Delphi Collected Works of Hugh Walpole (Illustrated)

by Hugh Walpole

  Ronder knocked three times with the knob of his walking-stick. The man must be out. He was about to turn away and go when the door suddenly opened, as though by a secret life of its own, and the pale face and untidy person of the Canon, like the apparition of a surprised and indignant revenant, was apparent.

  “May I come in for a moment?” said Ronder. “I won’t keep you long.”

  Foster stared at his visitor, said nothing, opened the door a little wider, and stood aside. Ronder accepted this as an invitation and came in.

  “You’d better come into the other room,” said Foster, looking about him as though he had been just ruthlessly awakened from an important dream. They passed through a little passage and an untidy sitting-room into the study. This was a place piled high with books and its only furniture was a deal table and two straw-bottomed chairs. At the table Foster had obviously been working. Books lay about it and papers, and there was also a pile of manuscript. Foster looked around him, caught his large ears in his fingers and cracked them, and then suddenly said:

  “You’d better sit down. What can I do for you?”

  Ronder sat down. It was at once apparent that, whatever the state of the rooms might be, his reluctant host was suddenly very wide awake indeed. He felt, what he had known from the very first meeting, that he was in contact here with a man of brain, of independence, of character. His capacity for amused admiration that was one of the strongest things in him, was roused to the full. Another thing that he had also by now perceived was that Foster was not that type, by now so familiar to us in the pages of French and English fiction, of the lost and bewildered old clergyman whose long nose has been for so many years buried in dusty books that he is unable to smell the real world. Foster was neither lost nor bewildered. He was very much all there.

  What could he do for Ronder? Ronder was, for a moment, uncertain. Here, he was happy to think, he must go with the greatest care. He did not smile as he had smiled upon Bentinck-Major. He spoke to Foster as to an equal.

  “I can see you’re busy,” he said. “All the same I’m not going to apologise for coming. I’ll tell you frankly that I want your help. At the same time I’ll tell you that I don’t care whether you give it me or no.”

  “In what way can I help you?” asked Foster coldly.

  “There’s to be a Chapter Meeting in a few days’ time, isn’t there? Honestly I haven’t been here quite long enough yet to know how things stand. Questions may come up, although there’s nothing very important this time, I believe. But there may be important things brewing. Now you’ve been here a great many years and you have your opinion of how things should go. I want your idea of some of the conditions.”

  “You’ve come to spy out the land, in fact?”

  “Put it that way if you like,” said Ronder seriously, “although I don’t think spying is exactly the word. You’re perfectly at liberty, I mean, to tell anybody that I’ve been to see you and to repeat to anybody what I say. It simply is that I don’t care to take on all the work that’s being shoved on to my shoulders without getting the views of those who know the place well.”

  “Oh, if it’s my views you want,” cried Foster, suddenly raising his voice and almost shouting, “they’re easy enough to discover. They are simply that everything here is abominable, going to wrack and ruin...Now you know what I think.”

  He looked down at his manuscript as much as to say, “Well, good afternoon.”

  “Going to ruin in what way?” asked Ronder.

  “In the way that the country is going to ruin — because it has turned its back upon God.”

  There was a pause. Suddenly Foster flung out, “Do you believe in God, Canon Ronder?”

  “I think,” said Ronder, “the fact that I’m in the position I’m in — —”

  “Nonsense,” interrupted Foster. “That’s anybody’s answer. You don’t look like a spiritual man.”

  “I’m fat, if that’s what you mean,” said Ronder smiling. “That’s my misfortune.”

  “If I’ve been rude,” said Foster more mildly, “forgive me. I am rude these days. I’ve given up trying not to be. The truth is that I’m sick to the heart with all their worldliness, shams, lies, selfishness, idleness. You may be better than they. You may not. I don’t know. If you’ve come here determined to wake them all up and improve things, then I wish you God-speed. But you won’t do it. You needn’t think you will. If you’ve come like the rest to get what you can out of it, then I don’t think you’ll find my company good for you.”

  “I certainly haven’t come to wake them up,” said Ronder. “I don’t believe that to be my duty. I’m not made that way. Nor can I honestly believe things to be as bad as you say. But I do intend, with God’s help, to do my best. If that’s not good enough for you, then you must abandon me to my fate.”

  Foster seemed to appreciate that. He nodded his head.

  “That’s honest at any rate,” he said. “It’s the first honest thing I’ve heard here for a long time except from the Bishop. To tell you the truth, I had thought you were going to work in with Brandon. One more of his sheep. If that were to be so the less we saw of one another the better.”

  “I have not been here long enough,” said Ronder, “to think of working in with anybody. And I don’t wish to take sides. There’s my duty to the Cathedral. I shall work for that and let the rest go.”

  “There’s your duty to God,” said Foster vehemently. “That’s the thing that everybody here’s forgotten. But you don’t sound as though you’d go Brandon’s way. That’s something in your favour.”

  “Why should one go Brandon’s way?” Ronder asked.

