PEOPLE, although they may believe in God, often think very differently about Him. Mr. Pattimore believed in His Name, which Name he surrounded with attributes as cold as ice. In his own attic bed that resembled God’s Name in its coldness he hoped to harden himself and become fit to be a dean, though so far in his life he had not even had a call to become a canon.
Mr. Gulliver didn’t take God in the least as Mr. Pattimore took Him, but rather fancied Him as a humorous gentleman, a little like Mr. James Tarr, and able, indeed willing, to supply the world with a good store of monsters and to bring the Nellie-bird to Mockery Gap as a stray fisherman.
If Mrs. Topple had been asked where she supposed God might be found, she would have replied that when she had once found the clover with four leaves God would be standing near by in the shape of an all-wise doctor.
Mr. Pink saw God as a vast sea of ever-changing colour, a sea that is beyond human vision, though the blessed may pass over there to a country that is very fair and is called Eternity….
Mr. Pink was at work at his desk, and the summer sun, as inquisitive as great people always are, peeped in upon him.
Mr. Pink had been asked in a letter to try to discover—‘It’s Miss Ogle who thought something ought to be done,’ Mr. Roddy had said—the arrears of rent that Mr. Gulliver owed to the Roddy estate.
He was now trying to decide a point that interested him more than the additional sum: that was, how much he ought to take off from the bill, because Gulliver had made at his own expense a new gate for Mr. Caddy’s cottage that went with the farm.
He was upon the point of taking away £1, 15s. 6d., the supposed value of the gate that Mr. Caddy liked so much to lean upon when he talked to the ducks, from Mr. Gulliver’s debt of £789, 14s. 3½d., when Miss Pink put her head into the door and said that a basket had been left by the fisherman for Mrs. Moggs, that he wished Mr. Pink to give to her.
‘I believe they ’re white mice,’ said Miss Pink, who had, it must be owned, peeped in to see.
Mr. Pink closed his ledger. He decided as the heavy book shut that he had better pay to Mr. Gulliver the £1, 15s. 6d. that the estate owed him, which would save the trouble of an extra sum.
Mr. Pink peeped at the mice too.
‘Mr. James Tarr said they would save her life and prevent her being lonely,’ he said, looking with admiration at the mice.
‘Will you take them to her now?’ asked Miss Pink, lifting one of the mice up in her hand and kissing it.
‘Perhaps I had better,’ replied Mr. Pink.
Miss Pink looked out of the door and watched him go. She stood upon the doorstep wrapped in her shawl, and she hoped, as she always did when she watched him go even to the nearest cottage to look at some repairs being done, that nothing would happen to him.
When Mr. Pink turned the corner to go to the shop, Miss Pink turned her eyes to the sea.
The sun—for the summer of our story was an unusually fine one—shone above in all happiness, and the only doleful object that Miss Pink could see to remind her of her fears was the Blind Cow Rock, that looked a dead black.
Miss Pink entered the house again and began to dust the front room.
Although it was summer, she filled the lamp with oil and trimmed the wick, and then, standing beside the table, Miss Pink looked at the front-room chair and began to wonder about the visitor she expected.
It wasn’t Mr. Gulliver now; her letter must have been given to him; Mr. Pring the good messenger could never have taken fifteen years to deliver it.
She had thought certainly that he would have come, and she would have found him, bowed in by Mr. Pink—for no man in the world was so gentle and polite as her brother—and sitting in that best chair! The white mice had reminded her—of course he would have brought her a tiny baby rabbit for a gift.
But now what was Miss Pink thinking of, and whom was she expecting as she looked at the plush-covered chair?
She had never told her brother, but still she had told herself that she didn’t want to go.
‘I don’t want to go,’ said Miss Pink, her tiny nose almost disappearing into her shawl; ‘I don’t want to go, because I love my dear brother, and I don’t like the rude way the sexton shovels the rough earth down upon one. I know it must hurt, and besides for a long time I have known, ever since my pain began, that the horrid beast that Mr. Tarr told us about—is death.’
Miss Pink straightened the sofa cushion, she dusted the window and looked out.
The black rock was there….
Mr. Pink carried the basket carefully, for although the mice were covered with a cloth he feared that they might escape, and every now and again he peeped in to see if they were safe.
Mrs. Moggs was standing behind her counter when Mr. Pink entered her shop. She was telling Esther Pottle, who for some unexplained reason had now learned to stand quiet and good, about all the rude things that the postmaster had said to her; and Esther looked at her, hoping all the time that Mrs. Moggs talked that the bells would begin to ring.
Mr. Pink sighed as he placed the basket upon the counter, because he had almost wished as he stepped along the stone path in the sun that the mice were for him.
