Arrest the Bishop? Read online

  “Why do you think about other people such a lot?” Judith asked him in her imperious girlhood. “I don’t bother about them! I think about myself!”

  “They’re more amusing than I am, I expect,” was Dick’s diagnosis.

  “And you go on liking stupid people even though you’re clever enough to know they’re stupid! Why?”

  “Perhaps Dick sees their nice side, like the angels,” suggested round, cheerful little Sue.

  “More likely an extrovert than an angel,” laughed Dick. The unknown word had closed that discussion with Judith, but there were many others more stormy as he grew older and paid frequent visits to the Palace. For Judith at sixteen was more than ready to try her prentice hand on a brilliant young Oxford undergraduate, and was naturally annoyed to find his friendship as firm as ever, but quite untroubled by her wiles. If she could not marry a Duke or Earl, or better still a sheikh, she might, she reflected, even marry Dick some day, supposing three or four intervening relations obligingly died and left him a Baron: if also, she had to admit, Dick showed any signs of wanting to marry her. But all that came to an end of course when she discovered, after her first season, that Dick, crowned with University honours and a Rugby blue, was about to become that most despised creature, a parson.

  “But why, Dick, why?” she reiterated, all the more angrily because it was clearly useless to threaten him with the withdrawal of her affection, because he wouldn’t really mind.

  “I don’t suppose you’d understand.” Dick was a little weary of adapting his answer to the various relatives, dons, acquaintances and important political friends of his family in language they would understand, but with Judith he let himself be outspoken and simple. “I don’t care a hoot for success or ambition or more money than will keep me in tobacco. You know my uncle enraged Grandfather by going out to India as a missionary instead of filling up that stuffy old rectory at Orchard Hundred. And he married a missionary, and, as I remember them both as the happiest people in the world, I suppose I got inoculated with their germs. Anyway, I happen to think that the only work worth doing is to try to help a few other people to God. Oh yes, you can tell me that a year or two ago I was pretty lax about Church and all that, but I’ve outgrown those teething pains. Now you can fire ahead and tell me what a fool I am, for I suppose I can’t pull your hair any more now that you’re a full-fledged deb. and the success of the season.”

  It need not be said that Judith took full advantage of the permission though with the sad consciousness that her words had no effect. Only, as it happened, her parting cuts were justified.

  “You’ll never stick to it, Dick, never!” she cried, and she was right. Dick was ordained deacon on 14th June, 1914, and in September of that year he had gained a commission in his county regiment. (“Not even the Guards!” wailed Judith.) There was not much interest in academic brains in the army of those days, but Dick’s gift of rapid yet thorough investigation into any subject, his intuition, and adaptation to every sort of circumstance and character did not escape the notice of his Commanding Officer. After a severe leg wound at Loos he found himself shifted into Military Intelligence, and for the last three years had been mixing, in France or at home, in the company of those specialists in crime and treason who might well have under mined his faith in human nature. To love sinners and hate sin may seem an almost impossible task but Dick, like Napoleon, had no use for the word impossible, as far, at least, as ultimate salvation was concerned. Refusing all offers to stay in the Services, or join the G.I.D. after a merely nominal service in lower ranks, Dick emerged from the army to return to the Theological College for a year before his priesthood, more determined than ever to carry on war in Blacksea, that war against sin and poverty which has so often silenced other more tempting music in the ears of world losers and world forsakers.

  “Though why Evelake?” asked the old school friend who understood his motives best. “I mean, I can understand dear old Bobs clicking with old Dithers.” Such was the reprehensible nickname given to the Bishop by an unnecessarily acute Sixth Form. “He’s a decent fellow, and Bobs isn’t particularly critical or perceptive and can’t take to parish work till he’s well. But he’s too easygoing and weak for you.”

  “My own padre isn’t, and I shan’t come across the ecclesiastical brass hats as a curate. If you want to know, I suppose it’s because my wicked, offensive old forebears made their ungodly pile out of sweating Blacksea, and enslaving its people in mines a century ago, that I feel I owe it a sort of debt. Besides, I understand them down there as I’d never understand your cockneys and those North Country chaps, all burrs and blasphemy. I’m set on going to a man like Mayhew who gets on with Dissenters and cares more for principles than frills, more for Christ than the Church.”

