Leslie Hartley - The Complete Short Stories of L.P. Hartley

Mr. Greenstream stopped at the churchyard gate and stared up at the tower to make out what the objects were which, hanging rather crazily at the corners below the parapet, had looked in the distance like whiskers, and completed the feline impression made by the church. A whiskered church! The idea amused Mr. Greenstream until his watchful tormentor, ever jealous of his carefree moments, prodded him again. With a sigh he entered the porch and listened. No sound. The door opened stiffly to confront him with a pair of doors, green baize this time. He went back and shut the outer door, then the inner ones, and felt he had shut out the world. The church was empty; he had it to himself.

It was years since Mr. Greenstream had been inside a church except on ceremonial occasions or as a sightseer, and he did not quite know what to do. This was a Perpendicular church, light, airy and spacious, under rather than over furnished. The seats were chairs made of wood so pale as to be almost white: they were lashed together with spars, and the whole group, with its criss-cross of vertical and horizontal lines, made an effect that was gay and pretty and in so far as it suggested rigging, faintly nautical.

Mr. Greenstream wandered up the nave but felt a reluctance, for which he could not quite account, to mount the chancel steps; in any case there was little of note there and the east window was evidently modern. Straying back along the north aisle wall he read the monumental inscriptions, black lettering on white marble or white lettering on black marble. Then he came face to face with the stove, an impressive cylinder from which issued a faint crackling. His tour seemed to be over; but he was aware of a feeling of expectancy, as if the church were waiting for him to do something.

‘After all, why not?’ he thought, sinking to his knees. But he could not pray at once—he had lost the habit, he did not know how to begin. Moreover he felt ashamed of coming to claim the benefits of religion when for many years he had ignored its obligations. Such a prayer would be worse than useless; it was an insult; it would put God against him. Then the Thought came with its needle-jab and he waited no longer but prayed vehemently and incoherently for deliverance. But a morbid fear assailed him that it was not enough to think the words, for some of them, perhaps the most operative, might be left out, telescoped or elided by the uncontrollable hurry of his mind, so he repeated his petition out loud. Until he had ceased to speak he did not notice how strange his voice sounded in the empty church, almost as if it did not belong to him. Rising shakily to his feet he blinked, dazzled by the daylight, and stumbled out of the church without a backward look.

Not once on the homeward journey to his narrow house in Midgate was Mr. Greenstream troubled by the Thought. His relief and gratitude were inexpressible; but it was not till the next day that he realized that the visit to Aston Highchurch had been a turning point in his life. Doctors had told him that his great enemy was his morbid sense of guilt. Now, so long as St. Cuthbert’s, Aston Highchurch, stood, he need not fear it.

Fearful yet eager he began to peer down a future in which, thanks to the efficacy of prayer, the desires of his heart would meet with no lasting opposition from the voice of his conscience. He could indulge them to the full. Whatever they were, however bad they were, he need not be afraid that they would haunt him afterwards. The Power whose presence he had felt in church would see to that.

It was a summer evening and the youth of Aston Highchurch would normally have been playing cricket on the village green, but the game fell through because a handful of the regulars had failed to turn up. There was murmuring among the disappointed remnant, and inquiry as to what superior attraction had lured away the defaulters.

‘I know,’ said a snub-nosed urchin, ‘because I heard them talking about it.’

‘Well, tell us, Tom Wignall.’

‘They said I wasn’t to.’

‘Come on, you tell us or . . .’

According to their code a small but appreciable amount of physical torture released the sufferer from further loyalty to his plighted word. After a brief but strident martyrdom the lad, nothing loth, yielded to the importunity of his fellows.

‘It’s about that praying chap.’

‘What, old Greenpants?’

‘Yes. They’ve gone to watch him at it.’

‘Where?’

‘In the tower gallery. Fred Buckland pinched the key when the old man wasn’t looking.’

‘Coo, they’ll cop it if they’re caught.’

‘Why, they aren’t doing no harm. You can’t trespass in a church.’

‘That’s all you know. They haven’t gone there just to watch, neither.’

‘Why, what are they going to do?’

‘Well,’ said Tom Wignall importantly, ‘they’re going to give him a fright. Do you know what he does?’

‘He prays, doesn’t he?’

‘Yes, but he don’t pray to himself. He prays out loud, and he shouts sometimes, and rocks himself about. And he doesn’t pray for his father and mother——’

‘He hasn’t got any, so I’ve heard,’ said an older boy, who, to judge from his caustic tone, seemed to be listening with some impatience to Tom Wignall’s revelations. ‘He’s an orphan.’

‘Anyhow,’ the speaker resumed unabashed, ‘he doesn’t pray for his king or his country, or to be made good or anything like that. He confesses his sins.’

‘Do you mean he’s done a murder?’

‘Fred Buckland couldn’t hear what it was, but it must have been something bad or he wouldn’t have come all this way to confess it.’

This reasoning impressed the audience.

‘Must have been murder,’ they assured each other, ‘or forgery anyhow.’

‘But that isn’t all,’ continued the speaker, intoxicated by the attention he was receiving. ‘He prays for what he didn’t ought.’

‘Why, you can pray for anything you like,’ opined one of the listeners.

‘That you can’t. There’s heaps of things you mustn’t pray for. You mustn’t pray to get rich, for one thing, and (he lowered his voice) you mustn’t pray for anyone to die.’

‘Did he do that?’

‘Fred Buckland said that’s what it sounded like.’

There was a pause.

‘I think the poor chap’s balmy if you ask me,’ said the older boy. ‘I bet his prayers don’t do no one any harm nor him any good either.’

‘That’s where you make a mistake,’ said the spokesman of the party. ‘That’s where you’re wrong. Fred Buckland says he’s got much, much richer these last six months. Why, he’s got a car and a chauffeur and all. Fred Buckland says he wouldn’t be surprised if he’s a millionaire.’

‘You bet he is,’ scoffed the older boy. ‘You bet that when he prayed somebody dropped down dead and left him a million. Sounds likely, doesn’t it?’

The circle of listeners stirred. All the faces broadened with scepticism and one boy took up his bat and played an imaginary forward stroke. Tom Wignall felt that he was losing ground. He was like a bridge-player who has held up his ace too long.

‘Anyhow,’ he said defiantly, ‘Fred Buckland says that church is no place for the likes of him who’ve got rich by praying in a way they ought to be ashamed of. And I tell you, he’s going to give old Greenpants a fright. He’s going to holler down at him from the tower in a terrible deep voice, and Greenpants’ll think it’s God answering him from Heaven, or perhaps the Devil, and he’ll get such a fright he’ll never set foot in Aston again. And good riddance, I say.’

Tom’s own voice rose as he forced into it all the dramatic intensity he could muster. But he had missed his moment. One or two of his companions looked serious and nodded, but the rest, with the unerring instinct of boys for a change of leadership, a shifting of moral ascendancy, threw doubtful glances towards their senior. They were wavering. They would take their cue from him.