Arrest the Bishop?

by Peck,Winifred

  “I’m sure everything is in the best possible order!” Though he roused himself to speak and smile, his wife’s cheerful vitality seemed to the Bishop only as a fire through a glass screen to a cold man. “Where’s Sue?”

  “Out at the G.F.S. party, but she’ll be back soon.”

  Like most clergy and headmasters the Bishop had a secret predilection for the society of the other sex, and not least for the young and attractive. Sue, his only child by the second Mrs. Broome, had managed to inherit her father’s admirable features with her mother’s quality of cosy warmth. She was no noted beauty like Judith, his daughter by his first wife, but that young lady’s meteoric career through two seasons with her stepmother’s wealthy relatives, mild flirtations, broken heart, spectacular wedding and recent far less pleasing, and even more notorious activities, had given him a certain distrust of outstanding charm in women.

  “Ah, here’s Bobs! That’s nice. I’m sure you’ve arranged everything beautifully for us, Bobs!”

  There was no false geniality in Mrs. Broome’s welcome to the genial, red-headed young parson who joined them. One of a Bishop’s problems is to find a chaplain who is a budding administrator, a competent shorthand typist, and congenial to his family all in one. The Broomes had endured in succession a bullying martinet and an over-competent young business woman during the war. They were, after this, delighted to welcome Robert Borderer, a connection of the Pounds and an Old Boy of St. Blaze, though his powers of organization were as sketchy as his Pitman, because he was pre-eminently pleasant to live with and devoted to the family. (Too devoted to Judith once, but that’s over long ago, thought Mrs. Broome sometimes.) Of course, as Bobs himself candidly told them, it was too cushy a job for him, but a wound sustained as a stretcher-bearer and chaplain in France made more active work impossible for the present.

  “Not more muddles than usual, I hope,” said Bobs, taking a large muffin. “We haven’t fixed up about the reading aloud, my lord. We had Jeremy Taylor last September, Latinius’ sermons last March. Should we have something lighter?”

  “I’d prefer P. G. Wodehouse myself,” said Mrs. Broome, absently, looking curiously from her husband to Bobs. It was clear that they were worried, seriously worried over something, and though this was frequently the case with her over-anxious Mark, it took a good deal to worry Bobs. “Or let the poor boys talk for a change! Two of the deacons were here before the war, dear, Dick and Mr. Staples I mean, just when that dreadful trouble over Mr. Ulder hung over us—he was turned out of his headship of the Theological College just afterwards, wasn’t he? And the others who are to be ordained deacons looked such babies when they came for the Examination! I’d like to give them all a good time, specially just before Christmas! Oh dear, what have I said? Something is wrong, I can see! You don’t mean that this dreadful Mr. Ulder is making trouble again!”

  “He has written to threaten me with a visit shortly,” admitted the Bishop unwillingly. “But we won’t talk about it, please, my dear. Let us—let us consider this problem of the reading aloud by Bobs. I must say I prefer to listen to him rather than to find subjects of conversation.”

  “But we’ll have the Chancellor and Dick and Canon Wye! They’re all easy enough! Still, what about a little Tolstoy?” Mrs. Broome tried to retain her habitual cheerfulness, but there could be no doubt that a blight had fallen upon the room at the mention of Ulder’s name.

  It is certain that some commentators must have suggested that the thorn in St. Paul’s side referred to a contemporary deacon or elder who had disgraced his calling and his God. There can be few greater trials for any Father in God, more especially nowadays when the press never fails to give widest publicity to the scandals of the Church. (“Only the birth of quintuplets or the wedding of a film star will ever get Ulder off the front page of the Penny Press,” Bobs had groaned once.) And the thorn is all the more painful in the Anglican Church because it is as difficult to deprive a parson of his living as to extract a deep and festering splinter from the human hand. Thomas Ulder had been the Bishop’s thorn for the fifteen years of his Episcopate. The last Bishop had just appointed him Head of the Theological College before premature senile decay ended mercifully in the death of the prelate. For all those years vague tales of bad management, financial difficulties, and the dislike and distrust of the candidates who spent a year in Lake Hall in preparation for Ordination, had harassed Bishop Broome. Five years ago definite tales of drunkenness and dishonesty were circulated and Mrs. Ulder left her husband, retreated to their native Donegal, and died. That was just before the first Great War, and it had taken all the efforts of the Bishop, the Chancellor of the Diocese and the Ecclesiastical Court of Appeal to dislodge him. For Ulder was not only a supremely crafty man: his neat figure, pale full face, unctuous manner and beautiful voice gave no suggestion of villainy: he made a good impression on all strangers, and his defence even in the last sulphurous accusations brought against him was almost water-tight. The case had ended in a compromise, largely brought about by Richard Marlin, the only ordination candidate of any promise or personality whom the College had seen for years. Through his skilful negotiations Ulder was persuaded to retire to the remote country living of which he was parson, where the congregation was so small and so old that, as Richard said, they would hardly notice the change in parsons. Even so the affair weighed heavily on the minds of all Dick’s theological superiors for they could not escape, as the young deacon escaped, to meet an open and less scabrous foe on the fields of France.

