stanza herself first and make her pupil repeat it.
Everyone in the drawing-room could hear the loud lesson in progress beating out the stresses and throbs of
The frown of his face
Before me, the hurtle of hell
Behind, where, where was a, where was a place?
The club was proud of Joanna Childe, not only because she chucked up her head and recited poetry, but because she was so well built, fair and healthy looking, the poetic essence of tall, fair rectors’ daughters who never used a scrap of make-up, who had served tirelessly day and night in parish welfare organizations since leaving school early in the war, who before that had been Head Girl and who never wept that anyone knew or could imagine, being stoical by nature.
What had happened to Joanna was that she had fallen in love with a curate on leaving school. It had come to nothing. Joanna had decided that this was to be the only love of her life.
She had been brought up to hear, and later to recite,
… Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
All her ideas of honour and love came from the poets. She was vaguely acquainted with distinctions and sub-distinctions of human and divine love, and their various attributes, but this was picked up from rectory conversations when theologically-minded clerics came to stay; it was in a different category of instruction from ordinary household beliefs such as the axiom, ‘People are holier who live in the country’, and the notion that a nice girl should only fall in love once in her life.
It seemed to Joanna that her longing for the curate must have been unworthy of the name of love, had she allowed a similar longing, which she began to feel, for the company of a succeeding curate, more suitable and even handsomer, to come to anything. Once you admit that you can change the object of a strongly-felt affection, you undermine the whole structure of love and marriage, the whole philosophy of Shakespeare’s sonnet: this had been the approved, though unspoken, opinion of the rectory and its mental acres of upper air. Joanna pressed down her feelings for the second curate and worked them off in tennis and the war effort. She had not encouraged the second curate at all but brooded silently upon him until the Sunday she saw him standing in the pulpit and announce his sermon upon the text:
… if thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee: for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell.
And if thy right hand offend thee, cut it off, and cast it from thee: for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell.
It was the evening service. Many young girls from the district had come, some of them in their service uniforms. One particular Wren looked up at the curate, her pink cheeks touched by the stained-glass evening light; her hair curled lightly upwards on her Wren hat. Joanna could hardly imagine a more handsome man than this second curate. He was newly ordained, and was shortly going into the Air Force. It was spring, full of preparations and guesses, for the second front was to be established against the enemy, some said in North Africa, some said Scandinavia, the Baltic, France. Meantime, Joanna listened attentively to the young man in the pulpit, she listened obsessively. He was dark and tall, his eyes were deep under his straight black brows, he had a chiselled look. His wide mouth suggested to Joanna generosity and humour, that type of generosity and humour special to the bishop sprouting within him. He was very athletic. He had made it as clear that he wanted Joanna as the former curate had not. Like the rector’s eldest daughter that she was, Joanna sat in her pew without seeming to listen in any particular way to this attractive fellow. She did not turn her face towards him as the pretty Wren was doing. The right eye and the right hand, he was saying, means that which we hold most precious. What the scripture meant, he said, was that if anything we hold most dear should prove an offence — as you know, he said, the Greek word here was
‘For it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell,’ rang the preacher’s voice. ‘Hell of course,’ he said, ‘is a negative concept. Let us put it more positively. More positively, the text should read, “It is better to enter maimed into the Kingdom of Heaven than not to enter at all.”’ He hoped to publish this sermon one day in a Collected Sermons, for he was as yet inexperienced in many respects, although he later learned some reality as an Air Force chaplain.
Joanna, then, had decided to enter maimed into the Kingdom of Heaven. By no means did she look maimed. She got a job in London and settled at the May of Teck Club. She took up elocution in her spare time. Then, towards the end of the war, she began to study and make a full-time occupation of it. The sensation of poetry replaced the sensation of the curate and she took on pupils at six shillings an hour pending her diploma.
The wanton troopers riding by
Have shot my fawn, and it will die.
Nobody at the May of Teck Club knew her precise history, but it was generally assumed to be something emotionally heroic. She was compared to Ingrid Bergman, and did not take part in the argument between members and staff about the food, whether it contained too many fattening properties, even allowing for the necessities of wartime rationing.
3
Love and money were the vital themes in all the bedrooms and dormitories. Love came first, and subsidiary to it was money for the upkeep of looks and the purchase of clothing coupons at the official black-market price of eight coupons for a pound.
The house was a spacious Victorian one, and very little had been done to change its interior since the days when it was a private residence. It resembled in its plan most of the women’s hostels, noted for cheapness and tone, which had flourished since the emancipation of women had called for them. No one at the May of Teck Club referred to it as a hostel, except in moments of low personal morale such as was experienced-by the youngest members only on being given the brush-off by a boy-friend.
The basement of the house was occupied by kitchens, the laundry, the furnace and fuel-stores.
The ground floor contained staff offices, the dining-room, the recreation room and, newly papered in a mud-like shade of brown, the drawing-room. This resented wall-paper had unfortunately been found at the back of a cupboard in huge quantities, otherwise the walls would have remained grey and stricken like everyone else’s.
Boy-friends were allowed to dine as guests at a cost of two-and-sixpence. It was also permitted to entertain in the recreation room, on the terrace which led out from it, and in the drawing-room whose mud-brown walls appeared so penitential in tone at that time — for the members were not to know that within a few years many of them would be lining the walls of their own homes with paper of a similar colour, it then having become smart.
