement, paused for a moment, and then as Ned continued to berate him fled to the kitchen.

Ned turned upon Teenie.

‘I might have known it. Another dodge. You’re all trying to live off me, the cat and all of you! Get out, do you hear? Get out!’

He pushed the palpitating girl into the kitchen, slammed the door upon her, locked it and put the key in his pocket. Having staved off aggression from that quarter he made himself finally secure by carrying his pudding up to his own room, where he locked himself in.

Sarah emerged from the sitting-room across the hall when she heard him go upstairs, and made for the kitchen. To find her kitchen door locked against her angered her more than such a trivial incident might warrant, and she rapped upon it loudly, calling: ‘Teenie! What’s the matter, Teenie? It’s me: open the door!’

Her anger increased to fury as she stood there holding the door handle, listening to Teenie’s muffled explanations. She felt that the whole economy not only of her household but of her life was in jeopardy. It was with a feeling of ‘now or never’ that she mounted the stairs, saying to herself: I’ll sort him.

She rattled Ned’s door, crying: ‘Give me the key of the kitchen door at once, do you hear? At once, or I’ll bring the police to you.’

Her voice was hard and full of decision: it betrayed no doubt of her ability to enforce her will, and its conviction penetrated to Ned. The door was unlocked and flung open. Ned glared at her, but he retreated a step, although he said: ‘Your impudence is beyond bounds. This is my room.’

‘Give me that key. How dare you intefere with Teenie?’

‘How dare she and all of you interfere with me?’

‘Hold your tongue!’ shouted Sarah. ‘Give me that key!’

It was the first time that she had ever shouted at her brother, and her passion seemed to sober him.

‘Oh, get out,’ he said in an exasperated but normal voice. ‘There’s your key.’

He flung it on the table and Sarah pounced on it.

‘If I find you doing such a thing again I’ll – I’ll thrash you within an inch of your life! And I’ll have you jailed.’

‘Get out, get out,’ repeated Ned, in a reasonable enough tone, urging her to the door as if she were demented and he in full command of his senses. ‘Get out of this; I have some work to do.’

‘Kindly give me your pudding-plate.’

‘Oh, take it, take it, take it. Is there anything else you want?’ inquired Ned ironically.

‘No nonsense from you, and don’t you forget it, my lad.’

Sarah slammed the door behind her and marched downstairs again. She freed her kitchen door and said to Teenie:

‘He won’t do that again. Don’t you worry; just leave him to me.’

Then she did an unheard-of thing: she invaded the study.

William was finishing a sermon on the text: ‘Though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him.’ The God of wrath and the God of love were incomprehensibly one and the same; it was not for His children on earth to question His doings….

The Book of Job lay open on the desk befor him; he was sitting with an idle pen, staring at a certain verse.

‘I must speak to you, William,’ said Sarah.

William’s heart contracted. Some fresh trouble?

‘Put your pen down and listen to me.’

What had happened to Sarah? William turned round in his chair.

Sarah was sharp and concise. This kind of nonsense could not go on, and she would not allow it to go on. To his astonishment William discovered that his wrestlings for the soul of his brother were included in Sarah’s definition of nonsense.

‘Either you leave him alone,’ she said, ‘or you back me up in my treatment of him.’

William began to grow angry. He found it easier nowadays to transform heaviness of heart into anger.

‘Do you know what you are talking about, Sarah?’ he said sternly.

‘I think I’m the only person in this house who has any sense at all of what I’m talking about. You’ve been preaching to Ned about sin and prayer and the will of God, and the only result is that he’s ten times worse than he was. You just drive him past himself, and it’s me who has to suffer for it. Arguing with him about sin isn’t of the slightest use: what he needs is discipline, not argument. I’m going to discipline him, and I want you to leave him alone.’

‘It’s my duty,’ began William, ‘as a minister of God’s Church’ he was going to say, but instead he turned to the desk again and hid his face in his hands. What was his duty? Was Ned visited by God’s wrath because of some secret sin? Or was the visitation incomprehensible, as in the case of Job? Ned had a lively conviction of other people’s sins, but not of his own. All Ned wanted, he said, was security, justice, a right place in the world; and was it his fault that the world conspired to defraud him of that? Logically, William was no match for Ned, who could twist any of his arguments by the tail. He had finally preached contented submission to the will of God, resignation, acceptance without murmuring, but that had only roused Ned to frenzy, so that for a whole day he had done nothing but bang in and out of the study, screaming forth blasphemies againt the God of his brother….’

Sarah relented when she saw the minister hide his face.

There might be a time for that kind of thing, later,’ she conceded, ‘but he’s in no condition for it just now. What he needs is firm handling, as if he were a bairn. I’m going to make him get up for breakfast, and dress himself decently. And I’m going to cut off the gas at the meter at eleven o’clock every night. A regular way of life —’

She broke off. Her resolution was not sufficient to enable her to finish her sentence. A regular way of life is the first duty of a Christian, she was thinking, but William, she knew, would not agree with her. Men got such queer bees in their bonnets; even the best of them.

