As for being brought out unconscious! Copperthwaite never looked more alive and kicking (for he had more or less to kick himself out) than when he emerged from under the car, patted its bonnet and gave it a grateful and a loving look.

Anthony’s orisons were physically much less laborious, for they only involved kneeling and sometimes wriggling and pressing his forehead against the bed, or the chair, or the pew, or wherever he happened to find convenient for his devotions. He didn’t go to church much; he knew, or had known, the order of the service so well that he listened to it with only half an ear; he preferred private to public worship. Following its majestic sequence did not give him time to slip in his own petitions. These needed an effort of memory which he could not compass while the clergyman, the choir, or the congregation, were all shouting or muttering against it. His prayers needed constant modification; this or that person had to be left out, this or that person put in. The task of selection and discrimination was difficult; and to perform it, Anthony felt he must be alone with God, undisturbed by the traffic noises, and the traffic signals, red, yellow, and green, on the Road to Heaven.

But did he really believe in the efficacy of his prayers? Did he really believe they would be answered? Did he believe in God, as implicitly and explicitly, as Copperthwaite believed in his car? Or was it all a superstition on his part, a sort of insurance against some calamity that might befall his friends or himself? or, having forgotten to mention this or that desired benefit, to have deprived them, and him, of some happiness?

He put his friends first, because he had had doubts about the propriety of praying for himself; perhaps for oneself one could only ask God to forgive one’s sins? To ask him to forgive other people’s sins was an impertinence, an almost blasphemous prompting of God’s Will, that Anthony would never be guilty of. Some of his friends were quite bad, and urgently in need of divine, moral and spiritual aid, so Anthony never presumed to mention who they were or how they could be improved.

His prayers, however, did include a long string of names of friends for whom he made a general, and sometimes an individual petition. They were divided mainly into two groups: friends who were still living, and relations of friends who had died. Anthony never counted them up (he had a Biblical distrust of counting the numbers of people) but together they must have come to forty at least. As he murmured the name, its owner for a moment came back to him, each one, living or dead, a link in the chain of his life, a link of love, a continuation of his own personality, a proof of identity, his and theirs.

But there are always snags, even in prayers. Anthony did not offer prayers for the dead. Not for doctrinal reasons, but because he thought he could do nothing for them; they were in the hands of God. But he prayed for the comfort and consolation of their relations, and friends, even when he knew that their relations and friends were quite glad to see the last of them.

The list of these relations and friends grew longer and longer, as, one after another, from love’s shining circle the gems dropped away. A queue formed; and Anthony, in self-defence, had to omit certain names in order to make room for others, just as, in the cemetery of San Michele in Venice, the bodies of the dead are only allowed a few years of earthly habitation before they are turned out. Without having to accuse himself of favouritism, Anthony had to decide whose relations were in the greater need of his prayers, who should stay and who should go.

There was another thing. Some of Anthony’s friends whom, living, he had prayed for, had before they died and passed out of the land of the living, changed their names, owing to divorce, re-marriage, titles for themselves or their husbands. Would God know the original ‘Mary’ of his prayers for the living, for the Mrs. X, or the Lady X, for whose bereaved relations Anthony asked God for sympathy? Anthony knew how absurd this question was. God was no student of Who’s Who or Debrett; he would know who Mary was; but just as in ordinary conversation one has to explain who ‘Mary’ may be, so, in Anthony’s appeals to the Deity, he felt he ought to explain who this ‘Mary’ was. God was no respecter of persons; but Anthony felt he should take the trouble to differentiate this Mary from the other Marys, one of whom had been the mother of Christ.

Another thing that made praying laborious was that in this long list of names he might have left out someone. Every religion has its ritual which must be strictly observed; a small fault, a casual omission, may invalidate the whole proceedings. Anthony knew his prayers by heart, and wasn’t ashamed of rattling them off at high speed so long as he gave a flick of affection to each name, alive or dead, for whom he prayed. But sometimes he had the feeling that one name—just one—had escaped him. And then he must start all over again, and sometimes twice, to make sure that no one had been omitted. Apart from the effort of repetition, he didn’t like doing this; he felt it smacked of conscience, not of devotion, but all the same, he had to.

His prayers for the living, who had not been bereaved, but were perhaps sad, and ill, and unfortunate, were easier, because he felt that for them his intercessions were the living word of encouragement, and not the dead word of condolence. For them he did not have to pray for the negative blessings, if negative they were, of consolation and comfort; he could pray for their future happiness (if not, of course, based on some improper relationship), the success of their undertakings, their personal, general and material welfare. There was nothing wrong in this. The Old Testament had condemned many, indeed most things, but not the ideal of prosperity. Prosperity had been taken from Job: it was indeed the gravamen of his spiritual suffering. But in the end it had been restored to him ten-fold.

So Anthony did not feel it was irreligious to wish for his friends, not too much burdened and borne down by sorrow, the desire of their hearts, even in the material sphere. Did not devout Roman Catholics pray to St. Anthony, his namesake, for the recovery of some unimportant object, a wrist-watch, for instance, which they had lost? One could not, oneself, pray to God for the recovery of a wrist-watch; in relation to God it would be outside one’s terms of reference; and, as a Protestant, one did not pray to the Saints. But on behalf of someone else, one might, and that was how Anthony came to pray that Copperthwaite, to whom he was much attached, might be granted the gift of a Roland-Rex motor-car. He did not think of himself as concerned in the gift: he only wanted it for Copperthwaite.

Rising stiffly from his knees, after an unusually long and laborious session of intercession, he felt he might have done someone a good turn. It is difficult to know what a friend really wants; and what will be good for him if he wants it. Copperthwaite wanted a Roland-Rex.

A few days later Copperthwaite came to him with a rather stiff face and said,

‘I’m afraid, sir, I shall have to ask for my cards.’

Copperthwaite had been with Anthony for a good many years, and the phrase was unfamiliar to him.

‘Your cards, what cards, Copperthwaite?’ He thought they might be some sort of playing cards.

‘My cards, sir, my stamps and my P.A.Y.E., same as you have always paid for.’

‘You can have them, of course,’ said Anthony, bewildered. ‘That is, if I can find them. But what do you want them for?’

Copperthwaite’s face stiffened yet more: Anthony could hardly recognize him.

‘Because I’ve been offered a better job sir, if you’ll excuse me saying so. I’ve been happy with you, sir, and you mustn’t think I don’t appreciate what you have done for me. But a man in my position has to look after himself—you might not understand that, sir, being a gentleman.’