  And so Dick set out on the career which led him now to Evelake Palace for his Ordination.

  “There’s a poem called the ‘Hound of Heaven’,” said Bobs, to whom poetry was a book you got for prizes rather than a book you read, a week later, “but you’re cut out for the Sleuth of Heaven all right, Dick, my boy.”

  But this nebulous career was very far from the imagination of Dick as he mingled his pleasure at being back at the Palace, and his solemn thoughts of the coming ceremony, with the reflection that Sue was even more of a darling now than he remembered of old.

  II

  WEDNESDAY EVENING

  The light from the shaded electric chandelier fell on the dinner table in the old Palace as Bobs concluded his reading from Pilgrim’s Progress and sat down to eat his pudding in an embarrassing silence. He had chosen Bunyan at a last moment’s appeal from the Bishop for reading aloud of any nature, and had to his horror sheered off Christian’s conversation with Madame Bubble only just in time. Judith’s eye caught his now in amused mockery as if to remind him that after her clerical upbringing she’d spotted the danger all right. Bobs smiled back bravely, though he inwardly regretted her presence bitterly. He thought he had conquered his old passionate dream; he knew certainly that Judith was as little fitted for a parson’s wife as she would be likely to contemplate that role. But that did not seem to matter. The plain fact remained that in any gathering her personality and vitality dwarfed all others. At the head of the table, the Bishop’s pallid face, finely moulded and set in those tragic St. Joseph lines, seemed carved in marble, and lifeless as his predecessors on the Cathedral tombs. The Chancellor presented as a rule a picture of a prosperous family lawyer, with his rubicund face, curly white hair, old-fashioned fringe of grey whiskers and jovial laugh, but to-night he seemed to wear a mask. Of course he was still grieving for the loss of his wife: he was present now because kind Mrs. Broome had asked him for Christmas, and he had himself expressed a wish to come earlier and join in the Ordination ceremonies, but it seemed to Bobs it was anxiety for the future rather than grief which obscured his usual geniality.

  On the other side of Mrs. Broome sat the Examining Chaplain. The young people had christened Canon Wye “Torquemada”, so thin, black and white was his high, narrow, pointed head, set on a neck so curiously thick, and so emaciated a body, that he was, as Dick said, the living image of a torch at one of his auto-da-fés, with flame supplied by his flashing, fanatical eyes. But the torch was not lit to-night: his face was dead and cold. Staples, the other candidate for the priesthood besides Dick, and the six who would on Sunday discard their shabby tweed coats or worn uniforms for very precise new clerical clothes, were all of them, chubby or lean, keen or vacuous, like mere pictures on a wall. Even Mrs. Broome seemed to lose her warm jovial personality as she presided, in the long black satin gown after the fashion of statelier days: Sue in a wispy dress of pale grey seemed a shadow. Only Judith in a long yellow tea-gown, swinging back a priceless ermine cape and perfect pearls a little impatiently, was radiantly awake and alive. (“Not Mike’s pearls, you know; someone else gave them to me so I don’t mind wearing them,” she had just explained to Dick.) Dick himself seemed to Bobs, with a vague memory of legal par
lance, nothing to-night but a Watching Brief behind his horn spectacles. Cover her face: mine eyes dazzle, thought poor Bobs, wondering for the hundredth time whether such was the fatal gift of charm and beauty which cost Ceres all that pain to seek her loved one through the world.

  “Just open the window for a moment, please, Bobs!” Mrs. Broome’s voice recalled the young man with a start.

  “If it’s not too much for you, Chancellor? Our steam-heating really parboils us at times!”

  “Quite, quite! By Jove, snow! A white Christmas after all, I’d say, for it’s been a heavy sudden fall.”

  Bobs lingered at the lattice. Yes, the snow had fallen and transformed the winter night. The moon fell on blanched lawns, and beyond them laid capricious fingers on the ruins of the Guest House and Infirmarium, visible from this side of the house. The walls lay dark and ominous but a white radiance fit up here a broken roof, there a fragile rose window and desolate turret stairway. Behind them the bare trees and shrubs stood like a ghostly concourse of those Carthusian monks who had paced the cloisters to the first Matins of Christmas long ago. There, beyond the frame of the luxurious rose-velvet curtains, far from the sparkling fire and table behind him, lay the true life of endurance, asceticism and world-denial, thought Bobs, fanciful for once.

