Tatalus

Chapter I A

Ting ! went the alarum clock ; the Vicar of Hartake woke and sighed, it was Sunday. He could hear the north-east wind still blowing hard, water to wash in would be like ice, the church at that hour like a vault; it was seven o’clock in the middle of January, and the sound of bugles in the camp marked it as another waryear. He must get out of bed in a minute.

“ Curious,” he said to himself, “ how a word you have read will stick to you without rhyme or reason . . . will haunt you. ‘ Faineant ,’ ” he repeated to himself. He had come across it in an article the night before, and had paused to weigh its meaning : “ idle ” didn’t quite express it. “ French is so subtle,” he had said to his wife; but long after the article was finished and forgotten that unlucky word stayed in his head.

It had coloured his dreams, teazing yet evasive; he had felt, all night, like a stupid boy trying to define it; and here with the ting of the alarum it was uppermost in his mind again.

" Why,” he asked himself, “ should a stray word come and take hold of the whole of my brain ? ” It’s a sign of overwork, they say, when some chance word like that gets on one’s nerves.

“ Faineant ” : he got out of bed.

His wife always went to the early celebration ; she broke the skin of ice in the china jug and soon showed cheeks rosy from washing, like Devonshire apples.

The vicar often said of her that her faults were the faults of her qualities. Having been bom without vanity, she only looked in the glass for propriety’s sake, to see that all was neatness ; the brown hair pulled back from her brow must show no “ ends.” The vicar brushed his hair more thoughtfully ; and while he breathed on his purple knuckles for a moment he thought, “ Idle ... I’m not idle ” ; that was the annoying part, that such a word should cling to such a man as he.

The church bell sounded. Jennifer and his wife stepped on to the snow, and a great gust of wind slapped their faces, a draught like a cold rope ran round their necks, and the vicar, who had had a poor supper and would have a poor breakfast—it being war-time, and his stipend small—felt spiritually cowed, and corporeally frozen.

The vestry seemed a perfect haven after the beating of the gale, but once his coat was off, and the thin white surplice donned, he shivered again: “ Are there

many ? ” he asked the verger.

“ About twenty, sir.”

The bell stopped ; the vicar walked up the aisle.

The church smelt faintly of old graves, but it was comforting in its shelter; the early sunlight touched the cross. “ I am a good medicine,” it seemed to say, but it was cold work handling the books and the chalice.

The vicar looked at his church, and saw his best, most loyal parishioners with purple fingers and halffrozen lips. “ War has drawn us together! ” he thought. It was a favourite thought, one of those thoughts you like to nurse because you feel there’s virtue in it ; and simultaneously his brain registered the word “ faineant.” He looked at the east window, and repeated the Lord’s Prayer with an added solemnity ; he was doing God’s work, it was enough.

Many of the ladies registered their spiritual feelings by frequent use of their handkerchiefs, and one young girl fainted.

The vicar read the next prayer aloud in his normal voice as one who draws a veil over intimate secrets, and the sunshine disappeared; the cold increased, every one shivered, in a hurry to get home. But because the vicar was hungry and eager to get to his own fire he lingered, giving added weight to old dry words, for he paid his conscience off in this way, with self-sacrifice.

At last he was back in the vestry, and the faithful few were stamping their feet on the snow outside ; his curate hurried in : “You ought to let me take the seven-thirty on a day like this, sir ! ” was his greeting.

“ No, no,” smiled the vicar. “ Each man to his post; it’s the third Sunday in the month ! My day.”

“ Well, you ought to have something.”

" Time enough when we get old, Wilson ! ” For though the vicar’s grizzled hair said he was getting old, his dark-brown eyes said he wasn’t; he had a horror of decay, it was his especial nightmare, he made extra services to avoid it, and tramped out to preach at alien parishes, and visited the poor indefatigably.