  “Why? Why? Why? Why do sheep huddle together when the dog barks at their heels?...But I respect him. Don’t you mistake me. He’s a man to be respected. He’s got courage. He cares for the Cathedral. He’s a hundred years behind, that’s all. He’s read nothing, he knows nothing, he’s a child — and does infinite harm....” He looked up at Ronder and said quite mildly, “Is there anything more you want to know?”

  “There’s talk,” said Ronder, “about the living at Pybus St. Anthony. It’s apparently an important place, and when there’s an appointment I should like to be able to form an opinion about the best man — —”

  “What! is Morrison dead?” said Foster eagerly.

  “No, but very ill, I believe.”

  “Well, there’s only one possible appointment for that place, and that is Wistons.”

  “Wistons?” repeated Ronder.

  “Yes, yes,” said Foster impatiently, “the author of The New Apocalypse — the rector of St. Edward’s, Hawston.”

  Ronder remembered. “A stranger?” he said. “I thought that it would have to be some one in the diocese.”

  Foster did not hear him. “I’ve been waiting for this — to get Wistons here — for years,” he said. “A wonderful man — a great man. He’ll wake the place up. We must have him. As to local men, the more strangers we let in here the better.”

  “Brandon said something about a man called Forsyth — Rex Forsyth?”

  Foster smiled grimly. “Yes — he would,” he said, “that’s just his kind of appointment. Well, if he tries to pull that through there’ll be such a battle as this place has never seen.”

  Ronder said slowly. “I like your idea of Wistons. That sounds interesting.”

  Foster looked at him with a new intensity.

  “Would you help me about that?” he asked.

  “I don’t know quite where I am yet,” said Ronder, “but I think you’ll find me a friend rather than an enemy, Foster.”

  “I don’t care what you are,” said Foster. “So far as my feelings or happiness go, nothing matters. But to have Wistons here — in this place.... Oh, what we could do! What we could do!”

  He seemed to be lost in a dream. Five minutes later he roused himself to say good-bye. Ronder once more at the top of the stairs felt about him again the strange stillness of the house.

&nb
sp; Chapter VIII

  Son — Father

  Falk Brandon was still, in reality, a boy. He, of course, did not know this and would have been very indignant had any one told him so; it was nevertheless the truth.

  There is a kind of confidence of youth that has great charm, a sort of assumption of grown-up manners and worldly ways that is accompanied with an ingenuous belief in human nature, a naïve trust in human goodness. One sees it sometimes in books, in stories that are like a charade acted by children dressed in their elders’ clothes, and although these tales are nothing but fairy stories in their actual relation to life, the sincerity of their belief in life, and a kind of freshness that come from ignorance, give them a power of their own.

  Falk had some of this charm and power just as his father had, but whereas his father would keep it all his days, Falk would certainly lose it as he learnt more and went more into the world. But as yet he had not lost it.

  This emotion that had now gained such control over him was the first real emotion of his life, and he did not know in the least how to deal with it. He was like a man caught in a baffling fog. He did not know in the least whether he were in love with this girl, he did not know what he wanted to do with her, he sometimes fancied that he hated her, he could not see her clearly either mentally or physically; he only knew that he could not keep away from her, and that with every meeting he approached more nearly the moment when he would commit some desperate action that he would probably regret for the rest of his life.

  But although he could not see her clearly he could see sharply enough the other side of the situation — the practical, home, filial side. It was strange how, as the affair advanced, he was more and more conscious of his father. It was as though he were an outsider, a friend of his father’s, but no relation to the family, who watched a calamity approach ever more closely and was powerless to stop it. Although he was only a boy he realised very sufficiently his father’s love for him and pride in him. He realized, too, his father’s dependence upon his dignity and position in the town, and, last and most important of all, his father’s passionate devotion to the Cathedral. All these things would be bruised were he, Falk, involved in any local scandal. Here he saw into himself and, with a bitterness and humility that were quite new to him, despised himself. He knew, as though he saw future events passing in procession before him, that if such a scandal did break out he would not be able to stay in the place and face it — not because he himself feared any human being alive, but because he could not see his father suffer under it.

  Well, then, since he saw so clearly, why not abandon it all? Why not run away, obtain some kind of work in London and leave Polchester until the madness had passed away from him?

  He could not go.

  He would have been one of the first to scorn another man in such a position, to mock his weakness and despise him. Well, let that be so. He despised himself but — he could not go.

  He was always telling himself that soon the situation would clear and that he would then know how to act. Until that happened he must see her, must talk to her, must be with her, must watch her. They had had, by now, a number of meetings, always in the evening by the river, when her father was away, up in the town.

  He had kissed her twice. She had been quite passive on each occasion, watching him ironically with a sort of dry amusement. She had given him no sign that she cared for him, and their conversation had always been bare and unsatisfactory. Once she had said to him with sudden passion:

  “I want to get away out of this.” He had asked her where she wanted to go.

  “Anywhere — London.” He had asked her whether she would go with him.

