Mr. Tuke looked at the curious inquisitive ones, and clapped his hands together loudly, like an irritated schoolmaster.
“Please, please,” he said. “Remember you are in God’s house.”
He came forward to the front of the table and held up his hand baton-wise.
“Will you all kindly sit down?” he said.
There was a scraping of chairs and the congregation, rather shame-facedly, one by one re-seated themselves. Mr. Tuke towered above them.
“And now will the Brother who spoke be so good as to stand up,” he asked.
There was a moment’s pause and someone by the door got to his feet: it was Mr. Alexander Kent.
Mr. Tuke stared at him in amazement.
“Do I understand,” he asked, “that you oppose Brother Marco’s election?”
“I do.”
Mr. Kent’s eyes behind his small, steel-rimmed spectacles had fixed on Mr. Tuke as he spoke. He was quivering with emotion, and the corners of his mouth were twitching. As he stood there he kept twisting his bowler hat in his hands as though he were trying to break it.
“May we be told the reason?”
“Because I don’t regard him as a fit person to hold office.”
The words were jerked out. They came in a vicious rush, and Mr. Tuke was astonished at the amount of bitterness behind them. Someone beside Mr. Kent—a woman, Mr. Tuke noticed, pulled at his sleeve to make him sit down, but he shook the hand angrily away, and remained there defiantly facing Mr. Tuke. He looked like a fierce, cornered little animal.
His reply, of course, had caused a second sensation. The Brethren began to turn round again, but Mr. Tuke checked them.
“Perhaps Brother Kent would like to come out to the front,” he said, “where everyone could see him.”
“I’m all right where I am,” Mr. Kent answered back. “I’ve said all I have to say.”
With that he sat down again. At once, everyone, who until that moment had been trying to see him turned towards Hesther and John Marco instead; they wanted to see how they were taking it. This and the time when the woman had broken into the Immersionist Service, looked like being the two most sensational nights in the history of the Tabernacle: and the remarkable thing was that John Marco had been the central figure of both.
Mr. Tuke returned to his table. He recognised this as a moment for supreme control and authority. His manner became Mosaic as he sat there.
“You have all heard what our Brother has said,” he declared. “I will ask our Brother once again if he will explain himself.”
Mr. Kent anticipated him, however. He was on his feet before Mr. Tuke had time to finish speaking. And when he was standing he looked such a little man, such a shoddy, insignificant little man. But he was showing his teeth.
“Mr. Marco knows,” he said, his voice trembling. “He knows what I’m talking about.”
With that he sat down again; he was so small that he simply disappeared into the back row. Mr. Tuke found himself staring into space.
There was a strained nervous silence. Then Mr. Tuke spoke.
“Does Brother Marco wish to say anything?” he asked.
But John Marco made no attempt to speak. He did not seem to have heard, and he did not even uncross his arms. When Hesther bent over and whispered something in his ear he took no notice.
“Then we will put the matter to the vote,” Mr. Tuke said in a dangerously sweet voice. “You must all do as your conscience dictates. Only remember, God is watching. He is here with us in this room. Those in favour?”
The hands were a little slower in coming up this time; they hesitated. There was always the possibility that they might be voting for a wife-beater or atheist. But soon there were thirty-five raised hands. Mr. Tuke counted them gloatingly.
“Those against,” he said.
Only Mr. Kent’s hand went up. It rose—bony and withered inside its stiff shirt cuff—a solitary symbol of dissension. The rest of the Brethren who had not voted all sat there with their eyes lowered.
“Then the Ayes have it,” said Mr. Tuke. “Brother Marco, you have been elected to the Synod.”
The words seemed to come to John Marco from a long way off. He started. Then he rose and went slowly towards the empty chair beside Mr. Tuke’s.
As for Mr. Kent, he took John Marco’s election as the signal to leave the building. He squeezed his way out of his seat and began to make off through the doorway at the back. John Marco watched him go, contemptuously. He stood there in front of them a half-smile on his face, looking at the narrow back of his defeated enemy.