Now the bell ceased ringing again, the vicar com¬ posed his face, and led his curate up the aisle between a larger congregation, and, kneeling, repeated with equal earnestness the same good words again. The eight o’clock celebration was more solid in effect, people looked as if they had come to do their duty, and they did it conscientiously, looking and feeling very virtuous.

Mrs. Jennifer had hurried on home to see that the fire was burning and the kettle boiling, and to scatter crumbs to the robins ; at a quarter to nine she saw her husband’s tall, lean figure and his pleasant face coming quickly between the trees ; he was laughing at the birds, and while he came snow began to fall.

Vicarage chimneys invariably devour all the heat, while the rooms they stand in smell of mildew; Jennifer’s vicarage faced west, a strong, steady old house designed to last, not to live in ; it was seldom warm. Now the vicar tried to coax the fire by smiling at it ; he stooped until his back ached, then stood with lifted coat, and still the precious flame went up the chimney !

“ Your tea will spoil, dear,” came his wife’s gentle voice ; she always sounded anxious over little things in life, but over big issues like “ Eternity ” she had no anxiety whatever ; “ now I’ve poured it out, do drink it,” she entreated.

“ I tell you I can’t enjoy it till I’m warm ! ” smiled the vicar.

After all, “ breakfast ” was a pleasure that didn’t last long, it was that good moment when a man is blessed by having got up early, by the feeling of a full day before him, by belief in himself as a useful being ; a different meal from supper, when he has done it all and still feels . . . what ? Tired, dissatisfied, a prey to a word.

But this short, golden “ breakfast ” feeling passed, a maid came in and spoilt it all by clearing everything away; each moment spent there after that was laziness. The vicar went off to his study.

The “ study ” was a cold room near the front door, its green paper bulged where the rain leaked in, the fireplace was rusty (giving up his fire was one of the vicar’s bits of patriotism), the carpet near the door stood up between two broken nails where the draught whistled in. Ivy leaves rattled round the window, four or five inches of thick naked fibre stood out on the porch where some creeper would bloom by and by ; old books set in rows had an unused look, the engravings on the walls stayed for ever the same, a Georgian gentleman’s black profile on a white paper, an etching of the Pyramids, a photo of the vicar and some former parish choir, a dull brown copy of a sacred picture showing a dying Christ on the Cross.

The big writing table looked most alive; it was littered with letters and religious pamphlets, a worn Bible, and a copy of George Herbert, together with a volume of modern essays on religious thought. The vicar’s rug lay over his chair, but he didn’t stay to tuck it round him, he leant on his table and looked through notes, put a pencil in his pocket, marked a verse for quotation, read over a summary he had made last night of the Reverend Atborough’s Thoughts on Prayer, and then stayed still a moment, thinking of nothing, to watch a thrush on the snowy lawn.

The church bell rang again, he hurried out; it was 9.45, his special service for the troops.

They had their own chaplains, but liked to come to the sheltering walls of the old Town Church : they “ liked the music,” one man said, they “ liked a change,”

they “ liked the vicar,” in fact they came and “ liked ” coming. It had given Jennifer new youth just as he was nearing old age.

The church was full this Sunday morning, and he and his curate took the service very earnestly, the men sang with a will, the organist gave them a “ military march,” and the sun looked out again, slanting in through the side windows. It was good to hear the wind outside, for the stove was lit, and iron pipes warmed the church, that was full of frosty breath and the sound of coughing. The men shouted “ Alleluia ” as if it was a war-cry, they sang as though to ease their hearts of all that ever troubled them, and they knelt in long brown rows with reddened faces that looked earnest, and here and there a pair of eyes that asked an answer to some sad enigma of the sun-illumined cross ; and the vicar felt: “I must get home to them !

it’s the chance of my life ! I must-” he stood

silent in the pulpit for a moment, because he felt there was something he so wanted to do, and while he bowed his head to say the exhortation his brain gave him the word “faineant ” again. He coloured with anger, to be aware of such a word at a time like that, when all his soul . . .

