Harmer John E-Book

Hugh Walpole

• Herausgeber: Ktoczyta.pl
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

Harmer John went to Italy to study art there. He was enraged by the desire to develop a plan to save the world. Life is a pure flame, and we live under the invisible Sun inside us... „We all live in the cemetery of the innocent saints, as in the sands of Ayegipt; Ready to be anyone, in the ecstasy of eternity and be content with six feet, like Adrian’s moles. Will the main character be able to ask for his task?

Leseprobe

Contents

BOOK I

HIS ARRIVAL

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

CHAPTER VI

CHAPTER VII

CHAPTER VIII

CHAPTER IX

CHAPTER X

BOOK II

OF HOW HE STAYED WITH US

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

CHAPTER VI

CHAPTER VII

CHAPTER VIII

CHAPTER IX

BOOK III

HOW HE LEFT US

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

CHAPTER VI

BOOK I

HIS ARRIVAL

CHAPTER I

HOW HE CAME TO OUR TOWN ON A STORMY NIGHT AND FOUND UNEXPECTEDLY A HOME

On a December night in the year 1906 a ferocious storm swept across our town.

There was nothing unusual in this: in Southern Glebeshire the winter is so often mild that the sea (impatient at the lassitude of the air) seems suddenly to rise, and to wish to beat its way across the narrow peninsula, to sweep the fields and hedges with its salt water: it calls the heavens to its assistance, the skies open, water pours out in torrents, the wind screams, shrieks, bellows–suddenly it knows that all is vanity, shrugs its hoary shoulders, creeps back muttering, lifts its hand to the sky in a gesture of cynical farewell, and lies, heaving, hoping for a more victorious day.

In the weeks around Christmas there is often such a storm, and, when other parts of England are showing gratitude sentimentally for the traditional snow, we recover from our torrents of rain to find the air warm, our skies mildly blue, the tower of our Cathedral stretching pearl-grey to heaven, and the Pol rumpled, with sunshine sliding to the sea.

But the storm while it lasts seems to shake our town to its very roots; you can almost feel wild hands tearing at the stones beneath your feet, rocking, rocking, rocking, hoping that at least one house may tumble....

On this especial evening, December 22, 1906, Mrs. Penethen, a well-known and respected widow, was sitting in front of her kitchen fire, her skirt drawn up to her knees, her toes resting on a wool-worked cushion, in her old old house in Canon’s Yard. The houses in Canon’s Yard are, as every one knows, the oldest in Polchester, and Mrs. Penethen’s was possibly the oldest in Canon’s Yard, so you can guess from that how old it was.

Mrs. Penethen had lived in that house for forty years: she had come into that same kitchen with the brown splashes on the ceiling and the two big warming-pans on the right of the oven when she was a blushing bride of twenty; she had borne two children in the four-poster upstairs, she had nursed her husband in the weeks of his fever, had seen him laid in his coffin, had seen the coffin carried down the crooked black oak staircase–and now there she sat with her feet upon the fender reading Thelma, by Miss Marie Corelli, and wondering whether she would hear the Cathedral clock strike ten through the storm.

She was not alone in the kitchen. There were also with her a cat, a dog and a sharp-eyed girl. The cat and the dog were asleep, one on either side of the fire; the girl was sitting staring straight before her. Her hands were clasped, not tightly, on her lap.

Mrs. Penethen was accustomed that her daughter Judy, who was now twenty-one and should know better, should sit for hours, saying nothing, doing nothing, only her eyes and her rising, falling breasts moving.

Through the icy cold and black waters of Thelma’s theatrical lumber her mind moved searching for her children. She was always carried away by anything that she read–that was why she liked novels, especially did they lead her into loves and countries that were strange to her. So she had, during the last two hours, been wandering with Thelma; her daughter’s eyes now dragged her back. Fifteen years of married life and no child! All thought of one abandoned–and then Maude. Four more years and then Judy. One more year and the sudden fever, and poor old John with his brown eyes, his side-whiskers and the slight hunch on his left shoulder, shoved down into the ground!

The book slipped on to her lap. She stared into the crimson crystal coals. John!... His hand was on her arm, his soft voice like a lazy cat’s begging her pardon for one of his so many infidelities. He always confessed to her. At first she had been unhappy; once she had run away for two nights, but he always told her that he loved her far the best, that she would outlast all the others. And she did. He was her lover to the very end, and kind and tender.... His brown eyes and the slight hunch on his shoulder.

