Best Australian Short Stories (26 page)

He was quite holding his own.

As the meal proceeded Lucretius Carus wrestled with St Jerome, Epicurus attempted St Augustine, Apuleius supported by Aemilia Pudentilla confronted even St Paul himself.

It was a merry repast.

Directly the pork was in play Mrs McCree, rising from her place, the flagon held in hands that did not falter, said in gentle, confiding tones to the Bishop, “You will taste my little elixir, Bishop? It is made from a recipe left me among the papers of my great-grandfather, Major-General Willing-Toper, of the East India Company’s service.”

“But, my dear Lady! It is not for you to wait on me!”

Jumping up, and gallantly possessing himself of the jug, the Bishop poured himself out a full glass, using, not the goblet dated 1683, but the hearty Georgian tumbler, with a capacity of one pint.

Returning the flagon to the sideboard, and smiling a faint, almost terrified smile, Mrs McCree went back to her chair.

“My memory is as good as ever,” the Bishop remarked, in parentheses as it were, “and for years, if I am not mistaken, I have addressed you as Jessie—yet, if my ears do not deceive me, I have today twice heard Phineas address you as Lucretia?”

“That is my middle name,” Mrs McCree answered, throwing a warning glance at her husband.

Here the Bishop tossed off half a glass of Nyppe.

“Of course, in those days, after the appearance of Tract No. 90, the chief points held out for our consideration were Scripture, the Church, General Councils, Justification by Faith, Purgatory, the Invocation of Saints, Masses, Homilies, the Celibacy of the Clergy and—er—er—other matters of importance.”

The Bishop finished his glass and in an absent-minded way got up and refilled it at the sideboard.

Mrs McCree became anxious.

Neither of the menservants had reappeared to take away the plates and dishes. Cook Teresa, ably assisted by Tabitha, was, in rather a flurried way, performing these offices.

“Where are the men?” Mrs McCree whispered, as Cook Teresa removed her empty platter.

“Lorst to the worrld, Mum,” Cook Teresa whispered back. “They must have sumpled the Nyppe. We managed to drag theer buddies into the scullery. I’ve covered thim with a blankut, and they look very, very happy theer. Very happy indade! Abigail is after climbing into a clane gown, and she will be here immejit.”

When the second course made its appearance, Abigail proving herself a treasure, the Bishop poured himself out a third tumbler of Nyppe.

“Your elixir, dear lady,” he said, turning with a smile (the smile known to the ladies of his Diocese as his smile) to Mrs McCree, “has the three qualities necessary to a good drink. It is cool, it is subtle, it is stimulating.” And he resumed his interesting discussion with the Vicar. “It was Tait of Balliol who entrenched himself so ably behind the Thirty-Nine Articles. Did you ever meet Tait?”

“No. No.”

“Nor Pugin ? Bloxham’s ‘umbra’?”

“No, no.”

“The Master was not pleased with Pugin. He considered he had humbugged Bloxham.”

“Ah, yes, so Gooch told me. Did you ever run across Gooch?” “No, no. But in the May Term of 1836 I ran across Bowyer in Athens, and he told me about Gooch. That is, he mentioned him.” Because in their day Englishmen went to Greece much in the same spirit that the crusaders went to the Holy Land, Athens led to Delphi, Thebes to Helicon; there for the next ten minutes they rambled.

“I found the Boeotian plains very striking.”

“Ah, yes! As I came down from Cithaeron on the way from Eleusis, they lay before me, rising beyond Asopus into reddish, gentle heights!”

“Helicon, the grey, distant summit, not unattainable!”

“The dim, huge, majestic mass of Parnassus!”

From Mallow’s Marsh they looked back on their Heaven.

Mrs McCree, who had been waiting in vain for the return of Cook Teresa, noticed with a failing heart Tabitha’s agonized face appearing round the door, and obeyed her beckoning finger.

She was hardly at all astonished, on being led to the kitchen, to find Cook Teresa sitting stiffly on a deal chair, and gazing into space with extraordinary concentration.

