The Quick and the Dead (3 page)

Even now, though I sit here pen in hand, I hardly know what or whose book it is that I am beginning to write. The story of Calamy? Something less or more than that. A history of my boyhood? That, too, is by the way. The moon of my memory keeps no seasons and answers no prayers: she is erratic in her rising and careless of what her light
may fall upon. Neither Calamy nor his fosterson is of the essence of the matter. Yet somewhere within the circle of one man's consciousness is to be found whatever meaning life may have; in one heart if in any—and as likely in any one as in any other—the word of revelation moves to its birth. So I must go groping on among these pictures of the past, in the hope that my motive in writing will presently be made plain to me, and that I, who have never attempted such a task before, may acquire in the doing of it something of the novelist's art that can impose order and cool definition on the warm rich confusions of experience.

Not even Mr Latitude—and Mr Latitude was immeasurably nearer Calamy's way of thinking and feeling than was our local minister, the Reverend Benjamin Fleer. Small wonder that Calamy sat uneasily at the feet of such a pastor! For reasons that will presently emerge, I doubt my capacity for being strictly just in my picture of Mr Fleer. But even in my early childhood, before I had any specific reason for disliking him, I thought how curiously he resembled a spider. He, nature aiding, had somehow contrived to combine plumpness and cadaverousness in his one person. He had a large round belly, square shoulders, plump hands, short fingers, long bony limbs, large feet, and a long gaunt face from which small sharp eyes peered under bushy eyebrows. His head was bald and highly polished, except for a grey growth of hair near the temples that was joined in contiguity with a pair of side-whiskers. His nose—long and sharp, but with large mobile nostrils—was perhaps his most significant member. Though spiderlyin the general shape
of him, there was a suggestion of horse in his face, a suggestion supported by the strange neighing quality that came into his voice in the more emotional passages of discourse. He belonged, in the main, to the hell-fire school of preaching; but lacked its austerity, for he would describe to us God's love for the repentant sinner with a sickliness of demeanour that made the everlasting bonfire attractive by contrast. It seemed, from Mr Fleer's account of the matter (I, fortunately, had access to saner versions), that the Almighty divided his time between acts of the most stupid and revolting cruelty and debauches of gross sentimentality. How Mr Fleer contrived to fit even a caricature of Jesus of Nazareth into this picture still passes my understanding. But he made no difficulty about such trifles as that. He worshipped the Book, and by the Book. He expounded the Book to us Sunday by Sunday, and with a confidence that left one in some doubt whether he had not written it himself.

So, inevitably, it was Mr Fleer who came to the house to make trouble about my mother. There is no occasion for surprise in that: I am surprised only that it did not happen years earlier. He planted himself in the doorway of our shop one summer morning, blocking
out the sunlight, and advanced his long nose in the direction of Calamy, who sat in his accustomed place and plied his craft.

‘Ah, Mr Calamy! Might one have a quiet word with you, brother?'

This, I can swear, was his way of approach; but I must not pretend to any first-hand knowledge of what subsequently passed at that strange interview. Mr Fleer began, most probably, with a reference to Calamy's absence from chapel the previous Sunday evening; and from that point proceeded, with oily sorrow, to discuss the behaviour of my mother, of which, in fact, he knew nothing but what idle or malicious tongues had told him. I cannot but believe that he got pleasure from his task, and I conceive it to be more important to understand than to blame him for that. He was, I conjecture, a man not temperamentally austere, but one in whom appetite and prudery were in unresolved conflict, so that the springs of passion in him were muddied at their source, and passion itself diverted into strange, dark, malodorous channels. He had been three times married in ten years, and was now, at forty-two or three, a widower of six years' standing. No personal scandal ever circulated against him, and there is no reason to suppose that he broke any
of the major commandments. It is simply a fact of history, which may or may not have significance, that nothing could live healthily in his atmosphere. His house was managed by a succession of housekeepers, and not one of these women, though they respected him and spoke no ill of him, was able to stay with him for many months together. Sooner or later, and more often sooner, they sickened and had to leave. How often this happened I do not know, but it happened often enough to get talked about in the village; and the time came when no local woman would accept the so-often vacated post. A Mrs Simmonds came, a brisk, capable, middle-aged woman, from a remote region south of the Thames, and died twelve months later. At this the more superstitious amongst us began whispering that there was a curse on the house. More sensible people, including the medical men, thought there must be something wrong with the drains, which were, indeed, devised on a primitive plan. So the drains were looked to, the well was cleaned out, the water was analysed—all with no positive result. Nevertheless, with an old man to look after the garden and haul coals and chop wood, and a ‘daily woman' to cook and clean for him, Mr Fleer made himself tolerably comfortable. Whatever the
curse on his house, whether of drains or demons, he himself was immune from its ravages; and so was able to come, full of godliness, to visit Brother Calamy.

