Authors: Stella Gibbons
‘There … you see!’ said Flora, reproachfully.
But muttering, ‘Ay, let ’un be for a moithering old fool’, Amos struck the horse again and the gig plunged forward.
Flora quite enjoyed the drive into Beershorn. The coat kept her pleasantly warm and the cold wind dashing past her cheeks was exhilarating. She could see nothing except the muddy road directly under the swinging mog’s-lanthorn, and the large outlines of the Downs against the starless sky, but the budding hedges smelt fresh, and there was a feeling that spring was coming.
Amos was silent. Indeed, none of the Starkadders had any general conversation; and Flora found this particularly trying at meal-times. Meals at the farm were eaten in silence. If anyone spoke at all during the indigestible twenty minutes which served them for dinner or supper, it was to pose some awkward question which, when answered, led to a blazing row; as, for
example: ‘Why has not – (whichever member of the family was absent from table) – come in to her food?’ or ‘Why has not – the barranfield been gone over a second time with the pruning snoot?’ On the whole, Flora liked it better when they were silent, though it did rather give her the feeling that she was acting in one of the less cheerful German highbrow films.
But now she had Amos to herself; and the opportunity was golden. She began:
‘It must be so interesting to preach to the Brethren, Cousin Amos. I quite envy you. Do you prepare your sermon beforehand or do you just make it up as you go along?’
An apparent increase in Amos’s looming bulk, after this question had had time to sink in, convinced her in the midst of a disconcerting and ever-lengthening pause that he was swelling with fury. Cautiously she glanced over the side of the trap to see if she could jump out should he attempt to smite her. The ground looked disagreeably muddy and far off; and she was relieved when Amos at last replied in a tolerably well-controlled voice:
‘Doan’t ’ee speak o’ the word o’ the Lord in that godless way, as though ’twere one o’ they pagan tales in the “Family Herald”. The word is not prepared beforehand; it falls on me mind like the manna fell from heaven into the bellies of the starving Israelites.’
‘Really! How interesting. Then you have no idea what you are going to say before you get there?’
‘Ay … I allus knows ’twill be summat about burnin’ … or the eternal torment … or sinners comin’ to judgement. But I doan’t know exactly what the words will be until I gets up in me seat and looks round at all their sinful faces, awaitin’ all eager for to hear me. Then I knows what I mun say, and I says it.’
‘Does anyone else preach, or are you the only one?’
‘Oanly me. Deborah Checkbottom, she tried onceways to get up and preach. But ’tweren’t no good. Her couldn’t.’
‘Wouldn’t the spirit work or something?’
‘Nay, it worked. But I wouldn’t have it. I reckoned the Lord’s ways is dark and there’d been a mistake, and the spirit that was
meant for me had fallen on Deborah. So I just struck her down wi’ the gurt old Bible, to let the devil out of her soul.’
‘And did it come out?’ asked Flora, endeavouring with some effort to maintain the proper spirit of scientific enquiry.
‘Ay, he came out. We heard no more o’ Deborah’s tryin’ to preach.Now I preaches alone.No one else gets the word like I do.’
Flora detected a note of complacency and took her opportunity.
‘I am looking forward so much to hearing you, Cousin Amos. I suppose you like preaching very much?’
‘Nay. ’Tes a fearful torment and a groanin’ to me soul’s marrow,’ corrected Amos. (Like all true artists, thought Flora, he was unwilling to admit that he got no end of a kick out of his job.) ‘But ’tes my mission. Ay, I mun tell the Brethren to prepare in time for torment, when the roarin’ red flames will lick round their feet like the dogs lickin’ Jezebel’s blood in the Good Book. I mun tell everybody’ – here he moved slightly round in his seat, and Flora presumed that he was fixing her with a meaning stare – ‘o’ hell fire. Ay, the word burns in me mouth and I mun blow it out on to the whoal world like flames.’
‘You ought to preach to a larger congregation than the Brethren,’ suggested Flora, suddenly struck by a very good idea. ‘You mustn’t waste yourself on a few miserable sinners in Beershorn, you know. Why don’t you go round the country with a Ford van, preaching on market days?’
For she was sure that Amos’s religious scruples were likely to be in the way when she began to introduce the changes she desired to bring about at the farm, and if she could get him out of the way on a long preaching tour her task would be simpler.
