A Bachelor's Comedy

CHAPTER IX

Andy paid one or two calls in the parish that afternoon and then went into the church to ring the bell for evensong. Clang, clang, cling! Come to church! So it had rung for generations of Sundays across the quiet fields, but only for Andy had it worked upon a week-day. He had a great argument on the subject with Mr. Thorpe, who thought that week-day services in Gaythorpe, where every one was busy from morning to night, would be merely an accentuation of the fact that the parson had nothing to do. For Gaythorpe never could and never would believe that a parson’s occupations could be truthfully called work.

It was only when Andy did finally so envelop himself in the mantle of the senior curate as to leave not a trace of the original Andy to be seen, that Mr. Thorpe said, “Have two a day, then, if you like. But to my mind it’s ridiculous! And nobody’ll come unless they want to get something out of you.”

Nobody, evidently, thought what could be got out of Andy worth leaving work and attending daily service for, so he read the service grimly alone each morning and late afternoon. Labourers, looking up from their work, used to say in a morning with a chuckle, “Parson’s at it again. Pity he hasn’t nowt better to do.” And later in the day, women, straining the milk, would remark to one another, “Does he think we’re going to leave all this and go up to church just at tea-time? Here – are them eggs for Mr. Deane? Oh, he only gets twelve to the shilling. It’s grocer gets thirteen.”

So Andy rang a quiet one – two – three, one – two – three, through the golden light of a late June afternoon, and afterwards stood alone as usual to read the lovely words of prayer and praise which seem to have been written in an age when men could be poets and yet sincere. An atmosphere of simple goodness and humanity clings like incense about the evening service, and the close of it is – in the dullest, dreariest place – like evening light through a stained window. It leaves such an impression of solemn peace and beauty.

Andy forgot to be annoyed at the absence of a congregation before he reached the exquisite prayer about the perils and dangers of this night, and he walked home quite content. He was not, of course, a model clergyman, or perhaps he would have gone on worrying about the absent flock. And when he got in he found Mr. Thorpe waiting for him.

“Waste of time,” said Mr. Thorpe. “Waste of time! What good does it do?”

Here was a poser! What good did it do?

“Stops me from getting slack,” said Andy, at last.

“Oh, you!” Mr. Thorpe implied that Andy ought to be able to look after his own eternal welfare without any outside help – it was his business.

“And perhaps when people hear the bell going it reminds them of good thoughts,” suggested Andy.

“What if they’re chapel?” said Mr. Thorpe. “There’s more chapel than church in Gaythorpe.”

Andy ceased arguing and called up the senior curate.

“I do what I think right.”

“Well, well! Nobody can do more than that,” admitted Mr. Thorpe, and he glanced slowly round the room for a change of subject. “I see you have the sideboard still. Looks well there. Handsome bit o’ furniture.”

“Very,” said Andy.

“But you made a mistake, buying it in. You oughtn’t to have bought it in. If us Thorpes had thought Mrs. Simpson required that sideboard, us Thorpes would have bought it in for her. You meant well. But you made a mistake. Us Thorpes would have bought it in ourselves if it had been required.”

He straightened his chest as one who has delivered himself of a burden, and added —

“I’m not one to bear grudges and tattle from one to another. If I have anything to say to a man I say it to him. Us Thorpes are like that.”

“Thank you, Mr. Thorpe. I’m afraid I did seem officious. I didn’t mean to be,” said Andy, with a manly simplicity and an understanding of the point of view of “us Thorpes” which was very pleasant and was all Andy – not a vestige of the senior curate in it.

“Naturally,” continued Mr. Thorpe in a tone that somehow responded to Andy’s, but in words which he had previously rehearsed to Mrs. Thorpe and did not intend to depart from – “Naturally it was narking to a well-known family like us Thorpes, with big farms all around Bardswell, to have the tale going about. If we’d thought she required the sideboard bought in, we should have bought it in. We knew she didn’t require it, so we didn’t buy it. But,” he added, unrehearsed, “all’s well that ends well, and so it is.”

