E-Book, Englisch, 352 Seiten
Jeal The Missionary's Wife
Main
ISBN: 978-0-571-31176-7
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
E-Book, Englisch, 352 Seiten
ISBN: 978-0-571-31176-7
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
Tim Jeal is an acclaimed novelist and biographer, whose Stanley: The Impossible Life of Africa's Greatest Explorer was published by Faber in 2007 and was a BBC Radio Four 'Book of the Week'. Stanley was named Sunday Times Biography of the Year, and, in the US, won the National Book Critics' Circle Award in Biography for 2007. Tim's memoir Swimming with my Father was published by Faber in 2004 and was also a BBC Radio Four 'Book of the Week' and was shortlisted for the PEN Ackerley Prize for autobiography. In September 2011 Faber will publish Explorers of the Nile: The Triumph and Tragedy of a Great Victorian Adventure, which, thanks to much original research, will shed fascinating new light on the 'Search for the Nile' and its colonial consequences. In 1973 Tim Jeal's Livingstone (1973) was selected as a 'Notable Book of the Year' by the New York Times Book Review and one of the 'Best and Brightest of the Year' by the Washington Post Book World.Livingstone formed the basis for a BBC TV documentary and a film for the Discovery Channel. It has never been out of print. Nor has Tim Jeal's Baden-Powell (1989), which was a 'Notable Book of the Year', and was chosen by Channel 4 for its 'Secret Lives' strand. In 1975 Tim was awarded the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize.
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In the months that followed her rejection, Clara’s pain and bewilderment did not fade away. Her worried father held himself partly responsible. By spoiling Clara, he believed, he had led her to expect to get whatever she wanted and had therefore left her ill prepared to endure failure or disappointment. During their largely silent meals, Alfred often recalled how happy and talkative she had been as a child before her mother died. Afterwards, he had thought that her faith would enable Clara to accept her loss. And sometimes, in the years that followed, she had seemed to come to terms with it, but little incidents had kept reminding Alfred that her deepest wounds remained unhealed.
One day, three years after her mother’s death, Clara – then fifteen – had been walking home with Alfred from a chapel meeting. It had been early evening, and they could see into many lamplit rooms. The area of town was a poor one, with numerous rooming houses. In a drab basement room of one such house, two children were sitting up in little cots, while their mother bent over them. ‘That’s the only heaven there is,’ Clara had blurted out. A few weeks later, she had stopped coming to chapel with her father, and soon she had pained him by visiting friends on the Sabbath and by playing tennis – though in deference to chapelgoers’ feelings, she always wrapped her racket in brown paper on her way to the courts.
Clara’s friends were mostly the daughters of affluent people – solicitors, potters’ valuers, commission agents, and so forth. With them, she attended dress shows and Palm Court concerts and went on shopping expeditions. Alfred sometimes wept at the change in her. He remembered Clara in childhood begging to accompany her mother, whenever she visited sick old women or read the Bible to the girls employed in a local cardboard factory. Some of these workers had been tubercular, and this was later thought to explain the infection that had killed Mrs Musson.
Clara knew she was making her father wretched by absenting herself from the chapel’s social functions as well as from its religious services. But she could not help it. As a girl she had loved to do good deeds. But the impulse had died with her mother; and afterwards, charitable acts, performed against the grain, had made her feel mean and hypocritical. She had gone on helping people only out of a sense of duty, and so had lost the afterglow that had once rewarded her spontaneous acts of generosity.
Years earlier, Clara had prayed that her bullying dancing teacher would die. And although God had not answered this prayer, Clara had never quite broken the habit of appealing for special favours. ‘Please let my mother live’ had merely been the last and most urgent appeal of all. Yet even then Clara had known in her heart that no God could be worth believing in if He listened to individual pleas. He was omniscient, so if something was right and just, He would do it anyway, without needing to be nudged. After her mother’s death, the process of praying had become synonymous with giving up hope. How could it have been right or just of Him not to have spared such a good and blameless person? Clara felt that she had been talking to herself. It was now nine years since she had prayed.
In the months after losing Charles, Clara tried, with limited success, to be rational about what had happened. She had loved him, she told herself, without knowing what sort of man he was. It was shameful to admit it, but she had probably been influenced by the romantic novels of Miss Braddon and Charlotte M. Yonge. Their humble heroines obeyed their hearts and fell for well-born heroes who, if sometimes feckless, at least always lived in elegant surroundings. And in Clara’s case, surroundings had been important. The plain and ugly furniture in her father’s house, the wax flowers and beadwork, the devotional texts in their heavy frames, had made Clara hungry for beauty. The drabness of the town had added to her sense of artistic deprivation. So when Charles Vyner preached his gospel of high art and hedonism, he had found a receptive pupil in Clara. How delightful, after she had admired magnificent rooms, to sit under a parasol in an open phaeton en route to a bluebell wood, there to enjoy a picnic of tender lamb cutlets on a bed of asparagus tips, followed by cold partridge and a crisp salad, all washed down with chilled champagne. Looking back on such halcyon days and on Charles’s many amusing sayings, Clara told herself that without loyalty and respect between people, nothing they did together could signify a thing – and yet she still could not end her grief.
