Never Too Late Page 14

  “I cannot quite see it,” said Lady Graham, who had closed her eyes as if communing with some inner vision of the church.

  “Yes, mother,” said Edith. “The one that has the Mothers’ Union banner in the corner.”

  “Then that is why I had forgotten,” said Lady Graham, who by this time had as usual reduced her audience to a state where faith was better than understanding. “But we can’t leave it there if Mrs. Carter and her family are going to use it, Mr. Choyce.”

  The Vicar did not quite see why a banner leaning against a wall in the far corner of a pew should be a serious inconvenience to a family of whom only two were of church-going age, but such was his reverence for Lady Graham’s feelings that he did not like to say so.

  “Oh, mother!” said Edith, “don’t you remember the time that clamp-thing that holds it up came out of the wall and the banner fell down while the Bishop was preaching? You weren’t here then, Mr. Choyce. It was a locum.”

  The fact of Mr. Choyce having been away would not seem decisive in itself, but it appeared to satisfy Lady Graham who said of course the Mothers’ Union banner could be left there and how stupid of her not to remember.

  “I’ll tell you how we can arrange it, Mr. Choyce,” said Lady Graham. “When I have Mrs. Carter in our pew on Sunday I will show her which the Old Manor House pew used to be and then afterwards we could have a word with you and Caxton.”

  “Of course!” said Mr. Choyce. “You think of everything for us, Lady Graham. But—if I may suggest it—could we not have the word at the vicarage? One of my Liverpool helpers, a well-to-do man in the shipping line, has just sent me a case of sherry and one of Marsala. I did not know Marsala, but I have opened a bottle and found it excellent. Rather softer than sherry, but not heavy.”

  “Of course not,” said Lady Graham.

  “Do you know it then?” said Mr. Choyce. “So few people do. I think they confuse it with Madeira.”

  At this Lady Graham laughed in a most charming way, without at all disturbing her still lovely face where the only signs of middle age were some faint lines at the outer corners of her dove’s eyes.

  “How young you look when you laugh” said the Vicar and then felt confused, but Lady Graham appeared pleased with his tribute.

  “So did darling mamma,” she said. “Sometimes one gets like one’s parents as one gets older.”

  “Then I’m glad you’re my mother,” said Edith. “How awful it would be to get like old Mrs. Panter,” but as Mrs. Panter, mother of Geo. Panter of the Mellings Arms, had a hooky nose and within the memory of all the oldest and most untruthful inhabitants had had a grey rather curly beard, it did not seem likely that Lady Graham would pass on any of these characteristics to her youngest daughter.

  ‘We mustn’t keep you, Mr. Choyce,” said Lady Graham, and though there was no particular reason for the Vicar to go home he felt that Lady Graham was somehow being—as when was she not—particularly kind and thoughtful, and so took his leave.

  After dinner Lady Graham rang up Mrs. Carter and explained the plan. Mrs. Carter said Might she just ask her husband, which Lady Graham felt to be a very suitable attitude. In a short time Mrs. Carter was back at the telephone to say that her husband thanked Lady Graham very much and ought he to wear a dark suit or should he come just as he was.

  “Oh, just as he likes,” said Lady Graham. “Robert usually wears a dark blue suit for church but he is so seldom here, I am sorry to say, that it hardly counts. When he retired last year I thought we should see more of him, but he has collected so many boards that he is always travelling. He is in Bristol this weekend, I really do not know why. He will be so disappointed to miss you, but you will come to dinner soon, I hope.”

  “So that is all right,” she said to Edith. “And, darling,” she added, “do you think you ought to be taking up something?”

  “What sort of something, mother?” said Edith.

  “Well, I don’t quite know,” said Lady Graham. “Of course I married quite young—older than you are but not so very much. It was near the end of my first season and I had kept a dance for your father, he was only a Colonel then, of course, and—”

  “Look here, mother,” said Edith lovingly but firmly. “You simply mustn’t tell me that one again. The boys and I all think so. I mean we adore it, but after all we do know it. Do you mind?”

  Lady Graham was quite silent.

  “I haven’t been horrid, have I mother?” said Edith, already repenting her protest. “I didn’t ever mean to.”

  “Not a bit horrid,” said Lady Graham. “You couldn’t be. I hope I have never been horrid to you.”

