by Hugh Walpole
Puddifoot, looking up across from his seat in the side aisle, thought, “There’s something the matter with him.” Suddenly he paused, looked about him, stared over the congregation as though he were searching for somebody, then slowly again went on and finished:
“Here endeth — the Second Lesson.”
Then, instead of turning, he leaned forward, gripping the Lectern with both hands, and seemed again to be searching for some one.
“Looks as though he were going to have a stroke,” thought Puddifoot. Then very carefully, as though he were moving in darkness, he turned and groped his way downwards. With bent head he walked back into the choir.
Soon they were scattered — every one according to his or her own individuality — the prayers had broken them up, too many of them, too long, and the wooden kneelers so hard. Minds flew like birds about the Cathedral — ideas, gold and silver, black and grey, soapy and soft, hard as iron. The men yawned behind their trumpets, the School played Noughts and Crosses — the Old Lady and her Triumph stepped away into limbo.
And then suddenly it was time for the Bishop’s sermon. Every one hoped that it would not be long; passing clouds veiled the light behind the East window and the Roses faded to ashes. The organ rumbled in its crotchety voice as the old man slowly disentangled himself from his throne, and slowly, slowly, slowly advanced down the choir. When he appeared above the nave, and paused for an instant to make sure of the step, all the minds in the Cathedral suddenly concentrated again, the birds flew back, the air was still. At the sight of that very old man, that little bag of shaking bones, all the brief history of the world was suddenly apparent. Greater than Alexander, more beautiful than Helen of Troy, wiser than Gamaliel, more powerful than Artaxerxes, he made the secret of immortal life visible to all.
His hair was white, and his face was ashen grey, and his hands were like bird’s claws. Like a child finding its way across its nursery floor he climbed to the pulpit, being now so far distant in heaven that earth was dark to him.
“The Lord be with you.”
“And with Thy Spirit.”
His voice was clear and could be heard by all. He spoke for a very short time. He told them about the Queen, and that she had been good to her people for sixty years, and that she had feared God; he told them that that goodness was the only secret of happiness; he told them that Jesus Christ came nearer and nearer, and ever more near, did one but ask Him.
He said, “I suppose that I shall never speak to you in this place again. I am very old. Some of you have thought, perhaps, that I was too old to do my work here — others have wanted me to stay. I have loved you all very much, and it is lonely to go away from you. Our great and good Queen also is old now, and perhaps she, too, in the middle of her triumph, is feeling lonely. So pray for her, and then pray for me a little, that when I meet God He may forgive me my sins and help me to do better work than I have done here. Life is sad sometimes, and often it is dark, but at the end it is beautiful and wonderful, for which we must thank God.”
He knelt down and prayed, and every one, Davray and Mrs. Combermere, Ellen Stiles and Morris, Lady St. Leath and Mrs. Brandon, Joan and Lawrence, Ronder and Foster, prayed too.
And then they all, all for a moment utterly united in soul and body and spirit, knelt down and the old man blessed them from the pulpit.
Then they sang “Now Thank We All Our God.”
Afterwards came the Benediction.
Chapter VI
Tuesday, June 22: II. The Fair
As Brandon left the Cathedral Ronder came up to him. Brandon, with bowed head, had turned into the Cloisters, although that was not the quickest way to his home. The two men were alone in the greyness lit from without by the brilliant sun as though it had been a stage setting.
“I beg your pardon, Archdeacon, I must speak to you.”
Brandon raised his head. He stared at Ronder, then said:
“I have nothing to say to you. I do not wish to speak to you.”
“I know that you do not.” Ronder’s face was really troubled; there was an expression in his eyes that his aunt had never seen.
Brandon moved on, looking neither to right nor left.
Ronder continued: “I know how you feel about me. But to-day — somehow — this service — I feel that I can’t allow our quarrel to continue without speaking. It isn’t easy for me — —” He broke off.
Brandon’s voice shook.