He had been so sorry always for his infidelities, but he had never promised that there would not be another. He knew that he could not resist.... Here, in Polchester, there had never been a scandal because of him. Women loved him and kept their mouths shut. Not as she had loved him. Not as she had kept her mouth shut. Shut for forty years. That was why they called her a bitter old woman. She put up her hand to her hair. Perhaps she was bitter. Indifferent. She did not believe in people. Cats and monkeys, she had read somewhere.... Only in novels were they fine and noble.

She picked up Thelma again, saying as she did so:

“Do you think the Cathedral’s struck ten, Judy?”

“Maybe,” said the girl.

“It’s time Maude was home!”

The girl said nothing.

“Mr. Fletch is bringing her back.”

The girl said nothing.

She read half a page, and the storm forced her to put the book down again. She looked up, listening, rather like a dog sniffing, with her grey hair parted, her fine sharp nose, her cool chin, her long shapely neck wrinkled a little now above the white collar of her grey dress, her hands long and thin, one like a spread fan before the fire. The storm! One of the worst for years. Every window-pane and door in the old house was whining and shivering. The gusts of wind came down the chimney, bringing with them flurries of rain that spluttered upon the coals. She heard a door banging somewhere above in the house. She got up, the book falling on the floor. She listened. Dimly through all the noise she heard the Cathedral chimes strike ten. Strange how dim when the Cathedral was almost next to their own house-wall! She stood listening. Was there not another sound? Some one knocking? She turned back to the room:

“Did you hear anything, Judy?”

The girl shook her head impatiently. Mrs. Penethen took the lamp from the table, went to the kitchen door and opened it. She stood in the little dark space between the two doors, listening, the lamp raised. The storm had suddenly died down, running now like an animal whimpering about the room.

Now unmistakably there was a knock on the outer door–a pause, and then two more. “With her free hand she pulled back a bolt, turned a key and opened the door a little way. A man was standing there. She always afterwards remembered that he had seemed there in the darkness, lit only by gleams from the blowing street lamp, gigantic.

“Who is it?” she asked.

There was no answer. The figure stepped forward.

“What do you want?” she asked more sharply, drawing back. The scurrying rain was keen against her face, and the wind, rising once more, blew her clothes against her legs.

“I want some supper and a bed.” He drew nearer to her, and she saw that he was carrying a bag. She realised instantly that his voice was a foreigner’s.

“I have nothing here,” she answered sharply.

“There is a card,” he said, raising one arm, “in your window. It says “Spare room for gentleman.’ ”

The storm was now shouting at them, trying to drive them in. “There is no room,” she screamed against the storm. “Engaged.”

Then she saw his face as he stepped back beneath the street lamp. It was the face of a boy. She had expected some foreigner, some hulking tramp threatening her. She was not afraid; she had only once or twice in all her life known fear. She knew how to protect herself. But now suddenly she realised that there was no need for protection–no need at all. Then she remembered that the voice had been soft, foreign, but an educated voice.

She moved back carefully into the house. “You had better come in for a moment out of this,” she said, raising the lamp.

“Thank you,” he said, and followed her in.

In the kitchen there was the light of the fire and the steady flame of the lamp set now on the table. She looked at him sharply, keenly, as she always looked at every one.

She saw now that he was not gigantic but tall indeed, well over six foot. Broad with it. Very broad in the oilskins that he was wearing, the collar turned up high and a seaman’s oilskin cap on his head low down over his brow. The first thing that she noticed seriously was the child-like face shining with the rain through the oilskin. It was as though a boy had dressed in his father’s clothes. But he was not a boy. Thirty, perhaps, or more. The mouth which turned up at the corners now, smiling, was a boy’s mouth. The eyes were bright blue and clear. A lock of damp black hair straggled down beneath the cap, touching his eyebrow.

He made a movement with his hand to push it back.

“You’d better take that oilskin off,” she said severely. “You’re dripping.”

“I don’t hope,” he said in a voice rather husky, with a foreign accent that puzzled her because it was strangely familiar, “that you’ll think me rude for coming at this hour. My heartliest thanks for your courtesy.”