  “Of course you haven’t,” said Edith. “Did you think you had?”

  “Oh no, not in the least,” said Lady Graham. “But one ought to know. At least perhaps one oughtn’t. Some people believe in telling other people about all the things they think the other people have done that were stupid, but it is extremely stupid of them to think it. Of course darling mamma did it so sweetly that one couldn’t possibly mind. And I don’t think she thought one would either. And I think you were quite right about that story of my engagement, darling, but you see you don’t know about being engaged and how it was heaven and still is in a sort of way. We will have a plan and if I tell my story more than once to the same person, you can make a special face at me. We will plan a face. But if it is the first time you mustn’t make a face,” and her ladyship looked at her youngest daughter with a smile almost as lovely and touching as her mother’s had been.

  “Oh, mother!” said Edith, her eyes brimming. “I’m sorry.”

  “But why, darling?” said her mother. “Someone would have said it to me soon. One of your friends, I expect. George Halliday or young Mr. Crosse.”

  “Oh mother! George and John-Arthur couldn’t be so impertinent,” said Edith. “Oh mother! was I impertinent?”

  “I don’t think so,” said Lady Graham. “If I had said it to darling mamma, who had her own ways and words in everything, I think she would have smiled. But it would have been her lovely sad, wistful smile, not the gay mischievous one and it would have broken my heart.”

  “Oh, mother!” said Edith, perhaps for the first time in her happy sheltered life as the youngest of a large affectionate family, feeling that she was outside in a chill wind and the rain beginning to fall. “Have I broken your heart?”

  “Not a bit, darling,” said her mother cheerfully. “Someone would have told me that someday and far less nicely. And if you could remember to look at your stockings before you put them on sometimes?” and Edith looked down at her very presentable legs which were both wearing very sheer American brown nylons, with a slight but distinct difference in the browns.

  “Oh mother, how awful!” said Edith, her attention now distracted from her penitence to more important objects. “I know why it was, because one’s nylons always ladder in one half of the pair and not the other half and one always keeps the good halves in case they happen to match anything else, but they never do and then they get all mixed up.”

  “Then it would be a good plan always to buy the same sort and the same shade if you can,” said Lady Graham.

  “There are some shops where you can buy three at a time for when one ladders,” said Edith, “but even then the other one would ladder sometime. I think your plan of buying millions of pairs exactly the same is the best.”

  “I was once told—though by whom I cannot think—” said Lady Graham, “that nylon stockings Perish if you keep them too long before you wear them and you ought to keep them in an air-tight tin canister. I wonder if we have one?” and her ladyship looked hopefully about the room. But canister there was none, air-tight or otherwise, and then Edith was sleepy and said she would go to bed and kissed her mother.

  “Oh, mother,” she said, “do you remember when I was very young and always making poetry?”

  Lady Graham thought her daughter was still very young, in spite of her New York winter, and said she hope
d Edith would go on making poetry, which was a much nicer word than writing poetry which sounded like a person at a desk trying to do a thousand lines.

  “I wish I could make real poetry,” said Edith. “I don’t mean the sort that people make thin little books of and you can’t understand it, but the sort people might like to read, or to say to each other. But it was a silly poem that I made when I was so very young. It was Darling Mummy, I love you with my whole tummy. And I still do,” she added, perhaps slightly ashamed of this precocious piece of rhyme.

  “Of course you do, darling,” said Lady Graham, whose gift for accepting and rationalizing—horrible word but as it seems to have come to stay we might as well use it—facts and words was not one of the least remarkable things about her. “And now you really must go to bed.” So Edith went to bed and very quickly to sleep.

  All we can say about the various arrangements for meeting the Carters on their own front doorstep, or outside the churchyard, or inside the church, is that after a good deal of discussion, complicated first by Mr. Carter not being in and then by his having gone out again because there wasn’t enough beer in the house and the Mellings Arms would always oblige, in and out of hours, it was decided that just inside the lych-gate was the best place, because one could park one’s car under the churchyard wall in the lane if it wasn’t too full. So at about a quarter to eleven on Sunday morning Lady Graham with Edith was at the lych-gate and almost at once Mr. and Mrs. Carter drove up and parked their car among the nettles up against the churchyard wall.

