Complete Works of Thomas Hardy (Illustrated) (923 page)

“To church on Sundays. H’m. She rather exaggerates her travels, to my thinking. I’ve been rector here thirteen years, and I have certainly never seen her at church in my time.”

“A wicked old woman. What can she think of herself for such deception!”

“She didn’t know you belonged here when she said it, and could find out the untruth of her story. I warrant she wouldn’t have said it to me!” And the rector chuckled.

On reflection the curate felt that this was decidedly a case for his ministrations, and on the first spare morning he strode across to the cottage beyond the ruin. He found its occupant of course at home.

“Drawing picters again?” she asked, looking up from the hearth, where she was scouring the fire-dogs.

“No. I come on more important matters, Mrs Chundle. I am the new curate of this parish.”

“You said you was last time. And after you had told me and went away I said to myself, he’ll be here again sure enough, hang me if I didn’t. And here you be.”

“Yes. I hope you don’t mind?”

“Oh, no. You find us a roughish lot, I make no doubt?”

“Well, I won’t go into that. But I think it was a very culpable — unkind thing of you to tell me you came to church every Sunday, when I find you’ve not been seen there for years.”

“Oh — did I tell ‘ee that?”

“You certainly did.”

“Now I wonder what I did that for?”

“I wonder too.”

“Well, you could ha’ guessed, after all, that I didn’t come to any service. Lord, what’s the good o’ my lumpering all the way to church and back again, when I’m as deaf as a plock? Your own common sense ought to have told ‘ee that ‘twas but a figure o’ speech, seeing you as a pa’son.”

“Don’t you think you could hear the service if you were to sit close to the reading-desk and pulpit?”

“I’m sure I couldn’t. O no — not a word. Why I couldn’t hear anything even at that time when Isaac Coggs used to cry the Amens out loud beyond anything that’s done nowadays, and they had the barrel-organ for the tunes — years and years agone, when I was stronger in my narves than now.”

“H’m — I’m sorry. There’s one thing I could do, which I would with pleasure, if you’ll use it. I could get you an ear-trumpet. Will you use it?”

“Ay, sure. That I woll. I don’t care what I use — ’tis all the same to me.”

“And you’ll come?”

“Yes. I may as well go there as bide here, I suppose.”

The ear-trumpet was purchased by the zealous young man, and the next Sunday, to the great surprise of the parishioners when they arrived, Mrs Chundle was discovered in the front seat of the nave of Kingscreech Church, facing the rest of the congregation with an unmoved countenance.

She was the centre of observation through the whole morning service. The trumpet, elevated at a high angle, shone and flashed in the sitters’ eyes

as the chief object in the sacred edifice.

The curate could not speak to her that morning, and called the next day to inquire the result of the experiment. As soon as she saw him in the distance she began shaking her head.

“No; no;” she said decisively as he approached. “I knowed ‘twas all nonsense.”

“What?”

“ ‘Twasn’t a mossel o’ good, and so I could have told ‘ee before. A wasting your money in jimcracks upon a’ old ‘ooman like me.”

“You couldn’t hear? Dear me — how disappointing.”

“You might as well have been mouthing at me from the top o’ Creech Barrow.”

“That’s unfortunate.”

“I shall never come no more — never — to be made such a fool of as that again.”

The curate mused. “I’ll tell you what, Mrs Chundle. There’s one thing more to try, and only one. If that fails I suppose we shall have to give it up. It is a plan I have heard of, though I have never myself tried it; it’s having a sound-tube fixed, with its lower mouth in the seat immediately below the pulpit, where you would sit, the tube running up inside the pulpit with its upper end opening in a bell-mouth just beside the book-board. The voice of the preacher enters the bellmouth, and is carried down directly to the listener’s ear. Do you understand?”

“Exactly.”

“And you’ll come, if I put it up at my own expense?”

“Ay, I suppose. I’ll try it, e’en though I said I wouldn’t. I may as well do that as do nothing, I reckon.”