Sent by my mother to call him to a meal, I found Calamy sitting thoughtful and idle in the shop, very much as I had seen him, those many years before, on the morning ultimately made happy for me by the manufacture of Jacko's boots. He looked up as I entered and regarded me with unseeing eyes.

I gave my message.

‘Ah, Claud,' he said. He paused a moment and then added: ‘You're a good boy, Claud. And you've got a good mother. Never forget that.'

I was embarrassed. But I was also moved. ‘And a good father,' I said, trying to get into my voice a kind of cheekiness that should hide my shy feeling.

‘A brave one anyhow,' said Calamy quietly. ‘He's just gone off to fight the Boers.'

I stared and gaped.

‘Yes,' said Calamy. ‘I'm not your father, my dear. It's time you knew the truth. Mr Fleer's been to see me. A strange man he is. Do you know, Claud, I just can't bring myself to like him.'

Tears started into my eyes; my face flamed;
the room began swaying about me. Calamy's voice came from a great distance.

‘I had to tell you, my dear. If I hadn't there's others that would have done. Mr Fleer was very unpleasant about it.'

‘I don't understand,' I said doggedly. ‘I don't believe it. Who
is
my father if you're not?'

He answered that question simply and directly enough. And I saw again that debonair horseman on the Icknam Road. ‘Yesterday he went off to the war. And last Sunday evening your mother met him and said good-bye to him, poor girl. They were seen together—'

‘Oh, I don't want to hear about
him!'
I interrupted angrily, on the verge of tears. ‘You're the only father I want.
Please
be my father.'

It was oddly, yet with a significant difference, a repetition of that scene of seven years earlier. The difference was mainly in me, partly in Calamy. Seven years had taught me much, but it had not taught me how a boy could be the son of two people not married to each other. All children, in my imagination, were conceived (my seniors had been forced to admit that much) but unbegotten.

‘Then mother—who's my mother? …
Was I changed at birth or something? Am I going to be a lord when I grow up?' I smiled wanly, half believing I had made a good joke.

Calamy got out of his chair. ‘Expect we'd better talk of this another time, my boy.' He put a hand on my head. ‘It'll make no difference to you and me.' The relief of this assurance set me sobbing in earnest. ‘No, no,' he said, ‘you mustn't cry. There's nothing to cry about, nothing at all. We'll all be happy together just as we've always been … Come along now, it's dinner-time. Mother'll wonder where we've got to. Not a word of this to her, eh?'

I gulped back my tears and fumbled for a handkerchief. We moved towards our dinner.

‘He's not a good man, isn't Mr Fleer,' remarked Calamy reflectively. ‘And not a sensible man. I had to read a piece of the Bible to him.' Calamy chuckled. ‘He didn't like that at all.' His sadness had lifted at the memory of Mr Fleer's discomfiture. That he had put to confusion a minister of the gospel, and by reading a passage from his own precious Book to him, evidently struck Calamy as a little comical. ‘D'you remember, Claud, how it says that Jesus stooped down and wrote on the ground? I've often wondered what it was he wrote.'

Before I could answer him—and I was scarcely capable yet of answering him articulately—my mother was upon us, loud with humorous reproaches.

‘You pair of ruffians—what are you gossiping about, and my nice dinner getting cold on the plates!' Suddenly she espied my condition. ‘Why, what's the matter, darling?'

‘Had a fly in his eye,' said Calamy quickly. ‘But it's out now, isn't it, Claud?'

