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The New Coterie  Volume 1   Issue: 6  Summer & Autumn, 1927  Page: 48
 
 The Prayer of A. O. Barnabooth By Valéry Larbaud
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Valéry Larbaud

THE PRAYER OF A. O. BARNABOOTH

(Translated by Adrian Collins)
 
WHEN years have passed, and I am in the tomb,
And things are just the same as they are now,
While still the cabs come crashing through the gloom,
Be I the cool hand on some burning brow, —
The brow of one who dreams of poetry,
And carols as he rides, although the air

 

Be thick and yellow, and he can scarce descry
The buildings looming black in Russell Square.
Be I some sweet thought cherished, undefined,
Amid the city’s rumour secretly,
A moment’s refuge from the whirling wind,
In Vanity Fair, for children gone astray;
And be my first steps in eternity
Eased with a little moss, on All Saints’ Day.
The New Coterie  Volume 1   Issue: 1  November, 1925  Page: 67
 
 The Prayer of A. O. Barnabooth By Valéry Larbaud
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T. F. POWYS

THE MULLET AND THE SWANS
 
A FABLE.

HINTON village expressed its highest respectability in its most harmless resident, and its most harmless resident was Mr. William Mullet.

Mr. Mullet had never become famous in an undertaking out of the common road, but he was famous, and in all kinds of quietness, in all kinds of virtue, he was a set example.

No one at Hinton could ever remember seeing Mr. Mullet converse with a woman upon whose character the least suspicion of untoward doings had ever fallen. Never, never, did the good man go to fairs or vulgar dances, or light-fashioned card-playings. Never had he been seen to enter in under the painted signboard of the village inn upon any summer’s evening.

Nothing could have been more proper than Mr. Mullet’s home-life; his life was, indeed, his home.

After she had done the housework so carefully as would beseem the wife of such a husband, Mrs. Mullet would sit beside the window and peep out between her flowering plants at the sinners. She liked to see with her own eyes how different they were; how different from herself and Mr. Mullet.

Mr. Mullet never even looked for the sinners. He left that part, so expressive of respectability, to his wife. He was retired. The people of Hinton believed that there had once been a time when Mr. Mullet was in business. Undertaking, or even groceries, it was whispered. Some went so far as to say that he had once laboured in both those vocations, most usefully.

Oddly enough Mr. Mullet used to have a queer sort of awe, or even fear of the sinners that Mrs. Mullet, with a kind of religious
The New Coterie  Volume 1   Issue: 1  November, 1925  Page: 68
 
 The Prayer of A. O. Barnabooth By Valéry Larbaud
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desire, was always looking out for. And when she would draw back the curtains to see what was going forward, he, quaintly enough, would say: —

“No dear, please don’t do that; someone might look in; someone might say something.”

Mr. Mullet had exactly the proper manners to deliver up, upon every happening that came to him in the usual daily matters of village life.

He might very well have just been the speaking part of the £3 5s. 6d. a week that his early industry in those useful trades — before mentioned — together with a small fund his father had left him had made him heir to.

He was never too polite; he was always exactly himself. If any little child who happened to be harmlessly, though a little carelessly, playing with a hoop in the street, let the hoop by any chance encounter Mr. Mullet, that correct gentleman would take the thing up with a smile and a nod and return it to the little boy — as though he were saying that he, too, had been young once. So kind and considerate a person was Mr. Mullet.

It is difficult to believe that such a naughty girl as Betty Payne could have lived at Hinton, and walked in the same street and breathed the same air as Mr. Mullet. One can surely hardly believe that the girl could in such company — for she must have sometimes seen Mr. Mullet — do what people say she used to.

The simple fact that Betty’s eyes were so pretty moved John Barrow, the itinerant chapel preacher, to describe her as a burning firebrand of vice, and even to add worse to that by calling her a stinking ditch of evil — the gentleman’s own trade of road-sweeper helping him to this last taunt of righteousness.

Between Mr. Barrow and Betty there had ever been an open hostility, dating back to the time when Betty, as a little girl, had called the attention of the passers-by to Mr. Barrow, who, in his worker’s clothes, was sweeping a road.

Betty’s words — she was young then — “Blest if thik bain’t our wold preacher; ’e be a poor man same as our daddy,” awoke so much hatred in the good preacher’s heart that never afterwards did he doubt for one moment but that Betty would be damned.

