Brotherly Love

by GEORGE JOHNSTON

MRS. BOCADIES is a kindhearted woman who is always helping people. Someone once called her a saint and started a controversy on Beater Street, but whoever did wouldn’t own up to it afterwards. Rev. Gorge said something pretty good: he said, on a public occasion of some local importance, “Her heart’s in the right place,”and there was a cheer. It was the right thing to say. Her help was really helpful too — except for one time when she helped poor Amabel Macdonald — but she had a fault: she couldn’t leave well enough alone. “Why can’t you leave well enough alone?” they would ask her. She would apologize and promise to do so next time, but well enough was more than she could bear, and in spite of her most faithful promises she would get busy. For example, she got busy on Rev. Gorge.

“For goodness’ sake!” they said. “Why don’t you leave him alone? If ever there was a well enough, he’s it!”

“I can’t help myself,”she said. “He ought to be getting somewhere!”

“Getting somewhere?” they echoed, in an incredulous tone. “With a new car and a trip to Florida every winter, where better could he get ?”

“I know, I know!” she said, and she got busy and took mental exercises to see if they would do her any good, but they didn’t really. “Maybe he could be a sales manager somewhere,” she offered, knowing it was naughty.

“And get ulcers!” they said, scornfully.

“Well, he needn’t get ulcers . . .” she answered, not very convincingly. However, when his real trouble came she was by no means at the bottom of it: she was, in fact, if anywhere, at the top; he said himself that without her he might never have come out of it at all.

Mr. Gorge was an extra-special preacher. People came from all over the place to hear him and went away feeling awful. He had enemies, to be sure, but even these admitted his talents, and nobody challenged his place in Boater Memorial Church. What made his sermons so effective? Well, it was hard to put your finger on it exactly, but somehow he made people feel awful. Sunday after Sunday they would come out of the church shaking their heads and trying to adjust themselves once more, while the bells rang out in the steeple. “How can you say a talent like that is wasted?” they would ask Mrs. Bocadies. “Don’t you feel awful?” Mrs. Bocadies would have to admit that she did; she looked awful; and yet somewhere deep inside her was an imp that wouldn’t be shut up, and it kept saying, even in the church vestibule after one of his most awful sermons, when she wondered if she could ever face herself again, “He ought to be a sales manager!”

Mrs. Bocadies is an honest woman, in a psychoanalytic sort of way, and when such a voice as this bothers her she will empty out her psyche like a handbag and see what’s in it; and on one of these emptyings-out she discovered the sales-manager imp; or, to be more scientific, she discovered the condition that produced him. “I believe,” she said to herself, “that I am in love with Rev. Gorge.”This was not so remarkable a piece of analysis as it might at first appear, and Mrs. Bocadies knew it: half the congregation were in love with him; but for her it might very well be serious, whereas for the others it was more or less like being in love with one’s gynecologist. But she had just lost her second husband and, whether she admitted it to herself or not, she was in the market for such a widower as Rev. Gorge, and she preferred to admit it.

A circumstance arose, however, that put the sales-manager business out of everybody’s mind. It was not without precedent; that is to say, it was with precedent: it had happened at the time of the Sewage Swindle that Rev. Gorge got on to the subject of brotherly love and his sermons went all to pieces. Everybody was worried and held meetings with refreshments. “What does he think he’s talking about?" they asked. But after a while it passed off, and so far as one could interpret the symptoms it might never happen again. Just to make sure, they sent him to Florida in the winter for three weeks after this, to restore his nerves.

The congregation felt good about it, and so did Rev. Gorge, and there was no reason that anyone could see why mutual satisfaction should ever come to an end. Then one morning, while Mrs. Bocadies’s sales-manager flurry was still causing some excitement, little Mary Snether came home early from church. She has an unfortunate personality, poor child, but besides this she had rather terrible news. “Rev. Gorge is on brotherly love again!" she said. Everyone was upset. It was in the late spring, just the best season for the church — or by implication the worst for this sort of thing to happen — and meetings of an ad hoc nature began to be held. The consumption of cakes, cream, lobster, and salami was on an emergency scale.

Mrs. Bocadies emptied out her psyche, and Mrs. Needleworth and Olive Cloon, who had got the idea from her, did the same, and they uncovered, as a sort of by-product of the result, a heretofore unsuspected element in the case — a woman. She was a lady missionary from the Northwest Territories who was known among the Women’s Associations as Little Snow Flower, from the title of the talk she gave to the church groups. She was a short, knobbly woman with large ears and an interesting sidelong walk which reminded one of a bear; and she was melancholy by nature, which to Rev. Gorge, in his brotherly love mood at any rate, was irresistible.

