God's Sparrows. Philip Child
squeezed her hand and said: “You ought to know.”
“My father used to say ‘the sweetest fruit comes after frost.’”
“Well — perhaps. That is, if things only happened to one and not in one.… I shouldn’t care what happened if only Joanna —”
But Maud, forcing herself to smile, shook her head at him.
Chapter II
I
The christening was to be held on the afternoon of Murdo’s arrival.
Summer stole into the gloomy drawing room, bringing to those inside the hum of insects and the fanning of a light breeze. An open French window framed a picture of ladies in muslin dresses “looking at the garden” and of the two boys skylarking on the lawn.
The room in which three of the last children of the nineteenth century were to be made children of God embodied the dim gentility of the Victorian age. Here the more Victorian members of the family had by now assembled. The Burnets were contriving to be subtly at home to the Thatchers from New England, whom for the first time they beheld as a clan within a clan in their own territory. No one versed in the delicate antagonisms of “in-laws ” could have failed to observe that this was a family gathering.
About the Thatchers there was a bred-in-the-bone stiffness; they were too much in earnest, too desirous to “do what’s right” to thread their way with finesse through the iridescent web of the social relations. To a Burnet — to Charles Burnet, for instance, who moved carelessly in flannels and blazer through a phalanx of formal cutaways — there was a locked-up look about the expressions of the Thatchers. The faces of the Thatcher women were all that women’s faces should be, gentle and solicitous; and yet always with a shade of obstinacy, of reserved opinion. Studiously affable, they mingled warily with the Burnets, evincing an interest, more than usually proprietary, in Pen’s children, as if subtly to underline the fact that the children were, after all, Thatchers. Their talk was of the family, the never stale epic of Thatcher births, marriages, and deaths.
Several of them were clustered near the fireplace, drawing, perhaps unconsciously, a feeling of family solidarity from the photographs of Thatchers past and present who gazed uncompromisingly from the mantelpiece upon this Burnet room. There Pen was talking to his eldest brother Diodate who had come from Ohio for the christening. Diodate sat in silence, making his presence felt, though he uttered no word, by the decisive severity of his attention. In him the inherited puritan earnestness, informing a more robust nature than Pen’s, had settled solidly into an upright practicality. He began to speak in a deep voice that boomed sepulchrally upon an instantly attentive circle, patting his knee at each point made. “They have — too many — missionaries (pat) — seem to think — they can’t get along without more (pat) — so I don’t help them — when they come to me (decisive pat) — I say let them get together and fight the devil at home (pat) — if that’s what they really want to do” (hands folded, knees crossed: full stop). The ladies confronted with indubitable male logic, fluttered and hastened to agree.… Something very likeable about Diodate: ability, honesty, kindliness.
His son Quentin, too shy to join his cousins on the lawn, stood near his father, swaying backward and forward on his heels and pretending that the Thatchers on the mantelpiece (especially the whiskered ones in the daguerreotypes) were a jury — no, better than that, were congress, whom he was swaying by a speech of great eloquence. There was a war — it was like the Civil War. The land was torn with strife and no one knew what to do. Then he, Quentin Thatcher.… Then after the war, the plaudits of his grateful countrymen surrounding him whenever he stirred abroad in his state carriage, preceded by a glittering escort of cavalry, brought tears to his eyes. It was tremendous.… Diodate exclaimed: “Quentin, stop mooning! … He’s a strange boy, Penuel. Half the time he does not seem to hear what you say.” The boy was like his mother, Diodate thought, lovable but not well-balanced . Emotional, not solid.… He had the Thatcher conscience, though.
But the very pith of the Thatchers was the old lady who sat on a horsehair sofa beside the pianola. There might be fewer Thatchers than Burnets present, but at no assemblage attended by Great-Aunt Joanna could the family be held inadequately represented. The repository of Thatcher lore, no baptism, marriage, or funeral could have taken place without her cognizance. She sat stiffly with her hands folded like talons over her ear trumpet, which she was holding in the lap of a formless dress of some black stuff that made little Joanna, who could not take her eyes from her godmother-to-be , think of “my Jewish gaberdine.” It was because of little Joanna that she had stirred from the old Thatcher house on the Connecticut river where, the last of her generation, she passed her days alone, utterly determined to die as she had lived without being “looked after” by a companion or even a servant.
Euphemia Burnet, thinking that the old lady, because of her tranquil attitude, would be a suitable subject for her own histrionics, set sail for the pianola and dropped anchor with the air of having at last reached port after a long voyage. Composing her features to an air of mysticism, she addressed Great-Aunt Joanna in the brassy voice of one summoning spirits from the vasty deep or addressing the very deaf.
“I am so glad to speak with one of the same generation as my dear father, Sir Rae Burnet,” she announced, carefully articulating each syllable. “I am strongly of the opinion, dear Miss Thatcher,” she went on, “that we do not have time really to live nowadays. No time to ‘loaf and invite the soul’ as your great poet Walt Whitman puts it. I think that is so important. Do you not agree? Now baptism, for example. I have vainly urged my brother-in-law to hold the service in the open air where the great words of the ritual could come to one reinforced by the beauty of nature and where one could linger over those magnificent phrases and savour them. Children’s little minds are so open to nature’s beauty, don’t you think?” With a studied wave of her hand Euphemia indicated Dan and Alastair who were lingering on the lawn till the last possible moment because of a conviction that the Thatcher aunts and uncles were hearty kissers.
No longer hearing a buzzing in her ear, Great-Aunt Joanna perceived that she had been asked a question and smiled blandly. Sensitive of her deafness, she had a disconcerting habit of not using her ear trumpet when she thought the conversation would not interest her.
But a smile was all Euphemia needed and she plunged into her latest religiosity (she was always titillating her imagination with new cults). The children, she said, ought to be christened amid nature’s foison and under heaven’s sun — an influence so favourable to young and impressionable spirits. Within an old house like this, haunted by who knew what malign effluences of people who formerly dwelt there.
“Whutt?” asked the old lady. “Whutt did you say?”
“Malign effluences ,” shouted Euphemia. “I am referring, Miss Thatcher, to the malign animal magnetism of an old house! In an old house who knows what malign effluences —”
Great-Aunt Joanna had caught the single word “animal,” and fixing Euphemia with a look of uncomprehending benevolence, she began to tell of an experience she had had downtown in Wellington. For several moments both spoke together, but the old lady had the placid self-sufficiency of a natural phenomenon, of a river or a waterfall, whereas Euphemia, an artist, needed an audience. Charles and Murdo Burnet, attracted by Euphemia’s struggle to be heard, came up in time to witness her discomfiture. One of those horseless wagons — those contraptions ! said the old lady, had spattered her with mud. She had marched out into the traffic and seized a policeman by the sleeve and made him blow his whistle.
Charles seized the ear trumpet, and putting it to Aunt Joanna’s ear, shouted: “What did you tell him, Miss Thatcher?”
“Whutt? I said to him, ‘Young man, in my country we respect old folks!’”
“Good for you!” said Charles.
“Don’t shout!” rebuked Aunt Joanna, “the trumpet isn’t deaf.”
“My sister Euphemia,” said Charles mischievously, “thinks christenings should be held out of doors. That’s how the Druids did it. Euphemia