On the following Sunday, when the Vicar was making his preparations to go
into the drawing-room for his nap--all the actions of his life were
conducted with ceremony--and Mrs. Carey was about to go upstairs, Philip
asked:
"What shall I do if I'm not allowed to play?"
"Can't you sit still for once and be quiet?"
"I can't sit still till tea-time."
Mr. Carey looked out of the window, but it was cold and raw, and he could
not suggest that Philip should go into the garden.
"I know what you can do. You can learn by heart the collect for the day."
He took the prayer-book which was used for prayers from the harmonium, and
turned the pages till he came to the place he wanted.
"It's not a long one. If you can say it without a mistake when I come in
to tea you shall have the top of my egg."
Mrs. Carey drew up Philip's chair to the dining-room table--they had
bought him a high chair by now--and placed the book in front of him.
"The devil finds work for idle hands to do," said Mr. Carey.
He put some more coals on the fire so that there should be a cheerful
blaze when he came in to tea, and went into the drawing-room. He loosened
his collar, arranged the cushions, and settled himself comfortably on the
sofa. But thinking the drawing-room a little chilly, Mrs. Carey brought
him a rug from the hall; she put it over his legs and tucked it round his
feet. She drew the blinds so that the light should not offend his eyes,
and since he had closed them already went out of the room on tiptoe. The
Vicar was at peace with himself today, and in ten minutes he was asleep.
He snored softly.
It was the Sixth Sunday after Epiphany, and the collect began with the
words: O God, whose blessed Son was manifested that he might destroy the
works of the devil, and make us the sons of God, and heirs of Eternal
life. Philip read it through. He could make no sense of it. He began
saying the words aloud to himself, but many of them were unknown to him,
and the construction of the sentence was strange. He could not get more
than two lines in his head. And his attention was constantly wandering:
there were fruit trees trained on the walls of the vicarage, and a long
twig beat now and then against the windowpane; sheep grazed stolidly in
the field beyond the garden. It seemed as though there were knots inside
his brain. Then panic seized him that he would not know the words by
tea-time, and he kept on whispering them to himself quickly; he did not
try to understand, but merely to get them parrot-like into his memory.
Mrs. Carey could not sleep that afternoon, and by four o'clock she was so
wide awake that she came downstairs. She thought she would hear Philip his
collect so that he should make no mistakes when he said it to his uncle.
His uncle then would be pleased; he would see that the boy's heart was in
the right place. But when Mrs. Carey came to the dining-room and was about
to go in, she heard a sound that made her stop suddenly. Her heart gave a
little jump. She turned away and quietly slipped out of the front-door.
She walked round the house till she came to the dining-room window and
then cautiously looked in. Philip was still sitting on the chair she had
put him in, but his head was on the table buried in his arms, and he was
sobbing desperately. She saw the convulsive movement of his shoulders.
Mrs. Carey was frightened. A thing that had always struck her about the
child was that he seemed so collected. She had never seen him cry. And now
she realised that his calmness was some instinctive shame of showing his
fillings: he hid himself to weep.
Without thinking that her husband disliked being wakened suddenly, she
burst into the drawing-room.
"William, William," she said. "The boy's crying as though his heart would
break."
Mr. Carey sat up and disentangled himself from the rug about his legs.
"What's he got to cry about?"
"I don't know.... Oh, William, we can't let the boy be unhappy. D'you
think it's our fault? If we'd had children we'd have known what to do."
Mr. Carey looked at her in perplexity. He felt extraordinarily helpless.
"He can't be crying because I gave him the collect to learn. It's not more
than ten lines."
"Don't you think I might take him some picture books to look at, William?
There are some of the Holy Land. There couldn't be anything wrong in
that."
"Very well, I don't mind."
Mrs. Carey went into the study. To collect books was Mr. Carey's only
passion, and he never went into Tercanbury without spending an hour or two
in the second-hand shop; he always brought back four or five musty
volumes. He never read them, for he had long lost the habit of reading,
but he liked to turn the pages, look at the illustrations if they were
illustrated, and mend the bindings. He welcomed wet days because on them
he could stay at home without pangs of conscience and spend the afternoon
with white of egg and a glue-pot, patching up the Russia leather of some
battered quarto. He had many volumes of old travels, with steel
engravings, and Mrs. Carey quickly found two which described Palestine.
She coughed elaborately at the door so that Philip should have time to
compose himself, she felt that he would be humiliated if she came upon him
in the midst of his tears, then she rattled the door handle. When she went
in Philip was poring over the prayer-book, hiding his eyes with his hands
so that she might not see he had been crying.
"Do you know the collect yet?" she said.
