Читать книгу Harmer John - Hugh Walpole - Страница 8

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This was the letter that caused him to pace up and down his study, his head a little forward, his hands closed behind his back, his short, rather stumpy body being moved forward in jerks as though by the action of some secret spring within him. As he moved, all his past life seemed to swing around him, up and down through the bare study, bare save for his untidy table with its crucifix, its piles of letters and papers, his arm-chair, a worn sofa—bare and grey in the ugly January light.

All his life, which seemed to him now in retrospect to have consisted only of one brief moment, had been engaged in this same war between his affections and his duty. There had been that first friendship made by him at Oxford—and he saw instantly a succession of pictures of English summers and bathes and cricket-matches and long walks in dusky evenings, an Italian holiday, a trip to Egypt—and how surprised they had both been by the emotion that after a while rushed in and filled their hearts, and how he, with his English public-school training, had been afraid of sentiment and feeling and had felt that his love for his friend was stepping in front of his love for God, and how he had gradually withdrawn ... and his friend had married and that had been the end. Then came his meeting with the woman whom he married, his passionate adoration of her, her quieter affection for him, some aloofness that she had, something that he never quite touched. And then in the very middle of this, when his married life and his religious life seemed so utterly to absorb him body and soul, the sudden upspringing of that strange friendship with Charles Upcott, a man of over forty, learned, a scholar, grave, an indoor man, nothing in common—and yet this sudden friendship that flamed up in a day and burnt with a steady fire until Upcott’s death, a year after their first meeting, from pleurisy. Christina, his wife, had seemed to understand this friendship and fostered it in every way. She said that it was what he needed, smiling at him in that quiet, strange, aloof way that removed her sometimes so far from him....

Here, too, he had doubted and felt that he was in the wrong. It was not only the emotional quality, felt both by Upcott and himself, that his training told him was weak and sentimental between men (although his soul told him that it was not), it was also that Upcott was a declared and convinced atheist, gentle towards Longstaffe’s beliefs because he loved him, but showing with every word and movement that he held them to be childish and incredible. So once again Longstaffe’s heart was in the way of his duty, but the matter was abruptly settled for him by Upcott’s sudden death.

He recalled now as he paced his study the grief and agony that that death had meant to him. Had he before or afterwards known such pain and loneliness? No, he must confess to himself that even his wife’s death had not afflicted himself so intolerably. There had never been a day, perhaps, when he had not thought of Upcott, seeing his hatchet-jawed face, his dreaming student’s eyes, his long shambling body, heard the echo of his little stammer, felt the warm touch of his hand....

And then he passed to his wife’s agony and death—her patience, her courage, her wonderful, wonderful courage! He could see her lying, her eyes lost in distance, assuring him that she was not in any pain, asking him about the trivial things of the day.... Christina! Christina! Christina! He said that name aloud as though by the whisper of it he might bring her for a moment back to him. But in vain, in vain, as it had always been in vain. She had always eluded him, loving him as a traveller loves a town in which he likes to stay for a moment before passing on—her eyes had been fixed on other destinies.

And so there had been left to him only Mary. Mary had been everything to him, mother, daughter, brother, sister, friend. From the very first, long before she could speak, she had seemed to understand him exactly. They had been such companions as never were! He had taught her to run, to swim, to bowl quite a decent fast ball, to ride, to shoot. She had been clever, too, far cleverer than he had ever been, and was soon reading books that were far beyond him. He had sent her to a splendid school for girls in the Midlands; the wrench of her departures had been terrible, but then their meetings, the holidays, the fun, the walks, the games, the companionship.

And then—the awful tragedy. Just as she was growing into perfect womanhood. Once again his heart had confronted his duty. He learnt in one fierce, blinding flash that did you love enough nothing mattered—God Himself must turn and bow His head before human love at its most intense. He fought for her like a tiger, he would have gone with her to the end of the world. She would not have it, seeing truly that his Polchester work was the only thing to keep him sane.

His love of God saved him. In his faith there were no complexities, no doubts, no fears. God was there and loved His children. God was sorry for Mary’s sin, but had forgiven her and was caring for her. Again and again he felt that he must leave Polchester and go to her; he did, of course, go up to London and visit her whenever it was possible, but the loneliness as the years passed grew harder and harder to bear. And yet he knew that he must not leave Polchester. His duty was there, the only work that his older years were likely to have for him. Oh! how he longed to have her back! How every room in the house called for her; how old Hephzibah, who had nursed her from her birth, longed for her; how at night he would rise from his bed and pace his room fighting his desire to ask her to return.