It was then that he noticed that Mr. Kent had not gone out unaccompanied. There was a young man beside him, a stranger, in a bright, new-looking mackintosh, who went out beside him. John Marco wondered who he was: he had not seen him before. And there was a girl with him: she had her hand on his arm. It was when she got to the door and turned round that he saw that it was Mary. For a moment she stood there, her face towards him. Then the young man in the new mackintosh said something to her and she turned away again.
Mr. Tuke was speaking again. But the words did not reach John Marco. At that one glimpse, the whole strategy of his life, the plans for his immense future, his riches, the lesser people that he would some day govern, the magnitude of his eventual operations—were all destroyed. He had seen Mary again; and the world was worthless. He sat there, oblivious to everything around him, staring blankly at the door through which she had just passed.
Hesther was watching him intently. He looked very pale. She wondered if Mr. Kent’s interruption had upset him more than he had shown.
Chapter XII
The Pain Under the side pocket of Mr. Morgan’s waistcoat had grown worse. It had started as no more than an occasional twinge, a tiny pin-point of sensation. But the pin-point had enlarged; it had developed. It had grown into something about the size of a threepenny piece that seemed to be red-hot for half the time. And when it was not burning, it ached. Mr. Morgan had deliberately ignored it at first, had told himself that most men of his age get little pains that they cannot account for. But when it began to wake him up at night, this piece of fiery anger inside him, he knew that he must see a doctor. The doctor had been consoling: he had prescribed bismuth. Mr. Morgan had taken the stuff: his mouth had seemed never free from the taste of it. But the pain had gone on just the same: it had been going on for two or three years now. Mr. Morgan had forgotten exactly how long, it had grown to be so much a part of him. And now it was no longer in that spot alone: he could close his eyes and feel it stabbing at him from half-a-dozen points at once.
After the doctor and his bismuth had admitted themselves to be defeated, Mr. Morgan had tried other remedies, desperate ones advertised in the back pages of magazines. He had eaten strange herbs. He had drunk magic potions. He had worn an electric locket. But still the pain had advanced. And when it had become so bad that his whole body seemed to be contributing to it, he had called in his own family doctor again. The doctor was startled this time; startled and resentful. He had invited another opinion and sent Mr. Morgan off in a hansom cab to Harley Street to get it. And the verdict (it had been more than an opinion) had been that Mr. Morgan—white-haired benevolent Mr. Morgan—the employer of twenty-three assistants, was in the grip of something too powerful to be resisted. The specialist said that it was . . . but he wrote the word in a private and confidential letter to Mr. Morgan’s doctor; at the time of the consultation itself he had merely pocketed the three guineas and agreed politely that Spring seemed to be later than usual this year. It was the doctor who had broken it to Mr. Morgan—he was relieved that there was no Mrs. Morgan who had to hear the news as well. And Mr. Morgan after a few seconds’ incredulity that his Maker should have chosen him for such an end had been very calm and dignified about it. He had shaken the doctor sadly by the hand, rather as one might shake the hand of an unwilling executioner, and had sent for Mr. Hackbridge; Mr. Hackbridge, large toothy and self-important, was stand
ing in front of his desk at this moment.
It was significant that Mr. Morgan had not sent for John Marco. A week ago he would have done so, he had grown to rely on the young man. He was so obviously of the stuff that managers are made of. But the episode in the vestry on the night of the election had shaken Mr. Morgan. He knew Mr. Kent, had known him for years in the way in which a large and important shopkeeper knows a small and unimportant one who happens to worship in the same Chapel. And he was convinced that Mr. Kent would not have spoken without conviction, without evidence. There must certainly have been something behind that outburst. But what? It was that which was troubling Mr. Morgan. In a sense, the uncertainty was worse than actual knowledge: Mr. Marco might have been guilty of anything. And so it was, with the pain remorselessly advancing all the time and with so little time to lose, Mr. Morgan had sent for Mr. Hackbridge instead. He felt that in an emergency like the present he could not afford to place his business in the hands of someone over whom even the faintest cloud of dubiety had ever rested.
