Chapter XXIX

Viola thought it the largest wardrobe she had ever seen; the largest, the ugliest, and the most shining.

It hung over all the other furniture as a monstrous Royal Museum hangs over the meaner dwelling places unfortunate enough to surround it. It was not only hideous, it was dwarfing. Viola confronted it with compressed lips and lifted eyebrows. She saw in its bright polished surface the whole of her future. She would always have things like this, in her new life—expensive, shining objects which she wouldn’t like.

Reggie stood beside her expectant and gratified.

‘This is a really good thing,’ he explained, ‘I thought it would do for our own room. It costs a hundred guineas, and I think it’s worth it.’

‘It is indeed, sir,’ said the shopman respectfully. ‘We consider it one of our finest articles.’

‘It was worth a hundred guineas,’ Viola said to herself, ‘but it wasn’t worth anything else. It certainly wasn’t worth a thought.

‘It’s so large,’ she objected aloud. ‘We should have to let it out in flats, and I should feel so terribly overlooked if I woke up face to face with it in the morning.’

‘Well, we’ve got to have a wardrobe,’ said Reggie patiently. He had been patient several times already, because Viola had been persistently unsatisfactory.

She had not taken a proper interest in what he showed her; she asked if they couldn’t order things in lumps without looking at them, and when he had made her look at them she had seemed to fade away into something unsubstantial.

She had, earlier in the day, expressed one or two personal preferences for weird things, but Reggie wasn’t going to have anything weird in the house.

He knew exactly what he wanted, and Viola obviously didn’t—she only knew what she didn’t want.

Reggie wished to have his furniture a little better, a little more expensive, and generally a little larger than other people’s; but of course the same kind of furniture.

He was quite willing to have beautiful objects if they weren’t queer.

‘I don’t want this wardrobe,’ said Viola with unusual finality. ‘I don’t want it at all!’

She had ceased to see it as a wardrobe. It became instead a polished mirror of the future. In it she saw her mother-in-law, a stout, good-looking woman with just the right jewels, hair, and finger-nails a little too conscious of them, and of her religion, which didn’t interfere with them, but was extremely high. She had been brought up a Nonconformist in a small provincial town, but it was quite wonderful how she had got on in London.

All Viola’s new sisters-in-law appeared in its polished surface, successfully married to city men, and one even more successfully to a Lord. Viola saw their fine pink children, their firm, fixed ideas. You always knew just what they thought of the Government, food, education and religion, and just what kind of places they would go to in the summer.

If it wasn’t Buxton it would be Harrogate; and if it wasn’t Harrogate it was Eastbourne, but it was always a place full of ozone and expensive hotels, where every one had the same ideas.

In the end, Viola thought, they would have the same tombstones, but they would have the same ideas until the tombstones came, fastened inflexibly over them, like these wide marble slabs which made the bare idea of resurrection incredible. It was a mistake to suppose the last trump would rouse Reggie’s relations, unless it was blown by a butler and they thought it was the dinner bell.

She turned away from the dreadful picture of her enveloped future to her young, handsome lover, but in his eyes she divined the same spirit; he had been pouring it into her all day on the torrent of his affections. She couldn’t quite have said what the spirit was, but it seemed to stand for the pressure of all the material world. Viola had always, from time to time, secretly rebelled against the material world, but she had never felt a rebellion as sharp as this.

‘It is guaranteed to keep its polish, madam,’ the shopman remarked persuasively.

‘Oh, yes, I know, I know,’ said Viola a little wildly. ‘But it hasn’t any shape; or if it has, it’s like a mausoleum without windows.’

‘Oh, come, Viola,’ Reggie objected, ‘it is exactly the same shape as any other wardrobe.’

‘I won’t have it in my room,’ said Viola desperately, with the finality of breaking glass.

The shopman turned discretely away, and Reggie met Viola’s eyes with astonished hostility. He grasped in a flash that they were in the middle of a crisis, one of those unexpected, important battlefields of love and sex in which somebody was going to get their own way at the expense of somebody else.