“There were a drop or two left in the cauldron,” Tabitha explained.

“I brought this on myself,” Mrs McCree told herself, beginning to get a little alarmed. Should anything (as she put it) happen to the Bishop how could she deal with him? Dear Phineas certainly could not lift him. She peeped into the scullery at the recumbent forms of the two menservants, and remembering a maxim of her great-grandmother’s, went across to unfasten their collars; neither stirred, yet they looked happy! She was reassured by reminding herself that a note in her great-grandmother’s hand, written in the margin of the recipe had stated: “This Nyppe is good for diseases of the head and for cold stomachs, and nobody can pine away when embalmed in so powerful a preservative.”

Not a little comforted she returned to the dining-room. She circulated dessert.

Tabitha and Abigail brought in coffee.

The flagon was half empty and she noticed with awe that the Bishop was not in the least the worse for liqueur. His noble countenance was decorous, not flushed, his articulation was meticulously exact; indeed, as she entered, he was, with perfect sangfroid, asking Phineas if he had “caught this new craze for the cultivation of rhododendrons”?

The word presented no difficulties. His long legs, too, in their elegant gaiters, stepped with their usual graceful precision as he went across to the sideboard and poured himself out an eighth glass of Nyppe.

Sipping at her Mocha coffee, bolstered up with cream, the Vicar’s wife, however, felt the first faint stirrings of a real alarm when (Phineas having dropped into a gentle doze) the Bishop drew his chair near to hers, and, with a kind smile, a very kind smile, laid a white hand, wonderfully kept, and given a look of sanctity by the Amethystine Episcopal ring, over hers, and said, lowering his mellifluous voice almost to a whisper, “For some months past I have been hoping to find an cpportunity of mentioning to you a subject very near my heart.”

“Great Heavens!” thought Mrs McCree, “is he growing amorous?”

It was a contingency that had never occurred to her.

The Bishop’s grey eye certainly looked beneficent.

Was his cheek, perhaps, a little flushed?

“I have not been unmindful of your devoted labours, dear Jessie,” he continued. “I have greatly admired the wonderful way you have managed the feminine, the economic, side of my dear old friend’s responsibilities in so remote a parish. You are almost, I have noticed, self-supporting! I feel that your gifts should have wider scope. Will you not, dear Jessie, accept the office of President of our Ladies’ Auxiliary ?”

Mrs McCree had been very well brought up, but she gave a little gasp—was it of relief? Was it of horror? Of disappointment?

It woke up the Vicar, who, looking at his watch, said in his usual direct way, “Th-th-three o’clock! Your man will be at the door by this, I th-th-think.”

Rising, he went to look.

Yes! There was the Bishop’s brougham.

And, after the customary ritual common to the departure from a seldom-visited friend’s house in the country; the search for the lent book; the borrowed coat; the bestowal of packets of sandwiches, of three pumpkins, two dressed chickens, a sucking pig, a dozen eggs; the assembly of the family: “And—I have added a few bottles of Nyppe wine,” Mrs McCree murmured, giving them to the groom to stow away in a carriage already packed with gifts. “I have already sent some flagons to the Governor, and to Mr McWhistle and other friends.”

The early afternoon had not belied the morning’s promise.

The sky was just as blue, the sun was just as temperate, the zephyr as discreet; all nature was keyed to the perfection of an autumnal, a mellow, beauty, as the Vicar, his wife, his daughter-in-law (who so seldom appeared), his two grandchildren, Juliet and Donalblain (who was four), accompanied the good Bishop to his waiting brougham.

His shovel hat was like a mirror, his gaiters exemplary in cut and fit, his apron quietly orthodox, his handsome face urbane, as with precise, undeviating steps he walked down the narrow path—so sweet with cloves and thyme—and seated himself with his customary aplomb, and a gracious expression of gratitude, in his smart carriage, and was whirled away to his Palace.