“Anyway I promise not to buy any more sideboards,” said Andy with a rueful smile.

Mr. Thorpe relaxed altogether, and his black eyes began to twinkle in his fat red face.

“She run you up, I hear. You had to pay a matter of eight pounds odd more than you would have done if Miss Elizabeth hadn’t been there. Appears Mrs. Simpson had been complaining to both of you, and you neither of you knew the other was going to give it to her. Would have been a rare good joke under some circumstances.”

What Mr. Thorpe really meant was that it would have been a rare good joke if it had happened in the Werrit family – but he did not say so, even to himself. He added, instead —

“Handsome young lady, Miss Elizabeth. Though most people admire Miss Norah most. But she’s one of your clever ones – you don’t want a wife too clever.”

“Some people don’t want a wife at all,” said Andy, with self-conscious jocularity.

“But that’s neither you nor me, Mr. Deane,” said Mr. Thorpe with a fat wink.

Andy drew himself up and toyed with the paperknife.

“And the school-treat?” he remarked.

“Yes – that’s what I came about,” said Mr. Thorpe, responding to the check. “It appears that you’ve consulted Miss Fanny Kirke about the date.”

“Yes,” said Andy. “I expected she would know all the details.”

“Everybody knows them,” said Mr. Thorpe. “They’re always the same. But you ought to have gone to some responsible lady like Mrs. Thorpe or Mrs. Will Werrit. I, myself, make nothing of being churchwarden. But Mrs. Thorpe seems to think that, in the position of churchwarden’s wife, she ought to have been asked to fix the date. Or Mrs. Tom Werrit. Or Mrs. Will.” He rose. “I was to tell you they can’t take trays this year.”

“Not take trays!” said Andy, who had already learned what that involved. “Why, they used to make themselves responsible for nearly all the provisions required. What shall we do?”

“I don’t know. They said I was to let you know, and I’ve let you know.”

But it was evident he had acted under compulsion, and he added, as one man to another —

“You go and have it out with ’em. Butter ’em up a bit and they’ll come round.”

And Andy replied – as one man to another —

“I’m hanged if I will! I’ll manage somehow if I have to make the cakes myself!”

Mr. Thorpe nodded.

“Just as you like, of course.”

But, oddly enough, his respect for Andy was increased by this unreasonable behaviour, and he stood by the door, scratching his head, and slowly evolving a means of compromise. Then he closed the door again, advanced a few steps, and remarked with the air of a conspirator, “I’ve got it!”

His manner was so queerly at variance with his appearance, that any one not concerned in the serious question must have been tickled by the incongruity; but Andy peered at him anxiously —

“Well?”

“I’ll fix the date. Can’t let you have my waggons to take the children until the 12th. You’d said the 5th. And if the date’s altered to suit me, Mrs. Thorpe must oblige you. And Mrs. Will and Mrs. Tom Werrit’ll follow her.”

It was Mr. Thorpe’s first effort at diplomacy, and he was fifty-one. No wonder he glowed with the late joy of the creator and forgot everything but the splendour of his own idea.

“My word. That’s a splendid plan. Awfully good of you,” said Andy with eager sincerity.

“But not a word to Mrs. Thorpe. Not a word,” chuckled Mr. Thorpe, going towards the door.

“You may rely on me,” said Andy warmly.

Mr. Thorpe paused with his hand on the door before opening it again.

“Look here,” he said. “You can’t know as much about women as I do. You come to me if you get stuck.”

He really felt, now he had started on a diplomatist’s career, that he should like to go on. He felt all the stirring pleasure of using talents hitherto unsuspected.

“I will,” said Andy gratefully, though he did think it rather ridiculous that fat Mr. Thorpe should consider he knew more about women than a young man who had been a curate in London.

