Arrest the Bishop?

by Peck,Winifred

  “I think you will make an exception for me.” Ulder grew bellicose, but restrained himself with a sudden unpleasant smile. “I brought my kit with me in case I had to stay. If every one here is reasonable I shall get off to-night and I will not detain you long!”

  “Let me turn him out, sir!” Bobs moved forward in impatient anger, but Ulder brushed him aside. For a minute he stood looking round him in malevolent triumph, holding out his hand to Mrs. Broome. Then suddenly he caught the back of a chair, staggered and groaned. Next moment there was a heavy crash and fall, and before that motionless circle of spectators the parson lay motionless and livid, while lilies from a vase fell, like a grotesque wreath, across his chest as the water dripped on his unconscious head.

  In any accident one notices how almost immediately the spectators divide themselves into an inner group who try to give aid, however inefficiently, and an outer ring who tender plentiful advice. It was Bobs, Dick and Mrs. Broome who knelt beside the prostrate figure, while behind them suggestions of “Straighten his legs” … “More air” … “Brandy” … “Water” … “Ring up the doctor” … rose in chorus. Only the Bishop’s contribution struck Dick a little curiously as they loosened Ulder’s collar. “Is he dead? Is Ulder dead?” The words suggested a certain awe and alarm, but also a vast relief.

  “Dead! Not a bit, sir! Dead drunk more likely!”

  “No, Dick, there’s something odd about his heart,” said Bobs. Last time they had knelt together like this was over the victim in a rugger scrum, but between that day and this the two men singly had seen too many wounded and dying to ignore certain symptoms—“Isn’t his pulse a bit odd too, Mrs. Broome? I think we should get the doctor at once.”

  “Shall I ring up?” Sue had recovered herself now and was stooping over Judith who for once in her life, Dick noted, actually looked a bit upset.

  “Yes—but wait, darling! I think he may be here any minute, for he promised to look in on Moira and try to give her some light sedative so that she’ll sleep before the hospital ambulance comes to-morrow. Mrs. Lee will tell you if he really is on the way, so do ask her, darling. Do you think we should move him, Bobs?”

  “Where to, Mrs. Broome?”

  “Well, a sofa on this floor anyhow! We’ll have to put him in the St. Ursula room on the Bridge later, for luckily it is all ready, and then with the pantry just below it’s so convenient for an invalid’s trays,” she added, her house keeping instincts reasserting themselves, though it seemed a little doubtful to the others, gazing with horror on that stricken, immobile, sallow face, whether any trays would be needed. “Ah, there’s a car in the drive surely! How lucky! It must be Dr. Lee!”

  “Well, well, easy to see where he’s been lately!” Dr. Lee, as he bustled in, small and sturdy, and as hasty in his speech as in his pronouncements, had, whatever his limitations, that great medical gift of making a major disaster seem for the moment, at least, a minor everyday occurrence. The tension lessened a little, though the doctor’s face grew more serious as he bent over the patient.

  “Give me a hand, Bobs, will you? That’s better! Well, well, how he dared to indulge with a heart in that state! Not too nice, Mrs. Broome, not too nice at all! I’m afraid you’ll have him on your hands to-night!”

  “Of course he must stay till he’s better!” Mrs. Broome glanced at her husband who was making no offer of hospitality.

  “I don’t know about that. Might be as well to take him off in the ambulance to-morrow with Moira. Ought to be under observation. Heart’s not in good case, not at all. He’s a sick man, and if we pull him through, he’ll have to change his way of life, altogether. It’s the water waggon for him!”

  “Could we not get him into an ambulance now?” asked the Bishop.

  “Couldn’t send one out to-night. It was all I could do to get along on chains. This fall of snow’s been very heavy, and the cold would finish him. We have the new ambulance booked for Moira, and that’s worth waiting for. He won’t want attendance to-night, I hope. I’ll give you something, Mrs. Broome!” The doctor fell upon his country-practice black bag, that pharmacopoeia of cures. “First, something to bring him round, but we’ll get him upstairs before that, for I expect he’ll have pretty acute pain. Now where’s my nitryll? Ah, here we are. I’ll take this up with me.”

  “And something for the night that I can give him,” urged Mrs. Broome, accustomed as she was to the little doctor’s deafness and forgetful ways.