Reggie was an experienced hand in a crisis; he never gave way, and he never spluttered. No one could manage a nervous horse or an angry workman better.

All ignorant and weak creatures who based their opposition to Reggie on the intensity of their emotion, found him easily their master.

But Reggie needed to have a good deal of power behind him, and he was conscious that Viola’s small, pale face, set against him, robbed him of half his force. He felt all the agonised ferocity of unshared passion, and it made him want to shake Viola or to shout at her.

She stood there so maddeningly aloof, so lovely, so inciting, and such an obstacle to what she incited. But Reggie quickly controlled every feeling in him except that of his habitual mastery; it would never do to let her see she could get her own way by showing temper.

‘My dear child,’ he said quietly, ‘you want your tea. I think we’d much better take this wardrobe.’ He turned to the shopman. ‘You may put this down on our list,’ he said with admirable coolness.

He knew Viola wouldn’t make a scene before the shopman, and she didn’t. She didn’t even turn away from the wardrobe. For quite a perceptible moment she went on looking at it. But when Reggie said, ‘Come along old girl, and have some tea,’ she acted with curious decision.

‘I am going home now,’ Viola said quietly. ‘I don’t want any tea.’ But as Reggie prepared to follow her into the motor she put up a small, detaining hand and said to the footman, ‘John, you need not hold the door open, Mr. Ainley is not coming back with me.’

Reggie lifted his alert eyebrows and wondered if this was a moment for a further lesson in mastery. But there was none of the weakness of provocation in the eyes which met his unflinchingly.

‘I am dismissed, then?’ he asked in a low voice. ‘But I shall see you to-morrow—you are going to Clare’s?’

Viola’s slight inclination of the head might have been taken for consent, or it might equally have been a sign to John to shut the door and return to his seat. She gave no other sign before the motor slipped off into Piccadilly.

It was an unsatisfactory stage in a quarrel for a parting, and Reggie was hardly sure whether to consider it finished or not. Viola had not smiled, but on the other hand Reggie had the wardrobe down on the list.

Mrs. Egerton met Viola in the hall.

‘You were so late, dear,’ she explained, ‘that I gave you up for tea and came home, and now you look exhausted. You’ve not forgotten that we all go to Clare’s to-morrow. She’s the new sister who has the pink pearls, isn’t she?’

Viola’s eyes met her mother’s with precisely the same fixed opposition Reggie had decided to override. ‘I am not going to Clare’s to-morrow,’ she said in a low voice. ‘I want to stay quietly at home.’

Mrs. Egerton’s lovely wondering eyes wavered for a moment, but they showed no desire for mastery. On the contrary, they revealed nothing but an access of maternal tenderness.

‘You’re tired, dearest,’ she murmured.

‘I want to be alone,’ said Viola, speaking as dispassionately as a girl on the verge of tears could manage to speak.

‘I think you are very wise,’ said her mother soothingly. ‘Shopping is terribly exhausting, and a quiet Sunday all by yourself is just what you need. Of course Reggie will be broken-hearted, and Clare very disappointed. It is never a good thing to disappoint one’s new relations-in-law. But no doubt you’ve had it all out with Reggie already?’

‘No,’ Viola admitted, ‘I don’t want to have it out. He’d make a fuss. I don’t want to argue about it. I want to be left alone.’

‘But of course,’ agreed her mother, ‘nothing could be more simple and natural. Go and lie down, darling. I will explain to Reggie.’

Mrs. Egerton’s explanations were not those which Viola would herself have given, but they made everything seem more simple and natural; everything—except a curious, hard, new sensation in Viola’s own heart. Something very tender and sensitive in Viola had hardened, as all sensitive things harden when they are handled by force.

It was curiously thrilling to find herself alone for Sunday. Viola could not remember that she had ever been really alone before. Harry had rushed in at the last moment with a hurried explanation and an indulgent pat. He had been supposed to be spending the Sunday in town, but he hadn’t really meant to, and his explanation was more perfunctory than his pat. It left Viola wonderfully free.