“It may be six months, it may be a year,” Mr. Morgan was saying. “They can’t tell.”
“You have my deepest sympathy, sir,” Mr. Hackbridge replied. “It has come as a great shock to me.”
Mr. Morgan paused: in a strange way he was rather enjoying shocking Mr. Hackbridge.
“And after I’m gone,” he continued, “there’ll have to be someone to carry on.”
“Quite so, sir,” said Mr. Hackbridge, in the same deliberately melancholy voice. “I see your point.”
“I shall probably sell the business eventually,” Mr. Morgan went on. “I shall go back to Swansea and get ready for the end. Until then I shall need a manager—someone I can trust.”
“Quite so, sir,” Mr. Hackbridge agreed again. He twirled the fine points of his moustache as he spoke and shifted his feet a little more widely apart.
“And I’ve decided to ask you to keep your eye on things in my absence,” Mr. Morgan said. “If you show that you can do it—I mean the buying and the accounts and everything—the new people will probably want to keep you in the same position. It’s your big chance, Mr. Hackbridge. It’s your opportunity.”
He came over and put his hand on Mr. Hackbridge’s shoulder.
“And we shall have to consider the financial aspect,” he wound up. “You get three pounds ten a week—don’t you?—at the moment. Well, we’ll bring it up to four. It’s a big jump, Mr. Hackbridge. A big jump.”
ii
Mr. Morgan’s consternation over Mr. Kent’s attack was, after all, only symptomatic of the wave of unrest that had run through the whole Tabernacle. People talked of nothing else. Wherever Mr. Tuke went on his visiting, he heard sly references to the occurrence. In the end things had become so bad by the Saturday night that he re-wrote his Sunday Sermon to counteract it: he preached on slander.
Not by any means that he was convinced of the baselessness of the whisperings. Like Mr. Morgan he had the agonised conviction that behind so much smoke there must be at least a tiny central core of fire. And the fact that John Marco was now an Elder, that he himself had been responsible for making him one, only alarmed him still further.
At last in an effort to clear up the whole mystery he had done the straight and manly thing: he had gone round to Mr. Kent and had asked him point blank for an explanation. But Mr. Kent had refused to say a word. He had been more than reticent: he had been secretive. And he had stood on his rights under the Amosite Charter.
“I don’t have to give any reason,” he had said. “The book says that anyone who opposes the Election of an Elder shall say so in open convocation, and that’s what I did. I said everything that I’m going to say.”
“But think of the effect within the Chapel,” Mr. Tuke had reasoned with him. “Think of the effect on our Brother.”
“That’s his affair,” Mr. Kent had replied bluntly. “His and his Maker’s.”
And though Mr. Tuke had stayed on, by turns wheedling and magisterial, the result had been the same. Mr. Kent had been adamant and Mrs. Kent had supported him. When Mr. Tuke had finally left them he was more aggravated and mystified than ever. That was why he had decided that he would pay an informal evening visit on John Marco to see if he could glean even the least hint of what had gone before.
He delayed his visit until nearly nine o’clock: he wanted to be quite sure that John Marco would be in when he got there. It was an unpleasant sort of night, wet without being cold; and inside his mackintosh Mr. Tuke steamed. By the time he had reached Clarence Gardens he was hot and sticky, and he could not help asking himself how many ministers of his standing would have turned out on such a night merely to lay a rumour. As he stood on the porch shaking his umbrella out into the darkness he envied other men whose day’s work was done once they had crossed their thresholds in the evening.
