Best Australian Short Stories (25 page)

Sir Charles bent his head and sipped.

A look of extreme and ineffable joy ran like sunlight over his face.

“My dear lady!” he ejaculated.

He sipped, he savoured.

Ecstasy succeeded astonishment.

His eyes shut, with the look of a man in a trance, he tasted, he rolled the Nyppe round his tongue.

He finished the glass.

He stood, vibrating, almost locking his gaze in that of Mrs McCree, his expression one of utter unbelief.

He was then understood to say something like “Shend mesheveral bottlesh”—“Gimme onemorsh”—and the two outdoor menservants and the A.D.C. having assisted His Excellency into the saddle, and handed the horse’s bridle first to His Excellency, then to the A.D.C., he was led home by back ways, ecstatically, deliriously happy.

But he was as helpless as a new-born babe.

Mrs McCree with a quiet smile went indoors to let the four maids out of the linen cupboard, and having done so, she put her feet up on the drawing-room sofa and engaged herself, with a somewhat mystic air, in the perusal of a book (perhaps
Crockford
) which gave lists of Deans, archdeacons, canons and prebends of cathedrals, their pay, emoluments, residences, perquisites and privileges, their precedence at banquets and royal levees, and their titles.

The Bishop was expected in about three weeks’ time.

As a girl Mrs McCree had lived on the Picton Hills not far from the Razorbacks, and this morning, in the intervals of her reading, her eyes looked through her drawing-room windows and lingered on those blue, authoritative ranges. She remembered them in her childhood to have been thatched with trees, now they were denuded; the buff grasses clothing them were intersected with many red channels in which the rains of autumn were accustomed to pelt downwards.

“As a girl,” she mused, “I used to look across to Mallow’s Marsh and watch the thick mists rising at sunrise from the green fields, and the roads that led, I fancied, to the sea, to cities, to a wider life than I had known.”

She dropped
Crockford
on to the threadbare carpet.

“It is true that I adored my home, that there was no one in it that I did not love, no simple everyday happening that I did not value and enjoy. The first apple-blossom! Never shall I forget seeing that! The stunted violets that come before the big ones—never shall I forget how sweet their scent used to be! Ike, the gardener, sitting in the moonlight practising ‘Cherry Ripe’ on a penny whistle! How mysterious and beautiful it seemed, how clear the faltering notes were! Never, never shall I cease to value those memories! But I imagined that elsewhere I should know a more wonderful life! And here I am at fifty-five looking at two minute, bare churches, one with cows feeding in the churchyard, one with two old horses grappling with the tough yellow grass—the wife of a poor parson trying to live on £90 a year!”

Mrs McCree looked searchingly round the room.

She critically regarded the two owls mounted as fire-screens that stood on either end of the mantelpiece, the silhouettes of her great- grandparents, grandparents, parents, uncles and aunts—so many soldiers, so many sailors, all idealists, no moneymakers; the two teasets in her china cupboard, one patterned with raised strawberries and their leaves, in a china like pumice-stone, the other sprawled with marsh-mallows and having blue bird-bolts on the back of each cup and saucer. She carefully examined the dessert service, imitating fig-leaves, the glass paper-weight enclosing a cottage on which snow fell if one shook it. Her treasures! Oh, well! They were very sweet, really.

The tapestry covering the Empire chairs was, however, “shrill”; the worn carpet had belonged to her Aunt Martha.

Heaving herself up, Mrs McCree walked to the window, the better to see the hills of her youth.

“Lovely still! Lovely, always!”

“Other people,” she told herself, “get more out of life than I seem to have done. What defect in my character has landed me here? What was my weakness? What was my mistake? My apparent freedom has been an illusion! I have had no real, no personal choice in any important crisis. My parents refused my first offer of marriage without even telling me of it—what gay adventures might not that young husband have given me?

“And why on earth did I marry Phineas?

“A poor parson nearly thirty years older than myself?

“Why? Why? Because he looked so woebegone! Because I felt sorry for him! Yes! That was why—I just gave myself away, body and soul, out of charity!”

Another thought struck her. “But was even this marriage entered into of my own free will? At home, as money grew short, I was an extra mouth to feed, I was a burden from an economic standpoint, it was necessary to lighten the family of such a drag! It was a question of having to get rid of me! Oh, I see that! It was taken for granted that I must say ‘Yes’. I realized that at the time. Daughters must marry. So I did.”

