Random Harvest (34 page)
Most of these friends lived abroad, so that occasions for personal meetings were rare; but he corresponded, regularly and voluminously, and it was this task that had lately made him aware of failing eyesight, and so of the need for someone to help him with it. Smith gladly volunteered, and it became a habit that two or three mornings a week Blampied would dictate slowly while the other took down in a longhand that soon developed into a private shorthand, marked by curious abbreviations and a general meaninglessness to the outsider. Afterwards, at his leisure, Smith would rewrite or type the letters in full. They went to most of the corners of the world—a hotelkeeper in Yokohama, a university professor in Idaho, a train conductor on the Orient Express, an Austrian soldier lying wounded in a hospital in Salzburg, an editor in Liverpool, a rubber planter in Johore, a woman head of an advertising agency in Brisbane . . . these were a few out of the twenty-odd. All, it appeared, were people whom Blampied had met at one time or another. “I used to travel a good deal, before the war put an end to it, and now, I fear, I have neither the zest nor the money to resume. But for a few shillings’ worth of stamps each week, I can almost achieve the same object. . . . This morning, for instance, I shall write to M’sieur Gaston Auriac, Rue Henri Quatre, Antananarivo, Madagascar. We met only once—on a steamer between Capetown and Durban, but we talked for long enough to make the discovery of each other. Maybe you were surprised when I asked you whether you and Paula could use the same toothbrush? You see, I have never married, so I don’t know whether physical oneness goes as far as that—but I do know that in the realm of mental and spiritual things there can be a similar oneness—the knowledge that yours and mine are no longer yours and mine, but OURS for every possible use. And this awareness, once acknowledged by both parties, lasts for ever. Gaston and I may disagree about this and that, but because our thought processes are in the same world, there’s a sense in which we can use each other’s minds. We’re both impervious to sentimentality and mob optimism, and both of us also, if I may so express it, are accustomed to think proudly. . . . We found that out during our three-hour talk seven years ago, and though we have never met since, we both know that it must still be true, despite all the changes that have taken place in the world about us. . . . Just now, we’re in the midst of an argument as to the right way to treat Germany now the war’s over. Gaston thinks the Allied armies should have pushed on to Berlin, even at the cost of an extra year of fighting, and then have broken Germany into fragments, acting with ruthless severity on the lines of delenda est Carthago. . . . I, on the other hand, would have offered terms of simply astounding generosity—lifting the blockade the day after the Armistice, forbearing to ask for meaningless and uncollectable reparations, and inviting all the defeated countries into an immediate conference on equal terms to discuss the disarmament and rehabilitation of Europe. As you can imagine, we’re enjoying as violent a discussion as the somewhat intermittent mails to Madagascar will permit. But the point is: both of us are still thinking proudly. Gaston is no frenzied sadist wishing to destroy for the sake of destroying; I am no milk-and-water humanitarian yearning over a defeated enemy merely because he is defeated and has been an enemy. Both of us have the same aim in view—the cure of the thousand-year-old European disease; both methods have succeeded at various times throughout history—his, I admit, more often than mine. Either might succeed today. But what will NOT succeed, and what we both know will not succeed, is the unhappy mean between the two—the half-way compromise between sentiment and vengeance—the policy of SAFE men playing for SAFETY.” He added, smiling: “So you see, Mr. Smith, why it did not shock me the other day to hear that you had been classed at one time as a dangerous man. All my friends are dangerous men.”
Smith came to enjoy the work of transcribing these letters, and sometimes also he helped with Church and Mission activities, especially those for which Blampied had little ability, such as children’s organizations. He found that his experience on the train had been no fluke, but the result of an apparently inborn aptitude for handling youngsters. Even the most stubborn, and from the worst slum homes, responded to his instinctive offering of ease and discipline; in fact it was the most stubborn who liked him and whom he liked the most. He began holding classes in the Mission building, classes that did not invade the religious field (which he did not feel either the inclination or the authority to enter), but touched it variously and from neglected angles—classes on civics, on local history, on London and English traditions. He was so happy over all this that it came to him with a sense of retrospective discovery that he must LIKE children—not sentimentally, but with a simple, almost casual affection. “You’d have made a good schoolmaster,” Blampied once said, and then, when Smith replied he wasn’t sure he’d care to spend all his time with children, the other added: “Exactly. Good schoolmasters don’t. Anyhow, you can help to make up for the fact that I’m a bad parson.”