It was the first and only lie that I ever knew him to tell. Was it, I wonder, eagerly recorded against him by Mr Fleer's Celestial Ledger Clerk?

I have said that the fields surrounding Adam Lane were at this period speckled with building plots. But it is time to be more particular. Speaking at a venture, I suppose that I must have been now in my thirteenth year. To me the preliminaries of building were anything but unwelcome. I had no thought for the future, for the time when four parallel rows of red villas should slope down at right angles to the Links Road (as we called it), and a vast green playground be thereby destroyed; nor did I regret the more rural past. It was sufficient for me that, from the very beginning of these operations, stacks of bricks and piles of new white planks began to appear in the nearer fields: appeared and remained,
week after week, unattended and apparently forgotten. The delicious smell of those planks returns to me now: delicious not in itself but for its associations. During the best part of a year, from midsummer to late autumn, one such pile of planks served my happy purpose. We called it ‘the craft'; I was skipper, with Bertie Wiccombe as crew; and together we sailed enchanted seas. Accustomed to the society of my contemporaries at school, on most occasions I couldn't help looking on Bertie Wiccombe, who was two years my junior, as the merest stop-gap. I saw a lot of him, for he lived next door; we could shout to each other over the garden fence. But he was only a kid, I felt; there was no real fun in going about with him; he lacked initiative. He was a fresh-complexioned, fair-haired child, the idol and victim of a doting, hysterical mother. He promised to be like her: already he had her high cheekbones, her abnormally wide bright eyes. He was both fond and mortally afraid of her: a paradox I could by no means understand. Mrs Wiccombe's mother-love took unfortunate forms. When she wasn't smothering the child with endearments and caresses she would beat him savagely, on the slightest pretext. Savagely? But no, that is more than I can vouch for. I only know
that on days when he was late home from playing in the fields, or had torn his clothes, or dared to display a touch of temper, we in our cottage would hear nightmare noises from next door. Feet running to and fro; a bumping and banging; shrill voices; and, finally, the house filling with screams. In the sudden silence that followed, Calamy and my mother would exchange an uneasy glance. And sometimes Calamy would start up out of his chair, as though to interfere. But he always, with a puzzled unhappy look, sat down again. To me it was purely horrible and fantastic. I had never in my life received, by way of corporal punishment, more than an impulsive smack or two. They had no special theories about the matter, Calamy and my mother; no one had told them that solemn punitive beating was inhuman nonsense; they were wise without instruction and almost without thought. When I was troublesome my mother would sometimes quarrel with me, in her childish ingenuous fashion; or Calamy, in support of her, would mildly remonstrate. And that was the end of the matter. The very quarrelling presupposed a friendship, a fundamental equality, not at all impaired by the relationship of mother and son; and as for Calamy's protests, they derived force from his
very mildness and their own infrequency. Good behaviour was taken for granted in our household; and breaches of it, at their worst, were in effect breaches of friendship, condemned because they made for temporary discomfort. My naughtinesses, though possibly numerous, were not sensational; but I cannot doubt that they were at least as grave as Bertie Wiccombe's. Thinking his case over,. I soon came to the conclusion that if Mrs Wiccombe had been my mother I should have run away. Herself I dismissed, briefly, as a madwoman: possibly I was not far wrong. But there is another possibility—which is that Bertie was cunning or craven enough to cry before he was hurt, and that the running and screaming was the beginning and end of the affair. Yet the fear, at least, was in some measure real; and the strange glitter in the woman's eyes was not to be argued away. Some shame or delicacy forbade me to question Bertie himself, and I fancy that the same hesitancy attended Calamy's endeavour to broach the subject to the boy's father. Wiccombe senior was a stout, slow-thinking, quiet fellow, whose features and feelings were hidden away under a black beard. During the day he worked at a sawmill five miles from our village; at night he returned to the bosom of
his excitable family. Excitable—it was his own word. He confided to Calamy that poor Susan was an excitable woman: ‘She'll make herself ill one day, Mr Calamy, with those tempers of her.' Meanwhile, miraculously, she failed to make her husband ill: he went stolidly about his business. And Bertie, the apple of her glittering eye, played with me in the garden, respected my seniority, and helped me navigate my craft.