Page 21 of Mr Collins in Love
I was nine years old and a woman was sobbing in the hall.It was Miss Hindmarsh, an old maid of forty, with red hands and a wart on the side of her nose.I did not know her well, though she was kind and had once helped me by mending a rent in my breeches because she had noticed it when I was passing by her cottage.She had lived there, until yesterday, with her brother Thomas, who, being prone to melancholy, had cast himself the previous day from the top of a cliff.I hugged my knees.
My father was refusing to allow Thomas Hindmarsh to be buried in the churchyard.Miss Hindmarsh was begging otherwise.If I looked sideways, there was the hem of Miss Hindmarsh’s worn coat, trembling before my father’s equally worn shoes and stockings.I stared at a table leg instead, at the nicks and dents.My father was recounting, with some indignation, the testimonies of George Decks and Mary Haight, a courting couple who had been lying in a meadow not twenty yards from the cliff edge when Thomas Hindmarsh had approached.George Decks had risen to his knees and yelled at the man to beware.Thomas Hindmarsh had glanced at him, once, and run over the edge.Suicide, plain as day.Therefore, he could not be buried in the churchyard.
Miss Hindmarsh gasped between sobs, as if she too were running towards a cliff edge, or perhaps away from one.The sound hurt my ears.The indignation in my father’s voice had an edge that was equally painful, and, looming above all were the thoughts I was trying not to think: the gaping horror of George Decks and Mary Haight; the hopeless suffering of Thomas Hindmarsh and the terror he must have felt at the top of his long fall.
A body must be buried, lest it stink.Also, bereaved people sometimes needed a grave to visit because they missed the person so violently that they needed somewhere to go, something to do, like taking flowers to the grave.Had I not myself sometimes visited the grave of my mother when I had been so unhappy I had not known what else to do with myself?But such visits made no difference to the dead; they were simply a way for the person left behind to express grief.
The difference between the consecrated ground within the churchyard and the un-consecrated ground without seemed nothing to me.The difference was that some distant priest—a man not unlike my father—had said some words over the churchyard.The words of priests were supposed to matter because they were a conduit for God.That much I knew.But I had always thought God to be one of those elaborate games of make-believe by which my elders set so much stock.One must say one believed, for that was what decent people said, but surely, I had thought, none of them really thought it was true.To me, religion was a charade, something akin to the polite lie that ladies of a certain class lacked bodily functions, or the fiction that the poor had nothing because they were lazy.
I was certain my father was no conduit for any unearthly power.I had never seen any proof and I had lived with him forever.So, the ground was the same, whether within or without the churchyard.That meant that both my father and Miss Hindmarsh were upsetting themselves for something imaginary.How could they not see how ridiculous they were?
I was glad of the table above me, strong and certain, for the world felt a dangerous place when my elders could not be trusted to use the evidence of their eyes and ears to arrange matters.
Occasionally, the lessons my father read on a Sunday seemed sensible.Thou shalt not kill, for example, seemed logical, for one did not want to live in a world in which people killed each other.But then English soldiers killed the French and my father encouraged the congregation to rejoice.What good was a philosophy in which opposing truths were both true?
My father had opened the front door and all but pushed Miss Hindmarsh out through it.He had said his piece and would hear no further argument.He shut the door.She stayed there in the porch for a time, weeping, until presently she ceased and went away.But I stayed beneath the table all the afternoon, hiding from a world which seemed suddenly even more cruel and unreasoning than I had supposed.
When I was sixteen and my father fell ill, I had tried most heartily to find some meaning and comfort in prayer and the church.I knew I must be a clergyman because my father would consider no other course for me, and in truth I did not argue because at least I knew what was expected of a clergyman, having watched my father and spent so much time at church.I knew my catechism and my articles.But no matter how I tried, my prayers were empty and the services raised no more sentiment in me than the ritual of my morning toilette.
I had thought, for years, that this lack of religious feeling meant I was in some way broken, or at best, incomplete.But the snicket gate through the carvet, the sight of Jem’s back as he preceded me down the path, the brook and the trees and the spider and watching Jem through the ferns…yes, all that made me feel something.
Indeed, for the first time in my life, I knew what men meant when they spoke of the divine.
* * *
Three days later, we went to bathe again.Afterwards, as we lay in the ferns, Jem again asked me if I would like to watch him.I said that I would, and matters progressed in the same way as they had done previously.But as we lay there afterwards, I allowed myself to sink into so delightfully torpid a state that my body betrayed me and I broke wind, loudly.
I had ruined our perfect idyll.I stammered an apology, and something about too much of Mrs Fowke’s rhubarb fool.
Jem gave a short laugh and said, dismissively, “Heard worse at sea.”
“All the same,” I said, still mortified.
“No, no,” he added, “It’s a sad arse as can’t sing sometimes, ain’t it?”
I looked at him through the ferns.His eyes were shut, his mouth softened by a smile.Everything in his demeanour told me that he really did not mind and that I had spoiled nothing.
Of course, I did not wish to start conducting myself regularly in a coarse or vulgar manner, but I had often felt, in refined company, that my very corporeality was something of which I ought to be ashamed.I should not sweat, nor cough, nor hiccup, nor allow myself any of the other natural functions to which the body cleaves.That Jem was not disgusted by me was such a relief that my heart filled with the most extraordinary feelings of tenderness and gratitude and, oddly, not a little admiration.He, and he alone, allowed me to be the poor forked animal that I was, and did not judge me for it.
I was still staring at him when he remarked, “That was prime, before, eh?I like it; knowing you’re watching.”
I mumbled something about liking it too.
“Wasn’t sure you’d still want to do such as yon,” he added.
“Why not?”
“Well, you being the parson now.”He grinned, suddenly.“A parson would never say ‘why not?’.”
“Mr Collins would never say it,” I agreed.“But down here I am not him.Remember?”
“Aye, I remember.”He paused.“Don’t you get weary?Always playing a part?”
“Weary?”I was often so tired I felt I could not live through another day.“Yes.But I have no choice.”
“But you’re a gentleman.Surely…”
“I had to become a clergyman.Father insisted.You know that.And in any case, I should never have made a soldier, should I?And I have no head for business.So, I did not disagree.And I suppose I am a bad clergyman as most men would judge it, for I have no calling, but I do my best to speak and behave as the rector to everyone but you.I must live my life somehow, but I do not understand the world, nor the way other people think.I do not really understand why they find some behaviours offensive and others delightful, and I don’t suppose I ever shall.I am different, I think, in many ways.You have said so yourself.And I cannot help that.So, I hide in plain sight to all but to you.For if anyone discovered my true nature, I do not know what they would do to me.”
