by Hugh Walpole
The silence and peace of Canon’s Yard when he left Bodger’s Street was almost dramatic. All that penetrated there was a subdued buzz with an occasional shrill note as it might be on a penny whistle. The Yard was dark, lit only by a single lamp, and the cobbles uneven. Lights here and there set in the crooked old windows were secret and uncommunicative: the Cathedral towers seemed immensely tall against the dusk. It would not be dark for another hour and a half, but in those old rooms with their small casements light was thin and uncertain.
He climbed the rickety stairs to Foster’s rooms. As always, something made him pause outside Foster’s door and listen. All the sounds of the old building seemed to come up to him; not human voices and movements, but the life of the old house itself, the creaking protests of stairways, the sighs of reluctant doors, the harping groans of ill-mannered window- frames, the coughs and wheezes of trembling walls, the shudders of ill- boding banisters.
“This house will collapse, the first gale,” he thought, and suddenly the Cathedral chimes, striking the half-hour, crashed through the wall, knocking and echoing as though their clatter belonged to that very house.
The echo died, and the old place recommenced its murmuring.
Foster, blinking like an old owl, came to the door and, without a word, led the way into his untidy room. He cleared a chair of papers and books and Ronder sat down.
“Well?” said Ronder.
Foster was in a state of overpowering excitement, but he looked to Ronder older and more worn than a week ago. There were dark pouches under his eyes, his cheeks were drawn, and his untidy grey hair seemed thin and ragged — here too long, there showing the skull gaunt and white beneath it. His eyes burnt with a splendid flame; in them there was the light of eternal life.
“Well?” said Ronder again, as Foster did not answer his first question.
“He’s coming,” Foster cried, striding about the room, his shabby slippers giving a ghostly tip-tap behind him. “He’s coming! Of course I had never doubted it, but I hadn’t expected that he would be so eager as he is. He let himself go to me at once. Of course he knew that I wasn’t official, that I had no backing at all. He’s quite prepared for things to go the other way, although I told him that I thought there would be little chance of that if we all worked together. He didn’t ask many questions. He knows all the conditions well. Since I saw him last he’s gained in every way — wiser, better disciplined, more sure of himself — everything that I have never been....” Foster paused, then went on. “I think never in all my life have I felt affection so go out to another human being. He is a man after my own heart — a child of God, an inheritor of Eternal Life, a leader of men — —”
Ronder interrupted him.
“Yes, but as to detail. Did you discuss that? He knew of the opposition?”
Foster waved his hand contemptuously. “Brandon? What does that amount to? Why, even in the week that I have been away his power has lessened. The hand of God is against him. Everything is going wrong with him. I loathe scandal, but there is actually talk going on in the town about his wife. I could feel pity for the man were he not so dangerous.”
“You are wrong there, Foster,” Ronder said eagerly. “Brandon isn’t finished yet — by no manner of means. He still has most of the town behind him and a big majority with the Cathedral people. He stands for what they think or don’t think — old ideas, conservatism, every established dogma you can put your hand on, bad music, traditionalism, superstition and carelessness. It is not Brandon himself we are fighting, but what he stands for.”
Foster stopped and looked down at Ronder. “You’ll forgive me if I speak my mind,” he said. “I’m an older man than you are, and in any case it’s my way to say what I think. You know that by this time. You’ve made a mistake in allowing this quarrel with Brandon to become so personal a matter.”
Ronder flushed angrily.
“Allowing!” he retorted. “As though that were not the very thing that I’ve tried to prevent it from becoming. But the old fool has rushed out and shouted his grievances to everybody. I suppose you’ve heard of the ridiculous quarrel we had coming away from Carpledon. The whole town knows of it. There never was a more ridiculous scene. He stood in the middle of the road and screamed like a madman. It’s my belief he is going mad! A precious lot I had to do with that. I was as amiable as possible. But you can’t deal with him. His conceit and his obstinacy are monstrous.”
Nothing was more irritating in Foster than the way that he had of not listening to excuses; he always brushed them aside as though they were beneath notice.
“You shouldn’t have made it a personal thing,” he repeated. “People will take sides — are already doing so. It oughtn’t to be between you two at all.”
“I tell you it is not!” Ronder answered angrily. Then with a great effort he pulled himself in. “I don’t know what has been happening to me lately,” he said with a smile. “I’ve always prided myself on keeping out of quarrels, and in any case I’m not going to quarrel with you. I’m sure you’re right. It is a pity that the thing’s become personal. I’ll see what I can do.”
But Foster paid as little attention to apologies as to excuses.
“That’s been a mistake,” he said; “and there have been other mistakes. You are too personally ambitious, Ronder. We are working for the glory of God and for no private interests whatever.”
Ronder smiled. “You’re hard on me,” he said; “but you shall think what you like. I won’t allow that I’ve been personally ambitious, but it’s difficult sometimes when you’re putting all your energies into a certain direction not to seem to be serving your own ends. I like power — who doesn’t? But I would gladly sacrifice any personal success if that were needed to win the main battle.”
