The mind is an intellectual pit, saith the philosopher, and as few as are those who choose to fill it, fewer indeed are the number who succeed in so doing. The Reverend Francis Masser preferred a slow silence to a fast rushing, a noise, and so he sat in his library. All was quiet there. All was still. The books neither moved nor coughed – and nobody called for Mr Masser to show them a miracle or attend to the sick or the dying.
Those who lived in the village of Child Frome preferred not to think about the Church. If a gossip should stop in the street to speak to her fellow gossip, and if both should hear the bells ring in their low tower, one might look at the other and shake her head. “Thik priest be reader”, she would say, and then she would turn aside her head, in a most decided and disgusted manner and spit on the cobbles . . . .
When the bells rang on Sundays, summoning all to hear the Word itself, in God’s chosen place, those who chose to obey their summons would sit together, in rows. St Michael’s seemed a church without age, eternal and unchanging – and the same simple people seemed to sit in it, from one age to the next, facing in the direction of the Cross.
Mr Masser stood in the pulpit, not so very far away from the Holy Cross itself, and spoke of the risen Christ and the bad state of the roads. He wore his black coat with the tell-tale flash of white at the neck. As he spoke, paper rustled; perhaps somebody was trying to read.
Farmer Rudd, for one – maybe a representative one, at that – did not listen to the sermon. He was content simply to sit beside his pretty wife, and sometimes to whisper to her. “Thik wold priest”, he said to Penelope one day, “be speaking.” And no doubt he, too, might have expressed himself as the gossip did in the street, did not a certain proud decorum prevent him from doing so in front of Lady Witting, who sat in the pew in front of him.
The Witting pew was the front pew of the church, and so the Reverend Masser had no difficulty in hearing what Penelope Rudd heard, too, in her right ear. He had been speaking about the roads. Now he coughed, and spoke on another theme.
“For Christ’s pity stints not at the sins of the flesh”, he said. Farmer Rudd looked down. “And if a man’s soul should fall ever so far into darkness” – and here he looked at the farmer’s wife, as if he could not help himself – “into the black pit itself, then yea, even there shall Christ’s mercy succour him.”
“’Tis plain, then”, a loud whisper tried to say quietly. “’Tis plain as print on thik page what God do think of they sinners!”
The next day, as the day after Sunday often is, turned out to be a Monday. Mrs Rudd found that she did not wish to remain at the farm when the sea was nearby, just over the hill and beyond a wind-raked field, that was full of nothing growing, and whispered continually, in a much louder voice even than her husband, about the futility of life and the awful splendour of death. She knew that what had been said in the street, and in St Michael’s church, might be repeated to the sea, which was sometimes grateful to learn of the state of things in Child Frome.
On the beach, where the waves crashed and died, wave after wave, she told the great, grey sea what she had heard. What was it that drove Mr Masser into his library? She did not know. He sometimes looked at her. He did not tell her what he was reading.
“It must be something very terrible”, she said.
“Terrible!”, said the sea . . . .
Sometimes a summer will pass quickly and become a winter. The leaves will wither, and the harvest will be gathered in, before one has set one’s affairs in order for the shorter days and longer, colder nights.
“Where is Judith?”, Mrs Rudd asked Tommy, her youngest son, when he ran into the kitchen one day, to wash his hands before supper. Tommy only ever shouted words, and they simply had to be blurted out, in a great hurry.
“Vicarage!”, he cried, and ran out.
From the kitchen window, Penelope could see her husband’s large form in the near meadow, an arm of it outstretched, directing the hired men towards the barn. She knew he would be coming in soon, hungry and, in all likelihood, impatient for his dinner. The child who failed to be ready to greet him at the table would not be treated to a kind, chiding word, but beaten at once, and with the full force of his patriarchal arm.
The farmhands moved away from the farmer. Since Mary, the farm’s only servant, had not yet returned from the town market, seven miles away, Penelope decided that she must go to the vicarage herself, and bring home her daughter. “And as I go”, she said, “I may consider the passing beauty of the day.”
A noble and harmless undertaking such as walking, and admiring the trees as we walk, may make us joyful, as busier moments in the day seldom do. Mrs Rudd walked happily, and although the vicarage was not far from the Rudds’ farm, she, in no time, shed her anxiety and put on, in its place, a mood of perfect serenity, that could not be harmed by even the toying of the wind, that tugged softly at her hat. She stepped to the gate, and opened it. There was Judith, walking towards her.
“Father Masser has been kind to me”, she said, a little crumpled in her clothes, as such young women sometimes are. Judith Rudd liked nothing better than to skip and dance. Her dress was thin and prettily white.