“Do you really think you are?”
“Oh yes. Ask anybody round here. People don’t take to me. I haven’t an ounce of crowd magnetism. And then I’m lazy. Only physically, I think, but then that’s the only kind of laziness most people recognize.”
“I think you’re old enough, if you don’t mind my saying so, to be forgiven a certain amount of physical laziness.”
“Yes, but I’m not lazy in the forgivable ways. If I went to Lord’s
to watch the cricket they’d think I was a sweet old clergyman who
deserved his afternoon off, but as I’m only lazy enough sometimes
to go without a shave—“
Smith laughed, knowing what he meant, for while it could not be said that the parson neglected his professional duties, it was certainly true that he made no effort to make himself either a worldly success or a beloved failure—the two classifications that claim a roughly equal number of adherents among the clergy. Nor, despite the fact that he inclined to High Church fashions, did he join the fanatical brotherhood of those who systematically disobey their bishops; his own disobediences were personal, casual, almost careless—wherefore his bishop disliked him all the more. So did various influential parishioners to whom he refused to toady; while the poor, to whom he also refused to toady, rewarded him with a vast but genial indifference. A few devoted lay workers ran the adjacent Mission, but they were not devoted to HIM, and when they pushed on him such tasks as the supervision of the annual outing it was with the knowledge and hope that he would have a bad time. Nor did they care for his church services, which they thought cold and formal; they realized, correctly, that he was not the kind of cleric to “drag the people in,” and from time to time they plotted, more or less openly, to have him supplanted by some energetic slum parson who would unite both Church and Mission into a single buzzing hive. But it is by no means easy to dislodge a parson of the Church of England, and Blampied had suffered no more than a gradual reduction of dues and stipend during his twelve years of office.
He was, in fact, though he hardly realized it because his wants were so few, very close to the poverty line. He wore the shabbiest clothes; he lived on the simplest and cheapest of foods, though always well cooked; he paid cash to tradespeople, but owed large sums to local authorities for taxes and bills of various kinds. About a month after his first meeting with Smith, his housekeeper fell suddenly ill and died within a few days; he was a good deal upset by that, but admitted that it had saved him from having to get rid of her, since he could no longer afford the few weekly shillings for her part-time services. It was then he suggested to Smith and Paula that they should move into the house and live rent-free in return for similar help; they were glad to consent, since their own money was rapidly dwindling.
Out of the unused fifteen they chose two large attic rooms with a view over roof-tops northward as far as Hampstead and Highgate, and it was fun to begin buying the bare necessities of furniture and utensils, searching the Caledonian Market for broken-down chairs that could be repaired and re-upholstered, discarded shop fittings usable as bookshelves, an old school desk that showed mahogany under its coating of ink and dirt. Gradually the rooms became a home, and the entirely vacant floor beneath encouraged a kinship with roofs and sky rather than with the walls and pavements of the streets.