She wandered about the house after a silent, lonely breakfast, asking herself what she was going to do with her splendid, empty hours? She certainly wasn’t going to see any of her friends, that would spoil it all and drag her back into the circle of wardrobes. She thought she would like to do something quite different, only when she sat down with the _Observer_ and a sealyham puppy she couldn’t quite think what different things there were to do. She felt she was being influenced by the house, the distant servants, who would expect her to go to church, and even the sealyham puppy, whose only idea was the hackneyed one of a Sunday walk in the Park.

It was with a strange dart of relief that Viola remembered Poplar. Why not go to Poplar and hear Jim Barton preach?

She couldn’t take the motor because it was Sunday, but there must be some other way of getting to Poplar, though it was strangely difficult when you had a motor to envisage any other methods of getting about. She would like to hear that odd man again, who seemed to think that none of the things mattered which Viola had been brought up to believe were the only things that mattered.

If it were really true they didn’t matter, he ought to be able to suggest substitutes.

Viola rang the bell and asked John how you got to Poplar.

John most conveniently had an aunt who lived in Poplar, so that he could suggest without hesitation the tube, and then a tram; you took the tram from a mysterious place called the ‘Lyre,’ which turned out, with apologies from John for mentioning it, to be the name of a public house; and when Viola said, ‘But, John, couldn’t I take a taxi from the Lyre, or whatever it is called?’ John coughed as if he were amused, and said, ‘Well, of course, you could, if you ’appened to see one passing.’

Viola realised, after she had braved the fairly simple problem of the tube and found herself outside the unaccountable Lyre, that taxis do not pass in Poplar, unless they are moving rapidly away from it.

It was a different world—a large, full world, with a big, broad road to move about on, driven into by a network of small and knife-like cuttings, brimming over with unexpectedly dishevelled life. All its inhabitants were completely unlike Viola. She felt herself hemmed in and surrounded by fried fish and feathers, by loud, unusual voices, and a certain openness of casual mirth. These people had their rules, their emotions, and even their privacies, but they were jostled and infinitely less private than the people Viola knew. They might have been a different race, and not merely the same race under different conditions.

But if they were casual they were kind. They stared at Viola a good deal, but they told her where she wanted to go, and when she mentioned Jim Barton’s name it acted like a talisman.

‘Oh, well, if you’d said Jim Barton,’ they explained, ‘you’d ’ave got there long ago.’

Calvary Church was only Mrs. Hodgkins’ fancy, Jim Barton was the property of Poplar.

Viola soon found herself before a large, dirty building, through the doors of which people passed slowly and persistently, like water passing through the neck of a bottle. Calvary was always full, and Viola found herself pushed resistlessly into it, and fixed solidly behind a column.

Very bad jingly music was being played on an organ. There was an altar and two candles, but Calvary had not been built for a church and looked a little lopsided. Somebody pushed a book into her hand, and the music having wandered about in an agreeable waltz, pulled itself together into a triumphant march.

The choir surged in, singing with exultation, but not by themselves; the whole congregation opened its mouth and flung all its lung power into the tune. It was not music, but it could have been suitably described as a ‘joyful noise before the Lord.’

Mrs. Hodgkins looked very well in her mortar-board and spotless surplice, and her husband marched beside her, as one who had been blessed beyond his deserts and is a trifle obscured by the process.

A little way behind them walked Jim. His cassock and his surplice had done very little to modify his appearance, his eyes were fixed on his hymn book, his chin jutted out a little, and his hair was not as smooth as Mrs. Hodgkins’s, thought it ought to have been.

Viola felt strangely disillusioned and upset at the sight of Jim. How could she have supposed that this man could help her? He was just an ordinary, common man, and all her problems stared inflexibly at her, beyond all powers of his to solve them.

Viola disliked church services. Their reiteration bored her, and like most fairly regular attendants at church, she had ceased to remember what the words meant.

The Church of Cavalry sang its hearty, jagged way through its chosen hymns and psalms as if it were breaking stones.

Mrs. Hodgkins read in an admirable monotone one of the nicer stories about King David. There was some more precarious singing, and then Jim put down his hymn book and prayed, silently at first, and with his untidy head buried in his hands.

