WHEN Lovejoy looked at the plot, measuring it with her eye, considering what to do with it, she found out a surprising thing; where before she had groped uncertainly, now she knew something about gardens; she began searching among the stone until at last she picked up a piece of fluted carving. “We must edge the beds with stone like this,” she said.
“That’s a bit of grave,” objected Tip.
“The grave’s all smashed,” said Lovejoy, unconcerned, “and look.” She had found another broken grave spread with fine marble chips. “We can make paths with this,” she said.
She had said “we.” Tip began to feel uneasy. He had shown her where she could make a garden, that was enough. “You do what you like,” said Tip. “’S your garden, not mine.”
“We’ll make a lawn here,” said Lovejoy as if he had not spoken, “and flowerbeds here, between the stone edges and the grass. Let’s clear some of the bits.” She squatted down and began picking up the stones. “We mustn’t make a noise so don’t throw anything, put it down gently,” she commanded. Tip did not move. “Help me,” said Lovejoy.
“Who d’you think I am?” said Tip. Lovejoy did not answer.
“I’m not going to make no sissy garden,” said Tip. “I showed you where it was, what else do you want?” And he turned to go back to the wall.
He expected an outcry; when anyone crossed Bridget or Josephine Malone—or Clara or Margaret or Mary, any of his five sisters—there was always an outcry; that was a good name for it, a howling, it might almost have been called a bawling, that could be heard right down the Street; but Lovejoy said nothing. She stayed where she was, picking up the stones, only her head sank lower and the two sides of her hair swung forward, hiding her face and showing her neck; with her finger she poked in the earth.
The effect was curiously powerful. Tip went a few steps and looked back; the silence tugged at him; she seemed so small and solitary among the stones that he could not bear it; he tried to go, he went a step more, then he came back. “All right, then, I’ll help you,” said Tip angrily.
She kept him till it grew cold and eerie in the graveyard. “My mum’ll lam me,” he said.
“Does she lam you?” asked Lovejoy wistfully.
“Don’t they care how late you are?” he asked.
“No,” said Lovejoy briefly and worked on. Tip began to think there were advantages in being Lovejoy; she could stay out as late as she liked, she was free of church; he began to look at her with a mixture of disapproval and respect.
They worked on; he had to admire the way she did it, soundlessly moving and clearing the stone and glass. “Keep any little bits that will do for edging,” she said, but to almost every bit Tip found she said, “No, that won’t do.” It was hard work. Tip’s back had begun to ache when at last she stopped. “You’ve got spunk, I’ll say that for you,” said Tip, when she stood stiffly up.
“It isn’t nearly done,” was all she said. “You’ll come tomorrow?”
“Me? No fear,” said Tip.
She looked at him.
“I’ve things to do,” said Tip loftily.
Lovejoy bent her head again in that quivering silence.
“I promised the others,” said Tip not quite as loftily.
“I was going to move that big stone there an’ I can’t by myself,” said Lovejoy sorrowfully. “An’ that iron bar, I can’t get that up.” It was a lament. “You told me to make another garden,” said Lovejoy. “How can I all alone? It was going to be so lo-ve-ly.” In the darkness her whisper seemed to go on and on like a sad little ghost. Tip tried to shut it out but he could not.
“Oh, all right,” he said crossly, “I’ll come for a little while.”
He was soon to learn his mistake. Lovejoy was a tyrant.
“I only came to tell you I can’t come,” he would begin. “We’re meeting down by the river.” But mysteriously he stayed, and missed the meeting. “Come straight after school,” begged Lovejoy. Her begging was almost as compelling as her silence.
On the second day the patch was cleared, and now began the work of finding the stone. Schooled by Vincent, Lovejoy was meticulous. “That doesn’t match,” she said to most of Tip’s efforts.
“Why does it have to have a stone edging?” asked Tip rebelliously. “Other gardens don’t.”
“This is an Italian garden,” said Lovejoy, “a real Italian garden.” Words could not describe how she loved the smooth pale stone and the little broken column.
Tip began to be infected. It was oddly exciting. There was the excitement of stealing up the Street and into the church, of listening, clinging like limpets to the wall to hear if the way were clear before they came out. “Never come out without listening,” Tip impressed on Lovejoy. “You can always hear; the stone makes footsteps sound loud if anybody comes.” Lovejoy knew that, from when she herself had listened as she stole from the candle box. They worked, speaking in whispers, careful to keep their heads down in case they were seen from the church-hut windows. If either of them was there alone and heard someone coming, even though he was sure it was the other, they arranged that they should immediately freeze into stillness behind a big tombstone that was laid against the hut wall; they could glide there in an instant from the garden, and it was big enough to hide them. If either of them was trailed or saw the other in danger, he was to give three deep hoots that they thought were like an owl’s. “Sparkey can do that too,” said Tip.
“He won’t be able to,” said Lovejoy with scorn.
“I will,” said Sparkey at once when Tip told him, but his hoots sounded more like a bat’s squeak than an owl’s.
Tip had had to tell Sparkey, though Lovejoy objected. “He’ll tell if you tell him,” she said.
“He’ll tell if I don’t,” said Tip. “He’s seen us. He sees everything in the Street. He doesn’t stay on his step. Now he’s our spy, he patrols.”
A friendship had grown up between Tip and Sparkey, made of worship on Sparkey’s side, kindness on Tip’s; Tip had taken him one Saturday to the park across the river and let him watch a game of baseball, and Sparkey’s mother had even let him go to the Malones’ to spend the night; now Sparkey was in a quandary. He would have loved to expose Lovejoy—to torture her, he thought, his eyes glittering—but he would have cut his throat sooner than disobey Tip. “It’s top secret,” said Tip.
“Kin I see it?” asked Sparkey.