He suddenly clicked his heels and bowed stiffly from the waist up in what she supposed was German fashion, in what at any rate was not English. Then he took off his oilskins, piling them on a chair. He was dressed in a decent dark-blue suit. He was certainly a very large man, as broad as he was tall. He was not fat, but his face was chubby, rosy and plump, his blue eyes staring with a little blinking bewilderment as though he were in truth a small boy suddenly wakened from sleep. He was a man though. He stood like a man, a little on the defensive, balanced stoutly on his legs, ready for any one. Perhaps he was a German, with his bow and his chubby cheeks, his blue eyes and his thick body. She didn’t like Germans.

“You can rest here a minute or two if you care to,” she said, “but you’d better be getting on soon if you’re wanting a bed to-night.” She looked at him, then added: “There’s a hotel down in the town. In the market-place. Down the hill.”

“Yes,” he said, smiling at her, “I were there and all was engaged.” He smiled so that she was compelled to smile too. She did not wish to. She was compelled. Then suddenly he saw Judy.

“My daughter,” Mrs. Penethen said. “My name is Penethen.”

He bowed, then said: “Hjalmar Johanson.”

“I beg your pardon.”

“Hjalmar Johanson. Svedish. Wait–I have a card.”

He delved into his clothes and produced a very large pocket-book, then, after searching, a card. She read:

Hjalmar Johanson,

Gymnastic Instructor,

Certified Professor of Gymnastics, Stockholm.

Address: Amager Faelledvej II/5,

Kobenhavn.

“Kobenhavn?” she repeated.

“Yes. Copenhagen. That’s what you call it in England. But I’m a Swede. Half–and half English.”

“Half English?”

“Yes, my mother were English.”

Having gone so far, accidentally as it were, without intending it, she felt that she must offer him some food and drink. Afterwards when, as she so often did, she looked back to the events of this evening, she wondered at her own actions. Unlike her to admit a strange man into her house without a question! But it seemed to her that she was caught by some force stronger than herself, and before she realised it he had drawn up his chair to the table and was eating the cold ham and bread and butter and drinking the beer, talking, laughing, jolly as though he had known them a hundred years. And had he not? It seemed to her that in no time at all he was completely familiar to her. She recognised a dozen little tricks–the foreign accent, the fling back of the head, the sudden dramatic gesture (this so un-English and yet so known to her), the smile that had in some way a touching childish crookedness, the corners of the mouth turning up so that it was saucer-shaped, clown-like, or rather a child laughing so eagerly that the whole face must share. Through it all the clear, steady blue eyes were the most familiar of any. Her own steady, earnest gaze seemed to be returned to her by his, so that their eyes held separate converse, gravely, honestly, apart from the rest of his tale, like two old friends who meet happily in a crowded inn.

As he talked Judy too was caught, Judy who never thought of a man. She turned in her chair to look at him, fixing upon him that same incredulous questioning glance that she had for all humankind. She said nothing, she did not move; she might have been a figure painted in pale blue and grey against her dark chair.

Yes, he was half English, half Swede. His mother was English, a Glebeshire woman indeed–family Polruan, Annie Polruan.

She had gone out when quite a girl with some English people to service in Stockholm. There she had met his father. He was a farmer–not a good man, no. He had been thrown from a horse and killed when he, the boy, was sixteen. The only child. He had had to work for his mother then. Had been all sorts of things in Stockholm, barber’s boy, waiter, sold newspapers, door-boy at a hotel, then because he was tall and strong he had been for some years an artist’s model. He liked that. Oh yes, he loved pictures–never could see enough of them, would go to Italy one day, Florence, yes, and Rome. Then an artist had been good to him and advised him because of his strength to go in for gymnasium, to be a physical instructor, or a masseur. Yes, there were many in Stockholm. He had gone through the course in Stockholm, doing it well. In the middle of it his mother had died. Yes, he had missed her terribly. It was his first great loneliness. He was so lonely, although he had many friends, that so soon as he had finished his course he went to Christiania. He was there for a year teaching gymnastics and doing a special medical course. Then he went to Copenhagen. Yes, the capital of Denmark. A very nice town. He did very well there, teaching exercises, making fat gentlemen and ladies thin, instructing schools. He made some money too–quite a bit. He was restless. His great ambition was to go to England and see where his mother had lived, and afterwards, perhaps Italy... Donatello....

Mrs. Penethen asked whether that was a place.

No, it was a man. A sculptor. Who made statues. Not the greatest, perhaps, but the kindest, the most human, the one to be loved most....