“ My fellow-men in Christ,” he said, and drowned the word with his voice. They were fighting for God against evil incarnate, and their arms must be strong ; they were fronting temptation each hour of their lives, and their souls must be firm ; they were set in slippery places, and their consciences must light them. “ Christ is love,” he told them, “ Christ must win ! . . .” And he drew a fine picture, in words they could enjoy, of

Daniel’s victory in the lion’s den. Rows and rows of faces stared at him, rows and rows of hidden hearts that, as a man, he longed to reach suc¬ cessfully. . . .

The men were roaring “ Fight the good fight ” next moment, and soon the chimes were ringing to call the parish to the " morning service.”

There was a fair scattering of officers, and old civilians, with white moustaches and an air of doing their bit by cursing all the powers that be. Good Mrs. Jennifer, in rhubarb brown, with her strong blue eyes fixed on the cross ; and in the front seat a little boy of six, who never ceased to turn and twist and wriggle till he got outside again.

The organist played grandly. The choir came in two by two ; ten pairs of little boys followed by some gawky youths, a bull-beef looking shop assistant and a stalwart blacksmith, four or five double-chinned altos, the curate—a good man with a face that shone like candle-grease—and lastly the vicar again, more earnest, more imposing than ever ; and very slowly, at the pace of a slug’s funeral, they marched up and took their places in the chancel.

The church was full, for all the residents of Hartake were respectable, well-to-do people ; they lived for the most part in neat little bungalows and “ country houses ” made of stucco with red roofs, and with hedges of bright green euonymus surrounding the old slate-roofed town like a circle of prim flowers ; and the ladies who walked out of them every Sunday morning wore pony-skin coats, or collars of Russian fox ; they had fashionable veils on their wind-chapped faces; and plenty of life in their eyes. They looked at each other with pleasure and approval, they were doing their duty, and that always makes one feel solid and safe, they were Christians in church on a Sunday. And as the oxygen in the air was exhausted, first one yawned and then another, and the air grew warmer. . . .

“ O come, let us sing unto the Lord,” cried all these ladies, and many looked absently at words they knew by heart, and many stared at the altar. All the summer, till the hay was cut, white marguerites were set there; during the autumn, dahlias—the dark, dusky sort; and all the winter, brown or white chrysanthe¬ mums, flowers with no scent; but who ever thought of putting roses in a church ?

The vicar’s wife sat through the lessons, her eyes, like deep blue wells of zeal, fast on the curate while he read : “For what is the hope of the hypocrite, though he hath gained, when God taketh away his soul? ”

Presently they all sang “ How sweet the name of Jesus sounds,” and knelt down for a litany ; old people bowed their heads as one bows to the rates and taxes* but the vicar gave heart and mind to each word—it was his way of “ doing his bit.”

In the pulpit he had the harder task of gripping the minds of all these well-dressed women (whose faces wore a guarded look as though already armoured for some surreptitious thrust).

He had prepared his sermon yesterday; his text from the Epistle, . . do that which is good and thou shalt have praise of the same,” was set on optimistic lines calculated to brace the “ good ” ; they were listening—well-satisfied, an angelic smile on the faces of ladies of temperament, an assurance of “ praise '' on the more stolid faces ; he had created that subtle chord of secret sympathy, he could speak now, and he found himself saying : . . let us look to it that we fail not

through secret temptations. What does it mean when some chance word or phrase clings to the mind ? Has it discovered an affinity there ? Search it out! Some evil word mocking us in its injustice ; I say to you, my brethren, search it out, be sure there is no truth in it, and if no truth, then why a sting ? Why this haunting power ? There is a little French word, I pray God it applies to none of us in these days : ‘ Faineant ,' a more subtle word than ‘ idle,’ ‘ slack.' Does that word bother you ? Look to it! We are all workers, every moment occupied for our country's need—but are we seeking God with all our might ? . . ."