  “Yes, yes, I’ll leave this with you. Now where are we? Here we are! Not the whole phial, I think—dangerous, and I may need some at Holt’s … going on there … will be no joke in this snow. Now where are those containers?—chemists send me some, Mrs. Broome … come in handy!” The doctor fumbled for cotton-wool and stuffed it in a glass tube, talking all the time. “Six I’ll give you, but one every six hours is the maximum dose, remember. There you are, half a grain each, and remember they’re dangerous! Now then we must get the patient upstairs! If four of you lads will give a hand up these abominable polished stairs. As bad as these long passages! Glad I don’t live in a Palace!” As the doctor’s voice and the heavy footfalls of the bearers died away in the distance the group in the hall stood in stunned silence till the tall clock chimed out nine times.

  “Compline,” said Mrs. Broome automatically. She and Sue were on their knees retrieving the broken vase and its contents. “But, oh dear, perhaps to-night, Mark, with Bobs upstairs … ?”

  One of the penalties of high ecclesiastical office must obviously be the impossibility of owning to a disinclination for Church services. Even as the Chancellor said firmly that he didn’t feel like Chapel after all this, and wanted a talk with the Bishop as soon as possible, Canon Wye was offering his services as Chaplain in place of Bobs, and the Bishop assenting with an attempt at gratitude. “We will consult together afterwards, you, I and the Canon,” Mrs. Broome heard him say as he moved away, his head and shoulders bent. Why did her dear Mark seem almost an old man to night? Although some of Judith’s remarks had escaped her stepmother, she had gathered at dinner that Mr. Ulder’s visit was connected with her stepdaughter’s escapades, and she briskly invited Judith to a good talk with her alone (certainly the confidences were unlikely to be fit for Sue’s ears).

  “Quite soon, darling, but I promised to go and see poor old Moira after dinner,” replied Judith. And of course, thought Sue, with the tolerant clear-sightedness which distinguished her, though Ju really is fond of old Moira, she isn’t looking forward to a talk with Mummy. Naturally she prefers men in her confessional!

  “I must see about some night things for the poor man, if Bobs hasn’t already,” said Mrs. Broome, ringing the bell. “Soames, I suppose that Mr. Ulder had no luggage with him?”

  “That butler springs up like a jack-in-the-box,” said Judith distastefully as she went upstairs with Sue. “I believe he listens at keyholes all the time, for he couldn’t have got from the pantry in that ridiculous Bridge so quickly.”

  “Doris says he’s a nosy-parker and a know-all,” smiled Sue. “Listen to him now!”

  “Yes, madam, and I was surprised,” Soames was saying, “seeing as how he was not expected for the night. He passed some remark about never letting his things out of his sight!”

  “Well, take it up and just leave it till the doctor goes—in fact I think I’d better get out anything he wants later myself. He must not be disturbed.”

  Soames went to the vestibule, and Mrs. Broome sighed a little as she left the hall. It always seemed so deserted at the exodus of the party to Chapel. The open doors of the Bishop’s and Chaplain’s rooms and the old library revealed desolate stretches of dark oak faintly irradiated by wood fires. Judith and Sue had vanished up the stairs, evidently wanting to be alone together. She felt a wretched weight of solitude and depression as she walked down the passage to the Bridge. On the right of the entrance was the big door into the Chapel and a murmur of intoning voices. Beyond, two narrow staircases enclosed the pantry an
d offices, and one of these Mrs. Broome ascended now. She would visit Mr. Ulder in the nearer room, St. Ursula, look in on poor old Moira next door, and then finish the evening in her own warm, vast, modern drawing-room. Sometimes she felt the Bishop’s spirits would be benefited if she could coax him out of the old part of the house with its low roofs, twisting passages, mysterious little stairs and creaking boards. But the whole family preferred the old gracious Elizabethan rooms, and all that Mrs. Broome had been able to do was to pack them with every conceivable modern convenience. The old drawing-room was now Sue’s gay sitting-room; in the old library, rows of desolate, wire-guarded old volumes and yellowing busts lurked harmlessly behind Mrs. Broome’s bright chintz-covered chairs and sofas. The Bridge wing she had never been able to transform satisfactorily. It was too shoddy, ugly and cramped, and to-night she remembered, as she always remembered when she was tired and depressed, the rambling attics above the Bridge bedrooms and the old wing, full of the junk of departed predecessors. They could only be cleared after the Bishop had glanced through the rubbish, to ascertain what, if any, were diocesan fixtures, and that was always to be to-morrow and never to-day! And then the sensible woman gave herself a mental shake. She was merely letting the house obsess her because she wished to avoid the far greater worries connected with Judith, Mr. Ulder, and her poor old sick housekeeper, Moira. It would be far better to face these squarely!