“ Who was Mrs. Gorge while she was alive?” Mrs. Bocadies asked. Nobody remembered. “What sort of a personality did she have?” Nobody remembered this either, though she had lived in the manse for a year and had joined in the church activities before the beer truck backed into her. Mrs. Bocadies accounted for her own vagueness on the subject by the number of relatives she had buried at that time; but in any case no one could remember poor Mrs. Gorge. “It doesn’t, matter,”said Mrs. Bocadies. “Maybe the Little Snow Flower fills a need.” Very well, then, they allowed; let her fill the need, whatever it may be, and go back to her Northwest Territories where she is doing such wonderful work. Mrs. Bocadies organized a missionary fund drive, and a committee was appointed to coöperate with the other churches, whose congregations were less resplendent.

2

MEANWHILE the brotherly love sermons were going on, and indeed the subject had become so deep that it was hard to see how Mr. Gorge would find his way out of it again. Meanwhile, also, the affair of the Little Snow Flower came into the open, and the atmosphere, whichever way you turned, was threatening. Rev. Gorge and the L.S.F. were constantly on streetcars together —in his brotherly love moods Rev. Gorge refused to drive his car — and they were on public platforms together and, really, they were like a pair of lovebirds.

Mrs. Bocadies can put up with mush in other people, because she has had so little of it herself, but she has a sense of the fitness of things just the same. She knows when it isn’t funny any more. However, she stuck by Rev. Gorge and his L.S.F. because the grain of belief that he would make something of himself one day was stubborn inside her and wouldn’t die out. It was like a nut tree, or maybe a nut. “I know I’ve told myself that I’m in love with him,” she said. “But so what? I still believe in him. There’s more in that man than preaching!”

“I wish there was!” said Mr. Snether, ominously. “I just wish there was! But until he gets on to whatever ‘more’ it is, we have to put up with his preaching. And I can tell you we won’t put up with it much longer!” Mr. Snether would talk ominously for pastime, but on this occasion he spoke for a movement in the church whose sentiments were gathering to a committee.

“Please give them a little more time!” begged Mrs. Bocadies. She pictured to herself the couple out walking together: if they went down one side of the street the L.S.F., in her sidelong locomotion, appeared to bang into Rev. Gorge and push him into the road, but if they went down the other side she seemed to wander away. Poor Mrs. Bocadies, her emotions were confused but she knew that matters were coming to a head and it seemed of importance to her that they should work out all right.

“Mr. Gorge,” she said. “I wish you’d come and pay me a visitation.”

Mr. Gorge looked at his watch apprehensively. “It’s a terribly busy week!” he said. “Dear me!”

“I know it is,” she said, “but I’ve been reading psychology and, my land, the whole world’s busy those days! Do come! We’ll have some tea tomorrow afternoon, just you and I together.”

Mr. Gorge gasped; he had drawn a breath to ask if the Little Snow Flower might come as well and there was nothing to do now but make a gasp of it; however, Mrs. Bocadies smiled at him and held his hand, and whatever Mrs. Bocadies’s other charms may be, her smile is pretty sweet.

“ What did you put in my tea?” asked Mr. Gorge the next afternoon.

“Just a little peppermint,” said Mrs. Bocadies, “because it’s relaxing. It kind of spoils the tea, doesn’t it? However, it’s there now.” Mr. Gorge tried a butter tart to see if there was anything queer in it, but there wasn’t. He was in a distraught state of mind.

“ Mr. Gorge,” said Mrs. Bocadies, after he had choked for a minute on a crumb, “your life has reached a crisis, hasn’t it? Why don’t you tell me about it? ”

“Well,” he said, “I hardly know where to begin. I suppose I should begin at the beginning.”

“Oh no!” she said. “That’s too difficult. Why don’t we start in the middle and see what develops from there?”

“Well,” he said, “all right, then.” He looked hunted for a moment and then he blurted out, “Isn’t she a wonderful woman?”

Mrs. Bocadies’s eyes shone. “Splendid!” she said. “Go on!”

“Mrs. Bocadies,” he said, “I haven’t spoken this way before, and in general I don’t like the idea of speaking this way at all, but you know I ... I’ve been looking at myself pretty closely these days and I have recognized in myself, well, the seeds of greatness. I’ll put it as bluntly as possible: I shouldn’t be in this job at the church.”

“I know it!” said Mrs. Bocadies, fidgeting with excitement. “I’ve said so many a time!”

“Mrs. Beater—” he went on, “I mean Mrs. Bocadies — you know these sermons I’ve been preaching? They come to me in a sort of trance: they’re prophetic sermons, Mrs. Bocadies. When they first manifested themselves I knew they were a mark of something special . . . and then along came Madeline.” He drew his fingernails across the top of his head, as though they were a rake. “Isn’t she a remarkable woman? She is, if I may say so in this scientific age, a sign from heaven.”

Mrs. Bocadies was fascinated. “What do you think you’re going to do?” she asked.

“I have decided,” he said, “to go to the Northwest Territories with her.”

