God's Sparrows. Philip Child
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herself growing old like Great-Aunt Joanna.
“Joanna, bring me that small photograph from the mantelpiece.”
Joanna brought her a daguerreotype of a child in a velvet crinoline. She had to tilt it to just the right angle to make the small, stiff figure appear from the background.
“Do you see that she has brown curls to her shoulders just like you?”
“Oh, Great-Aunt Joanna, is that really you?”
“It was, Joanna.… Now let me see what sort of a child my goddaughter is. Do you love your brothers?”
“Oh, yes! ’Specially Dan. I love him awfully.” She went on with a rush of confidence: “Sometimes when I don’t feel very well I am cross.”
“So are we all.… Do you go to church? Did you go this morning, Joanna?”
“Yes,” said Joanna, pleased.
“Tell me about the sermon.”
“All of it?”
“Why, yes, whatever you can remember.”
“The text, too? Everything he said?”
Surprised at the girl’s eagerness, Aunt Joanna nodded with a smile. Joanna settled herself comfortably on the hassock and a faraway look came into her eyes.
“The third chapter of the Book of Job, and the third verse,” she announced in a low, intense voice; then with a slight alteration of tone: “The third chapter of the Book of Job, and the third verse. Let the day perish wherein I was born, and the night in which it was said, There is a man child conceived.”
Aunt Joanna moved uneasily and put down her trumpet for a moment. The note of human despair on a child’s lips sounded eerie and dreadful.… But how perfectly and how unconsciously the child mimicked with her thin voice the intonations of a theatrical preacher. The old lady began to think: “I ought not to have —”
“My dear friends,” said Joanna, raising both her palms with the gesture of a preacher compelling the attention of his congregation. “These terrible words of the man of Uz, spoken from the tomb of the past, bring us face to face with the age old problem of evil. Sickness? Suffering? Why must they be? Who among us, seeing his dear ones, his parents and children bearing the mysterious cross of suffering, has not asked that question.…”
Great-Aunt Joanna Thatcher gazed at the rapt face of her goddaughter. Did the child know what she was saying? One by one the Thatchers and the Burnets in the room stopped talking and listened in tense silence to a child’s voice uttering the thoughts of a rather unctuous man.
“Oh-h , my dear friends” — the thin little voice swelled with the studied emotion of a preacher whose voice reaches out and gathers his audience into an embrace — “The suffering of those we love, is it not a challenge to us who are whole? How ap-applicable to us of the twentieth century is this Bible of ours! Sickness! Social injustice! Bereavement! War, bringing suffering to the innocent with the guilty! All the ills of human life! Have we not all had our pride humbled into the dust through seeing those whom we deemed part of ourselves — our own children, perhaps — suffering, and we powerless to help them…?”
Word for word Joanna repeated what she had heard that morning, with the same gestures, the same florid fluctuations of emotion. Unmindful of herself and of her audience of grown-ups , and unconscious that she, a child of six about to be baptized, was a figure of irony, she pierced the heart of more than one person in the room: of Pen, who thought how a man spends his youth trying to make a secure inner life for himself, only to see it vanish like a puff of smoke when he finds himself living his own bitter troubles over again in his children’s lives; of Maud, who always managed her moods and was cheerful except when unexpected chance brought her face to face with a hidden fear; of the old lady sitting on the sofa, in whom age had long since dulled the pain of life so terribly uttered by a young voice.
She put her hand on her godchild’s shoulder and her voice shook a little. “Thank you, Joanna. You are a dear little girl. But now I think you should stop before you become too excited.”
Murdo in surplice and stole came into the room and the service began. Joanna was excited, and all at once she felt that the pain which she knew so well was not far away. That would be dreadful! … The words of the service moved her to the depth of her soul.… And being steadfast in faith, may so pass the waves of this troublesome world. … The waves rolled in like surf beating on the shore. She trembled.… Great-Aunt Joanna lifted her trumpet and gave response in a firm voice: All this I steadfastly believe . Presently, everyone knelt and there was a rustle of silk like a breeze passing through leaves. The scene and the spoken words became dulled to Joanna, for pain had surrounded her like a mist. She whispered: “Father, please take me upstairs. I feel ill.”
Pen gathered her in his arms and took her upstairs, and Maud followed.
Burnets and Thatchers, drawn for a moment into one family by the too-bigness of life, watched them go in silence.
Dan stood by himself, awkward and self-conscious , though no one was looking at him. Murdo noticed him and said in a voice which he meant to be kind, but which sounded stern to Dan: “Well, my boy. You must take care of your sister. Someday it may be your responsibility. We don’t choose our responsibilities, you know; they choose us.”
Dan did not answer. He looked at the ground with the confused, troubled expression of a child who has been scolded; he was not quite sure why.
II
Most of the relations had left Ardentinny after the christening. Dan mooned about watching his mother and Aunt Fanny. His mother was ironing a flannel nightgown for Joanna. Tamp-tamp-tamp with the iron in short jabs on the collar and sleeves; then she lifted the garment carefully to fold it. Looking up, she smiled at him with her calm smile; it made him feel better.
Aunt Fanny was talking in an undertone, but he heard a little. “The doctor … Maud, it’s a terrible thing.…”
Mother put down the iron carefully on the mat and her look went inside as if she were thinking to herself. “It’s devilish,” she said softly.
He went up to his room and undressed by candlelight, dawdling in order to put off being put in bed with the light out. Alastair was asleep, and Joanna now slept in another room. He heard his mother’s murmur from Joanna’s room telling Joanna about the Princess Perdita and the fairy toadstools. “Ten good fairies sat on a circle of toadstools, and on another magic circle sat ten bad fairies; the good fairies liked people and wanted to help them, but the bad fairies wanted to harm them. One day Perdita went for a walk and all the fairies, both the good fairies and the bad fairies, beckoned to her.…” The wax melted and ran down the candle, making a glistening pool at the bottom. Idly, Dan picked up the lump of hot wax and pressed it into a pellet. “If I flip this so that it hits the doorknob, Joanna will get well,” he thought. But he was afraid to throw it. He blew out the candle, and presently, he went to sleep.
He awoke with a voice ringing in his ears and knew instantly whose it was. It was still nighttime, but moonlight lightened the room with cold brightness. The boy listened with taut muscles for the cry that had awakened him, and almost at once it came again. “Mother! Where are you? Come quickly!” Then the sound of his parents, hurrying up the stairs, their footfalls as they moved about the room, their voices talking low so that he and Alastair should not hear. Alastair was still asleep — of course.
Dan got out of bed, and barefoot, tiptoed down the hall until he stood outside the room. He listened, his heart thumping in his breast like a clock in an empty room.
He heard his father’s voice. “We must never let him feel it was his fault, Maud. It would do him harm to grow up with a thought like that.”
“We must not think it ourselves, Pen. You can’t blame a child for an accident.… Do you think he remembers?”
“No! No, of course not, thank heaven. A child doesn’t look backward or forward.”
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