abilities, Ralph, are not for you to enjoy—they are given to you to use for the Christian community.”
“Yes. All right. I will use them.”
“You’ve closed your mind,” she said.
Astonishment wrenched him out of his misery. She left him incoherent. “Me? I’ve closed my mind?”
“You spoke to your father of reason,” she said. “You’ll find there is a point where reason fails.”
“Stop talking at me,” he said. “Leave me alone.”
His mother left him alone. Her mouth drew in as though she were eating sour plums. If James were here it would be different, Ralph thought; he wanted to cry like a child for his uncle, of whom he knew so little. James could talk to them, he believed, James could ridicule them out of their caution and their scruples and their superstitions, James could talk them into the twentieth century. James is not like them, he knows it from his letters; James is liberal, educated, sympathetic. Ralph saw himself losing, being driven into the ground. All he believed, all he wished to believe—the march of order, progress—all diminished by his father’s hard deriding stare and his mother’s puckered mouth.
Why didn’t he fetch in the schoolmaster who encouraged him? Why didn’t he appeal to his headmaster, who knew him to be a bright, studious, serious boy? Why didn’t he get some other, reasonable adult to weigh in on his behalf—at least to referee the argument, make sure his father obeyed the laws of war?
Because he was ashamed of his father’s stupidity, ashamed of the terms of the quarrel. Because in families, you never think of appealing for help to the outside world; your quarrels are too particular, too specific, too complex. And because you never think of these reasonable solutions, till it is far too late.
“Ralph,” his father said, “be guided by me. You are a mere boy. Oh, you don’t want to hear that, I know. You think you are very adult and smart. But you will come to thank me, Ralphie, in the days ahead.”
Ralph felt he was trapped in an ancient argument. These are the things sons say to fathers; these are the things fathers say to sons. The knowledge didn’t help him; nor did the knowledge that his father was behaving like a caricature of a Victorian patriarch. His family had always been cripplingly old-fashioned; till now he had not realized the deformity’s extent. Why should he, when all his family’s friends were the same, and he had spent his life hobbling along with them? They were churchgoers; not great readers; not travelers, but people who on principle entertained narrow ideas and stayed at home. He saw them for the first time as the outside world might see them—East Anglian fossils.
“There will be no money for you, Ralphie,” his father said. “And you will hardly be able to support yourself through your proposed course at university. You may try, of course.”
“James will help me,” Ralph said, without believing it.
“Your uncle James has not a brass farthing of his own. And you’re quite mistaken if you think he would set himself up against his own brother.”
“Of course, I could see it coming,” Emma said. “After all the fine theories and pieties have been aired, what it comes down to is their hand on the purse strings. That’s their final argument.”
Ralph said, “It isn’t God who’s diminished by Darwin’s theory, it’s Man. Man isn’t anymore lord of the universe. He’s just a part of the general scheme of things. But there is a scheme of things, and you can put God at the top of it if you like.”
“But you don’t like,” his father said. Another flat statement. It was not evolution that was the issue now, it was obedience. Even if his father had taken that last point, Ralph thought, he had done himself no service by raising it. If Man was diminished, then Matthew Eldred was diminished: a lord of the universe was precisely what he wished to be.
“If you like,” Ralph said, “and I do like—you can still believe that Man has a unique place in creation. You can still believe that he has a special dignity. Only Man is rational. Only Man is an intellectual animal.”
“Bandying words,” his father said. He seemed satisfied with the phrase, as if he were a doctor and this were his diagnosis.
I except you, Ralph thought. I wouldn’t call you rational, not anymore.
When the conflict was at its height—when the family were barely speaking to each other, and a Synodlike hush possessed the rooms—Matthew absented himself for a night. He went to King’s Lynn, to discuss with some of his business cronies the charitable trust that they were setting up. It was to be an ambitious enterprise, with broad Christian interests: money for the missions, money for the East End doss house with which James kept a connection; money above all for the deserving poor of Norfolk, the aged and indigent farm laborers, those churchgoing rural folk who had been mangled by agricultural machinery or otherwise suffered some disabling mischance.
It was to be called the St. Walstan Trust; Walstan is the patron saint of farmers and farm laborers, and his image is found through the county on screens and fonts. The suggestion came from William Martin, a shopkeeper at Dereham; it was a little High Church for Matthew’s taste, but Martin was generally sound, very sound, and the county connection pleased him. Matthew was a local patriot now, a sitter on committees, treasurer of this and chairman of that. Ralph said to Emma, “I wish that charity would begin at home.”
That evening, the event took place which broke Ralph’s resolve. His mother came to his bedroom, upstairs on her noiseless feet. She tapped at the door, and waited till he had asked her to enter; this arch, stiff politeness had come upon the family since the row blew up.
Ralph looked up from his books, adjusting his desk lamp so that it cast a little light into the room. It pooled at his mother’s slippered feet as she sat on the bed. She wore her cardigan draped over her shoulders; she took the cuffs of the empty sleeves in her hands, and twisted them as she spoke. Her wedding ring gleamed, big and broad like a brass washer. She had lost weight, perhaps, for it hung loose on her finger, and her knuckle bones seemed huge.
Ralph listened to what she had to say. If he would not capitulate, she said—but she did not use that word—if he would not fall into line, fall in with the plans his father had formulated for him, then she could not say what his father would do about Emma. He might think that as Ralph had gone so badly off course, Emma needed guidance. He might like to have her at home, under his eye. There might, in fact, be no medical school for Emma at all.
His mother sighed as she said all this; her manner was tentative, and her eyes traveled over the peg-rug and the bookcase and the desk, they roamed the wall and flickered over the dark window at which the curtains were not yet drawn. But she was not afraid; and Ralph understood her. She had volunteered, he believed, for this piece of dirty work; she and her husband, his father, had planned it between them, so that there would be no more shouting, no more scenes, only his certain silent defeat.