  “Oh well, it was a bad business,” was all the information Dick gave Bobs. “I expect I made a fool of myself and every one but it wasn’t easy. You see, Ulder had all the honour cards and knew how to bluff us anyway every time. We’d all the low cards of procrastination, and cowardice, and failure to take our opportunities in the past. He could throw such mud on the Bishop and through him on the Church for not acting before, that he had to have his foul mouth stopped. He started by demanding a vacant canonry, then a rural deanery, then a good fat living. All I did was to argue him down to Mendle and its twenty inhabitants and five churchgoers. Oh, it was all wrong, of course—it was rather like leaving a unit in danger to save the whole brigade, or so it seemed to me. But the Bishop wholly refused to face the open scandal Ulder would have made.”

  “How did you get let in for it at all?”

  “Because Ulder himself had rather a weakness for me. The horrid fellow knew my grandfather was in Debrett, and I was the only chap there who’d been at Oxford. I tried to make him see that I only put up with the poisonous place because I was set on that curacy at Blacksea” (the one manufacturing and incredibly slummy town in the diocese) “but I expect it was a good thing. By Jove, if good presupposes the existence of evil anyone who put up with Ulder for a year should have seen enough evil to become a saint.” And Bobs had submitted, laughing, to Dick’s conclusions.

  “I’ve one piece of news for you,” said Mrs. Broome now, reflecting that the best way to cure one worry of the Bishop’s was to superimpose another. “I’ve had a telegram to say that Judith is coming to stay to-night—by car, so we won’t have to send for her. Yes, Soames, you can come and take tea away!”

  There was a general tendency in the diocese, and still more in the Palace itself, to consider Soames a very unworthy representative of that once high office, the Bishop’s butler. But, as Mrs. Broome pointed out apologetically, the best butlers of the Kensitas advertisement had been dying out for years or going into retirement, and their young efficient successors were swept away by the war. Soames was, she must admit, bad-mannered, under-sized and given to spots, but he had seen service in the war, he had had some experience under the Headmaster of a neighbouring school, and as a footman in some vague past: he was handy and liked odd jobs; and he was quite intelligent about messages and faces. (“Too intelligent,” commented Bobs, “he’s the ear for a key-hole right enough!”) And, most important of all, he had been introduced by the old housekeeper Moira who, t
ill her recent severe illness, had ruled most household affairs. His dealing with the tea-tray, which suggested a hasty make-do service in a canteen rather than the reverent collection of shining silver on the vast silver tray with its Crown Derby cups, usually tried Mrs. Broome’s equanimity, but to-day she was glad that the Bishop must suppress the first dismay which news of his elder daughter’s arrival invariably gave him of late years. Silently she passed him the telegram for which he held out his hand. Better let him see its wording at once!—“In dreadful trouble. Coming to you this evening to stay—Judith.”

  At least the personality of Ulder wavered as that of Judith filled the room. On the wall hung her portrait, known to the artist, as he studied her and was inevitably dazzled by her blue eyes beneath long lashes, her long neck, curling black hair, long white hands and air of exotic mockery, as “The Blue Poppy”. “It doesn’t show her gaiety clearly enough,” held Mrs. Broome, who adored her stepdaughter, except when she worried her father to death with her escapades. “Not dare-devil enough,” said her younger sister Susan. “Rose of all roses, rose of all the world,” was a Canon’s secret lovelorn verdict. A very clear, clever exhibition, thought the cynical Dean privately, of what we hear about as sex-appeal, to a most marked extent. But Bobs perhaps ex pressed best the overwhelming charm of her personality when, twenty years later, forgetting his quiet, kind wife, he read Esmond’s tribute to his Beatrix: “He who is old feels young again as he thinks of her and remembers a Paragon,” and putting down his Thackeray, sat lost in thoughts of Judith Broome.

  “But it is impossible, quite impossible that she should come here during the Ordination,” declared the Bishop, rising as Soames disappeared at last, and addressing the room as if it held his old School. “Good Heavens! Even before her marriage we used to pack her off to save at least one broken heart. I remember clearly after her wedding” (and a vision came to him of Judith, radiant in white satin, pearl tiara and veils, half-dancing down the aisle as if she were the fragrance of her lilies personified) “yes, just after the wedding, she cried: ‘No more cathedrals or palaces or Ordinations for me, Daddy darling! Mike and I are practising heathens!’”

  “Mike was not the man for her,” said Mrs. Broome almost automatically. It was with this phrase that she charitably comprehended the flying scandals culminating in a spectacular action for divorce which had marked her stepdaughter’s career. The Bishop, heart-broken at the memory of his first wife’s modesty and purity, had refused to allow Judith to the Palace till her decree was absolute. Mike was not playing the conventional gentleman’s part, but indeed Judith’s affair with Clive Fitzroy, that renowned Guardsman and V.C., would have made it a little absurd. Whether her Clive made her an honest woman or deserted her seemed almost immaterial to the Bishop. His child was in any case, he felt, a child of shame, and nothing in her gay, flippant, infrequent letters altered his view.