Jim loved the rough, loud music; it helped to shut him away into the silence of prayer.

He could feel the Power he knew and believed was God behind the wall of sound, speaking to him—wordless, wonderful things which could not be uttered, but which took away all fear of man.

You can’t have more than one great overmastering fear at a time, and Jim Barton feared God utterly. This morning he was in great need of Him, because his heart was shaken by another image. An image that was useless to his work and his life, and yet would not leave his imagination alone.

He had thought about Viola ever since he had seen her—that little slender, butterfly creature with questioning eyes had lit his heart from end to end with the precipitancy of lightning.

He prayed silently till the music stopped to be delivered from barren longing, and then he lifted up his eyes, and across the church he met Viola’s bent on him wonderingly, consideringly, as if his service of God was a strange thing. Her presence was so astounding that for a moment Jim thought it was not real, and then he shut out the actual image of her again, and plunged back into the reality of his prayer. He dared not pray any more to have the temptation removed from him; he only prayed that he might be used in her service, since she was brought for him to serve.

Then he spoke aloud, but still as if he were alone with God. There was a complete silence in the building; Jim’s words had the power of structural things and could not be allowed to pass as fugitive sounds pass.

Viola felt the extraordinary tensity of the silence, but she could not forget that Jim’s voice was blatantly cockney.

He got up and walked to the pulpit with a singular absence of self-consciousness, as if he were simply in a hurry to get there. But when he was there he stood silent for a long minute and looked at his congregation.

Viola had, after all, not underestimated those deep, compelling eyes. Jim gave out no text. He spoke as if he wasn’t in a pulpit at all. He meant every word he said. A great deal of it was very funny, in a wry, ironic manner, fun wrung out of Jim’s sense of the oddness, the futility, the inconceivable disconcertingness of life, and some of it was very fierce, with a sharp scorn of comfort and selfishness. He stripped the soul bare and let the winds of Heaven play on it; and the winds of Heaven play very rough games with a bare soul.

No one in Calvary Church ever felt comfortable for very long except Mrs. Hodgkins. She knew that Jim was speaking about other people, and she agreed with every word he said, except when he was a little coarse.

Viola didn’t agree with him. She felt raw and indignant. She wanted to argue and answer back. She hated to be put in the wrong, and, after all, that was where she was put—she was putting herself there, for all her indignation, with every word Jim spoke.

Jim didn’t see her any more, he didn’t see anybody. He was lost, as all great orators lose themselves, in his subject. He was trying to find out what God loved, and being at least fairly certain what He hated.

But every soul to whom he spoke could have recognised themselves in what Jim said, because every human soul is like every other human soul when it is naked. Jim punished himself unmercifully, because he lived among naked things and knew no safer method of punishment. All his sins thrust at him like swords.

Viola felt that Jim demanded too much of human nature.

He appeared to believe you can really love your neighbour as yourself, and give up without any flourish of a conscious sacrifice, not things—that luxury of giving—but the will behind the things, which it is the passion of all human creatures to keep inviolate.

Jim seemed to think that egoism shut out God, and that quite lovely, usual things were egoism. And he asserted that you ought to find out what you really did believe and then act on it, though all the walls of Jericho fell at the sound of the trumpet, and yet how could you really do this and yet be pleasant and beloved by the people who inhabit Jericho? Jim didn’t explain what happened after the walls of Jericho finished falling.

He just stopped suddenly, almost at once, it seemed to Viola, and yet he had been speaking nearly an hour. The suddenness of his break with her thoughts hurt and astounded her.

Why hadn’t he gone on? What right had he to stop so soon and shut the door between her soul and his?

Jim left the pulpit and buried his head again in his hands—his heart was shaking against his side. Had he harmed her? Had he helped her? Had he left for one moment the side of his Master to reach her, and so failed utterly in his loyalty to both? He dared not look at Viola again. It was a priest she had come to see and not a man, and Jim felt himself so very little a priest and so terribly much a man.