Mrs McCree turned away from the dazzling light.

“My fault has been—generosity! I gave all I had to give—and it has never been enough!

“Thirty years spent in this cramped house. Well, I shall end all this! The consequences? The consequences! I just don’t care! I shall make the Bishop tipsy with my wonderful Nyppa wine, my miraculous liqueur! Yes! I shall! Even if I can’t make him give Phineas a deanery! Even if he won’t make him an Archdeacon! Or a Canon! (There are several Canons over eighty in the Sydney diocese.) He might at least add twenty pounds a year to his stipend.”

Mrs McCree picked up
Crockford
.

With a careful regard for syntax, learnt from Little Mary’s Grammar, dimly remembering the calamity brought on the man in the mill-pool by a lax use of will and shall (“I will drown and nobody shall save me”) Mrs McCree lifted
Crockford
high in the air and declaimed in a ringing voice (which she hoped her Guardian Angel would hear): “I will make the Bishop tipsy, and nobody shall stop me!” In case of error she varied this formula by a second declaration of her intentions: “I shall make the Bishop tipsy and nobody will stop me.”

Having done this, throwing her book on the carpet, Mrs McCree to her own complete astonishment burst into tears, sobbing into the silence of the threadbare room, “Oh, Phineas! Darling! Wonderful, wonderful man! A gentleman! A scholar! A Saint! Oh, never, never was there such a kind, loving husband! Oh, Phineas! To see you so neglected! So ignored, so underpaid, so overworked! It’s a scandal, a perfect scandal! I can’t bear it any longer!”

Drying her red eyes Mrs McCree then marched in a resolute way to the laundry, where she poured a third gallon of Jamaica rum into her witch’s brew and gave Mrs Cog orders to keep a gentle fire burning in the copper for the next three weeks.

With a relentless and determined face—indeed, she looked more like Lady Macbeth than any actress ever has, before or since—the Vicar’s wife re-read her great-grandfather’s directions, to make quite certain that no vital, no necessary, ingredient was omitted; tipped yet a fourth bottle of brandy into the cauldron and dropped in a pound of ground ginger and a handful of quick-lime (in mistake for brook-lime), after which activities, and recollecting the effect of one wineglass on His Excellency (a four-bottle man as everyone knew), she buried her face in a damp sheet and laughed till she got a stitch in her side.

The day set apart for the Episcopal Visitation was one of the most perfect Mallow’s Marsh had ever known. The sun had very easily dispersed the thick mists, called locally “the pride of the morning”. Though cool, the air was not cold. Though warm, the sun was not hot. With the most discerning tact a zephyr sometimes stirred the wands of the pepper-tree, the swathes of the willows, the grey plumes of the wattles, already tasselled with buds. As if merely to display their delicate gradations of colour, ranging through buff and amber to bronze and dun, this subtle wind rustled, sometimes, the long grasses that veiled the Vicarage garden, the unending by-ways; even the main road meandering from Sydney to Picton was fringed with blue grass and red fescue, which swayed this way and that.

Was the sky blue?

It was.

The Vicarage was early astir.

The menu at luncheon was to be—

Roast Pork with apple sauce.

Beans, baked potatoes.

Summer Pudding.

Whipped Cream.

Coffee.

An oratorio of the most heartrending sounds had, two days previously, accompanied the slaughter of the best of the Vicarage pigs. A roomy flagon of Nyppa wine (or “Mrs McCree’s Liqueur”) had been lowered sixty feet down into the eighty-foot well, to cool off; the most exact calculations having been made to ensure that, though close to it, the bucket in which it reposed should not touch the water.

In the Vicarage every duty allotted to Cook Teresa, Abigail the Orphan and Mrs Cog had been faithfully performed. The garden (the bit, that is, between the front gate and the porch, over which a Marechal Niel rose was in full flower) was actually neat. A clump of polyanthus (very late) was in bloom by the front steps; there were six clove carnations out.

The service in Church had been most inspiring.