Mr. Gorge took a large mouthful of tea and then had difficulty swallowing it. It seemed to contain a quantity of air without which it wouldn’t descend. The perspiration trickled down his nose and he stood up, fished out his handkerchief, mopped himself across the brow and around the neck, and sat down again. “Mrs. Bocadies, he said, “one loves one’s fellow sinners — we are all in the same boat together, and it’s a little one and a precarious one to be sure — but as St. Paul knew, there are, in moments of crisis, few that one can trust. I have always known that you are one of the few, Mrs. Bocadies. My presence here this afternoon is evidence of this knowledge. Mrs. Bocadies—”

“It would be nice if you could call me Mabel.”

“Ah!” He stopped for a moment. “Mabel,” he said. “Bless you! Mabel, a fellow sometimes likes to talk about himself, and I have been unable to do so for many years. I haven’t yet reached the stage with Madeline, her heart is so full of her mission, but she has been the instrument in one of the great experiences of my life: the dropping of the scales from my eyes. Oh, Mrs Boc — oh, Mabel, if you could only convince yourself that all these years, when I have seemed to be preaching so happily, I was — well, as they say, kidding myself. Maybe you could. Maybe you have known it all along. My goodness, is there anything more exhilarating than having a good look at oneself?”

Mrs. Bocadies hadn’t been so enthralled by a conversation since the evening before her first husband’s heart attack, when she had had her talk with Sir Edward Thorpe. “Mr. Gorge,” she said, “I think you would like to bring your Madeline around here some evening and have a chat with her, just you two. You never see each other, except on streetcars and in meetings, and you can’t talk there.”

“ It would be wonderful!” said Mr. Gorge, moved almost to tears by this evidence of sympathy.

“Well, we’ll do it tomorrow evening, shall we?” she said.

3

MRS. BOCADIES lived in a rambling rug-brick mansion at the far end of Beater Street, almost out of town, and her property sloped away in a beautiful big park to the banks of the river. She left Mr. Gorge and the L.S.F. in what had been her first husband’s study, after giving them coffee and buns, and went off to the other side of the house to arrange some flowers. At half past ten her maid reported that the L.S.F. was writing something at the desk, while Mr. Gorge was walking around the floor.

“Isn’t it exciting?" said Mrs. Bocadies. “They are making plans.”

“I don’t dink dey are,” said the maid, who had been a countess.

“Well, try again in half an hour,” said Mrs. Bocadies, her curiosity piqued.

At eleven o’clock “de lady” was reading a book about Queen Victoria and “de dzog collair” was rummaging through a pile of geographical magazines. At half past eleven Mrs. Bocadies herself went in. The L.S.F. was asleep on a leatherupholstered settle and Rev. Gorge had apparently gone home. “Dear me!” said Mrs. Bocadies after she and the countess had at last awakened the L.S.F. “You must be very tired after all these meetings and things! Won’t it be peaceful to be back among your Eskimos and your trappers and your American aviators again, and your meteorologists and all that

The L.S.F. couldn’t thank Mrs. Bocadies enough for all she had done, all the money she had collected and everything. Mrs. Bocadies asked the L.S.F. not to embarrass her, and told her that she had been an inspiration, and then she got the countess — who had been a garage mechanic for a while during the war — to drive her home.

The following Sunday Rev. Gorge preached an old-style sermon again. Not a word about brotherly love and lots of words to make one feel pretty awful. At first the congregation was taken unawares, but soon the excitement among them became irrepressible, and at last the shuffling of feet, whispering, giggling, and turning right around in the pews forced Mr. Gorge into his closing prayer fifteen minutes before he was through. The uproar at the end of the service was inspiring; Mr. Gorge couldn’t help taking pleasure in it, he was so human and fallible after all. Many people were, of course, honestly disappointed. Mr. Snether was foremost among these, but many others besides him had developed a taste for talking ominously which it was hard to turn off.

On Tuesday evening a grand presentation was arranged, with salads and smoked oysters and chocolate cake, at which the L.S.F. wras given a rather large check; it was, in fact, the largest check in the history of Beater home missions. An orchid corsage was pinned on her and she said a few simple, moving words. Her departure at the airport was broadcast and everyone agreed that it was a pity it couldn’t have been televised, she looked so inspirational; but when the aeroplane received her and then taxied out to the runway it was as though the roaring blackness had swallowed her. Poor Mr. Gorge looked left behind for a while; however, everyone came back to Mrs. Bocadies’s to eat more, and Mr. Gorge brought over some old hats and was the life of the party.

After a while he and Mrs. Bocadies took a walk together among the gravel paths of the garden. It was a beautiful evening: a Ferris wheel still turned and twinkled in the distance, a merry-go-round thumped in the rise and fall of the breeze, and from time to time there was a gentle punctuation of screams from the roller coaster.

“Mrs. Bocadies,”said Mr. Gorge. “I don’t know how I can thank you.”

“Mabel,”she reminded him, and gave his hand a squeeze.

“Ah yes,”he said. “That’s right, Mabel.” He fell silent for a moment and then he began to look awful. “Are you thinking of a sermon?” she asked, but instead of answering he looked worse, so she tiptoed away. It occurred to her that things were beginning to be well enough again, and she wondered if she would be likely to leave them alone. Probably not.