Towards the end of September Blampied received a quarterly payment which he chose to devote to a crusading holiday rather than to paying arrears of his borough council rates; having invited Smith and Paula to join the expedition, he took them for a week into rural Oxfordshire “making trouble wherever we go,” as the parson put it, though that was an exaggeration. The question of country footpaths was, he admitted, his King Charles’s Head—every man, he added, should have some small matter to which he attaches undue importance, always provided that he realizes the undueness. Realizing it all the time, Blampied would puzzle over ancient maps in bar parlours, inquiring from villagers whether it was still possible to make the diagonal way across the fields from Planter’s End to Marsh Hollow, and generally receiving the answer that no one ever did—it was much quicker to go round by the road, and so on. “I reckon you could if you tried, mister, but you’d ‘ave a rare time gettin’ through them nettles.” A few more pints of beer would perhaps elicit the information that “I remember when I was a kid I used to go to school that way, but ‘twouldn’t be no help now, not with the new school where it is.” Yet those, as the parson emphasized, drinking his beer as copiously as the rest, were the paths their forefathers had trod, the secret short cuts across hill and valley, the ways by which the local man could escape or intercept while the armed stranger tramped along the high roads. All of which failed to carry much weight with the Oxfordshire men of 1919, many of whom, as armed strangers, had tramped the high roads of other countries. They obviously regarded the parson as an oddity, but being country people they knew that men, like trees and unlike suburban houses, were never exactly the same, and this idea of unsameness as the pattern of life meant that (as Blampied put it) they didn’t think there was anything VERY odd in anyone being a LITTLE odd.
Several times the parson spoke on village greens to small, curious, unenthusiastic audiences, most of whom melted away when he suggested that there and then they should march over the ancient ground, breaking down any barriers that might have been erected during the past century or so; but in one village there was a more active response, due to the fact that the closing of a certain path had been recent and resented. It was then that Blampied showed a certain childlike pugnacity; he clearly derived enormous enjoyment from leading a crowd of perhaps fifty persons, many of them youngsters out for a lark, through Hilltop Farm and up Long Meadow to the gap in the hedge that was now laced with fresh barbed wire. Smith found he could best be useful in preventing the children from destroying crops or tearing their clothes; he thought the whole expedition a trifle silly but pleasingly novel. Actually this particular onslaught had quite an exciting finish; the owner of the property, a certain General Sir Richard Hawkesley Wych-Furlough, suddenly appeared on the scene, backed by a menacing array of servants and gamekeepers. Everything pointed to a battle, but all that finally developed was a long and wordy argument between the General and the parson, culminating in retirement by both sides and a final shout from the General: “What the hell’s it got to do with YOU, anyway? You don’t live here!”
“And that,” as Blampied said afterwards, “from a man who used to be Governor of so many islands he could only visit a few of them once a year—so that any islander might have met his administrative decisions with the same retort—‘What’s it got to do with YOU? You don’t live here!’”
The notion continued to please him as he added: “I was a missionary on one of those islands—till I quarrelled with the bosses. I always quarrel with bosses. . . .”
Gradually Smith and Paula began to piece together Blampied’s history. Born of a wealthy family whom he had long ago given up no less emphatically than they had him, he had originally entered the Church as a respectable and sanctioned form of eccentricity for younger sons. Later, even more eccentrically and with a good deal more sincerity, he had served as a missionary in the South Seas until his employers discovered him to be not only heretical, but a bad compiler of reports. After that he had come home to edit a religious magazine, resigning only when plunging circulation led to its bankruptcy. For a time after that he had dabbled in politics, joining the early Fabians, with whom he never quarrelled at all, but from whom he became estranged by a widening gulf of mutual exasperation. “The truth is, Smith,” he confessed, “I never could get along with all the Risers-to-Second-That and the On-a-Point-of-Orderers. If I were God, I’d say—Let there be Light. But as I’m not God, I’d rather spend my time plotting for Him in the dark than in holding committee meetings in a man-made blaze of publicity!”
He formed the habit of talking with the two of them for an hour or
so most evenings, especially as summer lagged behind and coal began
to burn in a million London grates. To roof-dwellers it was a
rather dirty but strangely comforting transition—the touch of
smoke-laden fog drifting up from the river, the smell of
smouldering heaps in parks and gardens, the chill that seemed the
perfect answer to a fire, as the fire was to the chill. For
London, Blampied claimed, was of all cities in the world the most
autumnal—its mellow brickwork harmonizing with fallen leaves and
October sunsets, just as the etched grays of November composed
themselves with the light and shade of Portland stone. There was a
charm, a deathless charm, about a city whose inhabitants went about