Her mother looked at her carefully. She said: “Perhaps you should go home before your father does”.
Judith skipped away.
The vicarage could not have been a more inviting place. Ivy embraced it gently, and the chief aspect of the house was southerly. Before she followed her daughter, Mrs Rudd decided she would look as carefully at the vicar as she had done at Judith. She wished to thank Mr Masser for making the girl as happy as she herself, at that moment, was. She forgot her husband in this happy wish. She went to the door, and it opened.
When a room is a quiet one, and does not admit noise readily, those who enter it often sense its demeanour and do not boast loudly about a fine day’s business or halloo their friend who sits at the other end of it. Mrs Rudd came respectfully into the room, at the housekeeper’s invitation. Father Masser was in it, sitting at his desk. He stood to greet her, and seemed to hide something, hurriedly, as he did so. As she wished him to, she realized, he looked at her, but only quickly, and then he looked at the carpet – a soft material that muffled the boots of even the heaviest fellow, should one come in need of Christian guidance.
Penelope realized that she wished them to look at one another, only he would not do so. “He is ashamed”, she thought, though she did not know why.
Gossip is sly, and fills the mind quicker than the holy rays of kindness and hope. Those who met in the Child Frome street wished to damn – especially in winter, which was now come. It seemed to Penelope Rudd that it had been a long time since she had spoken to Father Masser and thanked him for his attentions to her dear daughter, who lacked friends in the village. Now it was well known that Judith went to the vicarage every day, wearing the same white dress. The news had spread even as far as Madderdown Manor, a few miles inland, where Lady Witting said a most unladylike word in response to it.
The truth about the priest and the farmer’s daughter, one dressed in black and the other in white, was not difficult to make out. Lord Witting frowned severely when his footman explained to him, bending from the waist, how matters now stood at the Child Frome vicarage. The living was Lord Witting’s to give and take away as he pleased. He did not like a silent man, especially one who called on the rich to adjust their earthly condition in order that they might more easily, when the time came, enter the kingdom of heaven. After the butler had spoken, it was said that the Mr Masser would lose his home and his occupation if he continued to entertain young, unwed ladies in the suspicious silence of his library.
Woe be to all gossips. In the library itself, yea even there, the word of the lord – the lord of the manor, that is, Henry Witting, the third Witting to be called Henry, and easily the most red-faced – did penetrate the stillness. The books looked sadly down on their master. Perhaps he would leave them to at the mercy of a rude successor, who, if it were John Audley of Hodston, would be no tolerant ruler of their liberal opinions.
Those who came to St Michael’s were fewer now than they had been in the glorious days of June and July. The empty pews rebuked Mr Masser and asked him: what is it that you do in your library with that pleasant young woman called Judith?
Sitting in his library, however, Mr Masser seemed, to his books, to be sad in a calm way only; it was mid-December, and he wore the vestments that suited his calling, and like some poor yet fleshed-out shadow, he sat in their midst, and did something. His hand moved, and his attention did not waver. It grew dark, and the shadow worked on, beneath lamplight. Mr Masser had a calling . . . .
The next day, Judith walked to the vicarage. She had a message from her mother for her friend, the vicar, and it was a pleasant one to carry on this frosty morning, with the sun’s beams bright, despite the season.
At the house, there was nobody to let her in. She went to open the library door, but it had been opened already; the books had all tumbled on to the floor, and the big window at the end of the room was, like the door it had watched so carefully and for so many years, open. On the library desk, something flickered – it was a piece of paper.
Judith looked at the paper – and it looked back at her. On it, she recognized her own face, rendered carefully in pencil – a grey shade that ceded to white where her forehead appeared – and she saw the artist had signed his name, as he always did, only this time he had written other words, too. “The silence calls me away”, a neat, black hand had written. “Goodbye, Judith.”
And underneath this fine piece of portraiture, drawn from memory, were the months’ worth of similar works, all innocently, purely kept in the desk drawer until this moment.
There was also a gold-crested letter, signed “Witting”, which contained the name of Mr Masser’s replacement. Judith turned her face to the wall . . . .
The waves smiled at Francis Masser. “You have sinned!” they cried happily.
“I hear the grave is silent”, he said.
“Ours is perpetually busy”, they replied. “Yet a man may easily find silence there.”
Mr Masser walked into the sea.
~
Plain as print by PJ Carnehan was read by Stephen Butterton at the Liars' League Black & White event at The Wheatsheaf, London on Tuesday 11 August 2009
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