“I have nothing to say to you. I do not wish to say anything to you. You have been my enemy since you first came to this town. My work — my family — —”
“I am not your enemy. Indeed, indeed I am not. I won’t deny that when I came here I found that you, who were the most important man in the place, thought differently from myself on every important question. You, yourself, who are an honest man, would not have had me back out from what I believed to be my duty. I could do no other. But this personal quarrel between us was most truly not of my own seeking. I have liked and admired you from the beginning. Such a matter as the Pybus living has forced us into opposition, but I am convinced that there are many views that we have in common, that we could be friends working together—”
Brandon stopped.
“Did my son, or did he not, come to see you before he went up to London?”
Ronder hesitated.
“Yes,” he said, “he did. But—”
“Did he, or did he not, ask your advice?”
“Yes, he did. But—”
“Did you advise him to take the course which he afterwards followed?”
“No, on my honour, Archdeacon, I did not. I did not know what his personal trouble was. I did not ask him and he did not tell me. We talked of generalities—”
“Had you heard, before he came to you, gossip about my son?”
“I had heard some silly talk—”
“Very well, then.”
“But you shall listen to me, Archdeacon. I scarcely knew your son. I had met him only once before, at some one’s house, and talked to him then only for five minutes. He himself asked to come and see me. I could not refuse him when he asked me. I did not, of course, wish to refuse him. I liked the look of him, and simply for his own sake wished to know him better. When he came he was not with me for very long and our talk was entirely about religion, belief, faith in God, the meaning of life, nothing more particular than such things.”
“Did he say, when he left you, that what you had told him had helped him to make up his mind?”
“Yes.”
“Were you, when he talked to you, quite unconscious that he was my son, and that any action that he took would at once affect my life, my happiness?”
“Of course I was aware that he was your son. But — —”
“There is another question that I wish to ask you, Canon Ronder. Did some one come to you not long ago with a letter that purported to be written by my wife?”
Again Ronder hesitated.
“Yes,” he said.
“Did she show you that letter?”
“She did.”
“Did she ask your advice as to what she should do with it?”
“She did — I told her — —”
“Did you tell her to come with it to me?”
“No. On my life, Archdeacon, no. I told her to destroy it and that she was behaving with the utmost wickedness.”
“Did you believe that that letter was written by my wife.”
“No.”
“Then why, if you believed that this woman was going about the town with a forged letter directed against my happiness and my family’s happiness, did you not come to me and tell me of it?”
“You must remember, Archdeacon, that we were not on good terms. We had had a ridiculous quarrel that had, by some means or another, become public property throughout the whole town. I will not deny that I felt sore about that. I did not know what sort of reception I might get if I came to you.”
“Very well. There is a further question that
I wish to ask you. Will you deny that from the moment that you set foot in this town you have been plotting against me in respect to the Pybus living? You found out on which side I was standing and at once took the other. From that moment you went about the town, having secret interviews with every sort of person, working them by flattery and suggestion round to your side. Will you deny that?”
Against his will and his absolute determination Ronder’s anger began to rise: “That I have been plotting as you call it,” he said, “I absolutely and utterly deny. That is an insulting word. That I have been against you in the matter of Pybus from the first has, of course, been known to every one here. I have been against you because of what I believe to be the future good of our Church and of our work here. There has been nothing personal in that matter at all.”
“You lie,” said Brandon, suddenly raising his voice. “Every word that you have spoken to me this morning has been a lie. You are an enemy of myself and of my Church, and with God’s help your plots and falsehoods shall yet be defeated. You may take from me my wife and my children, you may ruin my career here that has been built up through ten years of unfaltering loyalty and work, but God Himself is stronger than your inventions — and God will see to it. I am your enemy, Canon Ronder, to the end, as you are mine. You had better look to yourself. You have been concerned in certain things that the Law may have something to say about. Look to yourself! Look to yourself!”
He strode off down the Cloisters.