“Win!” Foster cried. “Win! But we’ve got to win! There’s never been such a chance for us! If Brandon wins now our opportunity is gone for another generation. What Wistons can do here if he comes! The power that he will be!”
Suddenly there came into Ronder’s mind for the first time the thought that was to recur to him very often in the future. Was it wise of him to work for the coming of a man who might threaten his own power? He shook that from him. He would deal with that when the time came. For the present Brandon was enough....
“Now as to detail...” Ronder said.
They sat down at the paper-littered table. For another hour and a half they stayed there, and it would have been curious for an observer to see how, in this business, Ronder obtained an absolute mastery. Foster, the fire dead in his eyes, the light gone, followed him blindly, agreeing to everything, wondering at the clearness, order and discipline of his plans. An hour ago, treading the soil of his own country, he had feared no man, and his feeling for Ronder had been one half-contempt, half-suspicion. Now he was in the other’s hands. This was a world into which he had never won right of entry.
The Cathedral chimes struck nine. Ronder got up and put his papers away with a little sigh of satisfaction. He knew that his work had been good.
“There’s nothing that we’ve forgotten. Bentinck-Major will be caught before he knows where he is. Ryle too. Let us get through this next week safely and the battle’s won.”
Foster blinked.
“Yes, yes,” he said hurriedly. “Yes, yes. Good-night, good-night,” and almost pushed Ronder from the room.
“I don’t believe he’s taken in a word of it,” Ronder thought, as he went down the creaking stairs.
At the top of Badger’s Street he paused. The street was still; the sky was pale green on the horizon, purple overhead. The light was still strong, but, to the left beyond the sloping fields, the woods were banked black and sombre. From the meadow in front of the woods came the sounds of an encampment — women shouting, horses neighing, dogs barking. A few lights gleamed like red eyes. The dusky forms of caravans with their thick-set chimneys, ebony-coloured against the green sky, crouched like animals barking. A woman was singing, men’s voices
took her up, and the song came rippling across the little valley.
All the stir of an invading world was there.
Chapter II
Friday, June 18: Shadow Meets Shadow
On that Friday evening, about half-past six o’clock, Archdeacon Brandon, just as he reached the top of the High Street, saw God.
There was nothing either strange or unusual about this. Having had all his life the conviction that he and God were on the most intimate of terms, that God knew and understood himself and his wants better than any other friend that he had, that just as God had definitely deputed him to work out certain plans on this earth, so, at times, He needed his own help and advice, having never wavered for an instant in the very simplest tenets of his creed, and believing in every word of the New Testament as though the events there recorded had only a week ago happened in his own town under his own eyes — all this being so, it was not strange that he should sometimes come into close and actual contact with his Master.
It may be said that it was this very sense of contact, continued through long years of labour and success, that was the original foundation of the Archdeacon’s pride. If of late years that pride had grown from the seeds of the Archdeacon’s own self-confidence and appreciation, who can blame him?
We translate more easily than we know our gratitude to God into our admiration of ourselves.
Over and over again in the past, when he had been labouring with especial fervour, he was aware that, in the simplest sense of the word, God was “walking with him.” He was conscious of a new light and heat, of a fresh companionship; he could almost translate into physical form that comradeship of which he was so tenderly aware. How could it be but that after such an hour he should look down from those glorious heights upon his other less favoured fellow-companions? No merit of his own that he had been chosen, but the choice had been made.
On this evening he was in sad need of comfort. Never in all his past years had life gone so hardly with him as it was going now. It was as though, about three or four months back, he had, without knowing it, stepped into some new and terrible country. One feature after another had changed, old familiar faces wore new unfamiliar disguises, every step that he took now seemed to be dangerous, misfortune after misfortune had come to him, at first slight and even ludicrous, at last with Falk’s escape, serious and bewildering. Bewildering! That was the true word to describe his case! He was like a man moving through familiar country and overtaken suddenly by a dense fog. Through it all, examine it as minutely as he might, he could not see that he had committed the slightest fault.
He had been as he had always been, and yet the very face of the town was changed to him, his son had left him, even his wife, to whom he had been married for twenty years, was altered. Was it not natural, therefore, that he should attribute all of this to the only new element that had been introduced into his life during these last months, to the one human being alive who was his declared enemy, to the one man who had openly, in the public road, before witnesses, insulted him, to the man who, from the first moment of his coming to Polchester, had laughed at him and mocked and derided him?
To Ronder! To Ronder! The name was never out of his brain now, lying there, stirring, twisting in his very sleep, sneering, laughing even in the heart of his private prayers.
He was truly in need of God that evening, and there, at the top of the High Street, he saw Him framed in all the colour and glow and sparkling sunlight of the summer evening, filling him with warmth and new courage, surrounding him, enveloping him in love and tenderness.
