God's Sparrows. Philip Child

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СКАЧАТЬ thought Pen. They had got to the beasts and cattle, and after another quarter of a page they could sit down and Dan’s patience might revive. A woman with a tinny soprano lifted up her praise with immolating vigour just behind Pen’s ear, dominating everyone else in church, imposing her ego. These little egotisms of people bothered Pen, he could never see beyond them. Maud’s voice, “Dan, dear, don’t wriggle !” Praise him and magnify him forever. A part of Pen’s mind not under control, thinking of Dan, said fervently, “Not forever !” It was like those moments, he thought, when you are in a cab on the way to the station. You will miss the train. The coachman flicks his horse and it giddaps into a shambling trot while mentally you push the cab to its destination.

      At last the third hymn, the one before the sermon. You could go out. Hats and coats. Dan’s hat mysteriously missing, to be finally retrieved from under the next pew but one.… They are out in the frosty air in the carriage going home. The children at last are quiet, for there is always something fresh to look at when you go for a ride. “The choir sings beautifully, don’t you think?” remarked Maud. “The children behaved very well considering —”

      Pen felt worn out and church always made him morose. “It’s nice,” he said, a sense of duty reasserting itself, “to get the children into the habit of going to church.” In his own ears his voice sounded thin, not from the depths of his convictions. It can do no harm to “expose” them, he thought; it might take. And any help a man can get — The end of life, sudden darkness, oblivion.

      “Oh, it is, dear!” agreed Maud warmly.

      Dan’s mouth was open, and he was engrossed in the mysterious thoughts of his age. “Father,” he said unexpectedly, “What is the kingdom of heaven?”

      One never knew what would catch a child’s attention. Pen answered carefully, for he believed in talking to children as though they were grown up.

      “It is the agreement of the heart with the will. But you are too young to understand that yet.”

      “The poor little monkey!” interposed Maud.

      “Is everyone in it?”

      “No, Daniel.”

      “Why isn’t everyone in it? Are you in it, Father?”

      Maud said quickly: “Children! What do you think we are going to have for dinner?”

      On Sunday evenings after church, all Maud’s family came to Ardentinny for high tea. The sound of talk and music floated up to the children, and often Dan and Alastair would creep out of bed and tiptoe to the edge of the stairs to listen with faces pressed to the banister, but Joanna, who was the baby of the family, was always too tired to stay awake for the singing, though she tried valiantly.… It was fun to hear their mother singing

      “Ma mère, hélas, mariez-moi,

      Puisque le temps est à plaisir …”

      when you did not know what the words meant and could not see Mother. It made her seem like a different person and yet the same. “It would be perfect,” Dan thought, “if only I could stay downstairs in the dining room with Mother and Father and listen. Grown-ups can go where they like.”

      Little knows the gosling what the gander thinks.

      At such times Pen Thatcher, sitting with Maud’s family in the dining room, felt himself an alien. The Burnets, who regarded Ardentinny as a Burnet stronghold, always outnumbered the Thatchers, most of whom lived in the States. Pen sometimes wondered whether, in marrying Maud Burnet (whom he loved), he had not really married Ardentinny. The house had been left to him because Maud’s father believed that “a man should be master in his own household.” But the Burnets still regarded it as their castle, and not even marriage had been allowed to make any difference in their family solidarity.

      The room surrounded the Burnets and Pen with an atmosphere of dignity and tradition which did not belong to the new world. It was unmistakably a room in which one dined rather than “had dinner.” In these years no modern chandelier of gas jets illumined too garishly the dark reticence of wainscoted corners; candles gleamed mellowly upon silver and upon oak panelling brought from Scotland years ago by Maud’s grandfather. Two ancestral Burnets in oils occupied panels on the west side of the room. They were Sir Murdo Burnet of Ardentinny Castle in Scotland, in the scarlet uniform and be-demned-careful-what-you-say -sir expression of a British general, and his wife, a dark, wild beauty in Gainsborough silks, bareheaded, with her hand touching the poised head of a greyhound nobly alive at her side. There could be no doubt that Sir Murdo felt at home in the eighteenth-century world upon which he stared with cold eyes. “I am a Burnet of Ardentinny,” he seemed to say, “and pray, sir, who may you be?”

      Since the general’s time, the Burnets had run true to form. They were all sure of themselves and of their place in society. They were cavaliers by instinct, even Maud who was one of the good rather than brilliant Burnets, and they loved dash, colour, tradition, in fact all those things which Pen in his private mind called “swank.”

      The Burnet ancestor irked Pen. He sometimes fancied that the general’s intolerant question was directed at none other than himself. “Pray, sir, who may you be? A demned puritan in my household, sir! ”

      Pen was by temperament and inheritance a New England puritan and by conviction a doubter. He was a puritan who had strayed from his own heritage into this tory background. Murdo Burnet, Pen’s brother-in-law , who was a medical missionary in Japan, called him a zealot in search of a conviction. At forty-five he was slightly bald, with marked furrows on his forehead, and he had the prematurely middle-aged look of a man who already eats and drinks failure for his daily fare and wakes to it in the small hours of the morning.

      One day Dan stared into the mirror over the mantelpiece at the dark little boy’s face — it might have been a stranger’s — and the thought suddenly flashed upon him: “Isn’t it queer that I’m me?”

      Dan had his times of fancy, but he was practical, too. He spent hours trying to find out how the piano worked. Aunt Euphemia Burnet, unable to explain, told him that the sounds were made by little fairies who stood on the wires and sang.

      “Shucks! Why do fairies have to have wires in order to sing?” asked Dan reasonably.

      He recognized vaguely that Aunt Euphemia was silly, but of course, as one of the family you “loved” her. The best thing about her was her parrot, which had once belonged to a spellbinding revivalist. When there were visitors, Aunt Euphemia had to cover the cage with a cloth because the sight of “two or three gathered together” always made the parrot cry: “Prrt. Prrt. Down on your knees, sinners!”

      The family were always in the background somewhere, so on the whole you took them for granted, though some of them you avoided as much as you could. For instance, you avoided Aunt Fanny because “she has a lot of common sense about making children behave!” Uncle Daniel Thatcher, who taught at Toronto University, did not count, though he was Father’s brother and Father always wanted you to talk to him; he was not an uncle like Uncle Charles. He lived in Toronto, and besides, he was old. Dan did not avoid Uncle Charles because he never seemed exactly like a grown-up . Uncle Charles took him to his first football game. “Now,” said Uncle Charles, “the object of the game is to batter the other side until they lie down and let you put the ball behind the goal post. We are cheering for the Tigers. They have yellow and black stockings; and mind you make a lot of noise. Enjoy yourself and, well — don’t ask me too many questions.” Uncle Charles cocked his hat at a jauntier angle and sucked in his breath with excitement; it was impossible to be with him and not have fun.

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