The Keys of the Kingdom (45 page)

Suddenly the boy lifted his head so that a shaft from the broken skylight fell upon him. For the first time Francis saw the child’s face. He gave a stifled exclamation and a heavy wave of terrible emotion broke over him, he felt it as a ship might feel the buffet of a heavy wave. That pallid upturned face was unmistakable in its likeness to Nora’s face. The eyes, especially, enormous in the pinched skin, could never be denied.

‘What is your name?’

A pause. The boy answered: ‘Andrew.’

Behind the landing door there was a single room where, cross-legged on a dirty mattress stretched on the bare board, a woman stitched rapidly, her needle flying with deadly, automatic speed. Beside her, on an upturned egg-box, was a bottle. There was no furniture, only a kettle, some sacking, and a cracked jug. Across the egg-box lay a pile of half-finished coarse serge trousers.

Torn by his distress, Francis could barely speak. ‘You are Mrs Stevens?’ She nodded. ‘ I came … about the boy.’

She let her work fall nervously into her lap: a poor creature, not old, nor vicious, yet worn-out by adversity, sodden through and through. ‘Yes, I had your letter.’ She began to whimper out an explanation of her circumstances, to exonerate herself, to produce irrelevant evidence proving how misfortune had lowered her to this.

He stopped her quietly; the story was written in her face. He said: ‘I’ll take him back with me today.’

At this quietness, she dropped her eyes to her swollen hands, the fingers blue-stippled by countless needle-pricks. Though she made an effort to conceal it, his attitude agitated her more than any rebuke. She began to weep.

‘Don’t think I’m not fond of him. He helps me in a heap of ways. I’ve treated him well enough. But it’s been a sore struggle.’ She looked up with sudden defiance, silent.

Ten minutes later he left the house. Beside him, clutching a paper bundle to his pigeon chest, was Andrew. The priest’s feelings were deep and complex. He sensed the child’s dumb alarm at the unprecedented excursion, yet felt he could best reassure him by silence. He thought, with a slow deep joy: God gave me my life, brought me from China … for this!

They walked to the railway station without a word between them. In the train, Andrew sat staring out of the window, hardly moving, his legs dangling over the edge of the seat. He was very dirty, grime was ingrained into his thin pallid neck. Once or twice he glanced sideways at Francis; then immediately he glanced away again. It was impossible to guess his thoughts, but in the depths of his eyes there lurked a dark glimmer of fear and suspicion.

‘Don’t be afraid.’

‘I’m not afraid.’ The boy’s underlip quivered.

Once the train had quitted the smoke of Kirkbridge it sped across the country and down the riverside. A look of wonder dawned slowly on the boy’s face. He had never dreamed that colours could be so bright, so different from the leaden squalor of the slums. The open fields and farmlands gave place to a wilder scene, where woods sprang up about them, rich with green bracken and the hart’s-tongue fern, where the glint of rushing water showed in little glens.

‘Is this where we are going?’

‘Yes, we’re nearly there.’

They ran into Tweedside towards three in the afternoon. The old town, clustered on the riverbank, so unchanged he might have left it only yesterday, lay basking in brilliant sunshine. As the familiar landmarks swam into his gaze. Francis’ throat constricted with a painful joy. They left the little station and walked to St Columba’s Presbytery together.

From the window of his room Monsignor Sleeth frowned down towards the garden where Miss Moffat, basket in hand, stood with Andrew and Father Chisholm, watching Dougal fork up the dinner vegetables. The tacit air of companionship surrounding the little group heightened his fretful feeling of exclusion, hardened his resolution. On the table behind him, typed on his portable machine, lay his finished report – a terse and lucid document, crammed with hanging evidence. He was leaving for Tynecastle in an hour. It would be in the Bishop’s hands this evening.

