Authors: Winifred Holtby
He was absent that night from roll-call, and next morning
was found, crouched on a fallen tree, his head in his hands, incapable of speech or effort.
The war was over; discipline was not what it had been;
the army doctor liked young Mortimer, who had struck him
as intelligent, alert and keen. Brain-storms were not un
known among young soldiers, and it certainly caused less inconvenience to have them after the Armistice instead of before it. Mortimer was sent to hospital in Abbeville for a fortnight to be treated for influenza, a convenient disease
which indeed opportunely attacked him. He apparently recovered from both of his disorders simultaneously and
was able to report for demobilization on the appointed
day.
But the result of his revulsion was his determination to
take Holy Orders. Because he had no right to live, he would
renounce the world. He played for some time with the
thought of becoming a missionary to the lepers; but he dis
carded that idea as a piece of sentiment which he must not
permit himself. His work lay in England.
He went up to New College with his government grant for the shortened course in Greats; then passed on to Lichfield Theological College.
Since he left Lichfield, he had lived in slum parishes,
fasted and prayed and spurred himself forward to new efforts
of endurance and toleration. The endurance was mental as
well as physical. He compelled his complex and subtle mind
to produce Simple Talks for Working Mothers and Manly
Addresses for Young Lads. He schooled his lively and in
convenient sense of humour to docility in the face of care
committees and church workers. His speculative habits
were smothered beneath an avalanche of drudgery. Thus
he was able to flog himself into a state of chilly happiness, sensitively alive to small pleasures. An unexpected leisure
hour in the London Library, an exhilarating spurt on his
bicycle between two rushing streams of
traffic down the Edgware Road, or a rare holiday, swimming and walking in
Cornwall, sufficed to make him in love with this world as
well as with the next.
But his trouble lay in his intellectual uncertainty. The
Catholic ideal of unity, of discipline and organization ap
pealed to him, but his temperament was fundamentally Protestant. He found himself
compelled to refer questions
of faith to his individual conviction instead of to authority. The spectacle of his friends who collapsed into Catholicism
on attaining middle age revolted him. The Anglo-Catholic
position failed to satisfy him. It was engaged in a battle which he thought unimportant. Though he loved and ad
mired Father Lasseter, he
was fatigued by the older man's pre-occupation with sectarian controversy.
But he despised himself for vacillations. When on Septua
gesima Sunday he preached at Saint Augustine's instead of Father Lasseter who had laryngitis, he condemned compromise in order to elucidate his own position. He thought
that by preaching to suit himself, he might meet the needs
of at least one member of the congregation. Quite unaware
of Eleanor's presence or of the Christian Cinema Company's distress, he pronounced sentence upon his own half-hearted-
ness. Two days later a funny little woman called Miss Denton-Smyth lay in wait f
or him outside the vestry door,
and asked him to find a bishop for her. He murmured
something about Father Lasseter, and left her, promptly
forgetting all about the incident.
But if he forgot the Christian Cinema Company once, he
was not allowed to forget it again. Almost every time he
took a service in Saint Augustine's, he was haunted by the
small bright figure of Miss Denton-Smyth. It was impossible
to ignore her, for she was vivid as a parrakeet in her unsuit
able green and crimson dresses. On the coldest mornings
she appeared at Early Mass among the faithful. She lay in
wait for Roger at the door; she hunted him down on his way
to Parish Meetings with inexorable, gentle, unhurrying
pursuit.
Roger spoke about her to Father Lasseter.
'Poor old thing. She's desperately poor and inclined to be
a nuisance. I'm really glad she's found a hobby at last. Be
thankful it isn't parish visiting or Church work. You'd better humour her.'
Roger humoured her. He listened to her story, walked
back to her room in Lucretia Road with her, accepted bun
dles of circulars, which he promptly threw into an overfilled
waste-paper basket in the Clergy House, and promised to
attend the At Home to Clergy and Social Workers which the
Christian Cinema Company had arranged.
He went in a mood of detached and melancholy amuse
ment. He had been reading the
Summa Theologia
and the
terrific power and knowledge behind the dry sentences
goaded him. He felt that Aquinas would have had nothing but contempt for his fluctuating impulse. He knew that he
was working himself up for another nervous and spiritual
crisis. References to Catholicism stung him. He found the Communion Service a fierce ordeal, every word and move
ment challenging him to justify his Protestantism in the face
of that huge claim upon Christian unity. If he was to face
his problems calmly he must, he felt, divert his attention
from these larger problems and amuse himself by trivial
encounters.
He knew one or two people at the party, but his habitual
shyness isolated him, and though he busied himself handling
cups of tea and rearranging chairs, he had opportunity to
observe the people round about him, and especially one
girl sitting eating sandwiches beside a radiator across the
hall.