  “Oh, Father darling, at last I can talk to you!” Judith moved to a chair by her father, as Dick left it to join Bobs at the window. She lowered her clear gay voice to a murmur quite audible to Bobs and, obviously from their sidelong glances of interest, to most of the table. “That funny reading! And did you hear darling Bobs skip Madame Bubble? I must tell you all about my spot of bother.” (So this was Judith’s version of terrible trouble, thought Mrs. Broome.) “So tiresome! Clive felt we must have a little conference about What Next? So we thought we’d be terribly wise and careful, so darling Clive suggested …”

  “My dear Judith!” The Bishop came to life with his best headmaster’s voice. Some of his prefects and most of his Staff had recognized it as a stucco facade in the past, but all his energy was in it now. “Not here! Not at the moment! This is not the place for any trouble you have to confide to me!”

  “But, darling, in a moment you’ll be interviewing all these dear, dear boys in your room, or praying away in Chapel, or signing papers with darling Chancellor Chailly! You know I’ll never manage to get hold of you and it’s urgent! Listen, please!” Her voice sank to something more like a whisper as Soames and the parlour-maid cleared the table, and arranged apples and port ceremoniously. “I’ll whisper.” (But the whisper was sadly penetrating.) “So Clive settled on Blacksea, for he felt sure no one we’d ever known or heard of could possibly track us there, and not the place for a King’s Proctor to week-end in, you’d say! And who do you think we met in the hall, just as we were leaving? Why, that ghastly repulsive parson who gave you all that mountain of worry—Elder—no Ulder, wasn’t it?”

  “Did he speak to you?” The Bishop could speak now, for Dick and Sue, Bobs and Mrs. Broome, had galvanized some sort of conversation into life round the table.

  “Spoke! He came straight from the visitors’ book to address us as Mr. and Mrs. Mortimer, but we thought that was the last of it. But, oh, darling, far from it! Clive left me in my flat on Monday, of course. We are both terribly careful about Curzon Street, in case we’re watched—I always think those funny earthy women going into the Garden Club are detectives, you know!—and there, next morning, was a letter from this dreadful creature threatening to expose us to the King’s Proctor unless we simply unloaded our bank books on him. Darling Clive was really angry!”

  “Probably!” interposed the Bishop dryly.

  “He said it was blackmail, of course, and all sorts of other things beginning with B, much worse! And that he’d go straight to the police. But of course he can’t, and that wretch knows he can’t. If it all became public I’d never get a divorce from Mike, and I really must marry Clive and settle down. It’s really urgent!”

  If the Bishop grasped the appalling implications which Mrs. Broome would have drawn from those words, he could not have been more dismayed. He could only look at Judith in dumb misery, while she, evidently relieved by confession, began to peel an orange adroitly, flashing a smile at Bobs and Dick. The word a-moral had not yet become fashionable, and there was no shred of extenuation in the poor Bishop’s mind for the utter frivolity and laxity of his own daughter. But the horror of Ulder’s appearance in the story blinded him momentarily to the scandalous behaviour of his child.

  “So Clive said the best thing we could do was to come straight to you and consult you, because you know the old wretch and may keep him quiet! I mean you could unfrock him for blackmail straight off, couldn’t you? I’m sure the Chancellor would love to, and I’d love to tug off his horrid collar myself, only I expect it’s greasy and scurfy! But I wasn’t sure if you’d like me to bring Clive here, as you have to be rather collet monte. I explained to Clive, so he’s staying at the Mitre, and I can let him know just what you think we should do.”

  “Judith dear, we’re going.” As Mrs. Broome had no success in catching her stepdaughter’s eye politely, she had to raise her voice authoritatively. “Now mind you men join the ladies for coffee as soon as you like, Mark dear, for it’s nearly nine and Compline time.” Dinner, she reflected, had taken terribly long, partly because Judith was inevitably unpunctual, and partly because Soames had waited so badly and looked so nervous and ill at ease. She must really speak to him to-morrow!

