It May Never Happen Page 4

  “Too big,” she murmured.

  “If there is a God,” said the son. “He is pitiable, weak, small. Hardly born …”

  He checked himself when he saw that his mother looked at him without comprehension. “I am old,” she shivered and he saw the tears cracking in her eyes. “I used to live in hope—you know for the future. You know, hope things would go right, hoping things for you children, but now I haven’t even got hope.” She looked wildly. “It’s gone.”

  She stared over his shoulder to the walls of the room and the heavy curtains.

  “It isn’t this old war and these old raids,” she said. “Life’s gone, it’s gone too quickly. There’s nothing, Ted, that’s how it seems to me, except if we could just be together as we were.”

  “Don’t cry, Mother.”

  “No, mustn’t cry, mustn’t let him see I cried. Women do cry. It’s silly. What shall we talk about? Let’s think of something else.”

  She became sly and detached like a young girl running away, daring him to catch her. He knew these changes of mood in his mother very well. She began to talk in a bold taunting way.

  “It’s the house,” she said scornfully. “Fie doesn’t like the house to be left. Someone must be in the house. It won’t run away I tell him. Good thing if it was bombed. But his mother was just the same, cling on, cling on, scrubbing, polishing. ‘You can’t take it with you,’ I used to say to her. She used to give me a look. ‘Eh,’ she said, ‘you want me to die.’ I can see her now. ‘You wicked woman,’ I said. And when they carried her out, the men bumped the coffin, dear, on the chest of drawers and I thought: ‘If you could see that scratch!’ Some call it faith. I call it property. Property.”

  His mother’s eyes became sly and malicious. She laughed.

  “Oh, there are things I could tell you,” she cried recklessly, looking at the door. “When it starts and I hear the guns, I think of you. Things you don’t know about, you were just a baby at the time. No one knows them. It’s my life. All those years. Can you hear him? Is he coming upstairs?”

  “No, I don’t hear him.”

  “No, he’ll be another minute or two. Quick, I’ll show you something. Come along.”

  She got up and seizing her son’s sleeve she nearly ran with him from the room.

  “You’re not to say anything,” she said.

  “His bedroom,” she said. “Look at it.”

  It was simply a bedroom with too much furniture in it.

  “Three chests of drawers,” the son said. “What does he want with three?”

  A look of wicked delight came into his mother’s face, a look so merry that he knew he was saying what she wanted him to say.

  “Two wardrobes,” he exclaimed.

  “Three with this!” exclaimed his mother, touching a cupboard in the corner, as if she were selling it.

  “And then—just in case you want to read,” his mother said satirically. She pointed one by one to several reading lamps by the bed, on the chests, on the dressing-table.

  “What’s he want five for?” said the son.

  “Shave?” said his mother excitedly, opening a heavy drawer. Inside was a number of razors and shaving things of all kinds. She bent to the drawer below.

  “Locked,” she said. Undismayed, she led him to the far wail. “Count,” she said. The son began to count. At seventeen he stopped. There were many more than seventeen pairs of boots lined up, and at the end the son stopped with astonishment.

  “Riding-boots. When does he ride?”

  “He’s never ridden in his life, my dear.”

  “Waders, climbing boots …” the son began to laugh. “He never fished, did he?

  “When did he buy all this gear?”

  “Oh, we haven’t begun, dear. Look at this.”

  One by one she opened the wardrobes swiftly, allowed her son to glance, even to touch for a moment, and then swiftly closed the door. She showed him some thirty suits of clothes and more hats than he could count.

  “I’ll try one on,” said the son laughing.

  “No,” said the mother, “he’d know you’d touched them.”

  “What’s the idea of this hoard? It’s madness,” he said.

  The word madness came to his head because, at this triumph of her secret-telling, she looked mad herself. Her eyes stared with all the malice of the mad, intent on their message. Then quickly as a mouse she scurried to the door and listened.