Despite the keen, incisive satisfaction of accomplishment it was undeniable that the past week at St Columba’s had been trying. He had found much to annoy, even to confuse him. Except for a group centred round the pious yet obese Mrs Glendenning, the people of the parish had some regard, he might even say affection, for their eccentric pastor. Yesterday, he had been obliged to deal severely with the delegation that waited on him to protest their loyalty to the parish priest. As if he didn’t know that every native son must have his claque! The height of his exasperation was touched that same evening when the local Presbyterian minister dropped in and, after humming and hawing, ventured to hope that Father Chisholm was not ‘leaving them’ – the ‘feeling’ in the town had lately been so admirable … Admirable – indeed!

While he meditated, the group beneath his eye broke up and Andrew ran to the summerhouse to get his kite. The old man had a mania for making kites, great paper things with waving tails, which flew – Sleeth grudgingly admitted – like monster birds. On Tuesday, coming upon the two breezily attached to the clouds by humming twine, he had ventured to remonstrate.

‘Really, Father. Do you think this pastime dignified?’

The old man had smiled – confound it, he was never rebellious always that quiet, maddeningly gentle smile.

‘The Chinese do. And they’re a dignified people.’

‘It’s one of their pagan customs, I presume.’

‘Ah, well! Surely a very innocent one!’

He remained aloof, his nose turning blue in the sharp wind, watching them. It appeared that the old priest was merging pleasure with instruction. From time to time, while he held the string, the boy would sit in the summerhouse taking down dictation on strips of paper. Completed, these laboured scrawls were threaded on the string, sent soaring to the sky, amidst joint jubiliation.

An impulse of curiosity had mastered him. He took the latest missive from the boy’s excited hands. It was clearly written and not ill-spelled. He read: ‘ I faithfully promise to oppose bravely all that is stupid and bigoted and cruel. Signed, ANDREW. P S Toleration is the highest virtue. Humility comes next.’

He looked at it bleakly, for a long time, before surrendering it. He even waited with a chilled face until the next was prepared. ‘Our bones may moulder and become the earth of the fields but the Spirit issues forth and lives on high in a condition of glorious brightness. God is the common Father of all mankind.’

Mollified, Sleeth looked at Father Chisholm. ‘Excellent. Didn’t Saint Paul say that?’

‘No.’ The old man shook his head apologetically. ‘It was Confucius.’

Sleeth was staggered. He walked away without a word.

That night he misguidedly began an argument, which the old man evaded with disconcerting ease. At the end he burst out, provoked:

‘Your notion of God is a strange one.’

‘Which of us has any notion of God?’ Father Chisholm smiled. ‘Our word “ God” is a human word … expressing reverence for our Creator. If we have that reverence, we shall see God … never fear.’

To his annoyance, Sleeth had found himself flushing. ‘You seem to have a very slight regard for Holy Church.’

‘On the contrary … all my life I have rejoiced to feel her arms about me. The Church is our great mother, leading us forward … a band of pilgrims, through the night. But perhaps there are other mothers. And perhaps even some poor solitary pilgrims who stumble home alone.’

The scene, of which this was a fragment, seriously disconcerted Sleeth and gave him, when he returned that night, a shockingly distorted nightmare. He dreamed that while the house slept his guardian angel and Father Chisholm’s knocked off for an hour and went down to the living room for a drink. Chisholm’s angel was a slight cherubic creature, but his own was an elderly angel with discontented eyes and a ruffled angry plumage. As they sipped their drink, wings at rest on the elbows of their chairs, they discussed their present charges. Chisholm, although indicted as a sentimentalist, escaped lightly. But he … he was torn to shreds. He sweated in his sleep as he heard his angel dismiss him with a final malediction. ‘One of the worst I ever had … prejudiced, pedantic, overambitious, and worst of all a bore.’

Sleeth wakened with a start in the darkness of his room. What a hateful, disgusting dream. He shivered. His head ached. He knew better than to give credence to such nightmares, no more than odious distortions of one’s waking thoughts, altogether different from the good, authentic scriptural dreams, that of Pharaoh’s wife, for instance. He dismissed his dream violently, like an impure thought. But it nagged him now, as he stood at the window:
Prejudiced, pedantic, over-ambitious, and worst of all, a bore.