  “What’s wrong with them all?” asked Dick in a more confidential whisper than Judith’s, lingering with Bobs at the dining-room door.

  “Ulder, I suppose,” murmured Bobs. “The Bishop had an enormous letter from him which he kept to himself. And the Chancellor and Canon Wye went to confer with him the minute they arrived, and were with him till dinner was announced. You can hear the Chancellor’s voice above a thunder-storm, you know, and as I was finishing letters in my room I kept hearing the name Ulder again and again. Heaven knows what’s up! I thought Ulder’s teeth were drawn. He’s threatening a visit in a wire we got after tea—an immediate visit. He’ll hardly come out to-night, I imagine, but the wire was from the P.O. at Evelake.”

  “Of course if he’d had a drop or two—” Dick paused.

  His gaze had been wandering over the group in the hall, vaguely contrasting the scene with the bare ascetic clergy-house awaiting him at Blacksea. Mrs. Broome stood by a table laden with coffee cups and silver jugs, for with her hospitable soul she loved to pour out coffee and extract confidences simultaneously from what she called the Bishop’s Boys. Firelight from the vast hearth shone upon great pots of orchids, poinsettias and azaleas, upon the dark and fair heads of Judith and Sue, and their shimmering frocks. Beyond a group of candidates the Chancellor and the Canon were conversing, the prosperous lawyer and the fanatic churchman as sharp in type as if drawn by Bunyan himself. The Bishop, very pale and lined by the glow of the chandeliers in the main part of the hall, was moving to his own room, with the courteous excuses of a born host. And then, as he paused for a moment to look at the long low refectory table where letters and papers were laid out, the ‘whole setting, clear, picturesque and mannered as any scene of a drawing-room play, was broken by the sudden sound of the great door bell. No one moved or spoke as Soames entered through the baize door from the servants’ quarters, just beyond the wide oak staircase, pushed back the tapestry curtains to the vestibule, and switched on the light outside.

  A Georgian bishop had added this entrance hall and surrounded it with inappropriate busts of Caesars. Even those close curled heads and beards seemed to shiver in the gale which swept in the wind and snow. Behind Soames was visible a short, clerical figure, relieving himself of a black hat and old-fashioned ulster. There was no need for Dick to glance at the horrified faces around him to realize the truth. Like every older person in the room he had known since the first loud clamour of the bell that the guest was the Rev. Thomas Ulder.

&nb
sp; There are some few men who possess undoubtedly an aura of evil, visible even to those who profess no psychic powers, and Thomas Ulder was one of them. His personal appearance had not been attractive in old days but five years of sloth and self-indulgence had revealed the ugly contours of his narrow brow and heavy chin till they resembled a pear in shape; his figure had widened on the same lines; his intemperate life had resulted in watery eyes and a twitching face. In the five years of his retirement he had deteriorated, as Irishmen can do with extraordinary celerity, but it was only when he focused those eyes on you, with the secretive stare of all creeping, slimy things and when his too oily manner stiffened into threats, that the sensitive shuddered as if turning over a stone which conceals maggots; and felt, in Bunyan’s phrase, threatened by an evil, a very evil thing.

  Christians must always differ in their attitude to evil, Dick supposed tolerantly, as he noticed that the Bishop’s first reaction was evidently to retreat through the narrow open ante-room into his own study. Just in time the prelate recognized that he was too late for he could hardly pretend not to hear the unnaturally loud and hoarse voice with which Soames heralded the visitor. Mrs. Broome advanced hesitatingly, Judith sank suddenly on to an oak settle, half concealed by a great pot of azaleas. All the rest of the company stood as still in their places as if they were trained members of a Greek chorus (or was it a picket on the alert?) except Bobs who moved forward as if to intercept the Bishop.

  “Ah—ha, my lord, I have caught you!” The hearty yet curiously careful manner and voice showed Bobs and Dick at once that their visitor had primed himself well for his arrival. “I thought this might be a lucky hour and day for me!”

  “I see no one without an appointment, I fear, Mr. Ulder.” (“Poor Dithers has the jitters,” the Sixth Form at St. Blaze would have diagnosed from the Bishop’s voice.) “I asked my Chaplain to tell you that I give none during the Ordination week-end.”