  The son stood by the fireplace when she went to the door and looked at a picture over the mantelpiece. It was the only picture in the room. It was a picture of a tall, bareheaded, austere man in ancient robes, standing in the shadows of a crowded place, alone. And in those shadows crouched a prowling group of lions, their surly faces barred with scowls of anger and fear.

  “Daniel in the Lion’s Den. He loves old Daniel,” said his mother, coming up behind him. “He’s always talking of Daniel.”

  The son gaped at the picture. The room was filled with his father’s life, but this picture seemed to be more profoundly his father’s life than anything in the room. He suddenly felt ashamed of being in his father’s room.

  “Let’s go back to the fire,” the son said.

  “Look, dear,” the mother was pulling at his sleeve. “Something else, quick.”

  She took him to a chest of drawers and opened the drawers one by one.

  “Pants,” she said in her deceptive voice, and as she spoke she carefully lifted one or two of the garments. Underneath them was a silver cruet.

  “Solid silver,” she said. “Wait. Two dozen teaspoons. A set of fish-knives. All silver.”

  “Come along, Mother. I know, I know.”

  “Silver tea-tray. Kettle,” she was at another drawer, ignoring him.

  “Fish-knives, spoons, ink-stands …”

  “Mother, stop …”

  “You move this. It’s heavy. Look at this one. Shirts.” She was lifting the shirts and revealing under them a cache of silver cream-jugs, hot-water jugs …

  “Oh dear,” said his mother. “We never use them. We never see them. He thinks I don’t know. He just comes home and goes straight to his bedroom and slips them in.”

  “Where does he pick up all this?” said the son.

  “Ask no questions, hear no lies,” said his mother.

  “No, seriously, what’s the idea?”

  The old lady’s face was marked suddenly by all the bewilderment of a lifetime. She was helpless.

  “Don’t ask me, dear,” she said. “It’s him. It’s how he’s always been.”

  She looked at her son, exhausted and enquiring. She had suddenly lost interest. She was also frightened.

  “Come out, in case he comes. You see, dear, how it is. We couldn’t leave all that.”

  She turned out the lights and they walked back into the sitting-room.

  “You’re looking tired, dear,” she said, in an unnatural voice, making conversation. “Do you sleep well?”

  She went over to the curtain again and peeped out as she said this.

  “Pretty well.”

  She came back to the fire.

  “I know. You dream. Do you dream? I dream something chronic. Every night. Your father doesn’t dream, of course. He just sleeps. He’s always been like that. Sometimes I have a terrible dream. I dream, dear, that I’m in a palace, a king’s palace, something like Windsor Castle, and I go into a great hall and it’s filled with—treasure : well, things, beautiful—you know, armour, pictures, china, and I stand there and I can’t get my breath and I say ‘Oh. I must get out.’ And I go out of a door just to get air to breathe….”

  “Indigestion,” said her son.

  “Is it? Well, through this door there’s another room, just the same, but it’s filled with commoner things—crockery, ironmongery, furniture—just like a second-hand shop, but thousands, dear, and I think, ‘Oh, let me breathe,’ and I hurry out of it by the door, and beyond that door,” said the mother, holding his hand, “is another roo
m. Ted, it’s full of everything decaying, filthy. Oh, it’s horrible dear. I wake up feeling sick.”

  “What is that?” asked the son, nodding to the ceiling. “Up there.”

  “On the ceiling?” she said. “Oh, that’s our crack.” “It’s getting bigger,” she said. “It’s a bad one.”

  “That was the land-mine, dear, the one that broke the windows. The one that killed old Mrs. Croft …”

  “I know, Mother, don’t …”

  “I thought we had gone and I said, ‘Oh Dad. We’ve gone.’ Ted, dear, the dust!”

  They looked at the ceiling. Beginning at the wall by the window, the crack was like a cut that has not closed.