“There’s a pack of women in Gaythorpe,” said Mr. Thorpe, opening the door. “Good-bye.”

But that was not what he meant to say, nor what Andy understood. He intended to convey to his Vicar the strange comradeship which binds all men together against all women. And the hand-shake they exchanged was a final expression of this bond.

For it is ridiculous to pretend that spoken words are so tremendously important, and that they alone bridge the blank space between one soul and another; they cast a line, as it were, but souls cross always in silence. The intrinsic part of every conversation is without words, which, if you think of it, becomes very comforting. It shows that our souls are not so lonely as we feared, and that they have a language which even death need not cause us to forget.

So Andy went back to his study full of the things that Mr. Thorpe had never said, and the churchwarden plodded sedately down the road mentally patting his Vicar on the back for remarks he had never made; and they both felt pleased with themselves, and each other – which is not a bad result for any conversation to have.

Andy pulled out a few sheets of foolscap, and began to write one of those articles which were sometimes accepted, when Mrs. Jebb came in to apologise about the asparagus.

“I’m sorry,” she said with mournful dignity, “but it is my misfortune and not my fault that my youth was not passed in circles where asparagus can be afforded.”

“Never mind,” said Andy. “I’m sure they enjoyed the party.”

Mrs. Jebb pursed her lips together and approached mysteriously.

“One thing,” she said in a low voice, “strikes me as very strange. The bones!”

“What bones?” said Andy, bending over the foolscap. “I’m rather busy just now, Mrs. Jebb, so if – ”

“I and Sophy have searched the dining-room. Then a cat occurred to our minds.”

“The poor old cat looked hungry,” said the Vicar after a pause.

“Ah, I thought you must have given them to the cat,” said Mrs. Jebb. “But at a luncheon party – however, in a bachelor’s establishment – ”

She evidently felt that Andy had not known how to behave, and that made the next step easier.

“I fear,” she continued, “that Mrs. Thorpe is to blame for what might have been a catastrophe if the fowls had been – er – entirely dismembered. I forget if it is larks, or a woodcock, or what, that you do cook in that way, though I never thought it really nice. However, as everything went off all right – ” She paused for Andy’s reply, having put the matter, it must be confessed, with some delicacy.

“Oh, excellently,” said Andy. “You must have heard us laughing.”

“Yes. If there had been champagne – but there wasn’t – ”

Again the point of a conversation passed unspoken, and then Andy pulled his paper towards him with such determination that Mrs. Jebb fluttered from the room.

Ten minutes later she tripped back, bearing a vase of roses.

“I always think a man’s room looks so desolate without flowers. As if he had no woman to care for him,” and she placed the vase close to Andy’s elbow.

He thanked her briefly without looking up. But when she had gone out again he stared blankly at the print on the opposite wall.

“Blest if the old girl isn’t gone on me! How unpleasant!”

The attentions of certain elderly-young church workers in his late parish had paved the way for comprehension, and he comprehended. But though it was intensely annoying he did not feel it to be unnatural.

He was, of course, an attractive fellow.

That he had learned, too, in his late curacy, for before that he had been exceedingly doubtful of his own charms.

He went in to supper feeling annoyed with Mrs. Jebb, but rather sorry for her all the same. And after supper he strolled out into the garden, where twilight was falling and the young moon was rising above a bank of cloud. A feeling of loneliness drove him to the front gate, where he could watch the distant houses being lighted up, one after the other.

Homes – thought Andy. Places where people were trying – trying —

He could not get hold of the tail of the flying thought.

Then an oldish man passed, worn with long labour, most patient in the twilight.

The thought came near again, but not near enough, and Andy called out a friendly ‘Good-night.’ Then he added impulsively, because he somehow wanted to do something – he somehow felt ashamed before that plodding figure – “I say, will you have a cigar?”

The man stopped, stared, and replied bluntly —

“I never smoked a cigar.”

“Then take these,” said Andy, emptying his case of that portion of his aunt’s last Christmas present with which he had stocked it in anticipation of the luncheon-party.