He pulled himself up. He was talking too long. But now he was here. In the town that his mother had always spoken of, with the Cathedral. He would perhaps live here. Make fat ladies thin, teach the children to be strong–and he had wonderful exercises.... He stopped again. After all, if he were to find a bed in the town....

It was at this moment that Mrs. Penethen said that after all she had a spare room. She had been speaking the truth when she had said that she had no bed. This room she did not let save to some one who would take it for a period, several months. But on such a night–and it was late–She was conscious of Judy’s sharp gaze. Yes, she was being impulsive, she who always acted so cautiously, but this man was honest, she would wager her life on it. And his boy’s face. She could not turn him out into that rain. She had the room. It would not take five minutes to make it ready. But some consciousness, perhaps, of her unusual impetuosity made her voice grim as she said to him:

“You had better come and see it: you may not like it.”

She picked up the lamp, raised it and walked ahead of him. He got up, pulling his big body together.

“It will have to be a bad bed not to be right enough for such a night,” he said, laughing. He went with his bag after her up the dark stairs, having to bend his head beneath the door-post.

When they had gone the girl rose from her chair and stood in the middle of the room, listening. Her stare as she waited, one hand on her hip, was ironical, and at the same time rather pathetic, as though she had lost her way, wondered of whom she should ask her direction, but would have no real belief in the security of the answer.

“Perhaps it’s Miss Midgeley,” she said aloud. But it was not Miss Midgeley. There were the sounds of a key fitting in the lock, of the door swinging back, of voices, and then three persons came into the room, two men and a girl.

The girl was at once the most noticeable, being quite remarkably beautiful. Her beauty shone through the ugly waterproof that reached to her heels, and in spite of the common cartwheel of a hat burdened with a multitude of cheap pink roses. She did not know how to dress, that was evident, but at once with her very entrance into the room she had taken the pins out of the hat and the hat off her head and was shaking the shabby roses in front of the fire, and so revealed her beautiful fair hair, masses of it, piled and crowned on the top of her tiny head. She was small and slight, perfectly proportioned, and giving the effect of being for ever “on tiptoe for a flight,” as though at any moment she might be discovered to have wings and float out into the air, vanishing, a speck of white and gold, into the blue sky. As she turned from the fire to speak to her companions it could be seen that she was happy, excited, pleased. Her ulster had been thrown off and she stood there in her rather common pink dress, her bosom heaving, her eyes dancing, her feet still moving to some enchanting strain.

“Oh, Judy, it was heaven!” she cried. “You should have been there!”

The two men were watching her each in his own way. The one was a big man, fat and fleshy, his face naturally red, turning in the veins around the nose to purple, the eyes small, the eyebrows so lightly marked as scarcely to be seen. He was jauntily dressed in a suit of light grey, and he wore a purple tie with a big horse-shoe pin. He had fat hands with short stumpy fingers. His air was genial but, for some reason to-night, a little uneasy–his age anything between fifty-five and sixty. His clothes fitted his stout limbs too tightly, just as the flower in his coat and the pin in his tie were too large. His companion was a pale, rather ascetic man, with a gentle smile and a courteous manner; nearly obsequious, he nevertheless gave the impression that he had his own private power. His name was Reuben Fletch. He wore a black tie and a neat pair of black shoes.

He was of a well-known Polchester family, had been born and bred in Polchester and had lived there all his life. He had lodged now at Mrs. Penethen’s for a number of years, was a solicitor by profession and a miser above all. He was said to be extremely able, to know neither conscience nor morals, and to have much power over important individuals in our town. He was forty-five years of age and unmarried.

The two men looked at the girl, the eyes of the stout man narrowing until they had almost vanished, and a very faint smile hovering about his lips. Fletch stared, his face immobile.

The girls as they stood together offered an interesting contrast. It was plain that they were sisters, and that they were Mrs. Penethen’s daughters; they had, both of them, something of her refinement in the sharp-pointed noses, the delicate ears and the white shapely necks; but all the life and colour seemed to have been stolen by the one girl from the other–stolen because Maude, the elder, had the air of a victorious captor, and in her lovely shining hair, her gleaming eyes, the soft colour of her cheeks, the grace and movement of her body, she seemed to proclaim her contempt for, her superiority over, the thin little lustreless girl at her side. Lustreless was what poor Judy was, her complexion pale, her mouth frowning, her whole body uneasy and awkward in its pose. A plain girl, even were Maude not there–plainer by far in contrast and from the power of some secret resentment and anger that she was feeling.

