The Cathedral Part 15

Falk looked at him. The man was mad. He was holding on to the railing, leaning forward, staring....

"Look here, it isn't safe to lean like that. You'll be tumbling over and breaking your neck if you're not careful."

But Davray did not hear him. He was lost in his own dreams. Falk despised dreams although just now he was himself in the grip of one. Besides the fellow was drunk.

A sudden disgust of his companion overtook him.

"Well, so long," he said. "I must be getting home!"

He wondered for a moment whether it were safe to leave the fellow there.

"It's his own look-out," he thought, and as Davray said no more he left him.

Back once more in the King Harry Chapel, he looked up. But he could see no one and could hear no sound.

Chapter VII

Ronder's Day

Ronder had now spent several months in Polchester and was able to come to an opinion about it, and the opinion that he had come to was that he could be very comfortable there. His aunt, who, in spite of her sharpness, never was sure how he would take anything, was a little surprised when he told her this. But then she was never certain what were the secret springs from which he derived that sense of comfort that was the centre of his life.

She should have known by now that he derived it from two things--luxury and the possibility of intrigue.

Polchester could not have appeared to any casual observer a luxurious town, but it had for Ronder exactly that combination of beauty and mystery that obtained for him his sensation.

He did not a.n.a.lyse it as yet further than that--he knew that those two things were there; he might investigate them at his leisure.

In that easy, smiling fas.h.i.+on that he had developed from his earliest days as the surest protection for his own security and ease, he arranged everything around him to a.s.sure his tranquillity. Everything was not as yet arranged; it might take him six months, a year, two years for that arrangement...but he knew now that it would be done.

The second element in his comfort, his love of intrigue, would be satisfied here simply because everything was not, as yet, as he would have it. He would have hated to have tumbled into the place and found it just as he required it.

He liked to have things to move, to adjust, to arrange, just as when he entered a room he always, if he had the power, at once altered the chairs, the cus.h.i.+ons. It was towards this final adjustment that his power of intrigue always worked. Once everything was adjusted he sank back luxuriously and surveyed it--and then, in all probability, was quickly tired of it and looked for new fields to conquer.

He could not remember a time when he had not been impelled to alter things for his comfort. He did not wish to be selfish about this, he was quite willing for every one else to do the same--indeed, he watched them with geniality and wondered why on earth they didn't. As a small boy at Harrow he had, with an imperturbable smile and a sense of humour that, in spite of his rotund youth and a general sense amongst his elders that he was "cheeky," won him popularity, worked always for his own comfort.

He secured it and, first as f.a.g and afterwards as House-prefect, finally as School-prefect, did exactly what he wanted with everybody.

He did it by being, quite frankly, all things to all men, although never with sycophancy nor apparent falseness. He amused the bored, was confidential with the wicked, upright with the upright, and sympathetic with the unfortunate.

He was quite genuine in all these things. He was deeply interested in humanity, not for humanity's sake but his own. He bore no man any grudge, but if any one was in his way he worked hard until they were elsewhere.

That removal attained, he wished them all the luck in the world.

He was ordained because he thought he could deal more easily with men as a parson. "Men always take clergymen for fools," he told his aunt, "and so they sometimes are...but not always." He knew he was not a fool, but he was not conceited. He simply thought that he had hit upon the one secret of life and could not understand why others had not done the same. Why do people worry so? was the amused speculation. "Deep emotions are simply not worth while," he decided on his coming of age. He liked women but his sense of humour prevented him from falling in love. He really did understand the sensual habits and desires of men and women but watched them from a distance through books and pictures and other men's stories.

He was shocked by nothing--nor did he despise mankind. He thought that mankind did on the whole very well considering its difficulties. He was kind and often generous; he bore no man alive or dead any grudge. He refused absolutely to quarrel--"waste of time and temper."

His one danger was lest that pa.s.sion for intrigue should go deeper than he allowed anything to go. Playing chess with mankind was to him, he declared, simply a means to an end. Perhaps once it had been so. But, as he grew older, there was a danger that the end should be swallowed by the means.

This danger he did not perceive; it was his one blindness. Finally he believed with La Rochefoucauld that "Pity is a pa.s.sion which is wholly useless to a well-const.i.tuted mind."

At any rate he discovered that there was in Polchester a situation exactly suited to his powers. The town, or the Cathedral part of it, was dominated by one man, and that man a stupid, autocratic, retrogressive, good-natured child. He bore that child not the slightest ill-will, but it must go or, at any rate, its authority must be removed. He did, indeed, like Brandon, and through most of this affair he did not cease to like him, but he, Ronder, would never be comfortable so long as Brandon was there, he would never be free to take the steps that seemed to him good, he would be interfered with and patronised. He was greatly amused by Brandon's patronage, but it really was not a thing that could be allowed to remain.

If he saw, as he made his plans, that the man's heart and soul, his life, physical and spiritual, were involved--well he was sorry. It simply proved how foolish it was to allow your heart and soul to be concerned in anything.

He very quickly perceived that the first thing to be done was to establish relations with the men who composed the Chapter. He watched, he listened, he observed, then, at the end of some months, he began to move.

Many men would have considered him lazy. He never took exercise if he could avoid it, and it was Polchester's only fault that it had so many hills. He always had breakfast in bed, read the papers there and smoked a cigarette. Every morning he had a bath as hot as he could bear it--and he could bear it very hot indeed. Much of his best thinking was done there.