  “I hope we aren’t late,” said Mrs. Carter as she got ungracefully out of the car, for to get out of modern cars gracefully would be impossible even to Taglioni were she alive, except that the shortness and fullness of her gauze skirts would have been easier than Mrs. Carter’s pencil-slim grey-skirt. But in both cases all onlookers would have had an almost full-length view of the legs concerned—and very nice legs too in Mrs. Carter’s case.

  Mrs. Carter shook hands with Lady Graham and said this was Dick, only everyone called him Paterson, which Agnes accepted without question but Edith asked why.

  “Carter Paterson,” said Mrs. Carter, to which Edith said Why not Seeds, or Little Liver Pills. Her mother looked at her.

  “It was so kind of you to meet us here,” said Mrs. Carter, ignoring (though not unkindly) Edith’s silly joke and addressing herself to Lady Graham. “The whole pew question is beyond us and we are only new members. I don’t even know how you begin to acquire one.”

  “Oh, nor do I,” said Lady Graham sympathetically, “because of course at home, at Rushwater—do you know Rushwater, Mrs. Carter?”

  Mrs. Carter said she was sorry but she didn’t.

  “It is where darling mamma used to live only now it is my nephew Martin’s and he breeds prize bulls because he still has a very painful leg owirig to the Italians,” said Lady Graham, which did not really elucidate the question.

  Mrs. Carter said she had heard that Italian doctors were very clever but had never met one.

  “It wasn’t the doctors, Mrs. Carter,” said Edith, “it was the war.”

  “I know,” said Mr. Carter, who apart from lifting his hat and looking amiable had not yet had a chance to make himself felt. “I was in the last year of it and got some sort of bug in Italy. I daresay their doctors were very clever but my bug beat them,” which words he uttered with a kind of fine insular pride in not being cured by foreigners. “And it beat our doctors too,” he added, more with pride in his own peculiar bug than in denigration of the English Medical School.

  “I am so glad you will come to the Holdings pew,” said Lady Graham, “and then afterwards we can have a really quiet talk with the Vicar and with Caxton who really knows everything.”

  “Do we know Caxton?” said Mrs. Carter to her husband.

  “You don’t, but I do,” said Mr. Carter. “He is Mr. Holiday’s estate carpenter. I’ve talked to him in the Mellings Arms once or twice. He’s the sort of man that can always produce a screwdriver or sixpennyworth of two inch nails from one of his pockets, or knock you up something eight by three by one and a half,” which light-hearted outline of Caxton’s capabilities made Edith laugh. And if Lady Graham did not laugh, it was partly because with all her social gifts and her charm she did not see jokes very quickly and partly because she had not paid much attention to what Mr. Carter was saying, being occupied by planning how everyone was to sit in the Holdings pew.

  The bell began to give those last single strokes which warn late-comers that they had better hurry up.

  “Come in,” said Lady Graham encouragingly to Mr. and Mrs. Carter, and she led her guests’ up the aisle to the Holdings pew, where she stood aside. “Will you go to the end, Mrs. Carter” she said, “and then I will come. Edith darling, you come next and will you sit near the door, Mr. Carter. At least one can hardly call it a door when there isn’t one” said Lady Graham, bestowing a kind of religious smile on her guest, “but some pews still do have doors though here they haven’t” and then, rather to Mr. Carter’s relief, her ladyship put herself into what one can only call a token kneeling position, sitting well forward on the hard seat with her head bowed onto her hands. The rest of the party did much the same and what thoughts passed through their minds one would very much like to know. For to very few of us is it given to be able to empty our minds of mundane thoughts even in the very act of kneeling, which also includes having to rake a hassock towards us with one leg or, if the hassock is one of those miserable, thin squabs which are undignifiedly hung by a ring onto a hook when not in use, to ignore it and, sitting well forward on the extreme edge of the hard seat, bend our body reverently over the back of the pew in front, while wondering if we have half a crown in our bag because a ten-shilling note would look like showing-off and a florin wouldn’t be enough, while to put in a half crown made up of smaller silver and base metal coins would feel irreligious.