‘I mun till the field nearest my hand before I go into the hedges and by-ways,’ retorted Amos, austerely. ‘Besides, ’twould be exaltin’ meself and puffin’ meself up if I was to go preachin’ all over the country in one o’ they Ford vans. ’Twould be thinkin’ o’ my own glory instead o’ the glory o’ the Lord.’
Flora was surprised to find him so astute, but reflected that religious maniacs always derived considerable comfort from digging into their motives for their actions and discovering discreditable reasons which covered them with good, satisfying
sinfulness in which they could wallow to their hearts’ content. She thought she heard a note of wistfulness, however, in the words, ‘one o’ they Ford vans,’ and gathered that the idea of such a tour tempted him considerably. She returned to the attack.
‘But, Cousin Amos, isn’t that rather putting your own miserable soul before the glory of the Lord? I mean, what does it matter if you
do
puff yourself up a bit and lose your holy humility if a lot of sinners are converted by your preaching? You must be
prepared
, I think, to sin in order to save others – at least, that is what
I
should be prepared to do if
I
were going round the country preaching from a Ford van. You see what I mean, don’t you? By
seeming
to be humble, and dismissing the idea of making this tour, you are
in reality
setting more value on your soul than on the spreading of the word of the Lord.’
She was proud of herself at the conclusion of this speech. It had, she thought, the proper over-subtle flavour, that air of triumphantly pointing out an undetected and perfectly enormous sin lying slap under the sinner’s nose which distinguishes all speeches intended to lay bare the workings of the religious mind.
Anyway, it produced the right effect on Amos. After a pause, during which the buggy rapidly passed the houses on the outskirts of the town, he observed in a hoarse, stifled voice:
‘Aye, there’s truth in what ye say. Maybe it is me duty to seek a wider field. I mun think of it. Aye, ’tes terrible. A sinner never knows how the devil may dress himself up to deceive. ’Twill be a new sin to wrestle with, the sin of carin’ whether me soul is puffed up or not. And how can I tell, when I am feelin’ puffed up when I preach, whether I’m sinnin’ in me pride or whether I’m doin’ right by savin’ souls and therefore it woan’t matter if I
am
puffed up? Aye, and what right have I to puff meself up if I
do
save them? Aye, ’tes a dark and bewilderin’ way.’
All this was muttered in so low a voice that Flora could only just hear what he was saying, but she distinguished enough to make her reply firmly:
‘Yes, Cousin Amos, it is all very difficult. But I do think, in
spite of the difficulties, that you ought to consider seriously the possibility of letting hundreds more people hear your sermons. You have a Call, you know. No one should neglect a Call. Wouldn’t you
like
to preach to thousands?’
‘Aye, dearly. But ’tes vainglorious to think on’t,’ he replied wistfully.
‘There you go again,’ reproved his youthful companion. ‘What does it matter if it
is
vainglorious – what does your soul matter compared with the souls of thousands of sinners, who might be saved by your preaching?’
At this moment the trap came to a halt outside a publichouse, in a small yard opening off the High Street, and Flora was relieved, for the conversation seemed to have entered one of those vicious circles to which only the death or collapse from exhaustion of one of the participants can put an end.
Amos left Flora to get down from the trap as best she could.
‘Hurry up,’ he called. ‘We mun hasten and leave the devil’s house,’ glancing back disapprovingly at the warmly-lit windows of the pub, which Flora thought looked rather nice.
‘Is the chapel far from here?’ she asked, following him down the High Street, where coarse yellow rays from the little shops shone out into the wintry dark.
‘Nay –’tes here.’
They stopped in front of a building which Flora at first took to be an unusually large dog-kennel. The doors were open, and inside could be seen the seats and walls of plain pitch-pine. Some of the Brethren were already seated, and others were hurrying in to take their places.
‘We mun wait till the chapel is full,’ whispered Amos.
‘Why?’
‘’Tes frittenin’ for them to see their preacher among them like any simple soul,’ he whispered, standing somewhat back in the shadows. ‘They fear to have me among them, breathin’ warnin’s o’ hell fire and torment. ’Tes frittenin’, in a way, when I stands up on the platform, bellowin’, but ’tes not so cruel frittenin’ as if I was to stand among them before I begins to preach, like any one of them, sharin’ a hymn-book, maybe, or fixin’ one of them wi’ my eye to read her thoughts.’
