Gerald Eversley's Friendship: A Study in Real Life

by J. E. C. Welldon

Born and bred in such a home, Harry Venniker, if he looked to his future life, must have seen it traced for him in clear and definite lines. To go to St. Anselm’s, the school in which his family had been educated for four generations, to distinguish himself not so much in work as in cricket and football, to get into the army, to spend a few years in the House of Commons and then to become a respectable peer and country gentleman, to be in fact what his father had been before him, and his grandfather before his father, was his ambition, if anything so natural and, as it seemed, so inevitable, could be strictly called an ambition. He was at this time, like so many English boys when they enter upon public school life, a splendid animal, healthy, vigorous, proud, elate, with no low tastes, possibly without any high aims, taking life as it came, and being content to enjoy it fully, but having no special sense of a vocation or mission in life. After all, the world’s missionaries are but few, abroad or at home, and the world would not be so comfortable if they were numerous. For it is the missionary’s business to disturb and upset established things, and there are secular missionaries (who are sometimes called ‘bores’) as well as spiritual. Harry Venniker must not be blamed if his vocation or mission remained obscure to him in boyhood. But he owed to his mother not only his sunny smile (although his had not as yet, like hers, a tinge of sadness) and his rich curling auburn hair, but the generous sympathy—derived from her example still more than from her precept—which made it impossible for him to resist the silent appeal of suffering or to withhold his aid if it were invoked in the cause of weakness and sorrow. It was this sympathy, spontaneously elicited, which had led him to swear eternal friendship with a boy so dissimilar to himself as Gerald Eversley. Until now Harry Venniker had had no great friend, or his only friend had been his sister.

The contrast between the stately pile of Helmsbury, which was Harry Venniker’s home, and the vicarage of Kestercham, where Gerald Eversley had spent the first thirteen years of his life, was strongly marked. But the two boys, when they met at St. Anselm’s, were not conscious of it, as neither of them had ever seen the home of the other. If I can succeed in delineating both these homes, the progress of this story will be more easily understood. Fortunately, in speaking of Kestercham vicarage it is possible to use some letters of Gerald’s—written partly to Harry Venniker and partly to another—which lie before me.

The village of Kestercham is situated in the heart of the most beautiful of English counties. It is hidden, I had almost said, it seems to hide itself, from human eyes. The rare traveller who should happen to pass through it, making a slight détour, perhaps, to catch the view of the cathedral which bursts upon the eyes at the sharp turning where the road emerges from the valley of Depedown, about a mile and a half from Kestercham, would be likely to judge (and not unreasonably) that it was cut off from the affairs of the outer world. The large manufacturing town of X—— lies at a distance of some ten miles from Kestercham; its tall chimneys rise like giants into the air; but the smoke dies away, and the din of the great city, long before you come to the blacksmith’s shop where the three roads meet, and the left arm of the time-worn signpost bears the inscription ‘To Kestercham.’ In one of Gerald Eversley’s letters, written some years after the beginning of this story, the following passage occurs:

‘How well I remember that blacksmith’s shop! Often and often, when driving home on winter evenings with my father from one of the neighbouring villages where he had been doing duty, have I strained my eyes to catch the jolly inspiring glow of the blacksmith’s stithy, and I think the drive always seemed less cold and dreary when once the ruddy flame, shining through the little windowpane, came into view. The blacksmith himself was my particular friend. I remember how I used to stand by his side, when I was a child, in silent eager admiration of the force with which he brought down the large hammer on a bar of red-hot iron, sending the sparks in wild confusion through the stithy, like so many fireworks, and what a delight it was to me—never to be forgotten—when he took my little arms in his brawny black hands and let me play at producing the same luminiferous effect. I do not know or did not reflect in those days that it was an operation used long ago by a sacred writer to exemplify the multitude of human troubles. The blacksmith was kind to me, and I think he was my first boyish hero. Certainly, if anyone had asked me in these days what was the profession that most satisfied my ambition next to the clerical (for I always put the clerical first, as being my father’s), I should have answered “the blacksmith’s.”’