And yet he must not. He could not ask her to face the ostracism and social banning that there would be. He did not know, too, how he himself could endure it, what his own anger might not be. Her name was never mentioned by any one in Polchester save by Mrs. Combermere, a rather eccentric widow who lived with her dogs in an old house in the Precincts, but outside the Precincts life and social code. She seemed to be Mary’s only friend. And yet it might not be so. When they saw Mary and realised her sweetness and goodness they would surely forgive that earlier fault. How could they help it? he said, looking up at her photograph on the mantelpiece.

And at that look he yielded. She shall come back. For a little while at any rate. At the very thought of having her again in that house his heart leapt with joy and his eyes filled with tears.

He sat down at the table and then again paused. There was another side to her return, a side involving wider and more public issues.

I have said already that the Rector of St. Paul’s, unless he were a man of very exceptional talent and intellect, would be by necessity outside the Cathedral politics.

Tom Longstaffe was neither in talent nor intellect an exceptional man, and during all his ten years in Polchester he had never on one occasion been asked to dine with the Dean, nor had any of the Cathedral ladies called on his daughter after their arrival. Old Bishop Purcell had indeed invited him to luncheon at Carpledon and he had gone and had spent a most happy afternoon, but within six months Bishop Purcell was dead and Bishop Franklin reigned in his stead. Bishop Franklin had not the personality of his predecessor, who was a saint of God if ever one walked this sinful earth. Bishop Franklin was a good man, but not too good, and his thoughts were for ever with the Kings of Israel, whose slightest habits and most abstruse customs were more real to him than were his wife (an invalid) and two dried-up, pigeon-breasted daughters.

As to the Archdeacons, Witheram was growing an old man now and was nearly always out of Polchester busied with visitations throughout Glebeshire; the other Archdeacon, Brodribb, who had succeeded Brandon in ’97, was a man without any colour of personality, agreeable, negligible, interested in Shakespeare Texts and Elizabethan dramatists, a man who did his duty, was easily influenced, and was something of a hypochondriac.

No, it was not these men who directed the Cathedral politics of our town. These were directed by two others, one the Rev. Ambrose Wistons, Vicar of the church of Pybus St. Anthony, a village a few miles out of Polchester, one the Rev. Frederick Ronder, Canon of the Cathedral. It may seem strange that some of the Cathedral policy should have been directed from a small village outside our town, but this was not the first occasion on which Pybus St. Anthony had played an important part in the affairs of the Cathedral.

It had been the custom for a number of years past that the Vicar of Pybus St. Anthony should be a man of mark, and promotion to positions of great importance had often arisen out of that humble appointment. Ambrose Wistons had been asked to come to Pybus with the quite definite understanding that he would play a large part in the Cathedral’s affairs, the larger perhaps because he was not actually one of the Cathedral staff.

Wistons had been at Pybus now for ten years, and he had made his personality felt throughout the whole of Southern England. He had on several occasions refused advancement; he was a man who kept his counsel, had few intimate friends, and was feared as much as he was loved. Himself was fearless, as every one knew, and was utterly single-minded.

He was perhaps the greatest preacher in the whole of England at that time, and Polcastrians crowded his village church on Sunday evenings. On the three or four occasions during the year when he preached in the Cathedral, the Cathedral nave was packed. People went perhaps as much for sensation as for eloquence. He seemed to love to shock the orthodox; he was a modern of the moderns, as his books showed, and to simple minds like Tom Longstaffe’s many of his utterances were treason.

“He seems to hate the Cathedral,” Tom Longstaffe said, pacing his study. “He would pull it down if he could. He says that it stands in the way of Christ. And yet there are times when he seems to hate Christ too, or at least His Divinity. Surely we are not meant to destroy the Bible utterly, as Wistons would have us do. He is a terrible danger here!” And yet the man’s courage drew him and attracted him as nothing else in Polchester did. But Wistons never noticed him, although they had met at many ecclesiastical gatherings. Wistons never did more than nod to him sternly. He never stopped to speak to him as did Ryle, or Bentinck-Major, or Martin. He did not want, it seemed, to know him. He went with his dry, wizened, almost sarcastic, spare face up and down the city intent on his own affairs, wanting nothing for himself, not even the love and affection of his fellow-men.