Maude turned round to the men. “Make yourself comfortable, Mr. Hogg, do. You know my sister Judy?... Where’s mother?”

“Upstairs,” Judy said, staring at the two men as though she hated them.

“She’s not gone to bed? I want my cocoa. You know where the whisky is, Mr. Fletch. I’m sure Mr. Hogg would like a glass.”

“Mother will be down in a moment,” Judy said. “She’s showing a new lodger his room.”

“A new lodger!” Maude cried. “At this time of night!–And mother said she wasn’t going to let the red room anyway. As though we hadn’t enough with Miss Midgeley as it is–”

“I know. She didn’t mean to let it. But he came in out of the rain, and mother took a fancy to him. He’s a foreigner–”

“A foreigner!”

“Yes. A Norwegian or Swede or something. And he’s about eight feet tall.”

Judy threw all this out scornfully as though she had contempt for them all but wished to see what effect this news would have upon them.

Not very much apparently. The two men were seated at the table helping themselves to the whisky, and Maude broke out:

“Oh well, bother it all anyway. I want my cocoa. It was a lovely dance, wasn’t it, Mr. Hogg? Didn’t you love every minute of it?”

She danced a few steps and then stopped abruptly as the door opened and her mother came in, followed by the stranger.

It was strange to observe the effect that at once he made upon all of them. Perhaps Judy alone of all that group observed it. His height had something to do with the challenge that he always presented to any company that he confronted, but it was not only his height. No one, save possibly Miss Midgeley, quite defined it during all that time that he was in Polchester. Mrs. Penethen had her version, Mary Longstaffe had hers, Fletch certainly had his, Ronder his, Cole his–all of them different. Why, to this very moment, so many years afterwards, when it is all a legend, his arrival, his deeds, the after effects, that exact impression of his personality is still hotly debated. “All I know is,” Mrs. Penethen herself used to say (she died in 1917), “you couldn’t be the same as you were before he came in, none of you. You fell in love with him at once or you couldn’t bear him. And I fell in love with him. Yes, that very first wet night when he was sitting at my table eating my bread and ham.

“ "I’ve got a room,’ I said, just as though it were some one else speaking the words behind me, for I assure you I had had no more intention of letting that room that night than I had of sailing through the ceiling on wings. But there it was, from the first I couldn’t resist him!”

On this present occasion Mrs. Penethen saw the new arrivals and said shortly, “Oh, so you’ve got back. Why, Mr. Hogg, good evening!” He got up and she shook hands with him, not overpleased at his presence it seemed. “Pray make yourself at home” (here just a touch of irony perhaps). “Oh, let me introduce. This is Mr. Johnson from Copenhagen. My daughter Maude, Mr. Johnson. Mr. Fletch, Mr. Hogg. Have a drop of whisky, Mr. Johnson, I’m sure you need it.”

Johanson shook hands with every one, clicking his heels and bending from the waist. That little habit may seem unimportant in itself, but it had its later seriousness, as it led certain people in our town to speak of him as “that German” at a time when Germans were not very popular with us because of Hoffmann’s proposed Town Hall.

He sat down very comfortably at the table next to Samuel Hogg, and was very soon telling that gentleman all about himself, his mother and father, Stockholm and Copenhagen, his hopes and his ambitions, it being always his simple way to believe that every one must be interested in hearing about himself just as he was interested in everything that they had to tell him. And Hogg sat with a smile, drinking his whisky.

From the first moment, however, eagerly though he talked, Johanson was conscious of Maude Penethen. He could not but be conscious of her with her wonderful hair, her perpetual movement about the room, her cries and laughter, her little coquetries and brazenries. And she also was conscious of him.

“Mother, I want my cocoa. Never mind the men, mother, they can look after themselves. Ladies first. Oh, mother, it was heavenly. I danced every dance. Such a shame it had to be over so early. Lady St. Leath looked in for a moment, mother. Yes, she did. She spoke to Miss Cardigan and asked how the Club was getting on. She made us a little speech and said how glad she was we were all enjoying ourselves. Oh, she looked all right, but a little dowdy, you know, like she always is. She doesn’t know how to dress a bit, and they say her husband would give her anything she’d ask for. Oh yes, and Canon Ronder came, just for ten minutes, and danced with Miss Cardigan. Oh, mother, you would have laughed! He’s like a tub and she’s so skinny. He spoke to me, too, and asked how you were. And I was much the prettiest girl there. I’m sure I was. Wasn’t I, Mr. Hogg?”

