“If he was really asleep in his chair why did he glide across the street?”
THE Reverend Aloysius Farqueson-Smythe sat nervously on the edge of a beautiful Queen Anne chair, and his long, thin, sensitive, delicate, tapering fingers played nervously with a teacup and spoon. The gentle clink of the metal against the porcelain made Farqueson-Smythe jump. He put a finger rather nervously inside his new clerical collar, a patent celluloid affair, which felt uncomfortable, but looked very pious, at least so Farqueson-Smythe thought, and smiled desperately at his hostess.
Lady Bumfrey was built like a battleship in full sail, moving with a strong south-easterly Trade Wind. Lady Bumfrey looked like something out of Saki’s pre-1914 epoch. She had lorgnettes through which she regarded the timid young curate with about as much approval as she would have regarded a trade unionist leader or a Labour Member of Parliament.
Lady Bumfrey considered that anything one centimetre to the political Left of the 1922 Committee savoured strongly of the deadly plague of Bolshevism. She disliked Liberals and Socialists with the same fervour that the late and largely unlamented Senator McCarthy, had purged real and imaginary Reds from beneath the beds of the unsuspecting Americans. Lady Bumfrey had an equal dislike for anything that savoured even mildly of progressive thought, in the religious field. Her theology could be summed up in the lines
“The rich man at his castle,
The poor man at his gate,
God made them high and lowly
And gave them their estate.”
She believed that not only were kings, princes and governors appointed by God, and that they were as sacrosanct as the Lord’s anointed in the days of the Hebrew monarchy, but that all those in authority, and particularly she herself, Lady Hortensia Bumfrey, were also specially favoured by the Deity, and this signal fact should be recognised by all such lower orders as came into contact with her august presence. It is one of the tragedies of the Establishment that people like Lady Bumfrey are occasionally patrons of livings.
Young Aloysius was being interviewed. Lady Bumfrey’s idea of an interview was a cross between the Spanish Inquisition and a Gestapo interrogation cell. She regarded her victims in much the same way that French paratroopers regarded Algerian prisoners. Or as the Inquisitors of old regarded heretics. She dealt with the trembling curate’s mind in very much the same way as anti-Semites had dealt with the victims of Dachau. There was as about as much compassion in her attitude as the Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan would have extended to a negro who had the guts to stand up for his rights.
“I was not very impressed with the sermon you preached last Sabbath,” boomed the bittern-like voice of Lady Hortensia Bumfrey.
“In what way, your ladyship?” queried the curate, and his thin china teacup nearly fell from his fingers. He swallowed hard and his Adam’s apple bobbed up and down above his collar.
“You seemed to cast some aspersions upon the literal validity of the Book of Genesis.”
“But I assure you that I have said nothing that is out of keeping with the agreed findings of 95 per cent of acceptable modern scholars,” answered the curate defensively.
“Rubbish!” said her ladyship. “Utter rubbish.”
“I’m afraid I don’t quite follow your ladyship,” said the curate.
“You foolish man! I would have thought that with all your theological training it would have been extremely clear.”
“What would have been clear?” persisted the curate.
“Modern scholarship is an insidious, satanic movement.”
“Oh,” replied Farqueson-Smythe. After all, there didn’t seem very much that a man could say when presented with a statement like that!
“Surely you agree with me?” persisted Lady Hortensia.
“Well, not—er—um—er—exactly, your ladyship. No. I’m afraid I don’t!”
“Then, of course, you realise that I would not dream of——”
“I’m not sure whether I would feel myself able to accept,” returned the curate.
“In that case, I think we may consider the interview as concluded,” said the terrifying patroness of the living. And with a sinking feeling, extending from his heart to the tips of his elastic-sided boots, Aloysius Farqueson-Smythe picked up his black, round, clerical hat and made his way out of her ladyship’s palatial mansion.