Very different was this other, Canon Ronder. Ronder was now a man of some fifty years of age, fat like a tub, with a red, jolly face, smart and even elegant in appearance (a difficult thing for a stout clergyman to be), and living with an elderly aunt in a comfortable house in the Precincts. Ronder was certainly at this time in 1907 the most important man in Polchester. There was no pie whatever, lay or ecclesiastical, in which he had not some finger.

“He is surely,” said Longstaffe to himself, “the most popular human being in Polchester, and quite naturally so. He is hail-fellow with every one. He brings the Cathedral really into contact with the town, and you will see Shandon the Mayor and Sharpe the Town-clerk as often there as Bentinck-Major or Brodribb—more often perhaps. Every one must like him—he is so genial and kindly and remembers every one, and is ready to listen to anybody’s story.”

And yet every one did not like him. Although no open breach had come it was quite certain that the town was divided into two parties, the Wistons party and the Ronder party, and the Wistons party did not hesitate to say terrible things about Ronder—that he was false, money-grabbing, sycophantic, would sell his mother, if he had one, to increase his personal comfort. On the other hand, the Ronder party said that Wistons was an atheist, a socialist, propagator of immoral opinions, a scientist before he was a Christian, an iconoclast, and so on.

The Ronder party were all for the development of the town. They wanted a better railway station, a new town hall, a golf links, a racecourse, a theatre, two more hotels—heaven knows what! Their argument was that our town with its Cathedral should be the most important in Glebeshire, that it could be if only the Polcastrians would wake up and realise that we were in a new world now, the Victorian era was, thank God, over and the Boer War had shaken us all up.

And the Wistons party retorted that we were forgetting God altogether, that the Cathedral was becoming a temple of Mammon, that the very Canons were concerned in shady money transactions that no honest man would touch, that officials in the position of Ronder and Bentinck-Major ought not even to know such men as Samuel Hogg and Jim Curtis.

To which the Ronder party retorted that the clergymen of the town ought to know every one, that the fortunes of the town and the Cathedral were intimately connected, that the Cathedral was badly in need of funds, that restoration of one of the Towers was necessary, that there were many other things to be done, that it was all very well to have fine ideas about the Four Gospels and be a professor of the very latest Higher Criticism, but where was Higher Criticism if one of the Western Towers fell down?

And so on. And so on.

Of all this Tom Longstaffe had been, until the last two months, only a spectator. Then suddenly, only a month or so ago, Miss Ronder had asked him to dinner, and he had found there the old Dean and his wife, the Bentinck-Majors and the Ryles—all the Cathedral set. Shortly after that Ronder had called upon him about tea-time, had been very jolly, had played on his piano, had admired a little bronze that he had picked up once in Rome, and had finally said that they did not see enough of one another, and that they must all pull together now for the good of the town and the Cathedral. This surprising visit had been followed by an invitation to dine at Bentinck-Major’s (every one knew that Bentinck-Major was a tool of Ronder), and then, most amazing of all, he had received an invitation to join the Shakespeare Reading Society, that society that had for its members only the most exclusive part of the Cathedral set.

The Cathedral had just discovered Tom Longstaffe—that was clear: or at any rate that section of Cathedral society that claimed Ronder for its leader. It would be idle to pretend that Longstaffe was not pleased. He had had a very lonely five years; he wished, as do most of us, to be liked by his fellows; above all, he adored the Cathedral. He had always felt that he was kept away from the Cathedral, not so much by a set of social snobs as rather by some force in the Cathedral itself. He had seen no way by which he might come closer to it. There was, it is true, a third party in the town who would have welcomed him to its arms, the party headed years ago triumphantly by old Archdeacon Brandon, the old-fashioned party who wanted everything to be as it always had been, who hated any change whether in town or Cathedral; but that party was dying, if it were not already dead, and consisted only of a few old men and women who may have had some rightful place in the world before the Boer War, but certainly had none anywhere now.

No, Tom Longstaffe was touched and pleased. He would rather, it is true, that it had been Wistons who had made some advance to him. He was not sure of Ronder, there was something about the man that he did not trust.... Nevertheless ...

He at once accepted the invitation to join the Shakespeare Reading Society and received by return the notice that on January 18 the play of Hamlet would be read at the Precentor’s house at 8.15 sharp, and that he had been cast for the part of Guildenstern.