People came to luncheon; there had been an invitation of some weeks before. He scarcely recognised them; one was Mr. Martin, another Dr. Trudon, an old Mrs. Purley, a well-established widow, an ancient resident, a Miss Barrester. He scarcely recognised them although he talked so exactly in his accustomed way that no one noticed anything at all. Mrs. Brandon also talked in her accustomed way; that is, she scarcely spoke. Only that afternoon, at tea at the Dean’s, Dr. Trudon confided to Julia Preston that he could assure her that all the rumours were false; the Archdeacon had never seemed better...funny for him afterwards to remember!
Shadows of a shade! When they left Brandon it was as though they had never been; the echo of their voices died away into the ticking of the clock, the movement of plates, the shifting of chairs.
He shut himself into his study. Here was his stronghold, his fortress. He settled into his chair and the things in the room gathered around him with friendly consoling gestures.
“We are still here, we are your old friends. We know you for what you truly are. We do not change like the world.”
He fell into a deep sleep; he was desperately tired; he had not slept at all last night. He was sunk into deep fathomless unconsciousness. Then he rose from that, climbing up, up, seeing before him a high, black, snow- tipped mountain. The ascent of this he must achieve, his life depended upon it. He seemed to be naked, the wind lashing his body, icy cold, so cold that his breath stabbed him. He climbed, the rocks cut his knees and hands; then, on every side his enemies appeared, Bentinck-Major and Foster, the Bishop’s Chaplain, women, even children, laughing, and behind them Hogg and that drunken painter. Their hands were on him, they pulled at his flesh, they beat on his face — then, suddenly, rising like a full moon behind the hill — Ronder!
He woke with a cry; the sun was flooding the room, and at the joy of that great light and of finding himself alone he could have burst into tears of relief.
His thoughts came to him quickly, his brain had been clarified by that sleep, horrible though it had been. He thought steadily now, the facts all arranged before him. His wife had told him, almost with vindictive pride, that she had been guilty of adultery. He did not at present think of Morris at all.
To him adultery was an awful, a terrible sin. He himself had been physically faithful to his wife, although he had perhaps never, in the true sense of the word, loved her. Because he had been a man of splendid physique and great animal spirits he had, of course, and especially in his earlier days, known what physical temptation was, but the extreme preoccupation of his time with every kind of business had saved him from that acutest lure that idleness brings. Nevertheless, it may confidently be said that, had temptation been of the sharpest and the most aggravating, he would never have, even for a moment, dwelt upon the possibility of yielding to it. To him this was the “sin against the Holy Ghost.”
He had not indeed the purity of the Saint to whom these sins are simply not realisable; he had the confidence of one who had made his vows to God and, having made them, could not conceive that they should be broken.
And yet, strangely enough, with all the horror that his wife’s confession had raised in him there was mingled, against his will, the strangest fear for her. She had lived with him during all these years, he had been her guard, protector, husband.
Her immortal soul now was lost unless in some way he could save it for her. And it was he who should save it. She had suddenly a new poignant importance for him that she had never had before. Her danger was as deadly and as imminent to him as though she had been in peril from wild beasts.
In peril? But she had fallen. He could not save her. Nothing that he could do now could prevent her sin. At that realisation utter despair seized him; he moaned aloud, shutting out the light from his eyes with his hands.
There followed then wild disbelief; what she had told him was untrue, she had said it to anger him, to spite him. He sprang from his chair and moved towards the door. He would find her and tell her that he knew that she had been lying to him, that he did not believe ——
Mid-way he stopped. He knew that she had spoken the truth, that last moment when they had looked at one another had been compounded, built up, of truth. Both a glass and a wall — a glass to reveal absolutely, a wall to divide them, the one from the other, for ever.
His brain, active now like a snake coiling and uncoiling within the flaming spaces of his mind, darted upon Morris. He must find Morris at once — no delay — at once — at once. What to do? He did not know. But he must be face to face with him and deal with him — that wretched, miserable, whining, crying fool. That he — ! — HE!...But the picture stopped there. He saw now neither Morris nor his wife. Only a clerical hat, a high white collar like a wall, a sniggering laugh, a door closing.