“Indeed you were, Miss Penethen,” he answered, smiling at her.

“Well, you shouldn’t say so even though you thought it, and you shouldn’t think it even though you were it,” said her mother. “It’s not for you to say.”

Maude laughed, drinking her cocoa, balancing on the edge of her chair and stealing glances at Johanson. Suddenly he looked directly at her. Their eyes met. She sprang up from her chair and danced about, flinging her arms around her mother, then rushing at Judy and kissing her, then pausing near Mr. Fletch.

“You never danced with me once,” she said.

He looked at her full with his round black eyes. “You never asked me,” he said.

“Oh, I did! I’m sure I did! Hundreds of times. Never mind! There’s another on Tuesday–”

Samuel Hogg got up. “I must be going, Mrs. Penethen. It’s late. Thank you for your hospitality.”

She did not try to prevent him, but said good night to him gravely. Maude saw him to the door, and there was some giggling and laughter, some low-voiced words before the outer door closed.

“I’m sure it’s bed-time for everybody,” said Mrs. Penethen.

But even then the evening was not concluded. The farther door opened, and a little woman with a wrinkled face looked in:

“Oh, I beg your pardon, but could I have another candle, Mrs. Penethen? Mine’s about done.”

She stepped into the kitchen. Her face was a map of wrinkles, she wore a red woollen jacket and a grey skirt. She was just like a robin. Johanson happened to be near the door. She looked up and saw him.

“Good heavens!” she cried.

Maude burst into laughter. “Oh, I can’t help it.... I beg your pardon.... But the difference in height.... Oh dear.... Mr. Johnson so tall and Miss Midgeley–!”

It was amusing! Mrs. Penethen herself smiled as she said:

“Miss Midgeley, this is Mr. Johnson. He has taken a room here.”

She looked up at him whimsically. “It will never do for us to go about together,” she said drily. “The whole town will laugh.”

He smiled. “They was always saying when I were a boy that I’d be a giant. I were as big when I were fourteen as I am now. There are plenty taller than me in Denmark.”

No one had anything to say to this, so they all prepared to go to bed. Only Maude at the last, as he stood aside for her to pass, said, smiling up at him:

“Good night, Mr. Johnson. I do hope the bed will be long enough!”

CHAPTER II

THE REVEREND TOM AT HOME AND ABROAD

The steepest street in our town, and one of the steepest in Southern England, is Orange Street, and nearly at the top of Orange Street, just below the Monument, is St. Paul’s Church. The Rector of St. Paul’s at this time was the Reverend Thomas Longstaffe. He had been Rector of St. Paul’s for ten years now, coming to Polchester in 1897, Jubilee Year, the very week that Archdeacon Brandon died so tragically.

He was a widower, about fifty years old when he arrived, and with him a daughter of eighteen, Mary, a very pretty girl, the adored of his heart, his only child.

When he had been four years in Polchester a terribly tragic thing occurred. Mary Longstaffe was a very bright, clever girl, modern in her ideas, knowing many things that were entirely beyond the average Polchester young lady of that time. She even talked of going up to Oxford, which was thought very daring of her by Mrs. Sampson, Mrs. Preston and other ladies in the Precincts. The Precincts ladies in fact did not like her, called her fast, and did not invite her to their houses. In any case, the Cathedral set always kept to itself in our town, and Tom Longstaffe, being only Rector of St. Paul’s and not even a Minor Canon, would be, of course, outside it. A certain Major Waring, a retired Indian officer, lived in our town and had an only son who was at Oxford. Lance Waring fell violently in love with Mary Longstaffe, and throughout one summer they were always together, riding, playing tennis, walking, and dancing. Early in the September of that year he was thrown from his horse and killed. In October it was known that Mary Longstaffe was going to have a baby, and that Lance Waring was its father.