Sixteen sulkies, gigs, buggies and buckboards had brought a congregation of thirty, the Offertory (12s. 6d.) had been a record, the organ had produced sounds distinctly resembling music, neither of the choir boys had sneezed during the sermon, which, in its measured cadences, its august prose, its exact, almost poignant scholarship, in the richness of its classical allusions, in the masterly ease with which the Bishop had ironed out a crease in Deuteronomy (or was it the Pentateuch?) and in its dramatic opening sentence,

“WHERE ARE THE YOUNG MEN OF MALLOW’S MARSH?”, would greatly have impressed anyone able to take it all in. The good Bishop never gave less than his best, even to the most sparse, the most rustic congregations.

Much in the spirit that Art students are sent to Italy, Abigail the Orphan had been “spared” by Mrs Cog in order that she might see the goffered frills on His Lordship’s lawn sleeves. She sat in the Vicarage pew beside Juliet and Donalblain. It was hardly to be expected that the ladies from the household where the Bishop was to lunch should appear, but there they were! Mrs McCree in puce surah with a rose in her “pork-pie hat”; her lovely daughter-in-law, who seldom appeared, looked quite ravishing in a Garibaldi-black, of course.

The Bishop seemed to be such a true “Prince of the Church”, and his eloquent, words so moved Mrs McCree that almost she relented; but her Guardian Angel, a good creature, not very bright, was no match for the old firm, Apollyon, Beelzebub, Mephistopheles and Co.; she refused to weaken; she would make that lordly being tipsy!

In her dining-room with its rows of Regency chairs upholstered in red rep faded to magenta, the table positively sparkled with crystal (it really was crystal, three engraved goblets were dated 1683) and glittered with mirror-like silver (it really was silver, mostly of George the First’s time).

The green fig-leaves from the dessert service, filled with grapes and hazel-nuts, the immense silver epergne garlanded with yellow roses, and a silver tazza, given to some ancestor who had been chaplain to Her (late) Majesty Queen Anne, made the table look magnificent.

Mrs McCree was proud of it.

“After all,” she thought, “only Lady Mary’s plate can rival ours”, and with infinite care she gently levered the huge glass flagon full of Nyppa wine on to the sideboard. The liqueur was chilled to that clammy yet inviting coldness that only the deep-delved earth can give. Its colour was not bright but treacherous-looking; it had the unsafe look of a bog, strangely unluminous, yet deep-toned. It did not seem to be inanimate! Continually, a kind of subterranean glow radiated from it, its surface would be sucked in, in a thousand dimples, and then, with a sort of sucking sound, released, to flow to the rim of the jug. A volcano that was not in eruption but which was brewing lava would perhaps be a simile that faintly hinted at its mysterious and peculiar qualities; it appeared to be as thick as treacle, but it wasn’t! As for its bouquet!

Juliet and Donalblain were having a meal in the Nursery with their mother, for the lovely young widow of the Vicar’s son seldom appeared, it was only the Vicar and his wife who bowed their heads when the Bishop said Grace—in Greek.

The Vicar, who was greatly enjoying the company of an old friend of his undergraduate days, had twice already capped a line from Horace with a quotation from Sallust and (let it be whispered) Catullus.

The two outdoor menservants, wearing white cotton gloves, waited at table, Cook Teresa having elected to carve. She could not bear, she said, “to see my lovely leg mucked up”. She deftly laid four pinkish, whitish, creamish, fragrant slices of pork on each Crown Derby plate, with its crispish, tannish, delectable-looking strips of crackling flanking them, each with a mound-of apple-sauce to add lustre to a perfect mouthful. The beans were strips of chalcedony and chrysoberyl. The potatoes! And the gravy! Oh, my dears!

“Ah, yes,” the Bishop murmured in his exquisitely cultivated voice, while he waited for the Vicar to be served, “I very well recall, during the early thirties, questions arising in my thoughts as to whether we could really be so cocksure in taking the absolute truth of the evangelical formula for granted. One of the great watchwords was the right of private judgment. We used, on Sundays, to have to find texts to sanction it.”

Here a slightly mystic air attested to the excellence of his first mouthful of pork.

“Side by side with our classical work we were obliged to find sanction in defence of Justification by Faith, Sanctification, Total Depravity, Election and Final Perseverance.”

“We were taught to look on anyone who did not ag-ag-gree with us with a kind of awful dismay,” the Vicar recollected, smiling. He, too, found the pork very good.

“Of what use were all those glib quotations from the minutes of the Council of Trent?” the Bishop wanted to know.

“There was always a doubt as to whether K-K-Keeble was really sound on the more vital aspects of the Christian Faith,” the Vicar hinted.