  “It is impossible to have her,” he reiterated, while Bobs sat pale and silent for once, torn between his longing to see Judith and the hopelessness of his love for her.

  “But, dearest, she says she is in terrible trouble! To whom should she come but her own father? Besides,” added Mrs. Broome, lapsing into her usual common sense, “we can’t stop her. She must be on her way in Clive’s car by now for the telegram was handed in at Evelake. What is it, Soames?” (How ubiquitous the shabby little butler seemed this evening!) “Another telegram? Perhaps she’s changed her plans! Oh no, it’s for you, Bobs. Well, dear, I for one shall welcome our little Judith gladly. I think she shall have her old room and I’ll move the Chancellor to St. Thomas Aquinas.”

  “I presume she’ll be tired and dine in bed,” was the Bishop’s dubious note of welcome. “Why change your arrangements for her?”

  “Did you ever know Judith tired? Of course I could put her in the Bridge room next poor old Moira—I had a bed made up there in case of an emergency.”

  “Certainly not,” said the Bishop with an emphasis which betrayed his impression that Judith’s life had been only too much of a passage way for her lovers.

  “No answer, Soames.” Bob’s face was even more troubled as the butler left the room. “I’m afraid this is really tiresome news, sir. Ulder wires that he is coming out here in the hope of an interview with you and other guests at the Palace to-night.”

  “Oh, my God!” said the Bishop. It was a prayer rather than an oath he uttered as he fell back in his chair, so clearly prostrated by the news that Mrs. Broome rose quickly yet heavily from the sofa in dismay and went to his side. But the Bishop, with unaccustomed brusqueness, brushed her aside and made for the door with a murmur about his work.

  “But he’s going to the Chapel, not to his room,” said Mrs. Broome, listening to her husband’s steps followed by the clash of the Chapel swing doors. “I thought all the trouble with that wretched Ulder was over long ago, Bobs. Has he been getting into fresh disgrace or rousing some old scandal?”

  “Hullo, Mummy!” A gay voice from the door saved Bobs the acute embarrassment of a reply. “What’s happened to poor Daddy? We met him just now on his way to the Chapel looking as if all his candidates had been drowned or gone over to Rome, at least! Poor Daddy! He didn’t even look at Dick here, so you must be extra nice, Mummy! Yes, I picked Dick up, hiking, along the road from Evelake. I thought he was being humble and apostolic!”

  “But it was only that my ecclesiastical superiors had got the one and only taxi,” added the newcomer. “So instead of following the Chancellor and Canon Wye on foot in proper humility, Sue has whisked me here first. I’d no idea she’d become such a Jehu with a car. The best girls didn’t crash along on their own before the war, as I tell her.”

  “I had to learn when Morris left and often we wish we couldn’t drive, don’t we, Bobs? We’re just ‘Fetch and Carry’ like the two old maids in some book! But what is wrong with poor Daddy, Mamma?”

  “He’s a little worried, darling. That tiresome Ulder has wired to say he is coming out to see him and his guests, as he puts it, to-night. You know what a nuisance he has been! And then, too, Daddy is a little upset because Judith is arriving on a visit to-night as well.”

  “Ju? Oh what fun, how lovely to see her! But—” she paused. Such a very carefully edited story of Judith’s affairs had been given her by her parents that Sue, who knew all about it with the simple acceptance of a post-war youth which would never again confuse ignorance with innocence, sometimes forgot how little she was supposed to know. Victorian girls were not allowed to see or touch pitch for fear of defilement. Sue and her contemporaries had learnt to meet it and wash away the stains carefully afterwards.

  “Shall I take you to your room, Dick?” Bobs was only too anxious to escape with his old friend, Dick Marlin. They had only met for a few minutes since Dick was demobilized, and returned to the Theological College, and as friends since childhood, through private and public school days and life at Oxford, they must obviously find an early opportunity of tiring the sun with talking. But though Dick agreed warmly he showed no disposition to leave Sue’s side in a hurry, and Mrs. Broome showed no wish to speed her guest.

  “Don’t hurry Dick away, Bobs,” she said, her jolly face looking for once a little strained and anxious. “I don’t know why it is but ever since I can remember him I’ve felt safer and happier when Dick was about, yes, even when you were in the nursery, Dick.” And it must be admitted that no handsomer tribute could be paid to any young man.

  Behind his pair of horn-rimmed spectacles Dick Marlin glanced deprecatingly at his hostess. They were old acquaintances, for the Pounds had purchased his grandfather’s place in Wiltshire and restored and renovated the old house to the intense fury of the old gentleman in his new little home across the Park. It was Mrs. Broome who, as a visiting aunt of the Pound family, had befriended little Dick on his rather alarming visits to the old man, and later welcomed him to her own married home. He and Judith had become friendly enemies from the first, and Sue had later sunned herself in the big b
oy’s patronage. “Friend of all the world,” Judith called him scornfully, and he deserved the title, for he was one of those lucky people who retain the charm of modesty to their elders, whose intellectual brilliance stimulates without annoying their contemporaries. And he happened to be born with an odd love for humanity.