As he walked dejectedly down the drive, his mind was full of a number of thoughts. Most of them centred around the ‘might-have-been.’ Aloysius Farqueson-Smythe was still only in his early twenties. He looked back over a childhood which seemed to have been a succession of long, irksome, debilitating illnesses. His nerves were not strong, his digestion was weak, his heart was not strong. His circulation was poor, he suffered from constipation, and he had an inclination towards asthma. He had chilblains in the winter time and hay fever in the summer. He hadn’t a muscle in his body that was big enough to be readily visible. His eyesight was bad, and his earing was not acute. He suffered from pimples and embarrassing skin eruptions, he was timid almost to a pathological degree, and his mind was a mass of nervous fears and repressed horrors. He had lived in a protected, sheltered, restricted environment for as long as he was able to remember. He had never been able to do anything that he wanted to do. He had longed to be able to play football and cricket at school. His parents had felt that it was too rough and dangerous for so delicate a child … so he had not played. He had not even been allowed to stand out and watch because of the coldness of the weather.
He had wanted to read biology and ultimately take up either medicine or bio-chemical research. His parents had not approved! He was destined either for the church or the Civil Service, he could take his pick, but medicine or research were not for him. Nobody in the family was in medicine or research. It just wouldn’t be done for a Farqueson-Smythe to do such a thing. Farqueson-Smythes were Civil Service people. Farqueson-Smythes were Church people, therefore Aloysius Farqueson-Smythe was going into either the Church or the Civil Service. This had been the parental attitude since the earliest moment in which he had shown any interest at all in the way in which he was going to spend his future life. Of two appalling alternatives, as far as the boy was concerned, the Church seemed the least appalling.
The one thing about Farqueson-Smythe which did work efficiently, was his brain. If his circulation had been better, his grey matter might have worked a dam’ sight better than it did. But even with all its crippling handicaps Farqueson-Smythe’s mind was an extremely able and flexible organ. He had found himself surprisingly interested in theology and gained one academic distinction after another at college. But what his pure intelligence was able to accomplish for him in the way of academic rewards had always been more than compensated by his complete and utter lack of drive and initiative. Men with minute minds, but equipped with drive and vigour had passed him over and over again. His most recent, and most bitterly felt disappointment had been in an affair of the heart. It is a well-known fact that many a young curate is regarded as fair game by the scheming dowagers of every parish. Many a middle-aged marriage monger is filled with a burning desire to foist off a pallid, buck-toothed daughter on some unsuspecting clerk in Holy Orders. Farqueson-Smythe had not been such a ready target for these ladies as other, more prepossessing curates had been. Nevertheless several of the more desperate shafts had been slanted in his direction, and only his extreme timidity had enabled him to escape by withdrawing beyond their range. It was then that the impossible thought had come to Farqueson-Smythe. He smiled with a kind of bitter irony as he walked down the drive. He had seen her.
That wasn’t really true. He had seen her photograph.
Her photograph had been life size and surrounded by neon lights. She had dazzling auburn hair, and eyes of the brightest, most vivid emerald green that he had ever seen. There were other things about her that he had noticed, too, and all those things, or nearly all of them, had been displayed very vividly on the photograph. She was the principal attraction at a Soho strip club! For a second Aloysius had forgotten his clerical collar and garb. He had simply stood staring like a man bewitched. And yet, although the obvious intent of that garish, coloured photograph with its neon surround, had been to stimulate a purely erotic reaction, Aloysius had felt something completely different. It was something which he knew he could never have explained. It was something which he knew as a frustrated biologist ought to be explained in terms of glandular secretion, but it wasn’t. If the photograph had shown her dressed as a Nun, or muffled up to the neck in demure, Victorian black lace, he would still have felt the same way. There was something about that picture which had clicked in his consciousness, that had exploded into a kind of delirium. He came back to look at the picture again, without his clerical collar. He had even dared to make enquiries of the commissionaire. The man had looked with a practised eye at the attenuated, emaciated frame of the earnest young man before him, and had laughed like the proverbial drain.
Aloysius, cut to the quick, had fled. He had fled to his lodgings and had flung himself down on the neat, prim, proper, respectable, and singularly lonely bed. And he had cried like a child all through the night.
He looked at his useless body; his timidity made him afraid of doing the wrong thing, of saying the wrong thing. He remembered in his childhood nearly saying the wrong thing, and being met with frosty disapproval from both parents. Everything had to be correct, everything had to be just so. What would the neighbours say? What would the neighbours think? He remembered how he had lain there, crying, and how he had cursed the influence of hi. . .
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