“I blame myself, Jessie, I b-b-blame myself.” Mr McCree fully realized how disappointed his wife was. “One rather g-g-glosses such things over! Where an Oxford man is concerned, that is! I q-q-quite forgot that Pussy” (for so he called the friend of his youth) “had been at Wadham College. Yes! My dear girl!” the Vicar shook his venerable head. “I should have remembered that the Bishop was a Wadham man. In his day they were all six-bottle men at Wadham.”

I SAW the spring come once—only once—and I won’t forget it. I had been ill all the winter and I was recovering. No more pain now, no more treatments or visits to the doctor. The face that looked back at me from my old silver mirror was the face of a woman who had escaped. I had only to build up my strength. For that I wanted to be alone, an old and natural impulse. I had been out of things for quite a long time and the effort of returning was still too great. My mind was transparent and as tender as new skin. Everything that happened, even the commonest things, seemed to be happening for the first time and had a delicate hollow ring like music played in an empty auditorium.

I took a flat in a quiet, blind street, lined with English trees. It was one large room, high ceilinged with pale walls, chaste as a cell in a honeycomb, and furnished with the passionless, standardized grace of a fashionable interior decorator. It had the afternoon sun, which I prefer because I like my mornings shadowy and cool, the relaxed end of the night prolonged as far as possible. When I arrived the trees were bare and still against the lilac dusk. There was a block of flats opposite, discreet, well tended, with a wide entrance. At night it lifted its oblongs of rose and golden light far up into the sky. One of its windows was immediately opposite mine. I noticed that it was always shut against the air. The street was wide, but because it was so quiet the window seemed near. I was glad to see it always shut because I spent a good deal of time at my window and it was the only one that might have overlooked me and flawed my privacy.

I liked the room from the first; it was a shell that fitted without touching me. The afternoon sun threw the shadow of a tree on my light wall, and it was in the shadow that I first noticed that the bare twigs were beginning to swell with buds. A water-colour, pretty and innocuous, hung on that wall. One day I asked the silent woman who serviced me to take it down. After that the shadow of the tree had the wall to itself and I felt cleared and tranquil as if I had expelled the last fragment of grit from my mind.

I grew familiar with all the people in the street; they came and went with a surprising regularity and they all, somehow, seemed to be cut to a very correct pattern. They were part of the
mise en scene
, hardly real at all, and I never felt the faintest desire to become acquainted with any of them. There was one woman I noticed, about my own age. She lived over the way. She had been beautiful, I thought, and was still handsome, with a fine tall figure. She always wore dark clothes, tailor made, and there was reserve in her every movement. Coming and going she was always alone, but you felt that that was by her own choice, that everything she did was by her own steady choice. She walked up the steps so firmly and vanished so resolutely into the discreet muteness of the building opposite, that I felt a faint, a very faint, envy of any one who appeared to have her life so perfectly under control.

There was a day much warmer than any we had had, a still, warm, milky day. I saw as soon as I got up that the window opposite was open a few inches. “Spring comes even to the careful heart,” I thought. And the next morning not only was the window open but there was a row of persimmons set out carefully and precisely on the sill to ripen in the sun. Shaped like a young woman’s breasts, their deep rich golden-orange colour seemed just the highlight that the morning’s spring tranquillity needed. It was almost a shock to me to see them there. I remembered at home when I was a child there was a grove of persimmon-trees down one side of the house. In the autumn they had blazed deep red, taking your breath away. They cast a rosy light into rooms on that side of the house as if a fire were burning outside. Then the leaves fell and left the pointed dark gold fruit clinging to the bare branches. They never lost their strangeness—magical, Hesperidean trees. When I saw
The Fire Bird
danced my heart moved painfully because I remembered the persimmon-trees in the early morning against the dark windbreak of the loquats. Why did I always think of autumn in springtime?

Persimmons belong to autumn and this was spring. I went to the window to look again. Yes, they were there, they were real, I not imagined them—autumn fruit warming to a ripe transparency in the spring sunshine. They must have come expensively packed in sawdust from California or have lain all winter in storage. Fruit out of season.