The vicar's face burnt red like a man who has stripped in public, but he felt relieved ; perhaps the same load slips from the mind of the peasant who has made con¬ fession ; he goes home to sin again, but he is purged for the moment; so the vicar finished warmly on a charming note of innocence and freedom, and then all sang with great force and effect

“ The people that in darkness sat A glorious light hath seen.”

A few minutes later his congregation were outside, chatting at the happy speed of those who have been debarred from talking for an hour and a half or more.

“ Did you see—a woman killed her baby by giving it a bloater ? " Miss Wurrell was saying, and Mrs. Bigthorn, cheerily : “ Black smallpox at Berlin ! "

. . Next door to starving ! ” “No end of women dead.” “ Good news ! Cold ? Yes, terrific. . . .”

The vicar came out rubbing his hands, and meeting a chaplain asked him to lunch ; Mrs. Jennifer frowned, the invitation was shifted to tea ; dinner on Sundays was an uncomfortable meal at the vicarage (a large joint of cold salt beef, that would be eaten as it stood till it was finished).

The vicar had barely time to get his feet warm after lunch before he was off to Sunday school and the children's service ; he came in at four in a glow of rosy self-satisfaction, this long day of splendid work was nearly over !

“ Grand—the way the fellows come to church now,” was the vicar’s text for their conversation.

“ But there’s a lot of immorality ...” the chaplain’s sour reply.

“ They have their own services, and then come on to mine ! ” twinkled the vicar.

“ They like to shout hymns,” grumbled his visitor ; he had been a High Church parson before he joined the Army, and the “ spirit of religion ” had been a sort of temperature, kept up by use of candles, red and silver lamps, Gregorian music, coloured cloaks and the breath of incense ; it wanted humble, adoring figures, not these rugged men who stamped their feet.

“ There’ll come a big revival,” he said at intervals, shaking his head.

“ Oh, it’s come ! ” cried the vicar’s wife ; the vicar stroked his lips ; had it come, or was it coming ? And if so, how ?

“ The men are waking up . . .’’he said at last, but ii against his speech rose a vision of the armoured faces of his female congregation, and something of the chaplain's gloom fell on him.

“ You know the Canadians have been disappointed," the latter told him, “ at what they found over here ; religious fellows some of them, very ; shocked at our modern Sunday in Society. Of course I’m not speaking of our English countryside ; God knows what these fellows expected, but they haven’t found it! Going back with a different picture of the ‘ old country,’ very sad . .

At six o’clock the chaplain left him ; bells were chiming, the snow had ceased ; it was that moment between daylight and dark, when the last lemon light in the west has died, and the birds have hidden.

“ Daniel,’’ said Mrs. Jennifer, “ Maggie wants us to have the children.’’

“ The children ? Good ! Of course they can come. Who’s it this time—that old Miss Woolley ? ’’

“No, it’s a French governess.’’

Maggie Buckle was one of Mrs. Jennifer’s sisters, she lived in London, and her little girl, Hilda, aged twelve, and her two little boys, Dunstan and Claude, aged eight and seven, often came as paying guests to their uncle and aunt in the country. Thinking of them, Daniel hurried gaily to his evening service.

The church was warm by that time, and full of soldiers, townsfolk, “ sweethearts,’’ shop-girls, kitchenmaids.

It was his curate’s turn to preach, unfortunately, and all the time that good man sententiously drew morals from the Book of Judges the vicar twitched and fidgeted ; they wanted something lively ! cheerful! satisfying ! Some men were afraid to smile ! he loved to bring the whole crowd close to him with an innocent joke which made them listen ! Ah, it was grand to hear them shout: “ God save the King ! ” Brave fellows, pretty girls, good people.

The vicar went home satisfied. But at half-past eight a middle-aged Canadian soldier called to ask admission to the Bible class ; a man with a placid yellow face, eyes like moonlit water, a round bald forehead, and the smile of a child of six.