  “I would go with any one,” she had said. Afterwards she added: “But you won’t take me.”

  “Why not?” he had asked.

  “Because I’m not in love with you.”

  “You may be — yet.”

  “I’d be anything to get away,” she had replied.

  On a lovely evening he went down to see her, determined that this time he would give himself some definite answer. Just before he turned down to the river he passed Samuel Hogg. That large and smiling gentleman, a fat cigar between his lips, was sauntering, with a friend, on his way to Murdock’s billiard tables.

  “Evenin’, Mr. Brandon.”

  “Good evening, Hogg.”

  “Lovely weather.”

  “Lovely.”

  The shadows, faintly pink on the rise of the hill, engulfed his fat body. Falk wondered as he had before now done many times, How much does he know? What’s he thinking? What’s he want?...The river, at high tide, very gently lapped the side of the old wall. Its colour to-night was pure crystal green, the banks and the hills smoky grey behind it. Tiny pink clouds ran in little fleets across the sky, chasing one another in and out between the streamers of smoke that rose from the tranquil chimneys. Seatown was at rest this evening, scarcely a sound came from the old houses; the birds could be heard calling from the meadows beyond the river. The pink clouds faded into a rosy shadow, then that in its turn gave way to a sky faintly green and pointed with stars. Grey mist enveloped the meadows and the river, and the birds cried no longer. There was a smell of onions and rank seaweed in the air.

  Falk’s love-story pursued at first its usual realistic course. She was there near the waterfall waiting for him; they had very little to say to one another. She was depressed to-night, and he fancied that she had been crying. She was not so attractive to him in such a mood. He liked her best when she was intolerant, scornful, aloof. To-night, although she showed no signs of caring for him, she surrendered herself absolutely. He could do what he liked with her. But he did not want to do anything with her.

  She leaned over the Seatown wall looking desolately in front of her.

  At last she turned round to him and asked him what she had asked him before:

  “What do you come after me for?”

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  “It isn’t because you love me.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I know — there’s no mistakin’ it when it’s there. I’ve lain awake a lot o’ nights wondering what you’re after. You must have your reasons. You take a deal o’ trouble.”

  Then she put her hand on his. It was the first time that she had ever, of her own accord, touched him.

  “I’m gettin’ to like you,” she said. “Seein’ so much of you, I suppose. You’re only a boy when all’s said. And then, somehow or another, men don’t go after me. You’re the only one that ever has. They say I’m stuck up... Oh, man, but I’m unhappy here at home!”

  “Well, then — you’d better come away with me — to London.”

  Even as he said it he would have caught the words back. What use for them to go? Nothing to live on, no true companionship ...there could be only one end to that.

  But she shook her head.

  “No — if you cared for me enough, mebbe I’d go. But I don’t know that we’d be together long if we did. I want my own life, my own, own, own life! I can look after myself all right...I’ll be off by myself alone one day.”

  Then suddenly he wanted her as urgently as he had ever done.

  “No, you must never do that,” he said. “If you go it must be with me. You must have some one to look after you. You don’t know what London’s like.”

  He caught her in his arms and kissed her passionately, and she seemed to him a new woman altogether, created by her threat that she would go away alone.

  She passively let him kiss her, then with a little turn in his arms and a little sigh she very gently kissed him of her own will.

  “I believe I could care for ‘ee,” she said softly. “And I want to care for some one terrible bad.”

  They were nearer in spirit than they had ever been before; an emotion of simple human companionship had crept into the unsettled disturbance and quieted it and deepened it. She wore in his eyes a new aspect, something wise and reasonable and comfortable. She
would never be quite so mysterious to him again, but her hold on him now was firmer. He was suddenly sorry for her as well as for himself.

  For the first time he left her that night with a sense that comradeship might grow between them.

  But as he went back up the hill he was terribly depressed and humiliated. He hated and despised himself for longing after something that he did not really want. He had always, he fancied, done that, as though there would never be time enough in life for all the things that he would wish to test and to reject.

  When he went to bed that night he was in rebellion with all the world, but before he fell asleep Annie Hogg seemed to come to him, a gentler, kinder spirit, and to say to him, “It’ll be all right.... I’ll look after ‘ee.... I’ll look after ‘ee,” and he seemed to sink to sleep in her arms.

  Next morning Falk and Joan had breakfast alone with their father, a headache having laid Mrs. Brandon low. Falk was often late for breakfast, but to-day had woken very early, had got up and gone out and walked through the grey mist, turning his own particular trouble over and over in his mind. To-day Annie had faded back from him again; that tenderness that he had felt for her last night seemed to have vanished, and he was aware only of a savage longing to shake himself free of his burden. He had visions this morning of going up to London and looking for work....

  Joan saw that to-day was a “Chapter morning” day. She always knew by her father’s appearance when there was to be a Chapter Meeting. He had then an extra gloss, an added splendour, and also an added importance. He really was the smartest old thing, she thought, looking at him this morning with affectionate pride. He looked as though he spent his time in springing in and out of cold baths.