And if Mary returned? Well, good-bye to the Cathedral set. Not that it mattered. For himself he did not care at all, and if he had Mary with him the whole world might cut him dead for all that he minded. But if God intended him to play a greater part in the town, to take more share in the Cathedral’s affairs? Well, if God intended that, He certainly also intended that he should love his own dear daughter—and, at the thought of her, at the mere glimpse of her smiling down at him from the mantelpiece, he sat at his table once again and wrote to her saying that she was right, that he could not bear to be apart from her any longer, that she must come as soon as possible....

Early in the afternoon of that dank day the mists came up from the Pol and wreathed themselves about the town. Longstaffe lit the gas in his study soon after he had finished his solitary luncheon and sat down and tried to work. He had much to do, and had not intended to go outside the house that day. But the thoughts needed for the prefatory letter to next month’s parish magazine would not come. This was never in any case an easy task for him; he certainly had not, of all men, the pen of a ready writer; and to-day the face of his daughter slipped in between himself and the paper and danced bewitchingly before him. And something else too. He did not know, he could not say. Perhaps he was not well. In any case, this fog disturbed him, filling the room with a strange brown, smoky light, and if he looked across at the window the bare-armed trees beyond were hidden and then revealed, suddenly peering in at him like skinny witches.

It was as though the whole world were smouldering in a cold, billowy, smoky fire, and then, as though at the word of a mysterious command beyond the window, it cleared and there was a cold blue sky and the limbs of the trees were stark grey; only in his room the brown mist still smouldered.

He would go out. He had done enough for to-day—enough, that is nothing, only that letter to his daughter which as he posted it in the Orange Street letter-box surely changed his life for him.

He went slowly up the High Street through a ghostly town in which doors closed, bells rang, voices murmured, walls slid forward and back again, colours in windows flamed and were veiled, houses leapt from the mist like centaurs and plunged then into a lake of grey.

Almost at one time he thought he had lost his way, and then the Arden Gate was before him and the Cathedral hung like a gigantic ship sailing through opalescent mist. Near to the Arden Gate, on the very edge of the Cathedral Green, a man was standing. Longstaffe ran into him, apologised, stopped and looked up. The man was like a statue, and, in that mist, gigantic. A hand was laid on Longstaffe’s shoulder and a voice, kindly, foreign, said, “My carelessness. But it is difficult in this mist. I have heard of your terrible English fogs, and now I see one. Could you tell me kindly if one may go into the Cathedral at this time?”

“Yes,” said Longstaffe, “certainly. Evensong is at half-past three. You have nearly an hour before that.”

“My heartliest thanks.”

Something kept Longstaffe there. “You are a stranger? Can I help you in any way?”

“Oh, I have been in your town two weeks and into your Cathedral every day. But there are hours—once they wouldn’t let me go in and another time I must leave before I wished!”

It came into Longstaffe’s mind then that he had heard something; some one had told him about a Scandinavian, a Dane or a Swede, who had come to the town, and intended to start a gymnasium or something of the sort. This might be he.

He liked the man’s kindly face, and something husky and boy-like in the voice. But it was not his business. “Nobody will disturb you in the Cathedral for at least an hour,” he said. “It will be too dark for you to see much, I’m afraid.”

“You are very kind,” the stranger bowed. “My heartliest thanks.”

But he did not move, and stood beaming down at Longstaffe as though he expected him to speak.

“Are you staying long in Polchester?” Longstaffe asked, feeling foolish.

“For a long time as I hope. I am half English, you know. My mother was from this county.” He felt in his pocket and produced a card. “I am intending to start some gymnasia here. There are none in your town. I like this town. I like your people. I have already many friends. I am very happy here.”

“I am delighted to hear it,” said Longstaffe. “It’s a very good idea, a gymnasium. Just what we want.”

“Ah, you think so. I am so glad. I think so. Mrs. Penethen think so and her daughters, and Miss Midgeley and all my friends. I have some money that I have saved, and I have seen two rooms that is very cheap, and an old sailor who will help, and his son who is very strong. Exercises is very good for everybody—for the muscles, for the heart, for the brain. It clears up everything and makes every one happy.”

This was a subject close to Longstaffe’s heart. “You are right, Mr.—Mr.—” he consulted the card—“Mr. Johanson. I wish you very good fortune.” He found a card of his own. “If I can be of any help to you—” His hand was gripped.

“Very kind indeed. My heartliest thanks.” The man bowed and strode off into the mist.

Longstaffe stood there for a moment, then turned up the Precincts.