When he came downstairs he reserved the first hour for his own reading, reading, that is, that had nothing to do with any kind of work, that was purely for his own pleasure. He allowed nothing whatever to interfere with this--Gautier and Flaubert, La Bruyere and Montaigne were his favourite authors, but he read a great deal of English, Italian, and Spanish, and had a marvelous memory. He enjoyed, too, erotic literature and had a fine collection of erotic books and prints shut away in a cabinet in his study.

He found great fascination in theological books: he laughed at many of them, but kept an open mind--atheistic and materialistic dogmas seemed to him as absurd as orthodox ones. He read too a great deal of philosophy but, on the whole, he despised men who gave themselves up to philosophy more than any other human beings. He felt that they lost their sense of humour so quickly, and made life unpleasant for themselves.

After his hour of reading he gave himself up to the work of the day. He was the most methodical of men: the desk in his study was full of little drawers and contrivances for keeping things in order. He had a thin vase of blue gla.s.s filled with flowers, a small Chinese image of green jade, a photograph of the Blind Homer from the Naples Museum in a silver frame, and a little gold clock; all these things had to be in their exactly correct positions. Nothing worried him so much as dust or any kind of disorder. He would sometimes stop in the middle of his work and cross the room, in the soft slippers of brown kid that he always wore in his study, and put some picture straight or move some ornament from one position to another. The books that stretched along one wall from floor to ceiling were arranged most carefully according to their subjects. He disliked to see some books projecting further from the shelf than others, and, with a little smile of protest, as though he were giving them a kindly scolding, he would push them into their right places.

Let it not be supposed, however, that he was idle during these hours. He could accomplish an astonis.h.i.+ng amount of work in a short time, and he was never idle except by deliberate intention.

When luncheon time arrived he was ready to be charming to his aunt, and charming to her he was. Their relations were excellent. She understood him so well that she left his schemes alone. If she did not entirely approve of him--and she entirely approved of n.o.body--she loved him for his good company, his humour, and his common-sense. She liked it too that he did not mind when she chose to allow her irony to play upon him. He cared nothing for any irony.

At luncheon they felt a very agreeable intimacy. There was no need for explanations; half allusions were enough. They could enjoy their joke without emphasising it and sometimes even without expressing it. Miss Ronder knew that her nephew liked to hear all the gossip. He collected it, tied it into little packets, and put them away in the little mechanical contrivances with which his mind was filled. She told him first what she heard, then her authorities, finally her own opinions. He thoroughly enjoyed his meal.

He had, by now, very thoroughly mastered the Cathedral finances. They were not complicated and were in good order, because Hart-Smith had been a man of an orderly mind. Ronder very quickly discovered that Brandon had had his fingers considerably in the old pie. "And now there'll be a new pie,"

he said to himself, "baked by me."...He traced a number of stupid and conservative decisions to Brandon's agency. There was no doubt but that many things needed a new urgency and activity.

People had had to fight desperately for money when they should have been given it at once; on the other hand, the Cathedral had been well looked after--it was rather dependent bodies like the School, the Almshouses, and various livings in the Chapter grant that had suffered.

Anything that could possibly be considered a novelty had been fought and generally defeated. "There will be a lot of novelties before I've finished with them," Ronder said to himself.

He started his investigations by paying calls on Bentinck-Major and Canon Foster. Bentinck-Major lived at the top of Orange Street, in a fine house with a garden, and Foster lived in one of four tumble-down buildings behind the Cathedral, known from time immemorial as Canon's Yard.

The afternoon of his visit was about three days after a dinner-party at the Castle. He had seen and heard enough at that dinner to amuse him for many a day; he considered it to have been one of the most entertaining dinners at which he had ever been present. It had been here that he had heard for the first time of the Pybus St. Anthony living. Brandon had been present, and he observed Brandon's nervousness, and gathered enough to realise that this would be a matter of considerable seriousness. He was to know a great deal more about it before the afternoon was over.

As he walked through the town on the way to Orange Street he came upon Ryle, the Precentor. Ryle looked the typical clergyman, tall but not too tall, here a smile and there a smile, with his soft black hat, his trousers too baggy at the knees, his boots and his gold watch-chain both too large.

He cared, with serious devotion, for the Cathedral music and sang the services beautifully, but he would have been able to give more time to his work were he not so continuously worrying as to whether people were vexed with him or no. His idea of Paradise was a place where he could chant eternal services and where everybody liked him. He was a good man, but weak, and therefore driven again and again into insincerity. It was as though there was for ever in front of him the consciousness of some secret in his past life that must on no account be discovered; but, poor man, he had no secret at all.

"Well, Precentor, and how are you?" said Ronder, beaming at him over his spectacles.

Ryle started. Ronder had come behind him. He liked the look of Ronder. He always preferred fat men to thin; they were much less malicious, he thought.

"Oh, thank you, Canon Ronder--very well, thank you. I didn't see you.

Quite spring weather. Are you going my way?"

"I'm off to see Bentinck-Major."

"Oh, yes, Bentinck-Major...."

Ryle's first thought was--"Now is Bentinck-Major likely to have anything to say against me this afternoon?"