Apparently he had misjudged Andrew, for the child emerged from the summerhouse bearing, not his kite, but a large wicker trug into which, with Dougal’s aid, he began to place some fresh-picked plums and pears. When the task was accomplished the boy moved towards the house, carrying the long basket on his arm.

Sleeth had an inexplicable impulse to retreat. He sensed that the gift was for him. He resented it, was vaguely, absurdly disconcerted. The knock on his door made him pull his scattered wits together.

‘Come in.’

Andrew entered the room and put the fruits upon the chest of drawers. With the shamed consciousness of one who knows himself suspected he delivered his message, memorized all the way upstairs. ‘Father Chisholm hopes you will take these with you – the plums are very sweet – and the pears are the very last we’ll get.’

Monsignor Sleeth looked sharply at the boy, wondering if a double meaning were intended in that final simple phrase.

‘Where is Father Chisholm?’

‘Downstairs. Waiting on you.’

‘And my car?’

‘Dougal has just brought it round for you to the front door.’

There was a pause. Andrew began, hesitantly, to move away.

‘Wait!’ Sleeth drew up. ‘Don’t you think it would be more convenient … altogether politer … if you carried down the fruit and put it in my car?’

The boy coloured nervously and turned to obey. As he lifted the basket from the chest one of the plums fell off and rolled below the bed. Darkly red, he stooped and clumsily retrieved it, its smooth skin burst, a trickle of juice upon his fingers. Sleeth watched him with a cold smile.

‘That one won’t be much good . . will it?’

No answer.

‘I said, will it?’

‘No, sir.’

Sleeth’s strange pale smile deepened. ‘You are a remarkably stubborn child. I’ve been watching you all the week. Stubborn and ill-bred. Why don’t you look at me?’

With a tremendous effort the boy wrenched his eyes from the floor. He was trembling, like a nervous foal, as he met Sleeth’s gaze.

‘It is the sign of a guilty conscience not to look straight at a person. Besides being bad manners. They’ll have to teach you better at Ralstone.’

Another silence. The boy’s face was white. Monsignor Sleeth still smiled. He moistened his lips.

‘Why don’t you answer? Is it because you do not wish to go to the Home?’

The boy faltered: ‘I don’t want to go.’

‘Ah! But you want to do what is right, don’t you?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Then you will go. In fact, I may tell you that you are going very soon. Now you may put the fruit in the car. If you can do so without dropping all of it.’

When the boy had gone, Monsignor Sleeth remained motionless, the contour of his lips fixed into a stiff, straight mould. His arms stretched down at his sides. His hands were clenched.

With that same stiff look upon his face he moved to the table. He could not have believed himself capable of such sadism. But that very cruelty had purged the darkness from his soul. Without hesitation, inevitably, he took up his compiled report, and tore it into shreds. His fingers ripped the sheets with methodical violence. He threw the torn and twisted fragments from him, scattered them irrevocably on the floor. Then he groaned and sank upon his knees.

‘Oh, Lord.’ His voice was simple and pleading. ‘Let me learn something from this old man. And dear Lord … Don’t let me be a bore.’

That same afternoon, when Monsignor Sleeth had gone, Father Chisholm and Andrew came guardedly through the back of the house. Though the boy’s eyes were still swollen, their brightness was that of expectation, his face, at last, was reassured.

‘Be careful of the nasturtiums, laddie.’ Francis urged the boy forward with a conspirator’s whisper. ‘Heaven knows we’ve had enough trouble in one day without Dougal starting on us.’

While Andrew dug the worms in the flower-bed the old man went to the tool-shed, brought out their trout rods, and stood waiting at the gate. When the child arrived, breathless, with a wriggling tinful, he chuckled.

‘Aren’t you the lucky boy to be going trouting with the best fisher in all Tweedside? The good God made the little fishes, Andrew … and sent us here to catch them.’

Their two figures, hand in hand, dwindled and disappeared, down the pathway, to the river.

First published in 1942 by Gollancz

This edition published 2013 by Bello
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Copyright © A. J. Cronin, 1942

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