If in the ordinary course of village events, that bring people together at times whether they will or no, Betty would pass accompanied perhaps by young Barrow, the preacher’s son,or
The New Coterie  Volume 1   Issue: 1  November, 1925  Page: 69
 
 The Prayer of A. O. Barnabooth By Valéry Larbaud
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by idle Tom Chitty, the drunkard, Mrs. William Mullet would close the shutters — such sinning was too much even for her. She would turn to the fire and warm Mr. Mullet’s slippers. . . .

The easy circumstances of his days led Mr. Mullet on gently. Then came a day like the others. A winter afternoon and honest Mr. Mullet, walking abroad, gave himself for an hour to the dangers of the Hinton lanes.

The general outlook was as usual; a tile had fallen from Farmer Rogers’ barn — that was the only sign that queer things were moving. Other matters were as they generally used to be.

Little Tommy Mullen was playing in the mud with his stockings hanging over his boots. Tommy was in very happy spirits, because he had just made twenty-four holes with a rusty hat pin in the Rector’s new bicycle wheels. Tommy had immensely enjoyed the sound of the escaping air.

Mr. Mullet nodded to Tommy.

Mrs. Rogers was coming down from the farm. She looked decked out and feathered, as was proper for a lady to be at that hour in the afternoon.

Mr. Mullet took off his hat, and talked about the flowers that his wife grew in the little glass-house at the back of his residence.

Mrs. Rogers went her way smiling; she liked Mr. Mullet.

The Rector passed by, leading his bicycle. He would have liked to have spoken to Mrs. Rogers, too, but he felt how necessary it was to get his bicycle into his own garden. He had ridden down the hill so gaily, and had only left his bicycle for a moment in the village, and now he was forced to walk up the hill again and miss Mrs. Rogers.

Mr. Mullet said “Good afternoon.”

Mr. Mullet walked on, he passed the tall ash-tree at the corner of the Hinton churchyard. He took the lane to the right and at length reached Tom Chitty’s cottage.

Mrs. Chitty was drawing some water from the well in the lane. Mr. Mullet remarked that he had seen in the paper that the glass was going down. It was not proper to say more, because Mrs. Chitty had been pointed out to him as a sinner.

On his way home to the village Mr. Mullet met Joe Banting, the carpenter. The retired undertaker loved to be polite, and
The New Coterie  Volume 1   Issue: 1  November, 1925  Page: 70
 
 The Prayer of A. O. Barnabooth By Valéry Larbaud
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so he praised the new village stile; he referred more especially to the steps, he said “that were so easy to climb.”

Never had an afternoon walk appeared more peaceful or more harmless to Mr. Mullet. Virtue herself seemed to hang over Hinton village that winter’s day.

* * *


Mr. Mullet reached the rising ground that is near to the Hinton churchyard, and there he stopped.

He did not know why, but he trembled and looked up. He tried to think; he tried to remember where he was, but his thoughts were odd, too.

Mr. Mullet could only see Betty walking, walking with a young man through some long rushes, and he began to wonder about Betty.

Mr. Mullet still looked up. He felt that he had never gone so far away from the earth or so far towards the sky. He appeared to be held up by some unknown and terrible force.

He wondered about it; he began to fancy that the force was a strange new sound that he heard in the distance. The village had become silent; there was no one to be seen. But in the sound that he heard Mr. Mullet was aware of the feet of a girl coming to him. The sound changed; it became a bright and dazzling light and then the girl again.

Mr. Mullet had an odd feeling that all things were melting away into the strange sound that he heard — the sound of wings. And while he looked up there passed over Hinton village two splendid swans. The strange sound was come and gone, and Mr. Mullet was left with a vision in his mind. He, too, was winged. He would seek for Betty. He loved her more than life. The evening was darkening, he would find Betty.

* * *


The kettle sang merrily at home and Mrs. Mullet watched at her window for the sinners.

Two figures were lurking under the shadow of Farmer Rogers’ barn. One was Betty and the other a man she seemed to know, and yet she was not sure. Who was he? she wondered.

Her husband had taken rather a long walk. Perhaps he had gone to tea with Farmer Rogers. Yes, that was it — talking about the new clergyman, a harmless subject. They would all meet in heaven, no doubt, so why not on earth?

Poor Mrs. Mullet! She cautiously moved his slippers a little nearer to the fire.