“ I hear you aren’t satisfied ? ” the vicar asked him ; they were standing at the front door, and could see the half-moon lying on her back above the trees ; the man looked up at her : “ Life’s short,” he answered.

“ It’s seeing all these motor cars about on Sunday,” began Mrs. Jennifer.

“ It’s seeing we know nothing,” said the soldier ; his smile was disarming, he seemed to draw closer to them in the dark : “ Have you ever been up moun¬ tains ? ” he asked. “ Have you seen the country shift as you get up ? ”

“You mean horizons ? ”

“ I mean the Church; she’s standing still—we don’t know God yet.”

“ We do know,” cried the vicar’s wife : “ the Church is God’s own means of revelation ! We do know, don’t we, Daniel ? ”

Something pressed the vicar’s heart and brain, it was as though a spirit had challenged him for truth ; but as a clergyman, with his wife’s shocked face at his shoulder, he answered reverently : “We know.”

And in his bed that night a word he couldn’t catch came and pricked at him, and bothered him, almost as if he had been a ne’er-do-well convicted of fraud.

“ O God,” he prayed, and was conscious of his wife’s voice : "I expect that man goes to chapel, dear.”

Chapter II

Daniel Jennifer and his wife had lived at Hartake for eight years ; they were liked and respected ; if there were some who thought the vicar’s wife rather slow, there were a few who thought the vicar rather fast—ecclesiastically—he had introduced a modern translation of the Bible.

But the more intellectual circle, who lived to them¬ selves on the hills outside, were scarcely aware of him, nor was he aware of them ; if they heard the bells at Hartake while they played golf on Sunday morning, it merely suggested another service in the same old rut. . . . Jennifer didn’t consider himself in the rut— he read the Hibbert Journal and the Spectator ! His father, a man with a red face, tremendous vitality, and no religious feeling at all, had been a very popular clergyman at a seaside village ; his mother, an intel¬ lectual lady with a pale oval face, dark hair and dark eyes, was a scholar and a recluse.

Daniel had gone into the Church as a matter of course, he had his father’s vitality and love of leader¬ ship, and his mother’s mind, perhaps something of her spirit; for all her quiet ways at the seaside rectory, her brown eyes often looked as if she asked for something more . . . and young Daniel at five-and-twenty had gone slumming. He had made the plunge like a diver, his ship being the Church, his breathing tube the settled creed, his pearls—a few souls rescued. His vitality had found its outlet in organisation, and immediate hard work checked his mother’s spirit in him ; he made demands on bishops and other clergy, he got up magazines and started campaigns, enjoying the fight, rubbing his hands if he was satirised in some ecclesiastical magazine.

His wife, Matilda Campion, was a clergyman’s daughter, one of a quiet, hard-working, Low Church family of old standing in the county ; she helped him manfully, and if they had little time together they were too busy to notice it. He had asked her to marry him one summer holiday, while staying with a college friend, when he was still a curate ; and a yellow photo on his mantelpiece showed her as she had been then : a handsome girl in a hideous dress, her glossy hair dragged back so tight that her round head shone like a hazel-nut. There were the same strong, honest features he knew now, the same integrity of purpose, the same lack of imagination. A good wife, and mother of three children, “ a good Christian,” people called her ; Daniel Jennifer told her most of his thoughts, and all he had said, but he had ceased to listen to her answers.

His eldest daughter, Margaret (who wished to teach), was now a Red Cross nurse ; his son Clement had left Cambridge for Army work, intending to enter the Church when the war was over; Thelma, the youngest, was still at school.

