LITMIR.BIZ

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of Hope and the Companionship of Marriage languished almost memberless, and the Mothers’ Union only kept going because gossip and unlimited strong tea made the weekly sewing-parties acceptable. Yes, it was discouraging work; so discouraging that at times it would have seemed altogether futile if she had not known the sense of futility for what it is—the subtlest weapon of the Devil.

      Dorothy knocked at the Pithers’ badly fitting door, from beneath which a melancholy smell of boiled cabbage and dish-water was oozing. From long experience she knew and could taste in advance the individual smell of every cottage on her rounds. Some of their smells were peculiar in the extreme. For instance, there was the salty, feral smell that haunted the cottage of old Mr. Tombs, an aged retired bookseller who lay in bed all day in a darkened room, with his long, dusty nose and pebble spectacles protruding from what appeared to be a fur rug of vast size and richness. But if you put your hand on the fur rug it disintegrated, burst and fled in all directions. It was composed entirely of cats—twenty-four cats, to be exact. Mr. Tombs “found they kept him warm,” he used to explain. In nearly all the cottages there was a basic smell of old overcoats and dish-water upon which the other, individual smells were superimposed; the cesspool smell, the cabbage smell, the smell of children, the strong, bacon-like reek of corduroys impregnated with the sweat of a decade.

      Mrs. Pither opened the door, which invariably stuck to the jamb, and then, when you wrenched it open, shook the whole cottage. She was a large, stooping, grey woman with wispy grey hair, a sacking apron and shuffling carpet slippers.

      “Why, if it isn’t Miss Dorothy!” she exclaimed in a dreary, lifeless but not unaffectionate voice.

      She took Dorothy between her large, gnarled hands, whose knuckles were as shiny as skinned onions from age and ceaseless washing up, and gave her a wet kiss. Then she drew her into the unclean interior of the cottage.

      “Pither’s away at work, Miss,” she announced as they got inside. “Up to Dr. Gaythorne’s he is, a-digging over the doctor’s flower-beds for him.”

      Mr. Pither was a jobbing gardener. He and his wife, both of them over seventy, were one of the few genuinely pious couples on Dorothy’s visiting-list. Mrs. Pither led a dreary, wormlike life of shuffling to and fro, with a perpetual crick in her neck because the door lintels were too low for her, between the well, the sink, the fireplace and the tiny plot of kitchen garden. The kitchen was decently tidy, but oppressively hot, evil-smelling and saturated with ancient dust. At the end opposite the fireplace Mrs. Pither had made a kind of prie-dieu out of a greasy rag mat laid in front of a tiny, defunct harmonium, on top of which were an oleographed crucifixion, “Watch and Pray” done in beadwork, and a photograph of Mr. and Mrs. Pither on their wedding day in 1882.

      “Poor Pither!” went on Mrs. Pither in her depressing voice, “him a-digging at his age, with his rheumatism that bad! Ain’t it cruel hard, Miss? And he’s had a kind of a pain between his legs, Miss, as he can’t seem to account for—terrible bad he’s been with it, these last few mornings. Ain’t it bitter hard, Miss, the lives us poor working folks has to lead?”

      “It’s a shame,” said Dorothy. “But I hope you’ve been keeping a little better yourself, Mrs. Pither?”

      “Ah, Miss, there’s nothing don’t make me better. I ain’t a case for curing, not in this world, I ain’t. I shan’t never get no better, not in this wicked world down here.”

      “Oh, you mustn’t say that, Mrs. Pither! I hope we shall have you with us for a long time yet.”

      “Ah, Miss, you don’t know how poorly I’ve been this last week! I’ve had the rheumatism a-coming and a-going all down the backs of my poor old legs, till there’s some mornings when I don’t feel as I can’t walk not so far as to pull a handful of onions in the garden. Ah, Miss, it’s a weary world we lives in, ain’t it, Miss? A weary, sinful world.”

      “But of course we must never forget, Mrs. Pither, that there’s a better world coming. This life is only a time of trial—just to strengthen us and teach us to be patient, so that we’ll be ready for Heaven when the time comes.”