  “Is that my pet at last?” Old Moira’s quivering voice reached Mrs. Broome as she turned the corner of the narrow stair and saw Judith rush into her old nurse’s room. Poor old Moira! She was indeed capable of returning from the grave to see her adored charge. Judith had been second fiddle to Sue’s nurse when the Broomes arrived at Evelake, and Moira, inherited from the Bishop’s predecessor as housekeeper, had at once taken the seven-year-old child under her wing. Perhaps Mrs. Broome had too weakly tolerated a distraction from Moira’s passion for bullying and upsetting the staff, for certainly she had been one of the adorers whose incense had tended to veil Judith from criticism and self-criticism alike.

  Dr. Lee opened the door of St. Ursula and admitted Mrs. Broome cautiously. He had just, it is to be feared, commented on the room’s name to Dick, in view of the scandals connected with his patient—“though perhaps eleven thousand is an exaggeration,” and his smile encouraged Mrs. Broome till she heard a low groan of pain from the bed.

  “It’s passing off,” Dr. Lee assured her, “passing off. There has been acute pain, and he has been restless enough to make me glad of these two Rugger toughs, but you can go off now, boys!”

  “Should we have a specialist?” asked Mrs. Broome doubtfully. The two so-called boys looked, like all untrained male attendants who have had to watch physical suffering, as if they wanted to be sick quietly; women are luckier for they merely feel faint. Dr. Lee was a good sound country doctor, but he was old and he was deaf, and would his stethoscope record to him what she vaguely diagnosed to herself as the murmurs of the heart?

  “I’ll get Dr. Gonne to see him in hospital to-morrow,” Dr. Lee assured her. “He’s first rate in these cases. I could have given Ulder that morphia I gave you to ease him, but he refuses to take it till he’s seen the Bishop. Wants to see Canon Wye and the Chancellor as well, but dissuade him if you can. I’ve given him an anodyne which won’t send him off to sleep as he insisted on keeping awake, but be very careful now with the tablets I gave you, Mrs. Broome. Only one at a time, even if the pain recurs, and no more till after a six-hour interval. But I don’t think it will be necessary. And no stimulants on any account, though he’s asking for them! Not on any account. You’ll be within earshot and his bell’s working? Excellent. Now, sir, you’re feeling a bit easier, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, yes!” Mr. Ulder’s voice was thin and weak but resolute. For the first time Mrs. Broome glanced at the bed, trying to conquer her nervous distaste for the scene. All the rooms in this Bridge wing were lighted by only one narrow window, set high in the wall, for old Bishop Main was a sincere advocate for keeping his sons at home. The Broomes had bought the ugly suites of fumed oak bedroom furniture from their predecessors, and not even Mrs. Broome’s attempts to brighten them with chintz and low rose lights redeemed them from the air of unoccupied apartments in a boarding house. Between the dressing-table on the left side of the room beneath the window, and the wardrobe on the right by the fireplace, the narrow bed faced her, and from the bed Mr. Ulder’s malevolent face and silky voice greeted her.

  “Is that Mrs. Broome? I must apologize for troubling you. But I must see the Bishop as soon as possible. You are sure, Dr. Lee, that this abominable stuff won’t send me to sleep first? Plenty of time for sleep, plenty of time!”

  “Is that Moira laughing next door?” asked Dr. Lee incredulously, as he turned from the bed to close his bag, and Mrs. Broome was thankful now for his deafness, as Judith’s clear, gay voice recounting her own story and the adventures of the evening was perfectly audible to her step mother. “Miss Judith’s a better doctor than I am!”

  “Of course everyone was disappointed that Ulder didn’t pass out altogether,” Judith was saying as Mrs. Broome softly opened Moira’s door for the doctor. “You could see it in all their faces, and I know I was myself.”

  “Have you told your mamma your lovely secret, dearie?” Moira, lying grey, frail and spent as a dead leaf on her pillows, was too preoccupied by her own discomfort to take in many ideas at once, it seemed.

