has the tantrums—’
The minister rose quickly, clapped on his hat and marched out into the night without another word.
Half frightened the two sisters looked at each other.
‘Na, he’ll no’,’ said Ann abruptly. ‘He’s no’ like us. It winna last.’
She hobbled to the fire and drew the simmering kettle on to the middle of the range. In response to this generous action Mary cleared her things off the table, merely compressing her lips as she looked at the condition they were in, and shaking them out ostentatiously before taking them into her room. A tacit truce was thus concluded.
Common sense had triumphed over rage and tears.
We’re queer folk, reflected Mary, as she went slowly back to her shop. Queer, dour folk, the Watsons.
That evening had brought her closer to her sister Ann. She actually felt the better for it.
The minister also was feeling the better for it. Although he had departed in impatience the heavy oppression which had weighed so long on his bosom had discharged itself like a gun with the flash and explosion of his attack on the two sisters. As if he had finally vaulted an obstacle he had balked at for years, William Murray was exhilarated and wondered at his previous foolishness. It now seemed to him that he had been faint-hearted all his life. He had made himself spiritually sick by evading the fact that God’s anger was as real as God’s love. The old ecstatic serenity was gone, but in its place he felt a tense determination to fight the battle of the Church. Instead of spreading himself anonymously into the universe, as if he were a quiet wave lapping into infinity, he recognized himself now as an individual with a definite place in the world; he was a minister, backed by that authority and prestige of the Church which, for the first time in his life, he had invoked, and invoked successfully. His appeal to the Church had been involuntary, almost unconscious; its very spontaneity convinced him that it had been prompted by God Himself.
Anger was at times good and necessary, he said to himself, as he walked home buoyantly. It was weakness to be too sympathetic. In his sick state he had sympathized too much with everybody: for instance, he had sympathized with both Mary and Ann Watson, first with one and then with the other, and yet they were both in the wrong – not to be sympathized with at all. Christ had driven the money-changers out of the Temple, and had spoken to devils as one having authority. That was the right way with those possessed of a devil.
He remembered suddenly how Sarah had said about Ned: ‘I’ve daured him.’ She was right. One could not create light without dispelling darkness. For years he had shut his eyes to the fact of evil; but now he had heard the word of God, and he would deal faithfully with evil wherever he found it. He had awakened out of his sleep. ‘Wherever I find it,’ he said, opening his own front door.
The wall in front of William Murray was no longer smooth, without handhold or foothold, no longer blank. It now had both lights and shadows on its surface. He could climb it.
EIGHT
When Elizabeth Shand awoke in the morning Hector was still asleep. He was facing her as he lay, but his head was half-buried in the pillow and little of him was visible save his tumbled hair and closed eyes. The terrible sensation Elizabeth had of having dropped down a bottomless chasm began gradually to fade before the reassuring familiarity of Hector asleep in the next bed. She could not see his face, but she knew that his body was the same body it had always been; behind those closed lids the same Hector must exist. If once she had been daunted by the aloofness of her sleeping husband she was now comforted by it. Asleep, he was still her sweetheart, unchanged by the conflicting storms of yesterday, sunk into the most profound part of himself, which, of course, was the essential Hector, the Hector who loved her and whom she loved. Their quarrel of the night before seemed irrelevant as she lay looking at him. She remembered how she had told the minister that she could not believe in the separation of the spirit from the body; and now she thought that it was when most completely sunk in the body, as in sleep, that the spirit was most itself.
Quietly she crept out of her own bed and crawled in beside Hector. Let him awaken to find her close to him, she thought. Surely there was some current of invisible force which flowed in an unbroken circuit around them as they lay motionless together, a healing current, she thought, which would bear away all their differences. She felt his eyelashes stir on her cheek, and pressed him to her in a passion of tenderness.
If Hector was surprised to be awakened in this fashion he did not show it. He rubbed his cheek on hers and kissed her tenderly enough. Even the reek of stale whisky did not annoy Elizabeth; she was both exalted and contrite, and she dismissed all scruples as unworthy. But Hector had a fiendish headache, a rotten headache; that damned whisky couldn’t have been good stuff. Elizabeth got up and fetched him two aspirins in a glass of water.
‘You’re much too good to me, Elizabeth.’
Did this protest mean that Hector felt himself fettered by his obligations to her? She did not stop to wonder.
Her mood, persisting until next day, which was Sunday, inclined her towards going to church, and she was a little surprised and touched by Hector’s ready acquiescence.
Whenever they went to church they sat in the Shand pew, and after the morning service all the Shands strolled home with Aunt Janet, and returned by way of Balfour Terrace, where John and Mabel took their leave and Elizabeth and Hector, waving good-byes, went back to the High Street alone.
John, being the senior Shand, sat at the outside end of the pew; Hector was next to him, then Elizabeth, Aunt Janet and Mabel. Elizabeth found it possible to smile on both the other women, but unconsciously, after the first silent greeting, she edged towards Hector and away from Aunt Janet. She found herself also regretting that she had cut off her intercourse with the minister merely because of Aunt Janet’s scandalmongering, and she waited eagerly to catch his eye and send him a message of reassurance.
The minister walked up to the pulpit with his usual solemnity, with even more than his usual dignity. His glance crossed Elizabeth’s once, but his blue eye flashed such a cold strange gleam that she felt snubbed. Perhaps he resented the way she had dropped him?
She forgot this personal question in her amazed disapproval of the sermon. She could not know that William Murray had sat up until far into the morning reshaping that sermon to fit his spiritual rebirth into the Church. Where was his sympathy, his tolerance? she asked herself. The man was thundering theology from the pulpit; splitting hairs, logic-chopping. Far above the heads of his congretation, anyhow, thought Elizabeth scornfully, looking round at the vacant or sleepy faces. He was now proving to them that the existence of good connoted the existence of evil; this world was a world of both good and evil, unlike the Kingdom of God, which, when it came, would be neither good nor evil, but equally beyond both, transcending both. Meanwhile, because on earth we had intuitions of good, we must admit also intuitions of evil.
‘The metaphor of darkness, like all metaphors, misleads our childish minds,’ said the minister. (Was that meant for her? thought Elizabeth.) ‘We fold our hands passively and wait for the sun to dispel the darkness of evil, when we should be fighting it, driving it away, casting it out, as Christ cast out devils.’
In her mind’s eye Elizabeth suddenly saw Ned’s distorted face, and her heart grew heavy with a feeling of doom.
‘The Church, as the visible body of Christ,’ preached the minister, ‘is an alliance against the powerful forces of evil. Alone, we cannot fight evil; it is too strong for the individual; we all need help in the struggle, and so we are banded together to form a Church. Who is not for us must be against us….’