  “And perhaps it would have been a good thing if we had gone,” she said, narrowing her eyes and searching her son’s face with a look that terrified him. “We’ve had our life. What is your life? I watch that old crack and I say, ‘Let’s see. Are you getting larger?’ But he sits there, quiet at his table and says ‘Remember Daniel. There’s nothing to be afraid of.’ It’s wonderful, really. He believes it. It does him good. There’s just ourselves, dear, you see. You’ve all grown up, you’ve gone your own ways, you can’t be here with me and it wouldn’t be right if you could be. I always feel I’ve got you. I think to myself, I’ve got something, I’ve got you children. But he’s got nothing. You mustn’t take any notice of the things I say. I expect you know women just say things and don’t know why they say them…. When I see him sitting there under the lamp, praying for me and you and all of us, I think, ‘Poor old Daddy, that’s all he’s got—his faith. But I’ve got him.’”

  “Ssh, Mother, don’t cry. He’s coming now,” the son said. Quickly she sat on the stool by the fire and put her head forward so that the disorder of her face should be hidden in the glow of the flame.

  The father tapped his fingers comically on the panel of the door.

  “May I come in? Sure I’m not interrupting? Thank you. Mother and son,” he smiled, nodding his head. “The old, old story, mother and son.”

  A flush of annoyance and guilt passed over the son’s body and came to his lips in a jaunty, uneasy laugh.

  The father frowned.

  “I say, old girl,” he said. “I’ve just been outside. There was a chink of light showing in my room. We must be careful …”

  “I was just showing Ted round,” said the mother.

  “Showing me round the estate,” Ted said.

  “I’ve switched it off,” the mother said.

  “Switch it on, old girl. Let’s have that tea.” He settled himself innocently on the edge of his chair with his legs tucked under it, and his pleased fingers joined over his waistcoat.

  “It’s a good thing I know your mother. How old are you, my boy—forty? In forty-five years I’ve got to know her,” the father smiled.

  The old lady nodded her head as she went over his words, and then she got up from her stool to make the tea.

  “I don’t think they’ll come to-night, dear,” she said with spirit.

  “I’m here,” the son laughed.

  “Run along, old girl. Of course they won’t,” the father said, ordering and defending his own. “I just know they won’t.”

  THE SAINT

  When I was seventeen years old I lost my religious faith. It had been unsteady for some time and then, very suddenly, it went as the result of an incident in a punt on the river outside the town where we lived. My uncle, with whom I was obliged to stay for long periods of my life, had started a small furniture-making business in the town. He was always in difficulties about money, but he was convinced that in some way God would help him. And this happened. An investor arrived who belonged to a sect called the Church of the Last Purification, of Toronto, Canada. Could we imagine, this man asked, a good and omnipotent God allowing his children to be short of money? We had to admit we could not imagine this. The man paid some capital into my uncle’s business and we were converted. Our family were the first Purifiers—as they were called—in the town. Soon a congregation of fifty or more were meeting every Sunday in a room at the Corn Exchange.

  At once we found ourselves isolated and hated people. Everyone made jokes about us. We had to stand together because we were sometimes dragged into the courts. What the unconverted could not forgive in us was first that we believed in successful prayer and, secondly, that our revelation came from Toronto. The success of our prayers had a simple foundation. We regarded it as “Error”—our name for Evil—to believe the evidence of our senses and if we had influenza or consumption, or had lost our money or were unemployed, we denied the reality of these things, saying that since God could not have made them they therefore did not exist. It was exhilarating to look at our congregation and to know that what the vulgar would call miracles were performed among us, almost as a matter of routine, every day. Not very big miracles, perhaps; but up in London and out in Toronto, we knew that deafness and blindness, cancer and insanity, the great scourges, were constantly vanishing before the prayers of the more advanced Purifiers.

  “What!” said my schoolmaster, an Irishman with eyes like broken glass and a sniff of irritability in the bristles of his nose. “What! Do you have the impudence to tell me that if you fell off the top floor of this building and smashed your head in, you would say you hadn’t fallen and were not injured?”

  I was a small boy and very afraid of everybody, but not when it was a question of my religion. I was used to the kind of conundrum the Irishman had set. It was useless to argue, though our religion had already developed an interesting casuistry.

  “I would say so,” I replied with coldness and some vanity. “And my head would not be smashed.”

