Читать книгу Death Makes a Prophet - Ernest Elmore - Страница 6

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Before he left his bookshop and moved to Welworth, Eustace had become a widower. It was shortly after the death of his wife, in fact, that he set out to evolve the first principles of Cooism. His best ideas had always come to him when sunk in a self-imposed trance, or, as he more pithily expressed it, “during a phase of Yogi-like non-being”. (“Non-being” figured as a very important factor in the Cult of Coo, though nobody seemed able to define its exact significance.) Whether the original idea of Terence, his only child, had also occurred to him when in a state of “non-being” seems doubtful, for at such periods Eustace was a receptacle for good ideas and Terence was probably the worst idea he’d ever had. For Terence was the antithesis of his father. Where Eustace was mild, dreamy and soft-spoken, Terence was athletic and practical, with a booming bass voice. When Eustace had first moved to Welworth, Terence was still a very junior schoolboy. At the time when this narrative opens he was a gradely young man of twenty-one, with a healthy appetite, wholesome ideas and the physique of a boxer. In the interim, his father had done everything to undermine his normality. He had sent him to a co-ed school with an ultra-modern, one might almost say, post-impressionistic curriculum; clamped down on his tremendous appetite with a strict vegetarianism; made him a Symbol-Bearer in the Temple of Osiris; and with the inhumanity of a fanatic with a one-track mind, kept him very short of pocket-money. To say that Terence disliked his father is not an exaggeration. He simmered with resentment under the restrictions placed upon him. He thought Cooism the most incomprehensible twaddle. He thought the Children of Osiris the most embarrassing collection of cranks in a town where ordinary men seemed odd. He rated vegetarianism as an unnatural vice. He thought co-education sloppy. He considered the Hon. Mrs. Hagge-Smith a blot on the face of creation. And yet, being naturally inarticulate and obedient, Terence dared not come out in open rebellion. He just suffered in silence like a goaded ox. Sometimes there was a look in his eye that was strangely reminiscent of an ox—a look of patient resignation that gave way every now and then to a gleam of ominous hostility.

The Mildmanns, father and son, lived in the mockest of mock-Tudor mansions on Almond Avenue. It was a big, secluded house standing in an acre of well-kept garden as befitted the High Prophet of Cooism. It was run by an efficient lady-housekeeper, a widow by the name of Laura Summers, a handsome, even striking, blonde, with perfect manners and a cultured voice. In the emancipated atmosphere of a Garden City this arrangement raised no breath of scandal. Merely a rip-snorting tornado of vilification that would have pulverised any man less innocent and unworldly as Mr. Mildmann. As it was he never even thought of Mrs. Summers as a blonde. She was his housekeeper and a convert (though not a particularly reliable one) to Cooism. Between Terence and Mrs. Summers there was considerable sympathy and understanding. Her late husband had been a man with a big appetite and few ideas. She felt sorry for Terence in his over-tight shorts, his sandals and open-neck shirts. He looked so like a little boy that has grown out of his clothes that the mere sight of him roused all her maternal instincts. They formed a sort of nebulous alliance against the soft-fingered influences of Eustace Mildmann. They shared little private jokes over many things that the Children of Osiris held sacred. Misplaced, perhaps, but very human. In particular over Mrs. Hagge-Smith—the very sight of whom always reduced Terence to a state of unutterable boredom.

Ostensibly the Archbishop—or in the nomenclature of the order, the “High Prophet”—of Cooism was, of course, its founder, Eustace Mildmann. But the force behind the movement, the financial prop, the true director of policy, was Alicia Hagge-Smith. She paid the piper and so, naturally, she called the tune. She was quite accustomed to calling the tune. She had been calling it all her life, for the simple reason that her late husband had made a million out of mineral waters.

Right from her earliest years Alicia had taken to religion as other women take to golf, bridge or pink gin. She had, so to speak, a nose for odd religions—the odder the better. She had feasted at the tables of many a faith, but always in the long run she had suffered spiritual indigestion and retired in search of a more assimilatory diet. At one time she had actually turned her back on the problems of salvation and taken up Eurhythmics. Unfortunately, a generous build coupled with an artistic fervour out of keeping with her mature years, had led her to rick her back during one of the more advanced exercises, leaving a vacuum in her life which was quickly filled with Cooism. And in Cooism, Mrs. Hagge-Smith seemed to have found a spiritual pabulum that suited her to a T. She gobbled up the movement lock, stock and barrel and, thereafter, allowed Eustace five thousand a year to act as figurehead whilst she steered the ship. Luckily, Eustace (probably during a phase of “non-being”) recognised on which side his bread was buttered, and sensibly accepted Mrs. Hagge-Smith’s patronage with open arms. In less than no time Cooism thrust out tentacles, though its central body still remained in Welworth, and, within four years of Alicia’s enrolment as a Child of Osiris, its membership numbered over ten thousand and Temples sprang up in London and the provinces. Within five years its subscriptions and donations covered all disbursements. In six, Cooism was making a handsome profit and Eustace found himself saddled with a far more elaborate hierarchy for the running of his movement. He needed his Bishop of York, so to speak—a worthy successor who, in the event of his sudden demise, could step into his sandals. It was thus that the office of Prophet-in-Waiting was created and paved the way for the sudden, flamboyant entry of that enigmatic personage, Peta Penpeti.