William still sat motionless.

‘You said before – don’t you remember? – that I was quite right in standing up to him.’

Sarah was insensibly taking up the defensive.

The minister roused himself with a sigh.

‘Yes, yes: you’re right to a certain extent, Sarah…. He must learn to live in this world as well as in the other.’ He smiled a little wryly. ‘But washing one’s face and putting on a fresh collar every day is only cleaning the outside of the platter after all.’

‘It’s at least a beginning,’ said Sarah, turning to go. ‘And it’s the only way that some bairns can be brought up to understand that there must be order in the world.’

The door closed behind her, cutting her off, but leaving the last sentence still hanging in the air.

Order in the world? Did William really believe that there was perceptible order in the world? What he believed was that God pervaded the world; but more and more he was being driven to acknowledge that God’s order was beyond human comprehension, although not beyond human faith. ‘Your God allows mean cunning,’ Ned had said. ‘Your God allows sheer cruelty. Your God allowed Christ to be crucified, and still allows it.’ Ned was blind to everything but the evil in the world…. There was one remark of his which persisted at the back of William’s mind. ‘Your God allows brute savages like Hector Shand to do things to people that I wouldn’t even think of, and then gives him a job and a wife and a home….’

He had not known what answer to make, for he too felt there was evil in Hector Shand.

Strangely enough, although Ned was becoming more and more exasperating, the minister was now convinced that there was real innocence in the boy. He was not evil in himself. He was twisted with fear, but he was not evil. Ned was a queer tangle of odds and ends, like the reverse of a pattern which might never be discernible this side of the grave, but which one felt was there. God’s pattern, thought the minister.

He summoned to his recollection what he could remember of his brother’s life. It was not much. There were six years between them – a large gap when both were young. He was at the University when Ned was at school: and he was in orders when Ned came to the University. But there was one dominant characteristic in all he could remember: Ned’s amiability, gentleness, docility – whatever it was, it was an almost excessive mildness of temper. Ned had been tied to his mother’s apron-strings until she died. He must have been about ten at that time.

The minister sighed, and followed in his memory the phantom of his mother. She had been gentle too; gentle and frail; uncomplaining under the harsh and somewhat fractious rule of her husband.

An odd thought struck him. Sarah was always like father, he said to himself in surprise, and Ned and I were like two different versions of mother….

The more he brooded on this resemblance between himself and his brother the more agitated he became. It was as if he were resisting with all his might the temptation to catch hold of an idea which was struggling for recognition. How could there be a fundamental resemblance between two people whose vision of life was so different? Ned’s vision was a nightmare; by an unhappy fatality he saw nothing but evil in the world. It was an impossible nightmare; one could not go on living in it; and yet the minister suddenly comprehended with agony that the nightmare closed round Ned with an immediate certainty that prevented him from questioning its truth. It was as real to him as water closing over his head. But if Ned were like a man weighted down so that his head was just under water, with a little readjustment could he not be as easily cradled on the top of the sea, and would he not then be exactly like his brother?

The minister swerved away from the implications of this admission, and forced his mind back to Ned. When waters are closing over his head a man can think of nothing but himself: he cannot be gentle and amenable; he must insist that his feelings are of the first importance, and that he is suffering; he must be in a state of terror. All that was true of Ned. Nor is a man necessarily a devil because he is drowning and clutches at other people and curses God. An infinitesimal readjustment to bring his head above water will suffice to restore his natural gentleness.

The verse in the Book of Job detached itself once more from the page:

‘O that one might plead for a man with God, as a man pleadeth for his neighbour.’

Oh, that one might!

What was this sea that closed over Ned’s head and for so many years had cradled himself in security?

The point of the idea had at last pricked the minister’s consciousness, and he started. Ned saw nothing but evil around him, and for years he himself had seen nothing but good. He had believed in a consoling dream exactly as Ned was believing in a nightmare. Was the dream as false as the nightmare? Or were they both real?

The minister felt as if he were on the verge of a sickening abyss.

When he recoverd himself he said aloud: ‘Neither heaven nor hell. Or both heaven and hell?’

He remembered, as if from a far-off world, that he had once guessed at a final state of being where there was neither punishment nor forgiveness, neither good nor evil…. But that must be on the other side of death…. On this side of it both heaven and hell were real. You could not have one without the other: you could not live without admitting both. That had been forced upon him.

They must be real. They must be real. But God was incomprehensible.

‘O that one might plead for a man with God, as a man pleadeth for his neighbour.’

But one might not. Sympathy was unavailing. That, too, he had had to learn.

The minister offered up a prayer to the incomprehensible God he acknowledged, asking that his feeble spirit might be sharpened and hardened to do God’s work as a faithful member of His Church.

Later he finished his sermon.