‘But I thought you wanted to frighten them?’
‘Ay, so I do, but in a grand, glorifyin’ kind of a way. And I doan’t want to fritten’ ’em so much that they woan’t never come back to hear me preach again.’
Flora, observing the faces of the Brethren as they crowded into the dog-kennel, thought that Amos had probably underestimated the strength of their nerves. Seldom had she seen so healthy and stolid-looking an audience.
As an audience, it compared most favourably with audiences she had studied in London; and particularly with an audience seen once – but only once – at a Sunday afternoon meeting of the Cinema Society to which she had, somewhat unwillingly, accompanied a friend who was interested in the progress of the cinema as an art.
That audience had run to beards and magenta shirts and original ways of arranging its neckwear; and not content with the ravages produced in its over-excitable nervous system by the remorseless workings of its critical intelligence, it had sat through a film of Japanese life called ‘Yĕs’, made by a Norwegian film company in 1915 with Japanese actors, which lasted an hour and three-quarters and contained twelve closeups of water-lilies lying perfectly still on a scummy pond and four suicides, all done extremely slowly.
All round her (Flora pensively recalled) people were muttering how lovely were its rhythmic patterns and what an exciting quality it had and how abstract was its formal decorative shaping.
But there was one little man sitting next to her, who had not said a word; he had just nursed his hat and eaten sweets out of a paper bag. Something (she supposed) must have linked their auras together, for at the seventh close-up of a large Japanese face dripping with tears, the little man held out to her the bag of sweets, muttering:
‘Peppermint creams. Must have something.’
And Flora had taken one thankfully, for she was extremely hungry.
When the lights went up, as at last they did, Flora had observed with pleasure that the little man was properly and
conventionally dressed; and, for his part, his gaze had dwelt upon her neat hair and well-cut coat with incredulous joy, as of one who should say: ‘Dr Livingstone, I presume?’
He then, under the curious eyes of Flora’s highbrow friend, said that his name was Earl P. Neck, of Beverley Hills, Hollywood; and he gave them his ‘cyard’ very ceremoniously and asked if they would go and have tea with him? He seemed the nicest little creature, so Flora disregarded the raised eyebrows of her friend (who, like all loose-living persons, was extremely conventional) and said that they would like to very much, so off they went.
At tea, Mr Neck and Flora had exchanged views on various films of a frivolous nature which they had seen and enjoyed (for of ‘Yĕs’ they could not yet trust themselves to speak), and Mr Neck had told them that he was a guest-producer at the new British studios at Wendover, and would Flora and her friend come and visit the studios some time? It must be soon, said Mr Neck, because he was returning to Hollywood with the annual batch of England’s best actors and actresses in the autumn.
Somehow she had never found time to visit Wendover, though she had dined twice with Mr Neck since their first meeting, and they liked each other very much. He had told Flora all about his slim, expensive mistress, Lily, who made boring scenes and took up the time and energy which he would much sooner have spent with his wife, but he had to have Lily, because in Beverly Hills, if you did not have a mistress, people thought you were rather queer, and if, on the other hand, you spent all your time with your wife, and were quite firm about it, and said that you liked your wife, and, anyway, why the hell shouldn’t you, the papers came out with repulsive articles headed ‘Hollywood Czar’s Domestic Bliss’, and you had to supply them with pictures of your wife pouring your morning chocolate and watering the ferns.
So there was no way out of it, Mr Neck said.
Anyway, his wife quite understood, and they played a game called ‘Dodging Lily’, which gave them yet another interest in common.
Now Mr Neck was in America, but he would be flying over to England, so his last letter told Flora, in the late spring.
Flora thought that when he came she would invite him to spend a day with her in Sussex. There was somebody about whom she wished to talk to him.
She was reminded of Mr Neck, as she stood pensively watching the Brethren going into the chapel, by the spectacle of the Majestic Cinema immediately opposite. It was showing a stupendous drama of sophisticated passion called ‘Other Wives’ Sins’. Probably Seth was inside, enjoying himself.
The dog-kennel was nearly full.
Somebody was playing a shocking tune on the poor little wheezy organ near the door. Except for this organ, Flora observed, peering over Amos’s shoulder, the chapel looked like an ordinary lecture hall, with a little round platform at the end farthest from the door, on which stood a chair.