The Children's Book - A. S. Byatt [72]
All of them knew, even Dobbin, that no lecture series conforms to its ideal elegance and depth, as first mooted. Lecturers refuse, lecturers fail. The same people, who can be relied on, turn up, and say the same things. There would have to be a lecture on vegetable-growing, and Mrs. Wolsey would have to give it. Bernard Shaw would be replaced by some thin and nervous student, who would have no idea how to speak to soldiers. They went on to the second stage of planning, which is the secondary list of reliable performers.
Patty Dace said she thought they should ask Herbert Methley. He had decided opinions and was an inspirational speaker. She had heard him, once, in Rye, which was an indication that he might be willing. She could not remember exactly what he had said, but she remembered it as being mesmeric. It had been to do with freeing the instinctual self, something like that. Everybody present had been stimulated and excited.
Frank said that he had never met Mr. Methley but he had been very impressed—very impressed indeed—by the copy of Marsh Lights which Miss Dace had kindly given him. He had gone on to read The Giant on the Hill, and Bel and the Dragon, which he had also admired. He would be delighted both to meet Mr. Methley, and to hear him speak.
Patty Dace looked searchingly at him. He smiled mildly back. He was unaware that the gift of the novel had been a test of his faith on her part. It had tested his faith. But he felt obliged not to reveal to Miss Dace how much it had done so. In fact, he thought about it, quite hard, every day. It had given him solid images of his doubt.
It was a novel about someone in his own position, the solitary priest in a made-up Marsh church, with a dwindling congregation. The priest in the book, who was called Gabriel Medcalf, had been bewitched by, or had fallen in love with, or had deceived and disappointed, a woman called Bertha, whom he met mostly when he was walking along the brook in the countryside. There was a kind of greenness about this character, which was rather cunningly done by flickering references to the lights in her pale hair, or her eyes, or the shadows on her fine skin. Frank was not very responsive to female charm, and Bertha corresponded to no fantasy of his own. He rather thought she might be an embodiment—symbolic or actual—of a kind of elder-tree witch, a guardian of flowers and berries. She had no blemishes, and was evasive. What Frank responded to was a something in Methley’s description of the relations between the church building and the landscape. In this world, the church was gaunt and skeletal, a solid shell around a lifeless space. The spiritual energy had leached into, or returned to, the earth and the marsh and the water around the church. Trees appeared to walk, and moved angry arms, or spoke in inhuman voices, creaking and groaning. The marsh lights flittered and gathered in dancing circles, and split again into snakes of light, running errands across the evening darkness. Frank had been impressed as a boy by Wordsworth’s sense of the ancient force—not measured by human time—in crags and boulders. Methley had learned from him—huge stones lurched like primeval scaled beasts, from the lips of brackish lakes to dry land and back. Hillocks heaved with slow, slow energy. Cracks opened into traps. The whole earth was possessed, and either indifferent or inimical, unless the inadequate Bertha was meant to be a way to enter it, or find harmony in it. Gabriel Medcalf failed the test, and ventured less and less frequently outside his church, and its walled graveyard. Gabriel in the novel lost his sense of the divinity of Christ, and saw him as “a kindly Jew, slaughtered long ago in Palestine.” This phrase had got under Frank Mallett’s skin. He recognised it, and resented his recognition. At times he felt his own church, like the