  “You would not say so,” answered the Irishman. “You would not say so.” His eyes sparkled with pure pleasure. “You’d be dead.”

  The boys laughed, but they looked at me with admiration.

  Then, I do not know how or why, I began to see a difficulty. Without warning and as if I had gone into my bedroom at night and had found a gross ape seated in my bed and thereafter following me about with his grunts and his fleas and a look, relentless and ancient, scored on his brown face, I was faced with the problem which prowls at the centre of all religious faith. I was faced by the difficulty of the origin of evil. Evil was an illusion, we were taught. But even illusions have an origin. The Purifiers denied this.

  I consulted my uncle. Trade was bad at the time and this made his faith abrupt. He frowned as I spoke.

  “When did you brush your coat last?” he said. “You’re getting slovenly about your appearance. If you spent more time studying books”—that is to say, the Purification literature—“and less with your hands in your pockets and playing about with boats on the river, you wouldn’t be letting Error in.”

  All dogmas have their jargon; my uncle as a business man loved the trade terms of the Purification. “Don’t let Error in,” was a favourite one. The whole point about the Purification, he said, was that it was scientific and therefore exact; in consequence it was sheer weakness to admit discussion. Indeed, betrayal. He unpinched his pince-nez, stirred his tea and indicated I must submit or change the subject. Preferably the latter. I saw, to my alarm, that my arguments had defeated my uncle. Faith and doubt pulled like strings round my throat.

  “You don’t mean to say you don’t believe that what our Lord said was true?” my Aunt asked nervously, following me out of the room. “Your uncle does, dear.”

  I could not answer. I went out of the house and down the main street to the river where the punts were stuck like insects in the summery flash of the reach. Life was a dream, I thought; no, a nightmare, for the ape was beside me.

  I was still in this state, half sulking and half exalted, when Mr. Hubert Timberlake came to the town. He was one of the important people from the headquarters of our Church and he had come to give an address on the Purification at the Corn Exchange. Posters announcing this were everywhere. Mr. Timberlake was to spend Sunday afternoon with
us. It was unbelievable that a man so eminent would actually sit in our dining-room, use our knives and forks, and eat our food. Every imperfection in our home and our characters would jump out at him. The Truth had been revealed to man with scientific accuracy—an accuracy we could all test by experiment—and the future course of human development on earth was laid down, finally. And here in Mr. Timberlake was a man who had not merely performed many miracles—even, it was said with proper reserve, having twice raised the dead—but who had actually been to Toronto, our headquarters, where this great and revolutionary revelation had first been given.

  “This is my nephew,” my uncle said, introducing me. “He lives with us. He thinks he thinks, Mr. Timberlake, but I tell him he only thinks he does. Ha, ha.” My uncle was a humorous man when he was with the great. “He’s always on the river,” my uncle continued. “I tell him he’s got water on the brain. I’ve been telling Mr. Timberlake about you, my boy.”

  A hand as soft as the best quality chamois leather took mine. I saw a wide upright man in a double-breasted navy blue suit. He had a pink square head with very small ears and one of those torpid, enamelled smiles which were said by our enemies to be too common in our sect.

  “Why, isn’t that just fine?” said Mr. Timberlake who, owing to his contacts with Toronto, spoke with an American accent. “What say we tell your uncle it’s funny he think’s he’s funny.”

  The eyes of Mr. Timberlake were direct and colourless. He had the look of a retired merchant captain who had become decontaminated from the sea and had reformed and made money. His defence of me had made me his at once. My doubts vanished. Whatever Mr. Timberlake believed must be true and as I listened to him at lunch, I thought there could be no finer life than his.

  “I expect Mr. Timberlake’s tired after his address,” said my aunt.

  “Tired?” exclaimed my uncle, brilliant with indignation. “How can Mr. Timberlake be tired? Don’t let Error in!”

  For in our faith the merely inconvenient was just as illusory as a great catastrophe would have been, if you wished to be strict, and Mr. Timberlake’s presence made us very strict.