  The service began. The Vicar read well and spoke well and used the noble words set down for us just as they are in the prayer book. Under a former Vicar there had been considerable backsliding in the way of reading only the first and the last sentence of certain prayers or exhortations; this manner of reading being considered by many (and they, alas, the most ready to be up and doing anything so long as it is something) to make the service not only shorter, which it does, but better understood of the people, which it doesn’t. For as a large number of the congregation had never quite known what all the prayers meant, loving them none the less through long association, so did another part of the congregation love them through a quiet search into their meaning and a decision that the Morning and Evening Service were on the whole part of the Bible. And if one did find things that were beyond comprehension it was probably because one could not yet comprehend; but one could love very comfortably without comprehending and perhaps gradually begin to understand without knowing it.

  Those members of the congregation, mostly humble folk, who remembered Lady Graham’s mother, Lady Emily Leslie, were apt to think of her in church more than elsewhere, as her ladyship’s arrival with her invaluable secretary Miss Merriman in attendance was one of the weekly festivals of the village, so did she trail and drop her belongings and fuss with the hymn book; lose, find, and lose again her large bag; converse aloud with herself about the amount of money she should give for the offertory; drop whatever sum she had chosen and have to get someone else to pick it up for her because of her stiffness; suddenly remember that the book she had wanted to bring to church so that she could lend it to the Vicar who did not particularly wish to read it had been left on the garden seat the day before; all these she turned to favour and to prettiness. But already, so kindly do our minds and hearts unite in healing sore wounds, Lady Emily was remembered as a lovely echo of past days and the stories that grew round her were being in part transferred to Lady Graham. And so it is with each generation. The wavelet laps the shore, a larger wave comes from the sea and carries both forward; in the backward pull of t
he sea both wave and wavelet return to their home, while other waves large and small in their turn advance and retreat. Now it was to Lady Graham that the village looked; later it would be some one of her sons or daughters and so the endless chain of life will go on, though we can hardly believe in it for we shall not be there—and how can anything, how can the world itself go on if we ourselves are not there to see?

  The service went on. Lady Graham, to whom the words and the feeling meant more than most people knew, became lost in the old, ever-new orderly sequence and had almost forgotten her pew-guests till the little bustle of settling down to the sermon came, at which moment her ladyship began to apply her mind to what she would say afterwards to Caxton.

  Time passed. Hymn six hundred and sixty-six was announced and Edith made a cross face to herself because it was not what she called a real hymn. Coins clinked and paper rustled (though in most cases it didn’t, being of very bad quality and not often enough renewed). The two sidesmen tried to look as if they did not know what each member of the congregation was putting into the plate, which in both cases was a very handsome silver-gilt one, the gift of Sir Robert Graham’s grandfather. Lady Graham put in a ten-shilling note. She usually gave a pound but she felt this might be ostentatious before her new acquaintances, and was gently ruffled to see that Mr. and Mrs. Carter each put in a pound; but reflecting that this was perhaps their entrance fee as it were, upon their first visit, she forgot about it almost at once. The little congregation was silent. Mr. Choyce lifted the plate as an offering before the altar, the final words of blessing and dismissal were spoken and the little congregation dispersed.

  There must sometimes rise in the minds of people as they come out of church the proverb, kept in our memory by Shakespeare: “Out of God’s blessing into the warm sun.” There are few country churches in which one does not feel an air combined of cold, damp, and mustiness, wish one had brought a warmer coat, and find that Brother Ass, that beloved and too sensitive tenant of our mortal frames, is kicking against the pricks like anything. Some churches it is true have hot water pipes under the floor, where hot air comes up through gratings, thus giving to bad little boys an opportunity to drop bits of tissue paper on them and see how far up the draught will carry them. Others have one immense cylinder which dries and scorches all within its immediate neighbourhood, requiring unlimited quantities of coke and breeding much ill-feeling between the sexton and any other church hangers-on as to whose duty it is (a) to keep it burning, (b) to see that it doesn’t get red hot, and (c) to rake it out with a piece of iron turned up at the end and re-fill it with coke. Not to speak of the cleaning of the large pipe that carries away most of the hot air through a hole in the wall. But Mr. Choyce, whose experiences among the Liverpool docks district had given him a working acquaintance with many ships’ engineers, had learnt the ways of this stove and stood no nonsense from it; neither did Caxton, who as a master carpenter despised metal and gloried in getting the better of it. So the church was usually kept pretty warm and in a cold summer Caxton would get the stove going for a weekend just as a great violinist might take out his fiddle for his own private delight. On this particular weekend he had got the stove going on Saturday night and let it die down during the morning, so the cold was not unbearable.