“Nope,” said Tip, which was hard on a little boy. “You couldn’t get down the wall, but we’ve let you into it. None of the other boys know,” he said to take out the sting.
Lovejoy had been fearful of Father Lambert. “He lives next door in the Priest’s House. He’ll catch us,” she said.
“Not he,” said Tip. “He never knows anything. He’s half asleep.”
They did not see Father Lambert, up above them, carefully draw back his head from the wall and go on down the steps into the church. Every now and then he stepped up to the windows and glanced down at them as, absorbed, they carefully fitted in their pieces of stone to make the garden edges. They were well hidden. On the church side the windows were high up, only someone as tall as the Father could have looked through them. “He won’t know,” said Tip. “Besides, I can always pretend I’m going into the church to pray.”
“But I can’t,” said Lovejoy.
Perhaps it was this conversation that made her think of the church; before she had not raised her head to look at it at all. The windows ran all along the back, and from the graveyard the ceiling, the lamps, the top of the altar, and the statues’ heads could be seen. Lovejoy had been happily setting two bits of stone into the edging, which was now almost finished; as she looked up and into the church Tip saw her face change; for a moment she was still, then, forgetting, she stood upright. “Get down,” hissed Tip, but Lovejoy said, in a strange polite voice, “Thank you very much, Tip, but I don’t think I’ll make the garden here.”
Tip followed her eyes. He could see the ceiling, two hanging lights, and the top of a blue screen; that’s the top of the altar, thought Tip, the altar in the Lady Chapel. He could see the statue of Our Lady, she stood on a high pedestal that made her higher than the other statues; Tip could see her head and white veil, the breast of her blue robe, her hand, and the Holy Child’s gilt halo. Through the glass she looked quite close, as if she were watching them, but what was there startling in that? But Lovejoy was still standing up, her eyes wide open, not concealed as they usually were, and, as Tip watched, tears of consternation ran out of them.
In the church Father Lambert dropped a pile of books; Tip seized Lovejoy, dragged her down, and pulled her behind the tombstone. She crouched, weeping, beside him. Do girls do nothing but cry? thought Tip. “What’s the matter?” he said impatiently, then more patiently, “What’s the matter? Go on, tell,” he said, resigned. After a moment he put his arm round her.
“Well, no wonder,” said Tip when Lovejoy had finished telling. “No wonder!”
That was not very comforting and Lovejoy’s hairs lifted again. “You mean, no wonder the garden was smashed?”
Tip had not meant anything of the kind; he meant it was no wonder Lovejoy was frightened, but he was suddenly filled with an irresistible desire to torment this tormenting little creature. He nodded solemnly and Lovejoy quailed.
“Will she smash this one?”
“You couldn’t be surprised,” said Tip solemnly, and was gratified when the last of Lovejoy’s control broke to smithereens. “But what am I to do?” she wailed. “What can I do?”
They had come out from the tombstone, and she knelt down beside the garden while the tears ran down her face. Tip began to feel uncomfortable. He did not know what she could do.
“You could tell Father Lambert,” he said at last.
“Tell Father Lambert?” That seemed to Lovejoy a really idiotic thing to do.
“He’d forgive you and give you a penance.”
“What’s a penance?”
“A penance is—a penance,” said Tip. Then he tried to make it clearer. “It’s a sort of punishment that makes things all right again. It would have to be a dreadful one for this. That was holy money!” said Tip, shocked.
Lovejoy thought deeply, her tears drying. Then she looked up at Tip. “You give me one,” she said.
When Lovejoy looked at him in that trustful way, Tip felt a heady bigness. He said, “I don’t know if it would work,” but more in duty bound than anything else. The thought of punishing Lovejoy was so delicious that he had to look at his toes to keep from smiling.
“All right, I’ll give you a penance,” he said, and then pronounced, “You’ll put all those twopences back.”
There was a silence; then: “I don’t like that punishment,” said Lovejoy. “Give me another.”
“The less you like it the better it is,” said Tip glibly. That had often been said to him, but she did not take this view of it at all.
“I haven’t any twopences,” she said.
“You must get them,” said the inexorable Tip. “Get them, not steal them,” he said quickly.
Lovejoy’s face fell. “How am I to get them, then?” she said, going back to tears. “Even with stealing, I took weeks to get the fork.”
“You didn’t—you took three days, you told me so,” retorted Tip, but Lovejoy had already a woman’s power of shrinking and expanding time. “Weeks!” she wailed, and in a way that was true. She was a child as well as a small woman. “They did it all so quickly,” Angela was to say when she knew the whole story. “How could it happen like that? It was so quick!” But Olivia made one of her rare contradictions.
“It wasn’t quick,” said Olivia. “At least not to them. A month can go on forever to a child. To wait five minutes can be an agony. You’ve forgotten what it was like.” And she said again, “It wasn’t quick.”
Now to get the three-and-eightpence seemed an impossible task. “I’ll never get it. Never,” sobbed Lovejoy, and soon, weakly, Tip found himself promising to help. “I’ll help you earn it but you must put the money back yourself—in candles,” said Tip, feeling his power. “And you’ll pay twice as much for each candle, to make up,” he said.
“Children are half-price,” said Lovejoy, fighting, but Tip did not waver.
“You’ll pay fourpence each and you’ll light them one by one, each time we get a fourpence, and that’ll be your penance. Three-and-eightpence is eleven candles. You’ll go into the church eleven times. And,” he added, seeing a respite for himself, “you’re not to touch the garden till the penance is done.”
Lovejoy looked at the garden and then up through the window at the statue. “I don’t like her. I don’t want to look at her,” she said bitterly.
“That’s because you’re wicked,” said Tip cheerfully; then he relented. “It’ll get better with each candle. Each time you’ll mind it less.”