And his headache was upon him again, his heart pounding and leaping. No matter. He must find Morris. Nothing else. He went to the door, opened it, and walked cautiously into the hall as though he had intruded into some one else’s house and was there to rob.
As he came into the hall Mrs. Brandon was crossing it, also furtively. They saw one another and stood staring. She would have spoken, but something in his face terrified her, terrified her so desperately that she suddenly turned and stumbled upstairs, repeating some words over and over to herself. He did not move, but stayed there watching until she had gone.
Something made him change his clothes. He put on trousers and an old overcoat and a shabby old clerical hat. He was a long time in his dressing-room, and he was a while before his looking-glass in his shirt and drawers, staring as though he were trying to find himself.
While he looked he fancied that some one was behind him, and he searched for his shadow in the glass, but could find nothing. He moved cautiously out of the house, closing the heavy hall-door very softly behind him; the afternoon was advanced, and the faint fair shadows of the summer evening were stealing from place to place.
He had intended to go at once to Morris’s house, but his head was now aching so violently that he thought he would walk a little first so that he might have more control. That was what he wanted, self-control! self- control! That was their plot, to make him lose command of himself, so that he should show to every one that he was unfit to hold his position. He must have perfect control of everything — his voice, his body, his thoughts. And that was why, just now, he must walk in the darker places, in the smaller streets, until soon he would be, outwardly, himself again. So he chose for his walk the little dark winding path that runs steeply f
rom the Cathedral, along behind Canon’s Yard and Bodger’s Street, down to the Pol. It was dark here, even on this lovely summer evening, and no one was about, but sounds broke through, cries and bells and the distant bray of bands, and from the hill opposite the clash of the Fair.
At the bottom of the path he stood for a while looking down the bank to the river; here the Pol runs very quietly and sweetly, like a little country river. He crossed it and, still moving like a man in a dream, started up the hill on the other side. He was not, now, consciously thinking of anything at all; he was aware only of a great pain at his heart and a terrible loneliness. Loneliness! What an agony! No one near him, no one to speak to him, every eye mocking him — God as well, far, far away from him, hidden by walls and hills.
As he climbed upward the Fair came nearer to him. He did not notice it. He crossed a path and was at a turnstile. A man asked him for money. He paid a shilling and moved forward. He liked crowds; he wanted crowds now. Either crowds or no one. Crowds where he would be lost and not noticed.
So many thousands were there, but nevertheless he was noticed. That was the Archdeacon. Who would have thought that he would come to the Fair? Too grand. But there he was. Yes, that was the Archdeacon. That tall man in the soft black hat. Yes, some noticed him. But many thousands did not. The Fair was packed; strangers from all the county over, sailors and gipsies and farmers and tramps, women no better than they should be, and shop- girls and decent farmers’ wives, and village girls — all sorts! Thousands, of course, to whom the Archdeacon meant nothing.
And that was a Fair, the most wonderful our town had ever seen, the most wonderful it ever was to see! As with many other things, that Jubilee Fair marked a period. No Fairs again like the good old Fairs — general education has seen to that.
It was a Fair, as there are still some to remember, that had in it a strange element of fantasy. All the accustomed accompaniments of Fairs were there — The Two Fat Sisters (outside whose booth a notice was posted begging the public not to prod with umbrellas to discover whether the Fat were Fat or Wadding); Trixie, the little lady with neither arms nor legs, sews and writes with her teeth; the Great Albert, the strongest man in Europe, who will lift weights against all comers; Battling Edwardes, the Champion Boxer of the Southern Counties; Hippo’s World Circus, with six monkeys, two lions, three tigers and a rhino; all the pistol-firing, ball- throwing, coconut contrivances conceivable, and roundabouts at every turn.