He did not answer for a moment, and she felt that he did not trust his
voice. She was oddly embarrassed.
"I can't learn it by heart," he said at last, with a gasp.
"Oh, well, never mind," she said. "You needn't. I've got some picture
books for you to look at. Come and sit on my lap, and we'll look at them
together."
Philip slipped off his chair and limped over to her. He looked down so
that she should not see his eyes. She put her arms round him.
"Look," she said, "that's the place where our blessed Lord was born."
She showed him an Eastern town with flat roofs and cupolas and minarets.
In the foreground was a group of palm-trees, and under them were resting
two Arabs and some camels. Philip passed his hand over the picture as if
he wanted to feel the houses and the loose habiliments of the nomads.
"Read what it says," he asked.
Mrs. Carey in her even voice read the opposite page. It was a romantic
narrative of some Eastern traveller of the thirties, pompous maybe, but
fragrant with the emotion with which the East came to the generation that
followed Byron and Chateaubriand. In a moment or two Philip interrupted
her.
"I want to see another picture."
When Mary Ann came in and Mrs. Carey rose to help her lay the cloth.
Philip took the book in his hands and hurried through the illustrations.
It was with difficulty that his aunt induced him to put the book down for
tea. He had forgotten his horrible struggle to get the collect by heart;
he had forgotten his tears. Next day it was raining, and he asked for the
book again. Mrs. Carey gave it him joyfully. Talking over his future with
her husband she had found that both desired him to take orders, and this
eagerness for the book which described places hallowed by the presence of
Jesus seemed a good sign. It looked as though the boy's mind addressed
itself naturally to holy things. But in a day or two he asked for more
books. Mr. Carey took him into his study, showed him the shelf in which he
kept illustrated works, and chose for him one that dealt with Rome. Philip
took it greedily. The pictures led him to a new amusement. He began to
read the page before and the page after each engraving to find out what it
was about, and soon he lost all interest in his toys.
Then, when no one was near, he took out books for himself; and perhaps
because the first impression on his mind was made by an Eastern town, he
found his chief amusement in those which described the Levant. His heart
beat with excitement at the pictures of mosques and rich palaces; but
there was one, in a book on Constantinople, which peculiarly stirred his
imagination. It was called the Hall of the Thousand Columns. It was a
Byzantine cistern, which the popular fancy had endowed with fantastic
vastness; and the legend which he read told that a boat was always moored
at the entrance to tempt the unwary, but no traveller venturing into the
darkness had ever been seen again. And Philip wondered whether the boat
went on for ever through one pillared alley after another or came at last
to some strange mansion.
One day a good fortune befell him, for he hit upon Lane's translation of
The Thousand Nights and a Night. He was captured first by the
illustrations, and then he began to read, to start with, the stories that
dealt with magic, and then the others; and those he liked he read again
and again. He could think of nothing else. He forgot the life about him.
He had to be called two or three times before he would come to his dinner.
Insensibly he formed the most delightful habit in the world, the habit of
reading: he did not know that thus he was providing himself with a refuge
from all the distress of life; he did not know either that he was creating
for himself an unreal world which would make the real world of every day
a source of bitter disappointment. Presently he began to read other
things. His brain was precocious. His uncle and aunt, seeing that he
occupied himself and neither worried nor made a noise, ceased to trouble
themselves about him. Mr. Carey had so many books that he did not know
them, and as he read little he forgot the odd lots he had bought at one
time and another because they were cheap. Haphazard among the sermons and
homilies, the travels, the lives of the Saints, the Fathers, the histories
of the church, were old-fashioned novels; and these Philip at last
discovered. He chose them by their titles, and the first he read was The
Lancashire Witches, and then he read The Admirable Crichton, and then
many more. Whenever he started a book with two solitary travellers riding
along the brink of a desperate ravine he knew he was safe.
The summer was come now, and the gardener, an old sailor, made him a
hammock and fixed it up for him in the branches of a weeping willow. And
here for long hours he lay, hidden from anyone who might come to the
vicarage, reading, reading passionately. Time passed and it was July;
August came: on Sundays the church was crowded with strangers, and the
collection at the offertory often amounted to two pounds. Neither the
Vicar nor Mrs. Carey went out of the garden much during this period; for
they disliked strange faces, and they looked upon the visitors from London
with aversion. The house opposite was taken for six weeks by a gentleman
who had two little boys, and he sent in to ask if Philip would like to go
and play with them; but Mrs. Carey returned a polite refusal. She was
afraid that Philip would be corrupted by little boys from London. He was
going to be a clergyman, and it was necessary that he should be preserved
from contamination. She liked to see in him an infant Samuel.
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