Cynics might say that it was because the Archdeacon, no longer so young as he had been, was blown by his climb of the High Street and stood, breathing hard for a moment before he passed into the Precincts, lights dancing before his eyes as they will when one is out of breath, the ground swaying a little under the pressure of the heart, the noise of the town rocking in the ears.
That is for the cynics to say. Brandon knew; his experiences had been in the past too frequent for him, even now, to make a mistake.
Running down the hill went the High Street, decorated now with flags and banners in honour of the great event; cutting the sky, stretching from Brent’s the haberdasher’s across to Adams’ the hairdresser’s, was a vast banner of bright yellow silk stamped in red letters with “Sixty Years Our Queen. God Bless Her!”
Just beside the Archdeacon, above the door of the bookshop where he had once so ignominiously taken refuge, was a flag of red, white and blue, and opposite the bookseller’s, at Gummridge’s the stationer’s, was a little festoon of flags and a blue message stamped on a white ground: “God Bless Our Queen: Long May She Reign!”
All down the street flags and streamers were fluttering in the little summer breeze that stole about the houses and windows and doors as though anxiously enquiring whether people were not finding the evening just a little too warm.
People were not finding it at all too warm. Every one was out and strolling up and down, laughing and whistling and chattering, dressed, although it was only Friday, in nearly their Sunday best. The shops were closing, one by one, and the throng was growing thicker and thicker. So little traffic was passing that young men and women were already marching four abreast, arm-in-arm, along the middle of the street. It was a long time — ten years, in fact — since Polchester had seen such gaiety.
This was behind the Archdeacon; in front of him was the dark archway in which the grass of the Cathedral square was framed like the mirrored reflection of evening light where the pale blue and pearl white are shadowed with slanting green. The peace was profound — nothing stirred. There in the archway God stood, smiling upon His faithful servant, only as Brandon approached Him passing into shadow and sunlight and the intense blue of the overhanging sky.
Brandon tried then, as he had often tried before, to keep that contact close to himself, but the ecstatic moment had passed; it had lasted, it seemed, on this occasion a shorter time than ever before. He bowed his head, stood for a moment under the arch offering a prayer as simple and innocent as a child offers at its mother’s knee, then with an instantaneous change that in a more complex nature could have meant only hypocrisy, but that with him was perfectly sincere, he was in a moment the hot, angry, mundane priest again, doing battle with his enemies and defying them to destroy him.
Nevertheless the transition to-night was not quite so complete as usual. He was unhappy, lonely, and in spite of himself afraid, afraid of he knew not what, as a child might be when its candle is blown out. And with this unhappiness his thoughts turned to home. Falk’s departure had caused him to consider his wife more seriously than he had ever done in all their married life before. She had loved Falk; she must be lonely without him, and during these weeks he had been groping in a clumsy baffled kind of way towards some expression to her of the kindness and sympathy that he was feeling.
But those emotions do not come easily after many years of disuse; he was always embarrassed and self-conscious when he expressed affection. He was afraid of her, too, thought that if he showed too much kindness she might suddenly become emotional, fling her arms around him and cover his face with kisses — something of that kind.
Then of late she had been very strange; ever since that Sunday morning when she had refused to go to Communion.... Strange! Women are strange! As different from men as Frenchmen are from Englishmen!
But he would like to-night to come closer to her. Dimly, far within him, something was stirring that told him that it had been his own fault that during all these years she had drifted away from him. He must win her back! A thing easily done. In the Archdeacon’s view of life any man had only got to whistle and fast the woman came running!
But to-night he wanted some one to care for him and to tell him that all was well and that the many troubles that seemed to be crowding about him were but imaginary after all.
When he reached the house he found that he had only just time to dress for dinner. He ran upstairs, and then, when
his door was closed and he was safely inside his bedroom, he had to pause and stand, his hand upon his heart. How it was hammering! like a beast struggling to escape its cage. His knees, too, were trembling. He was forced to sit down. After all, he was not so young as he had been.
These recent months had been trying for him. But how humiliating! He was glad that there had been no one there to see him. He would need all his strength for the battle that was in front of him. Yes, he was glad that there had been no one to see him. He would ask old Puddifoot to look at him, although the man was an ass. He drank a glass of water, then slowly dressed.
He came downstairs and went into the drawing-room. His wife was there, standing in the shadow by the window, staring out into the Precincts. He came across the room softly to her, then gently put his hand on her shoulder.
She had not heard his approach. She turned round with a sharp cry and then faced him, staring, her eyes terrified. He, on his side, was so deeply startled by her alarm that he could only stare back at her, himself frightened and feeling a strange clumsy foolishness at her alarm.
Broken sentences came from her: “What did you — ? Who — ? You shouldn’t have done that. You frightened me.”
Her voice was sharply angry, and in all their long married life together he had never before felt her so completely a stranger; he felt as though he had accosted some unknown woman in the street and been attacked by her for his familiarity. He took refuge, as he always did when he was confused, in pomposity.