‘The fisherman——’
‘You mean the Nellie-bird, Mr. Pink,’ said Esther.
Mr. Pink nodded. ‘The fisherman thought you would like to play with them when you feel lonely, though they ’re nowhere near as beautiful as the sea.’
‘I’m sure the sea ’s nothing like so pretty,’ replied Mrs. Moggs, nodding and ringing both her bells at the same moment. ‘I’ll let them sleep here’—Mrs. Moggs opened a drawer—‘and they can’t hurt the postal orders, because they ’re all in the next one.’
Mr. Pink leaned over the counter. ‘The sea ’s still there,’ he whispered, ‘and I beg you to go down to it. I believe you could pray there better than in any church you know. There is some one who isn’t well, Mrs. Moggs, that I want you to pray for.’
Mrs. Moggs looked at Mr. Pink and her bells hung silent.
‘I know,’ she said.
‘You will come one day?’
‘Yes, one day,’ Mrs. Moggs replied….
Mr. Pink had turned to wave his hand, as he used to do whenever he went two hundred yards away from her, when he left his sister standing upon their cottage steps. But he couldn’t return at that moment to see the difference. The difference, that he always noticed now when he came in to her, the growing look of fear in her eyes, as though something hidden was dragging her, hour by hour and day by day, nearer and yet nearer to the dreadful darkness.
‘Perhaps the sea might help, or the fisherman. I can’t bear to see her in pain,’ said Mr. Pink.
Mr. Pink walked down the lane and stepped upon the soft warm grass of the meadow that led to the sea.
Mockery was out to play that afternoon; cries came to him from the children, who were chasing Esther and calling after her rude country words about the Nellie-bird being her lover.
Mrs. Topple was wandering in the fields, and looking sadly about her because she had been so long wandering and had found nothing.
Dinah Pottle was lying in the wood upon the very moss-covered stump where the hermit of old used to pray, hoping Simon would come; but God Simon was upon the hill with the other Mary, while Rebecca watched them from the vicarage window.
Mrs. Pattimore was dusting the Dean.
Caddy was telling his ducks a new story; and Mr. Gulliver was remarking to the hay as he turned it over—for perhaps he had looked up to the hill as well as Rebecca—that if anything ever happened to his daughter Mary while she was yet unwedded, he would renounce her for ever and cast her out from his home.
Standing upon those yellow sands, Mr. Pink wished that he had been able to persuade Mrs. Moggs to come and look at the sea.
The sea was so still and clear, that Mr. Pink could notice the little fish that were swimmimg in it, and even the coloured shining stones that were at the bottom.
‘If only she would come,’ said Mr. Pink, ‘I feel sure that her soul would leap and cry out for eternity.’
He looked further away, to where the sea and the sky met one another.
‘Her soul would not stay as far as her eyes can see, but it would rush on until the glory of God is reached.’
Mr. Pink hadn’t noticed it before, but he now saw that a boat was sailing by. Hardly sailing, perhaps, because there was almost a dead calm, but leisurely gliding, and appearing as if it were a part of the summer sky and the sea.
The fisherman was asleep in the stern. Mr. Pink had come there on purpose to ask the fisherman about his sister; he must know of something, he felt sure—some seaweed, perhaps—that would ease the continuous pain that she suffered. Mr. Pink called, but the fisherman didn’t awake.
‘The new fisherman is wonderful,’ said Mr. Pink. ‘Esther, who used to be so rude, is a good girl now because she loves him; he found those white mice for Mrs. Moggs; and even Mrs. Pattimore begins to sing in her garden; and one day he will show Mrs. Topple where the precious clover grows.’
Mr. Pink stood upon the sands and held out his arms towards the fisherman.
He called out again.
The boat remained still as if painted into a picture of the sea, and the fisherman still slept.
When anxious agony possesses the human mind, even the sea, wide and watery as it is, appears sometimes to the trembling and tormented one to be indeed only a picture of waters and no real thing.
At that moment, with only one idea in his heart, and that idea to obtain help for his sister from the only one that Mr. Pink believed was able to give it, Mr. Roddy’s agent fancied the wide sea to be a green highway that led to the sleeping fisherman. For—and in great distress one hardly knows what one does—Mr. Pink walked with his arms outstretched into the sea.
The boat had seemed so near, and the sea green and so like a firm carpet, that it certainly appeared natural to suppose that one could walk out to the boat and touch the fisherman’s arm that lay so idly over the stern.
But history, that so often repeats itself, now, alas! did so again; for although he was not blind like the cow, yet when the waters flowed around him, and the boat that he sought disappeared behind the dark rock, Mr. Pink sank out of sight too, and was never seen again on the Mockery shore.