      At this a sudden and remarkable change came over Mrs. Pither. It was produced by the word “Heaven.” Mrs. Pither had only two subjects of conversation; one of them was the joys of Heaven, and the other the miseries of her present state. Dorothy’s remark seemed to act upon her like a charm. Her dull grey eye was not capable of brightening, but her voice quickened with an almost joyful enthusiasm.

      “Ah, Miss, there you said it! That’s a true word, Miss! That’s what Pither and me keeps a-saying to ourselves. And that’s just the one thing as keeps us a-going—just the thought of Heaven and the long, long rest we’ll have there. Whatever we’ve suffered, we gets it all back in Heaven, don’t we, Miss? Every little bit of suffering, you gets it back a hundredfold and a thousandfold. That is true, ain’t it, Miss? There’s rest for us all in Heaven—rest and peace and no more rheumatism nor digging nor cooking nor laundering nor nothing. You do believe that, don’t you, Miss Dorothy?”

      “Of course,” said Dorothy.

      “Ah, Miss, if you knew how it comforts us—just the thoughts of Heaven! Pither he says to me, when he comes home tired of a night and our rheumatism’s bad, ‘Never you mind, my dear,’ he says, ‘we ain’t far off from Heaven now,’ he says. ‘Heaven was made for the likes of us,’ he says; ‘just for poor working folks like us, that have been sober and godly and kept our Communions regular.’ That’s the best way, ain’t it, Miss Dorothy—poor in this life and rich in the next? Not like some of them rich folks as all their motor-cars and their beautiful houses won’t save from the worm that dieth not and the fire that’s not quenched. Such a beautiful text, that is. Do you think you could say a little prayer with me, Miss Dorothy? I been looking forward all the morning to a little prayer.”

      Mrs. Pither was always ready for a “little prayer” at any hour of the night or day. It was her equivalent to a “nice cup of tea.” They knelt down on the rag mat and said the Lord’s Prayer and the Collect for the week; and then Dorothy, at Mrs. Pither’s request, read the parable of Dives and Lazarus, Mrs. Pither coming in from time to time with “Amen! That’s a true word, ain’t it, Miss Dorothy? ‘And he was carried by angels into Abraham’s bosom.’ Beautiful! Oh, I do call that just too beautiful! Amen, Miss Dorothy—Amen!”

      Dorothy gave Mrs. Pither the cutting from the Daily Mail about angelica tea for rheumatism, and then, finding that Mrs. Pither had been too “poorly” to draw the day’s supply of water, she drew three bucketfuls for her from the well. It was a very deep well, with such a low parapet that Mrs. Pither’s final doom would almost certainly be to fall into it and get drowned, and it had not even a winch—you had to haul the bucket up hand over hand. And then they sat down for a few minutes, and Mrs. Pither talked some more about Heaven. It was extraordinary how constantly Heaven reigned in her thoughts; and more extraordinary yet was the actuality, the vividness with which she could see it. The golden streets and the gates of orient pearl were as real to her as though they had been actually before her eyes. And her vision extended to the most concrete, the most earthly details. The softness of the beds up there! The deliciousness of the food! The lovely silk clothes that you would put on clean every morning! The surcease from everlasting to everlasting from work of any description! In almost every moment of her life the vision of Heaven supported and consoled her, and her abject complaints about the lives of “poor working folks” were curiously tempered by a satisfaction in the thought that, after all, it is “poor working folks” who are the principal inhabitants of Heaven. It was a sort of bargain that she had struck, setting her lifetime of dreary labour against an eternity of bliss. Her faith was almost too great, if that is possible. For it was a curious fact, but the certitude with which Mrs. Pither looked forward to Heaven—as to some kind of glorified home for incurables—affected Dorothy with strange uneasiness.

      Dorothy prepared to depart, while Mrs. Pither thanked her, rather too effusively, for her visit, winding up, as usual, with fresh complaints about her rheumatism.

      “I’ll be sure and take the angelica tea,” she concluded, “and thank you kindly for telling me of

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