The kind-hearted curate, at great trouble to himself, obtained the tube and had it fixed vertically as described, the upper mouth being immediately under the face of whoever should preach, and on the following Sunday morning it was to be tried. As soon as he came from the vestry the curate perceived to his satisfaction Mrs Chundle in the seat beneath, erect and at attention, her head close to the lower orifice of the sound-pipe, and a look of great complacency that her soul required a special machinery to save it, while other people’s could be saved in a commonplace way. The rector read the prayers from the desk on the opposite side, which part of the service Mrs Chundle could follow easily enough by the help of the prayer-book; and in due course the curate mounted the eight steps into the wooden octagon, gave out his text, and began to deliver his discourse.

It was a fine frosty morning in early winter, and he had not got far with his sermon when he became conscious of a steam rising from the bell-mouth of the tube, obviously caused by Mrs Chundle’s breathing at the lower end, and it was accompanied by a suggestion of onion-stew. However he preached on awhile, hoping it would cease, holding in his left hand his finest cambric handkerchief kept especially for Sunday morning services. At length, no longer able to endure the odour, he lightly dropped the handkerchief into the bell of the tube, without stopping for a moment the eloquent flow of his words; and he had the satisfaction of feeling himself in comparatively pure air.

He heard a fidgeting below; and presently there arose to him over the pulpit-edge a hoarse whisper: “The pipe’s chokt!”

“Now, as you will perceive, my brethren,” continued the curate, unheeding the interruption; “by applying this test to ourselves, our discernment of — ”

“The pipe’s chokt!” came up in a whisper yet louder and hoarser.

“Our discernment of actions as morally good, or indifferent, will be much quickened, and we shall be materially helped in our — ”

Suddenly came a violent puff of warm wind, and he beheld his handkerchief rising from the bell of the tube and floating to the pulpit-floor. The little boys in the gallery laughed, thinking it a miracle. Mrs Chundle had, in fact, applied her mouth to the bottom end, blown with all her might, and cleared the tube. In a few seconds the atmosphere of the pulpit became as before, to the curate’s great discomfiture. Yet stop the orifice again he dared not, lest the old woman should make a still greater disturbance and draw the attention of the congregation to this unseemly situation.

“If you carefully analyze the passage I have quoted,” he continued in somewhat uncomfortable accents, “you will perceive that it naturally suggests three points for consideration — ”

(“It’s not onions: it’s peppermint,” he said to himself)

“Namely, mankind in its unregenerate state — ”

(“And cider.”)

“The incidence of the law, and loving kindness or grace, which we will now severally consider — ”

(“And pickled cabbage. What a terrible supper she must have made!”)

“Under the twofold aspect of external and internal consciousness.”

Thus the reverend gentleman continued strenuously for perhaps five minutes longer: then he could stand it no more. Desperately thrusting his thumb into the hole he drew the threads of his distracted plug. But he stuck to the hole, and brought his sermon to a premature close.

He did not call on Mrs Chundle the next week, a slight cooling of his zeal for her spiritual welfare being manifest; but he encountered her at the house of another cottager whom he was visiting; and she immediately addressed him as a partner in the same enterprize.

“I could hear beautiful!” she said. “Yes; every word! Never did I know such a wonderful machine as that there pipe. But you forgot what you was doing once or twice, and put your handkercher on the top o’ en, and stopped the sound a bit. Please not to do that again, for it makes me lose a lot. Howsomever, I shall come every Sunday morning reg’lar now, please God.”

The curate quivered internally.

“And will ye come to my house once in a while and read to me?”

“Of course.”

Surely enough the next Sunday the ordeal was repeated for him. In the evening he told his trouble to the rector. The rector chuckled.

“You’ve brought it upon yourself” he said. “You don’t know this parish so well as I. You should have left the old woman alone.”

“I suppose I should!”

“Thank Heaven, she thinks nothing of my sermons, and doesn’t come when I preach. Ha, ha!”

“Well,” said the curate somewhat ruffled, “I must do something. I cannot stand this. I shall tell her not to come.”

“You can hardly do that.”

“And I’ve half-promised to go and read to her. But — I shan’t go.”

“She’s probably forgotten by this time that you promised.”

A vision of his next Sunday in the pulpit loomed horridly before the young man, and at length he determined to escape the experience. The pipe should be taken down. The next morning he gave directions, and the removal was carried out.