The things he noticed about her were odd things. She
wore very trim country shoes, with low heels and boyish worsted stockings. She had removed her hat, and her brown
fringe overhung her straight sullen brows. She was talking
with grave attention to a lean gawky youth whom Roger
knew to be Macafee, the inventor. She listened to him as
though what he was saying were interesting and important,
but there was no coquetry in her clear, critical glance and
abrupt questions. Roger knew far too well the earnest and
unintelligent response of womanly women who hung upon a man's words, inhaling through open mouths with indis
criminating favour his most commonplace remarks. This
girl was listening as an equal listens, nodding her head from
time to time, so that her brown, heavy, silken, lustreless
straight hair swung back and forth. Then her face broke suddenly into a charming smile, and he noticed the band of freckles across her nose, and the clear line of her well-moulded chin. Of all the people in the room, he felt that he
would like to know her, and laughed at himself for acting so
well the curate, threading his way through impenetrable
forests of chairs, carrying tea, and sustained by the prospects
of conversation with an unknown girl.
'I don't suppose I shall ever see her again,' he thought. 'This meeting's rather a frost. I imagine that this Cinema
Company will go t
he way of many other companies. And
I?' He did not know where he would go.
'Father Mortimer,' - Miss Denton-Smyth was at his elbow -
' I want you so
much
to meet my cousin, Eleanor de la Roux;
you know we owe
her
the continuance of the company and
everything.'
She led him across the room to the girl whom he had
noticed talking to the young men and introduced them. 'Do
you remember coming with me to hear Father Mortimer preach, Eleanor?'
To Roger's surprise the girl greeted him with a remarkable phrase. 'I'm not likely to forget,' she said, 'and I don't
know yet whether I'm likely to forgive.'
Forgive? Forgive? He could not even remember what he
had preached about that night at St. Augustine's. But the incident excited his imagination. He had noticed the girl. He had wanted to make her acquaintance. And already he
had unconsciously affected her life. It was amusing; it sym
bolized the curious diversity of experience which went to
make the pattern of life. 'We are so oddly interrelated,' he thought. 'We are members of one another. An inescapable communion. We cannot avoid incurring responsibility for
our brethren.' With half-comical dismay he contemplated
the glib complacency with which good Churchmen referred to this intricacy of mutual relationship as though it were not
one of the most alarming qualities of the universe. He com
mitted himself to go down to Annerley on the following
Friday to visit Macafee's laboratory.
He wanted to see Eleanor de la Roux again. He wanted
to find out exactly how his sermon had affected her. He
felt as though he might use this brief diversion to dam the
rising tide of his own intellectual disturbance. Was he with
held from Rome by loyalty or indolence? Throughout half
that night he knelt in his cold cell-like room, wrestling with the angel of his honour, and calling in vain upon his sense
of humour to save him from the madness of apostasy.
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His first visit to Macafee's laboratory remained in Roger's
memory as the occasion when he first became aware of the
reality behind St. Paul's laconic injunction that it is better
to marry than to burn. When he
saw Eleanor de la Roux at the Christian Cinema Company's At Home he had been
amused and intrigued by a situation in which an unknown
young woman had acknowledged his influence upon her
life; but when he joined Miss Denton-Smyth and her young
cousin to motor down to Annerley, he immediately knew
that Eleanor de la Roux meant more to him than a casual
acquaintance.
Standing in the laboratory, listening to Miss Denton-
Smyth's hurrying monologue, he followed the girl's pilgrimage from desk to table, watching with novel excitement her
assured and unselfconscious movements. Driving back in
the car he suddenly knew that he could not bear the expedition to end like this. She would just drop out of his life like
the hundreds of other men and women whom he met by
chance and parted from without regret.
When they had set down Miss Denton-Smyth at Lucretia
Road he turned to Eleanor. 'Must you go straight home?'
he asked, 'or will you come and have coffee or something
with me?'
'I don't really mind,' she said indifferently. 'Isn't it
pretty late?'
'There's a place in the Earl's Court Road quite near your
club,' he insisted. 'It won't, take you out of your way.' 'Oh, very well.'
They drove almost in silence back to
the Earl's Court
Road. It was a clear cold evening, and the polished roads gleamed as though they were transparent and lit from within. The lighted city seemed like an alabaster globe in which
electric lights are veiled, a lovely and fragile bubble that one
blow could shatter. Roger felt that his new mood of happi
ness was as brittle. He sat very still, hardly daring to move
or speak lest he should break its magic. He was content to
watch the houses fall away from him, and Eleanor's firm
gauntleted hand upon the wheel.