*
On a freezing evening almost a year later, Alfred asked Clara to come with him to a fund-raising lecture in the town’s Temperance Hall. He had noticed a marked improvement in his daughter’s spirits, and so felt hopeful that she would come. The lecture was to be delivered by a missionary who had just returned from Africa and had already given some very popular talks in London. Such men were received by the faithful of Sarston with almost as much adulation as was lavished upon world-famous explorers. But while Alfred knew that he could hardly expect Clara to react in that way, he was confident that she would be impressed. He had met Robert Haslam at a prayer meeting in an alderman’s house and considered him superior to most missionaries.
Knowing how disappointed her father would be if she refused to come, Clara accepted his invitation. Being familiar with the jargon of evangelism, she expected to be bored. When she arrived, the atmosphere in the Temperance Hall was expectant and emotional. People wanted to be moved by tales of noble endeavour. Clara, seeing the missionary step on to the dais, was at first amused. His skin had been so darkly tanned that he looked like a Negro himself. His jutting brows and slightly emaciated face reminded her of Elijah (or had it been Elisha?) as depicted in a well-remembered child’s edition of the Old Testament. As he began to speak, she stifled a laugh. His voice was strange, as if his tongue had trouble framing ordinary words; he spoke English with perfect grammar but with a most peculiar accent.
Yet the rustling of dresses and scattered coughs soon died away. Although Clara was irritated by the rapt expressions on so many admiring female faces, even she could not deny that Robert Haslam was a peculiarly persuasive man. Instead of treating them to missionary clichés about dark and degraded minds being illuminated by the Gospel, he asked his audience to consider what they would think if a stranger arrived in Sarston and asked them to abandon their customs.
‘Would you give up monogamous marriage because a foreigner said it was wrongheaded? I’m sure you wouldn’t – not even when he told you that in his country a man can be respected only if he has many wives and children. Or would you agree to give your house and land to the king because an African told you that only kings are entitled to own land?’ Robert Haslam gazed benignly at the well-dressed people sitting in the front row. ‘Of course you wouldn’t. It’s hard to abandon one’s own customs, even when somebody who may know better tells you why you should. That’s why missionaries have to understand the people they wish to convert.’ He looked around. ‘Are there any bankers here tonight? If so, prepare to be shocked. I’m afraid Africans think that thrift is evil. In my small village, if my harvest is better than my neighbour’s, I’d be wise to share my grain with him. Next year my harvest may be poor and his may be abundant. Africans survive famines by sharing their grain and not by selfishly saving it for themselves.’ Again he looked around. ‘There must be many shopkeepers and manufacturers here. Well, my friends, you won’t like to hear this: Africans care nothing for punctuality. They’ve no clocks and have never heard a factory bell. They think it’s better to take life easy than to rush from place to place.’
Clara felt bemused. If no way of life was better or worse than any other, how could a missionary expect people to believe that his beliefs were superior? She was pondering this when Haslam declared loudly:
‘Africans ought to live as they like: owning little, sharing much, without envy of each other or lust for wealth.’ He smiled reassuringly at the puzzled faces in front of him. ‘But, my friends, while I love my African brothers and find much among them to admire, I see terrible cruelty too. When I first came to live with Chief Mponda’s people, Mponda had just strangled one of his wives for infidelity. Polygamy is unimaginably vile, and I am fighting it with all my strength. Mponda gives orders for twins to be murdered at birth. Tradition tells him that disaster will strike if he doesn’t. He’s not an unusually brutal chief, but in his eyes trial by ordeal is a perfect form of justice. So innocent people are forced to drink poison every year. And many harmless men and women are drowned or burned as witches. You cannot imagine the suffering caused by witchcraft unless you witness the horror of it yourself. Ladies and gentlemen, the conversion of a single chief to Christianity can spare the lives of hundreds and save the souls of thousands more. Unless you support missions with money, then you will be as bad as the man who sees someone dying in the gutter but does nothing to lift him up.’
Robert Haslam was soon describing his winning of the tribe’s trust by treating diseases and building a watercourse. It suddenly came to Clara why his accent was so strange. The man had spoken no English...