  “Darling, it won’t be a lovely secret, it’ll be a nameless child if that old devil next door can’t have his mouth shut!” Mrs. Broome gasped in consternation at this further complication in Judith’s tale. Had the girl, or had she not, confided this to her father at dinner? “Hullo, Mummy! I’ll be off, Moira, and leave you to flirt with Dr. Lee, but I’ll see you in the morning. Leave a little rat poison with us, Dr. Lee! Hullo! What’s that?” She paused at the door. “Oh, it’s Soames with the Ulder kit! Leave his things just inside the door, Soames, Mrs. Broome says, but don’t go in and disturb him by unpacking! See you soon, Mummy dearest! Good-bye, Dr. Lee! I’ll be seeing you soon for some new sort of dope. I’ve nearly finished mine, and it doesn’t seem to give me much sleep these days anyway!”

  From the Chapel came the faint sound of men’s voices chanting:—“Save us, O Lord, waking, and guard us sleeping!” but except for that very necessary petition, for the faint distant sounds from the kitchen quarters, and the whistle of wind and swish of falling snow, the Palace was very dark and still as Bobs and Dick went downstairs to take refuge in the old library, and sink down gratefully with their pipes by the fire in the plump, comfortable armchairs.

  “This is a bit of all right after Chaos and Old Night in the Palace,” said Dick gratefully.

  “Funny home for us,” meditated Bobs. “Oh, I don’t mean this. I mean the Church of England which seems a bit of a drug in the market to-night.” He rose suddenly and limped down the long room through the intercommunicating door to the Chaplain’s room, returning in a very baggy old Harris coat of loud design. “That’s better! How I hate my clerical rags!”

  “Uniform, after all!” said Dick, vainly endeavouring to clean out his pipe. “I must marry soon to have a wife’s hair pins ready for this job! Uniform, and thank Heaven clergy have no buttons to polish. Though I must say my lamp of faith burns lowest when I see the parson in the advertisements of gents’ outfitters!”

  “Yes, but uniforms of what sort of army?” asked Bobs with unusual bitterness.

  “Same as any, I expect. At least we can’t criticize our Commander-in-Chief. The Staff must have rotters as well as good men; the regimental officers differ a lot. It’s difficult to make the average Tommy see that he’s fighting in a war of sheer survival against all the evil in the world, but if you can get at him he’ll do his job. It’s funny when you’ve been in M.I. to see how exactly the other Churches represent military allies. You’ve all the same enemy, you admit politely, but there’s the devil to pay in differences over strategy
and policy.”

  Dick and Bobs had known each other so long and intimately that each knew when the other was ready for the confidential conversation into which they drifted now, though they exchanged no high phrases about ideals and vocation, as they grunted out remarks between their pulls at their pipes. Early in this century, under the influence of Anglo-Catholic divines of unusual gifts or charm and warmed by the fire of the Christian Socialist, and the first glow of the Students’ Christian Movement, both had taken orders. Bobs, simple soul, met with the joyful consent of his family, and the puzzled approval of his Oxford tutor, who felt that the Church after all was the only future for a Fourth Class man; Dick came by way of Military Intelligence and Settlement work, activities which had brought him to the conclusion that personal religion was the only possible hope of happiness for any individual soul, and that the Church Militant rather than the Civil Service was more likely to help that end. Now together they looked over that past across the gulf of the war, and Dick’s attitude was as clear-cut and cheerful as his hatchet face behind his horn spectacles. They could talk things out, for the exodus from Chapel led to no disturbance. Bobs cocked an ear as steps sounded outside, but relaxed.

  “The Bishop’s taken Chailly and Wye to his room for a consultation. That’s O.K. Go on, Dick …”

  “All that’s the matter with you,” Dick summed up at length, half an hour later, “is that you don’t like your job here.”

  “I don’t, but I’ll say this, it’s cured me of any ambition ever to be a Bishop!”

  “But you aren’t fit for regular parish work till your leg’s sound. The doctors give you hopes of a cure in a year and meanwhile you must make the best of a routine job. It’s just a war sentence, a medical board, Bobs, and after a bit you’ll join me at Blacksea, won’t you? And meanwhile can’t you take a hand in movements like Life and Liberty and Toc H, which get overlooked in parish routine—for there’ll be routine enough anywhere, I expect! Lots of spiritual spit and polish and dress parades in the best of Churches.”