Daniel was shaving himself a few days later when the conviction stole over him : “ Spring has come ! ”

There was a stillness, not that death-trance which falls upon ripe woods in autumn, but a stillness of recovery i6

Old trees in the garden were breathing visibly, a scent of pine and cedar wood ; the first yellow tips of bulbs showed, the air was fresh. It had rained all night, and would rain again, and meantime things were growing. Daniel had an impulse to go out. He didn’t want his wife “ poking questions ” at him, so he walked down softly ; this early outing, with its spice of the unusual, was a little preparation for the children. This pale sunlight was so clean and young-looking ; but instead of adventuring forward his thoughts went back ; as a child he had lived by the sea, and now at Hartake, when half asleep, would fancy the rustling trees were waves. Children, and the sea ! What more could one want ? He felt particularly glad of their coming this year : “ We all need waking up,” he thought; “we want the simple outlook, faith, acceptance, the simple love of God.” But while he framed these thoughts, his brown eyes dwelt now on one tiny bulb tip, now on a clump of violet leaves ; and Fan, his Irish setter, stretched herself and yawned.

The prayer bell sounded. There was dear old Tilly looking out of the porch, puzzled and upset at this irregularity ! and a longing to play truant seized the vicar.

“ I couldn’t make you hear,” his wife kept saying.

But Daniel was his father’s son that morning, enjoying the full pleasure that accompanies a feeling of recovery. He had forgotten the soldier until his wife mentioned the incident, and then said heartily : “ Capital fellow, get him to come to my Bible class. If I had my way-”

When Jennifer began : " If I had my way-”

*7

Mrs. Jennifer did two things : she finished whatever it was she had in hand (if they were in their bedroom she completed her toilet, if she was writing she collected scattered sheets and shut the blotter) ; then while Daniel was happily supposing himself to be the Arch¬ bishop of Canterbury, she said : "Yes, dear ? ” and slipped away.

This morning she went to the kitchen, and Jennifer, brought to sudden silence by her absence, looked out of the window ; those smoke-like clouds had thinned and vanished, there was blue sky at last, a day for the gods !

The vicar wished he had his son a baby still, to toss into the air, while he told his wife : " The little beggar's growing ! ” He missed his daughters' kisses on a day like this, though they were like their mother, un¬ demonstrative and rather shy ; Margaret with his own brown eyes darkened thoughtfully, Thelma with her mother’s pure, deep blue. As some intellectual had said: "To meet the Campion eye was to meet conscience naked ! ”

Well! his children were out in the world, and if the nest was a little empty—(here he rubbed his hands)— he had plenty of visiting to do. And he set off gaily, greeting every man he met; those who knew him received a handclasp, a nod, a smile; strangers had his high-crowned hat touched to them.

This hat was smooth and large and solid-looking, with a very curly brim ; it had a look of jolly dignity, which was just what the vicar liked to convey.

Walking at a great pace he was suddenly conscious of the overwhelming song of an early lark. It made him i8 TANTALUS

lean over his dog and stroke her head : “ We ain’t old yet! ” he told her.

It was true Daniel Jennifer was fair and rosy, tall, good-looking, with a smooth skin that coloured easily, a slightly hooked nose and brown eyes soft as pansy petals ; the lines in his face were all made by pleasure, screwing up his eyes to smile, lifting his brows in mock astonishment, laughing, praying, enjoying himself. He had reached that time when man, like a garden full of warmth and quiet nights, wants a little Indian summer of enjoyment.

Chapter III

The London train had just steamed in, handkerchiefs already waved, a little girl’s voice pierced the gale of smoke, and headlong over the luggage came two flying, thin, black legs. The vicar had his neck dragged down, his cheeks kissed, while he stood like a tree upon which a flock of birds alight, entirely possessed by their vitality.

A girl was helping his wife with the hand-luggage.

“ Is that your Mademoiselle ? ” he asked.

“ Yes,” cried Hilda : “ Mam’selle! here’s Uncle

Dan.”

“ Welcome to Hartake,” said the vicar genially.

In the cab his little niece gripped his hand.

“ There’s Hartake Church ! ” she shouted to the governess ; and Daniel saw a small black toque, the oval of a pretty cheek outlined against the sunset; “ Better than that old Miss Woolley ! ” was his thought.

“ Have you been long in Town ? ” he asked her.