He pushed the palpitating girl into the kitchen, slammed the door upon her, locked it and put the key in his pocket. Having staved off aggression from that quarter he made himself finally secure by carrying his pudding up to his own room, where he locked himself in.
Sarah emerged from the sitting-room across the hall when she heard him go upstairs, and made for the kitchen. To find her kitchen door locked against her angered her more than such a trivial incident might warrant, and she rapped upon it loudly, calling: ‘Teenie! What’s the matter, Teenie? It’s me: open the door!’
Her anger increased to fury as she stood there holding the door handle, listening to Teenie’s muffled explanations. She felt that the whole economy not only of her household but of her life was in jeopardy. It was with a feeling of ‘now or never’ that she mounted the stairs, saying to herself: I’ll sort him.
She rattled Ned’s door, crying: ‘Give me the key of the kitchen door at once, do you hear? At once, or I’ll bring the police to you.’
Her voice was hard and full of decision: it betrayed no doubt of her ability to enforce her will, and its conviction penetrated to Ned. The door was unlocked and flung open. Ned glared at her, but he retreated a step, although he said: ‘Your impudence is beyond bounds. This is my room.’
‘Give me that key. How dare you intefere with Teenie?’
‘How dare she and all of you interfere with me?’
‘Hold your tongue!’ shouted Sarah. ‘Give me that key!’
It was the first time that she had ever shouted at her brother, and her passion seemed to sober him.
‘Oh, get out,’ he said in an exasperated but normal voice. ‘There’s your key.’
He flung it on the table and Sarah pounced on it.
‘If I find you doing such a thing again I’ll – I’ll thrash you within an inch of your life! And I’ll have you jailed.’
‘Get out, get out,’ repeated Ned, in a reasonable enough tone, urging her to the door as if she were demented and he in full command of his senses. ‘Get out of this; I have some work to do.’
‘Kindly give me your pudding-plate.’
‘Oh, take it, take it, take it. Is there anything else you want?’ inquired Ned ironically.
‘No nonsense from you, and don’t you forget it, my lad.’
Sarah slammed the door behind her and marched downstairs again. She freed her kitchen door and said to Teenie:
‘He won’t do that again. Don’t you worry; just leave him to me.’
Then she did an unheard-of thing: she invaded the study.
William was finishing a sermon on the text: ‘Though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him.’ The God of wrath and the God of love were incomprehensibly one and the same; it was not for His children on earth to question His doings….
The Book of Job lay open on the desk befor him; he was sitting with an idle pen, staring at a certain verse.
‘I must speak to you, William,’ said Sarah.
William’s heart contracted. Some fresh trouble?
‘Put your pen down and listen to me.’
What had happened to Sarah? William turned round in his chair.
Sarah was sharp and concise. This kind of nonsense could not go on, and she would not allow it to go on. To his astonishment William discovered that his wrestlings for the soul of his brother were included in Sarah’s definition of nonsense.
‘Either you leave him alone,’ she said, ‘or you back me up in my treatment of him.’
William began to grow angry. He found it easier nowadays to transform heaviness of heart into anger.
‘Do you know what you are talking about, Sarah?’ he said sternly.
‘I think I’m the only person in this house who has any sense at all of what I’m talking about. You’ve been preaching to Ned about sin and prayer and the will of God, and the only result is that he’s ten times worse than he was. You just drive him past himself, and it’s me who has to suffer for it. Arguing with him about sin isn’t of the slightest use: what he needs is discipline, not argument. I’m going to discipline him, and I want you to leave him alone.’
‘It’s my duty,’ began William, ‘as a minister of God’s Church’ he was going to say, but instead he turned to the desk again and hid his face in his hands. What was his duty? Was Ned visited by God’s wrath because of some secret sin? Or was the visitation incomprehensible, as in the case of Job? Ned had a lively conviction of other people’s sins, but not of his own. All Ned wanted, he said, was security, justice, a right place in the world; and was it his fault that the world conspired to defraud him of that? Logically, William was no match for Ned, who could twist any of his arguments by the tail. He had finally preached contented submission to the will of God, resignation, acceptance without murmuring, but that had only roused Ned to frenzy, so that for a whole day he had done nothing but bang in and out of the study, screaming forth blasphemies againt the God of his brother….’
Sarah relented when she saw the minister hide his face.
There might be a time for that kind of thing, later,’ she conceded, ‘but he’s in no condition for it just now. What he needs is firm handling, as if he were a bairn. I’m going to make him get up for breakfast, and dress himself decently. And I’m going to cut off the gas at the meter at eleven o’clock every night. A regular way of life —’
She broke off. Her resolution was not sufficient to enable her to finish her sentence. A regular way of life is the first duty of a Christian, she was thinking, but William, she knew, would not agree with her. Men got such queer bees in their bonnets; even the best of them.
William still sat motionless.
‘You said before – don’t you remember? – that I was quite right in standing up to him.’
Sarah was insensibly taking up the defensive.
The minister roused himself with a sigh.
‘Yes, yes: you’re right to a certain extent, Sarah…. He must learn to live in this world as well as in the other.’ He smiled a little wryly. ‘But washing one’s face and putting on a fresh collar every day is only cleaning the outside of the platter after all.’
‘It’s at least a beginning,’ said Sarah, turning to go. ‘And it’s the only way that some bairns can be brought up to understand that there must be order in the world.’
The door closed behind her, cutting her off, but leaving the last sentence still hanging in the air.
Order in the world? Did William really believe that there was perceptible order in the world? What he believed was that God pervaded the world; but more and more he was being driven to acknowledge that God’s order was beyond human comprehension, although not beyond human faith. ‘Your God allows mean cunning,’ Ned had said. ‘Your God allows sheer cruelty. Your God allowed Christ to be crucified, and still allows it.’ Ned was blind to everything but the evil in the world…. There was one remark of his which persisted at the back of William’s mind. ‘Your God allows brute savages like Hector Shand to do things to people that I wouldn’t even think of, and then gives him a job and a wife and a home….’
He had not known what answer to make, for he too felt there was evil in Hector Shand.
Strangely enough, although Ned was becoming more and more exasperating, the minister was now convinced that there was real innocence in the boy. He was not evil in himself. He was twisted with fear, but he was not evil. Ned was a queer tangle of odds and ends, like the reverse of a pattern which might never be discernible this side of the grave, but which one felt was there. God’s pattern, thought the minister.
He