A little afterwards in the same letter he says: ‘From there (i.e. from the blacksmith’s shop) to Kestercham every inch of the way is familiar to me. The tall late-flowering limes—I never knew why they were so late in flower, but they always were—the hedgerows in which it was my boyish pleasure to search for the clematis and the wild rose, or to whisk off the heads of the ox-eyed daisies for violating my father’s rule that flowers, like young ladies, ought not to be staring, the two trim high-gabled farmhouses, hardly distinguishable one from the other, between which the road passed (the daughter of one of the farmers in these houses was a teacher in the Kestercham Sunday school), then the cottages, straggling at first, but gradually becoming closer until you descend a steepish hill and come upon a gully where a torrent rushes across the road in the winter or even in the summer if it is unusually wet, and you go through the green gate where the path turns off the high road and leads to the vicarage. That green gate was a great feature in the life of the vicar’s family at Kestercham; it marked the boundary between the vicarage and the world, the world being the parish of Kestercham with its barely three hundred souls. A walk to the green gate was a regular incident of the day; my father and I took it always, even if we did not go farther, after breakfast. I think he must have taken that walk nearly five thousand times since we came to Kestercham. Perhaps a hundred yards or a little more before reaching the gate on the way from X——, if you lift your eyes, you may catch a distant glimpse of the church nestling sleepily among the elms (unless it is summer, and the foliage so thick as to spoil the view), or if the wind is from the south, and your ears are sharp, you may hear the cawing of the rooks from their immemorial home in the churchyard. No gun was ever pointed at those rooks, or at the old owl that lived in the venerable riven elm between the churchyard and the Grange; for Mr. Seaford, the farmer who occupied the Grange, protected the owl as being the enemy of the mice which infested his farm and stackyard, and the rooks were the traditional favourites of my father, who looked upon them as possessing a special right of sanctuary within the precincts of the church.’

The vicarage, as this letter shows, lies off the high-road, nearly half a mile away from it. You go through several fields of oats and barley (or perhaps of mangoldwurzel and turnips, if it is the turn for root crops), then through a hay-field, generally the last to be cut in the village, then past the church and the moated Grange, and finally a sharp turn in the road or lane brings you in sight of the single cadaverous-looking poplar by the vicarage gate. The house itself is invisible until you stand at the front door; it is literally embedded in the trees.

This was Gerald Eversley’s home; he had never known any other. A quiet, sober red brick house with a facing of flint-stones built into the rubble; two rooms on the ground floor, looking into the garden, one of them the drawing-room with its ample bay-window, the other the dining-room, though in Gerald’s mind it was associated with lessons as much as with meals; above these rooms two corresponding bedrooms, in one of which Mr. Eversley had slept ever since he became vicar of Kestercham; on the other side of the house, which extended some way backwards, other bedrooms above the kitchen and the morning-room (which was seldom used until the afternoon) and Mr. Eversley’s study. Just outside the front door a noble birchtree raised its branches high above the roof of the house: how those boughs would creak and whistle in the north wind! Gerald had often lain awake in the still hours of the night listening to the rhythm of their moaning and wondering how long it would be before one of them fell with a thunder-clap to the ground. In front of the doorway was an oval grass-plot with a flowerbed, containing a large cactus in the middle, and a gravel carriage drive encircling it; beyond, a level bowling-green carefully kept and overshadowed by firs. There had been trees at the far end of the bowling-green as well as at its sides when Mr. Eversley came to Kestercham; but they had been cut away so as to allow a clear view from the vicarage of the church and the meadows leading to Kestercham Green. For it is a peculiarity of Kestercham, rendering the life at the vicarage still more solitary than it would otherwise have been, that the church and the vicarage are removed by a long distance—a mile and a half, even if one takes the short cut across the fields—from the ordinary scenes of the village life. It would seem that the church was originally designed to subserve the spiritual needs of several hamlets (for it is fully as near to the confines of Ripenham or Coddington as it is to Kestercham Green) and that the vicarage was built in due proximity to the church. The result is that at Kestercham the spiritual centre—the church—and the secular centre—the public house—are as far divided locally as possible. There is not a human habitation near the vicarage or in sight of it except the Grange, and even that is not visible from the vicarage itself. The vicarage stands in a solitude which may be felt.

