Part 37 (1/2)
”What a disagreeable idea!”
And yet, why should it be?
Resolutely she told herself that Peter was at perfect liberty to fall in love with Meg if he liked, and set herself to listen intelligently to the Vicar's sermon.
Meg started to put her children to bed, only to find that her fertility of imagination in the afternoon was to prove her undoing in the evening; for her memory was by no means as reliable as her powers of invention.
Little Fay urgently demanded the whole cycle of little Mophez' dleams over again. And for the life of her Meg couldn't remember them either in their proper substance or sequence--and this in spite of the most persistent prompting, and she failed utterly to reproduce the entertainment of the afternoon. Both children were disappointed, but little Fay, accustomed as she was to Auntie Jan's undeviating method of narrating ”Clipture,” was angry as well. She fell into a pa.s.sion of rage and nearly screamed the house down. Since the night of Ayah's departure there had not been such a scene.
Poor Meg vowed (though she knew she would break her vow the very first time she was tempted) that never again would she tamper with Holy Writ, and for some weeks she coldly avoided both Jophez and Mophez as topics of conversation.
Meg could never resist playing at things, and what ”Clipture” the children learned from Jan in the morning they insisted on enacting with Meg later in the day.
Sometimes she was seized with misgiving as to the propriety of these representations, but dismissed her doubts as cowardly.
”After all,” she explained to Jan, ”we only play the very human bits. I never let them pretend to be anybody divine ... and you know the people--in the Old Testament, anyway--were most of them extremely human, not to say disreputable at times.”
It is possible that ”Clipture's” supreme attraction for the children was that it conveyed the atmosphere of the familiar East. The New Testament was more difficult to play at, but, being equally dramatic, the children couldn't see it.
”Can't we do one teeny miracle?” Tony would beseech, but Meg was firm; she would have nothing to do with either miracles nor yet with angels.
Little Fay ardently desired to be an angel, but Meg wouldn't have it at any price.
”You're not in the least _like_ an angel, you know,” she said severely.
”What for?”
”Because angels are _perfectly_ good.”
”I could _pletend_ to be puffectly good.”
”Let's play Johnny Baptist,” suggested the ever-helpful Tony, ”and we could pittend to bring in his head on a charger.”
”Certainly not,” Meg said hastily. ”That would be a horrid game.”
”Let me be the daughter!” little Fay implored, ”and dance in flont of Helod.”
This was permitted, and Tony, decorated with William's chain, sat gloomily scowling at the gyrations of ”the daughter,” who, a.s.sisted by William, danced all over the nursery: and Meg, watching the representation, decided that if the original ”daughter” was half as bewitching as this one, there really might have been some faint excuse for Herod.
Hannah had no idea of these goings-on, or she would have expected the roof to fall in and crush them. Yet she, too, was included among the children's prophets, owing to her exact and thorough knowledge of ”Clipture.” Hannah's favourite part of the Bible was the Book of Daniel, which she knew practically by heart; and her rendering of certain chapters was--though she would have hotly resented the phrase--extremely dramatic.
It is so safe and satisfying to know that your favourite story will run smoothly, clause for clause, and word for word, just as you like it best, and the children were always sure of this with Hannah.
Anne Chitt would listen open-mouthed in astonishment, exclaiming afterwards, ”Why, 'Annah, wot a tremenjous lot of Bible verses you 'ave learned to be sure.”
The children once tried Anne Chitt as a storyteller, but she was a failure.
As she had been present at several of Hannah's recitals of the Three Children and the burning fiery furnace, they thought it but a modest demand upon her powers. But when--instead of beginning with the sonorous ”_Then an herald cried aloud, To you it is commanded, O people, nations and languages_”--when she wholly omitted any reference to ”_the sound of cornet, flute, harp, sackbut, psaltery, and dulcimer_, and all kinds of musick”--and essayed to tell the story in broad Gloucesters.h.i.+re and her own bald words, the disappointed children fell upon her and thumped her rudely upon the back; declaring her story to be ”_kutcha_” and she, herself, a _budmash_. Which, being interpreted, meant that her story was most badly made and that she, herself, was a rascal.