But as he tugged at the massive handle in the socket beside the front door and heard the tinny rattle of the bell in the basement depths below, he was aware of a new and indefinable sensation; it occurred to him with the suddenness of a revelation that this was not a happy house. He could not say exactly what it was that put the notion into his head. It might have been merely the melancholy bell-notes below stairs; it might have been the blind, curiously deserted appearance of the front; it might have been its size, so out of proportion to the number of people who lived in it; or it might even have been simply the wetness of the night and his own soaking legs. But Mr. Tuke felt sure it was none of these. It was something intrinsic. Something in the bricks and mortar of the place. It seemed to Mr. Tuke in that inexplicable moment of clairvoyance to be the sort of house in which flowers would wither, fires prove heatless and laughter die away inaudibly on the lips.
Then Emmy opened the front door and Mr. Tuke pulled himself together with a jerk. He was not given to day-dreaming of this kind and wondered if he had caught a chill and were feverish.
“And is Mr. Marco at home?” he asked in his full, rich voice.
Emmy shook her head.
“He’s gone out for a walk,” she said.
“In this weather?”
“That’s what he said.”
Mr. Tuke paused.
“Is Mrs. Marco in?”
“The old one is,” Emmy answered. “She’s in there.”
She jerked her head towards the drawing-room as she spoke.
“Then perhaps I may be allowed to pay my respects,” Mr. Tuke replied.
He stepped into the high, dark hall as he said it. He did not like being kept hanging about on doorsteps like a tradesman, and he had never been able to get this draggled maid-of-all-work to treat him with the kind of respect to which he was entitled. He handed her his dripping umbrella and stooped down to remove his goloshes.
“Perhaps you could get rid of these somewhere and then announce me,” he said curtly.
But Emmy did not get rid of them. She held them in her arms with his saturated mackintosh on top and the valuable silk hat somewhere underneath it, and opened the drawing-room door with her free hand.
“The Minister,” she said.
Mr. Tuke pushed past her—he had to push: the creature did not even have the good manners to step back for him—and entered the room. As he did so, there was a chuckle of delight from the far side of the fire and old Mrs. Marco half rose to receive him.
She had changed a good deal in those last three years. With someone to look after her and bring her regular meals, and nothing to do all day but read her Bible when she felt like it and ring for cups of tea, she had become strikingly different from the rheumatic old witch who had hobbled about the cold passages in Chapel Villas. She wore her best all day now. And she was cantankerous in the way that old women with an assured livelihood can afford to be.
“Shut the door, Emmy,” she screamed over Mr. Tuke’s shoulder as she rose to meet him. “You’re leaving me in a draught.”
Then she held out her hand in its ribbed, black mitten.
“I wanted to see
you,” she said. “I wanted to hear all about it.”
“About what?” Mr. Tuke asked.
“Oh, don’t try to pull the wool over my eyes,” she answered with a hard, vindictive little laugh. “I heard, what happened. And I want to know exactly what he meant.”
Mr. Tuke pulled a chair to the fire and sat down. As he did so he saw how very false his imagination out there on the doorstep had played him. The fire was toasting his legs already and on a table by the window a bowl of hyacinths was blooming. He was somewhat taken aback, however, by the directness of Mrs. Marco’s onslaught. The only thing to do was to play for time.
“Whose meaning is it that you want to understand?” he asked suavely.
“Mr. Kent’s,” Mrs. Marco told him.
“So someone has told you all about that little affair,” Mr. Tuke replied.
“It isn’t a little affair,” Mrs. Marco contradicted him. “He’s my son and I want to know what Mr. Kent meant by it.”
Mr. Tuke put the tips of his fingers together.
“Really,” he said, “I haven’t the least idea what he meant. He didn’t tell me.”
“Then why don’t you ask him?”
“I did.”
The words slipped out unintentionally. He was about to cover them up with something else, but Mrs. Marco had already pounced on them.
“And what did he say?” she asked. “Now I shall hear something.”
“He declined to say anything,” Mr. Tuke answered. “He merely said that he opposed your son’s election.”
“Pah!” Mrs. Marco blew out her lips with anger. “Everyone’s trying to keep things back from me these days.”
“Then why not ask your son yourself?” Mr. Tuke suggested cunningly.
“He wouldn’t talk about it either,” Mrs. Marco admitted.
I Shall Not Want Page 14