A day or two later a message arrived from her, saying that she wished to see him. Anticipating a terrific attack from the irate old woman he put off going to her for a day, and when he trudged out towards her house on the following afternoon it was in a vexed mood. Delicately nurtured man as he was he had determined not to re-erect the tube, and hoped he might hit on some new modus vivendi, even if at the any inconvenience to Mrs Chundle, in a situation that had become intolerable as it was last week.

“Thank Heaven, the tube is gone,” he said to himself as he walked; and nothing will make me put it up again!”

On coming near he saw to his surprise that the calico curtains of the cottage windows were all drawn. He went up to the door, which was ajar; and a little girl peeped through the opening.

“How is Mrs Chundle?” he asked blandly.

“She’s dead, sir” said the girl in a whisper.

“Dead? ... Mrs Chundle dead?”

“Yes, sir.”

A woman now came. “Yes, ‘tis so, sir. She went off quite sudden-like about two hours ago. Well, you see, sir, she was over seventy years of age, and last Sunday she was rather late in starting for church, having to put her bit o’ dinner ready before going out; and was very anxious to be in time. So she hurried overmuch, and runned up the hill, which at her time of life she ought not to have done. It upset her heart, and she’s been poorly all the week since, and that made her send for ‘ee. Two or three times she said she hoped you would come soon, as you’d promised to, and you were so staunch and faithful in wishing to do her good, that she knew ‘twas not by your own wish you didn’t arrive. But she would not let us send again, as it might trouble ‘ee too much, and there might be other poor folks needing you. She worried to think she might not be able to listen to ‘ee next Sunday, and feared you’d be hurt at it, and think her remiss. But she was eager to hear you again later on. However, ‘twas ordained otherwise for the poor soul, and she was soon gone. ‘I’ve found a real friend at last,’ she said. ‘He’s a man in a thousand. He’s not ashamed of a’ old woman, and he holds that her soul is worth saving as well as richer people’s.’ She said I was to give you this.”

It was a small folded piece of paper, directed to him and sealed with a thimble. On opening it he found it to be what she called her will, in which she had left him her bureau, case-clock, settle, four-post to bedstead, and framed sampler — in fact all the furniture of any account that she possessed.

The curate went out, like Peter at the cock-crow. He was a meek young man, and as he went his eyes were wet. When he reached a lonely place in the lane he stood still thinking, and kneeling down in the dust of the road rested his elbow in one hand and covered his face with the other. Thus he remained some minute or so, a black shape on the hot white of the sunned trackway; till he rose, brushed the knees of his trousers, and walked on.

THE END.

The Unconquerable

(written with Florence Dugdale-Hardy)

I

There were times when Philip Fadelle acknowledged to himself with a sense of amusement not untinged with bitterness that even death had scarce succeeded in tempering the force of that inflexible will which he had ever recognised as an essential part of the being of his friend Roger Wingate. From the time when they were schoolboys together it had been a goad to urge him into paths whither he would not, the more effective in that it was wielded with the semblance of good-fellowship.  The compelling pressure on his arm had been so much the friendly grip of one whose mastery of circumstance has given him the right to hale his friend, by the hair if need be, into ways of prosperity, that now when these fingers were cold and relaxed the moral force remained as potent as ever.

Among other things he remembered that, when he had spoken or rather hinted, of his intention to ask Gertrude Norton to be his wife, this same good friend had revealed the fact that there would be rivalry between them, but in mitigation, he had dwelt insistingly, his hand meanwhile pressing Philip’s shoulder somewhat more heavily than usual, upon the fact that Gertrude Norton had been framed by Nature, obviously, to be the wife of himself, the astute and rising young politician, rather than to be the divinity of the struggling man of letters.  Upon this occasion, Fadelle was glad to remember, he had refused to grant the premisses, not that this was of great moment, seeing that some weeks later Roger Wingate was the accepted suitor of the girl whose gay looks and bounding spirits had seemed to merit some orbit of their own, instead of suffering eclipse by the luminous and self-sufficient personality of a too eminent husband.

He remembered also, with less of gratitude, that if he had acted more promptly and had omitted to confide in his friend, all might have gone differently.  When, at length, he had decided to go to her he had broken his journey to linger irresolutely a day or two in an old Cathedral town, within the peaceful close and under the shadow of one of the most notable piles of Mediaeval architecture in England.  His dallying had led to his arrival at the home of the woman he wished to make his wife a few hours after her engagement to Roger Wingate.