“Thank you, sir,” said the man, stuffing them into his bag with a bit of bread and half an onion.

Then he plodded on again, thinking the Vicar was a rum ’un, and no mistake, and agreeing with the newspaper he took that parsons ought to be done away with if they could afford to go about with their pockets crammed with cigars.

Andy stood there, looking after the man as he went up the lane to the little house where he slept at night, and where he had kept his wife, and maintained his children ever since early youth. He smelt of earth and sweat and was rough in his manner, and yet he enabled the Vicar of Gaythorpe to get hold of that thought which had previously eluded him.

Andy saw.

It is pleasant to see the glory in things that are glorious, but there is a still more intimate and exquisite pleasure about seeing glory in things which seem sordid. It is a sort of treasure-hunting of the soul – as fresh and full of life as a boy’s treasure-hunt in a water-logged hulk – as full of the thrillingly unexpected.

Andy went back into the study and took down some accounts which he had shelved. They dated from the late Vicar’s time, and were complicated, and he stuck to them until they were done.

But he had no idea why he did it.

At last he put down his pen and stretched himself, and something he had vaguely been keeping at bay ever since the early afternoon swept over him like a tide. He lit a candle and went out into the silent hall where the light was already extinguished, and unlocked the dining-room door. It had the odd look common to all unused rooms at night – they seem to be waiting in some uncanny and yet quite conscious way for somebody long gone.

Andy came there to search for nearer dreams of Elizabeth. Elizabeth as she had been in her youth and gracious kindness only a few hours before. Elizabeth as she might be when they were married. And he found instead the most clear and vivid memory of a man he had never seen. He never thought much of the old Vicar, for what he had heard of him in no way appealed to the imagination. And yet now he suddenly remembered the years his predecessor had spent between these walls, and that he must, too, have been young when he came – young and full of life and hope.

It was, truly, as if the old Vicar held out a hand in that still, dimly-lighted room, claiming recognition, and the new Vicar gave it in a half-spoken —

“Poor old chap! I’d forgotten he planted the rose trees and the holly hedge. He must have liked the garden.”

Then Andy went to bed, but he was restless and could not sleep, for now the dreams of Elizabeth that he went to look for in the dining-room pressed so close around him that he remained vividly awake.

He could not have told next morning what those confused dreams were – no one, not even a young man can describe the dreams of a young man about the girl he hopes to marry. They are like the City of Married Love itself, that has spires soaring into a clear heaven and little dim places where a man may hide. And one tells of the spires and another of the dark, but no one of the whole; for the poet and realist and true lover all combined who can write about those dreams as they are, has yet to be born.

And married love – that Enchanted Muddle – is different from any other love.

For love without marriage has also the dark places and the spires pointing upwards, but it has no battlements – and battlements keep in and keep out many things.

Andy got up in the morning, hoping to see Elizabeth, and yet almost afraid to see her, lest she should guess that he had dared to come so near to her in his dreams.

A letter lay on the breakfast-table that seemed, even when opened and read, to be of minor importance. But that is the extraordinarily interesting thing about life – you never can tell what is important and what is not.

Still, of course, “Dear Andy. – We are coming to Marshaven for a few days on the 15th. Promenade Hotel. Do come over and see us. – Your affectionate Aunt,” could hardly – any more than the sideboard – be regarded as a likely messenger of Fate.

Andy beamed as he helped himself to fried bacon. Fortunate – most fortunate. Just when he needed some one to back him up in demanding the hand of a girl who might marry a duke if she wanted, here was the fashionable Aunt Dixon with her two stylish daughters by a husband previous to Uncle Dixon.

The gratitude which Andy had always felt to his aunt by marriage for her kindness to him, and the admiration he had always entertained for the Webster girls, grew stronger than ever as he sat eating his breakfast; then his reflections were interrupted by the incursion of Mrs. Jebb.