What horrified every one so terribly was that she stayed calmly on in our town for several months after this was known. She seemed to have no shame at all, and walked up and down the High Street and took her usual seat in the Cathedral just as though she were like every one else. Of course every one cut her, every one except old Mrs. Combermere, who was eccentric and just did things to show her eccentricity, and young Lady St. Leath, whose brother had married the daughter of Samuel Hogg the publican, once owner of a low public-house down in Seatown, who was “queer,” therefore, in any case, and the perpetual sorrow and cross of the old Dowager’s life.

Mary Longstaffe had stayed in Polchester until Christmas of that year, and after that she vanished. It was rumoured vaguely from time to time that she lived in London, that she had a son, that she lived by writing for the newspapers; in any case she was not seen again in Polchester.

On the whole there had been considerable sympathy felt for poor Tom Longstaffe. He had always been a popular man: she was his only child, and he must be very lonely now without her. It all came of the girl having no mother and picking up all these advanced ideas. It was as likely as not that she had become one of these Suffragettes about whom now in London every one was talking.

Yes, the Reverend Tom was lonely, very lonely indeed. He was now, in 1907, sixty years of age, and for the five last years he had lived quite alone save for an old family servant. He was a short, thick-set man with a face red-brown, the colour of a pippin apple, grey hair, and a good strong chin. He was a man who adored sport of every kind and was never indoors when he could be out of it. This was the man known to most of the Polcastrians, a jolly, red-faced, kind-hearted sportsman with not too much of the parson about him.

Within this man there was another, a man deeply religious and passionately affectionate. He was never much of a reader, his sermons were so simple as to be called by many people childish, and he never spoke of his religion unless it were his duty to do so; it was, nevertheless, at the root of his whole life.

He was also, outwardly, nothing of a sentimentalist–nevertheless he had had in earlier years two friendships, and afterwards his love for his wife and his daughter, and these few relationships had been passionate in their hidden intensity. Of his two friends one had died and the other had married; his wife had endured two years of agony from cancer before her death; his daughter’s tragedy was common knowledge to every one. What he had suffered through these things no one save his daughter knew–nevertheless here he was, the cheeriest and merriest clergyman in Polchester.

The Rectory was a square grey-roofed building standing back from Orange Street and having a lawn and two old trees in front of it. To the left of it and almost touching it was the church, and to the right of it Hay Street, where was the famous Polchester High School for Girls.

It was a jolly old Rectory with solid, square rooms, plenty of space and light, and a fine view over Polchester from the attic windows.

On a certain day in January 1907 Tom Longstaffe suffered from an agonising temptation, and alone in his study on that grey January morning he wrestled with this temptation, knowing in his heart that he would be beaten by it.

He had that morning found on his breakfast table the following letter from his daughter:

11 Gower Street, London, W.C.,

January 3, 1907.

Darling Father–I am coming home. Podge and I can endure being away from you no longer. I think I could have held out a while more but for your last letter, which, for all its pretended cheeriness, gave the whole show away. If you miss me so much and I miss you so much, aren’t we sillies, when life is so short, to keep away from one another? And all for what? All for a lot of chattering old women about whose opinion we neither of us care a scrap. More serious than that is the one that if I come back to live with you I may damage your congregation. They may stay away because of me. Well, if they do I can but go away again. But why should they? It isn’t as though they didn’t know all about it and haven’t known for the last five years. And it isn’t as though I were going to make myself prominent in any way. They’ll never see either Podge or myself if they don’t want to. You shall give them their tea and listen to their outpourings just as you have always done. I shan’t expect to be asked to any of their houses, and you must go to them just as you have always done. I shall make that quite plain as soon as I arrive. They’ll be used to me in no time, and only pity you and love you the more because you have such a heavy burden to bear! (Isn’t that the phrase?) And meanwhile, oh meanwhile, darling Daddy, we shall have one another! Just think of that! Morning, noon and night we shall be together and shall be wondering all the time what we have been doing to have wasted five precious years of our lives away from one another!

It is true that I have Podge, and that he is everything a mother can want in a son, but he isn’t you–and I need you both. I do indeed. And so it shall be.

As to finances, we shall manage quite well. I’m becoming quite an authority on Housing questions, the Way the Poor Live (or Don’t Live), Women’s Suffrage and anything else you like. My articles are the astonishment of economic London!

After all this you will expect to see your daughter with ink (instead of vine-leaves) in her hair and holes in her cotton frocks. Wait! Only you wait! And you shan’t wait very long either. Whether you like it or no, I am coming–so Prepare! Your always loving

Mary.

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.”