Mockery Gap by T.F. Powys

Author:T.F. Powys
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: Literary, British Literature, Fiction
ISBN: 9780571279050
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 1925-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 16

THE WHITE MICE

PEOPLE, although they may believe in God, often think very differently about Him. Mr. Pattimore believed in His Name, which Name he surrounded with attributes as cold as ice. In his own attic bed that resembled God’s Name in its coldness he hoped to harden himself and become fit to be a dean, though so far in his life he had not even had a call to become a canon.

Mr. Gulliver didn’t take God in the least as Mr. Pattimore took Him, but rather fancied Him as a humorous gentleman, a little like Mr. James Tarr, and able, indeed willing, to supply the world with a good store of monsters and to bring the Nellie-bird to Mockery Gap as a stray fisherman.

If Mrs. Topple had been asked where she supposed God might be found, she would have replied that when she had once found the clover with four leaves God would be standing near by in the shape of an all-wise doctor.

Mr. Pink saw God as a vast sea of ever-changing colour, a sea that is beyond human vision, though the blessed may pass over there to a country that is very fair and is called Eternity….

Mr. Pink was at work at his desk, and the summer sun, as inquisitive as great people always are, peeped in upon him.

Mr. Pink had been asked in a letter to try to discover—‘It’s Miss Ogle who thought something ought to be done,’ Mr. Roddy had said—the arrears of rent that Mr. Gulliver owed to the Roddy estate.

He was now trying to decide a point that interested him more than the additional sum: that was, how much he ought to take off from the bill, because Gulliver had made at his own expense a new gate for Mr. Caddy’s cottage that went with the farm.

He was upon the point of taking away £1, 15s. 6d., the supposed value of the gate that Mr. Caddy liked so much to lean upon when he talked to the ducks, from Mr. Gulliver’s debt of £789, 14s. 3½d., when Miss Pink put her head into the door and said that a basket had been left by the fisherman for Mrs. Moggs, that he wished Mr. Pink to give to her.

‘I believe they ’re white mice,’ said Miss Pink, who had, it must be owned, peeped in to see.

Mr. Pink closed his ledger. He decided as the heavy book shut that he had better pay to Mr. Gulliver the £1, 15s. 6d. that the estate owed him, which would save the trouble of an extra sum.

Mr. Pink peeped at the mice too.

‘Mr. James Tarr said they would save her life and prevent her being lonely,’ he said, looking with admiration at the mice.

‘Will you take them to her now?’ asked Miss Pink, lifting one of the mice up in her hand and kissing it.

‘Perhaps I had better,’ replied Mr. Pink.

Miss Pink looked out of the door and watched him go. She stood upon the doorstep wrapped

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