But to Mr. Eversley, and therefore, of course, to Gerald in his early days, the heart of Kestercham parish—the building to which it owed its unity and sanctity—was the church. Mr. Eversley, who had some slight knowledge of architecture, would delight in pointing out to his young son the traces of many hands and different ages in the structure of the church—the outline of the old Norman archway at the west end, the six (would be) decorated windows of the nave, the groined roofing in the chancel and the massive tower built in the reign of Henry VII. by Edward Rickling, then the head of the Rickling family who for many generations owned the manor of Kestercham and lived at the Grange—it was then called the Hall—before it passed into the hands of the Seafords. The Ricklings have left many marks of their importance upon the church, perhaps the most striking being a large monument on the north wall representing the same Edward Rickling laid out after his death, and his wife and three sons and two daughters weeping beside him. Nearly opposite to the memorial of the Rickling family is a monument in brass supposed (though nobody knows) to have borne the name of a certain Balthazar Gardereau, a French Huguenot and silk-merchant of Lyons who settled at Kestercham, when he had been driven out of his own country by the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, acquired the great tithes of the living, and presented to the church the service of Communion plate which still exhibits the letters B. G. in monograph. But this is history, or it is legend, the best of which Kestercham is capable.

The Kestercham folk were not, it may be supposed, loyal to the Crown in the seventeenth century, or, as is more probable, they displayed no interest in politics or war, and so escaped the anger of Cromwell’s army which is said to have been once encamped somewhere in the neighbourhood; for there is a royal coat of arms of Charles I., with the date 1640, hanging in the church, and it can hardly be thought that the Roundheads, if they had caught sight of it, would have left it there. Mr. Eversley, as a loyalist and a believer in the divine right of kings, was very proud of it. The south porch of the church is or was a little remarkable; for under its gable was the figure of a flying angel bearing a scroll with the legend, ‘Gather my saints together unto me,’ the church being dedicated to All Saints. When Mr. Eversley came to Kestercham a tall cross rose behind the figure of the angel and surmounted the gable. Mr. Eversley left the angel, not without a qualm of conscience, but he caused the cross to be taken down at the same time as he removed all traces of a holy-water basin which some workmen in repairing the porch had brought to light.

Gerald Eversley’s earliest recollections were associated with Kestercham church. Twice every Sunday, in the morning and the afternoon, he accompanied his father thither. Its simple services impressed themselves upon his mind. They represented his ideal of public divine worship. In after days, when his thoughts and feelings had become liberalised, he was fond of dwelling with a certain irony upon some quaint prehistoric customs which lingered on at Kestercham. But these very customs seemed venerable to him as a boy. The church had no vestry, but a curtain (which Mr. Eversley himself provided, for before his time there had been none) hung in front of the belfry—if, indeed, it can be called a belfry, when there was only a single bell—and behind that curtain, underneath the tower of the church, Mr. Eversley would assume his surplice before the prayers, and would exchange it for his black gown before the sermon. He had a commanding air—so Gerald felt—as he slowly walked the length of the church, joining heartily in the hymn that was being sung. He did strange things, or things which would seem strange in more modern times, for he was exempt from the fear of criticism which affects the minds of men, and especially of clergymen, living in the eye of the world. The parishioners of Kestercham did not regard or read the newspapers; they did not care to inquire what other people said. Thus it was, for instance, that Mr. Eversley would pause in his sermon and address some poor woman whose infant exhibited signs of crying, saying kindly, ‘Never mind. Stay where you are. Better a screaming baby than an absent mother!’ So, too, he has been known, in passing up the church, to ask a parishioner about his health or his family. All this would seem odd nowadays, perhaps irreverent; but nobody thought it odd at Kestercham.