Another year, p.5
Another Year, page 5
This time a timid murmur of approval ran round the room.
“If the things you have just suggested were desirable or possible,” she continued, “then why do you think we have not carried them out ourselves?—because we had not the courage?—or the intelligence?—or sufficient faith in our church?”
“I made no reflection,” began Mr. Matthews, “on the …” She stopped him with a petulant flutter of her hand and went on in a louder voice. Two little patches of colour rose up and flushed her cheeks. Her eyes never blinked or left his face.
“I will tell you why,” she said—“it is because your suggestions are so puerile that they never dawned upon us. The doors of our church are always open—wide open to these people you are talking about. They are free to come and worship if they choose: but they do not choose, and on that account we do not want them.
“You propose to lure them to our church with a vulgar programme of entertainment. You expect this Council to perform the antics of cheapjacks and showmen to entice them. If that is your way of filling St. Peter’s Church, then you are insulting and debasing religion.
“But I prefer,” she said in a calmer voice—“I prefer to think that you conceived these foolish plans hastily, without proper reflection or knowledge of this parish. Your predecessor, Mr. Todhunter, was a very great and good man. If he had considered these undignified devices necessary he would have put them into practice himself. But he did not. He conducted the services at St. Peter’s Church with dignity and decorum, and we consider it your duty to follow his example and do the same.”
Mr. Matthews listened incredulously. He looked round at the other members of the Council, but none of them had anything to say. Some looked sheepish and uncomfortable: others had suddenly taken on the appearance of small-sized Mrs. Bannister Pagets.
She stood up to go and Mr. Matthews wished that he had got up first.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I counted a great deal on your help. But I came here to do my best in a disgraceful parish, and I shall carry on with my plans because I think they’re right.”
Mrs. Bannister Paget buttoned the last of her purple capes and picked up her gloves.
“What you do in your spare time is not our concern,” she said, “but I understand your plans depend upon the use of the Church Hall?”
“Naturally they do—and I shall use it.”
“In that,” she answered, “I am afraid you will be disappointed. The Church Hall is controlled by this Council. and we shall vote unanimously against its use for such unseemly exhibitions.”
Mr. Harper opened the door for her and she went out. Mr. Cheesewright ran down the passage and opened the front door for her and she went out of that as well. The Council followed: the gate squeaked and they were gone.
Mr. Matthews went back to the drawing-room. The air was heavy with the odour of stale lavender from Mrs. Bannister Paget’s purple silk. He opened the windows and drew the curtains over them.
“Well,” he said—“that’s that. I suppose I asked for it. I ought not to have gone so bull-headed at them. I ought to have gone quietly and persuaded them by degrees.”
“No matter how you did it,” said Ruth, “you would have had that woman dead against you. She wasn’t defending the dignity of St. Peter’s Church at all. She was defending something else—and she was frightened.”
“She was frightened?—but my dear Ruth!”
“Of course she was. Nobody would have been as rude as that if they weren’t frightened.”
“But why should anybody be frightened of a social club?”
“She was frightened because you were threatening to pull down and destroy her own snug little world. Don’t you see? … she’s cock-of-the-roost of that ‘devoted little circle round the church’. She looks upon St. Peter’s Church as her own private monopoly: a comfortable little club complete with a docile Vicar to run about at her beck and call. Nobody has ever disputed her possession of it before—and suddenly you come along and threaten to fill her exclusive little church with a crowd of nasty people from the new town who might even refuse to run about and do what she tells them. It’s enough to frighten anybody!”
He sat down by the fire. “It’s going to be difficult,” he said. “I never dreamed that anything like this would happen. She’s got the whole Church Council in her pocket. They’re all against us.”
“I’m sure they are,” said Ruth—“and probably the organist and the verger and everybody else as well. In the garden you’ve got the onion maggot and the turnip maggot. In the Church you’ve got the Bannister Paget maggot that eats into the heart of it and sucks the life out of it—and Bishops wonder what’s wrong with the Church and why so many decent, ordinary people keep away.”
“What are we going to do about it?”
“I don’t know,” replied Ruth. “I’m not sure what we can do.”
Mrs. Burgin came in to say that dinner was ready.
“I owe you an apology, Roger,” said Ruth as they went into the dining-room. “You were right and I was wrong. There is a devil between the Church and the Woodbank people after all!”
Chapter Five
St. Peter’s Church was beside the river, with a boat yard on one side of it and a warehouse on the other. On the opposite side of the river stood a tall brick flour mill with a smudge of flour around its lower windows and a cluster of barges against its wharf. The church was at a corner where the lane from the Vicarage came down to the shore, and there was only the narrow, cobbled towing path between the churchyard and the river.
Mr. Matthews came down the lane on the morning after his arrival at the Vicarage, and thought what a fine position the church must have had in the days when Woodbank was a village and open meadows fringed the Thames. It stood on a gentle rise with a wide sweep of the river before it, and from the tower there must have been long, uninterrupted views across the marshes to the estuary, with the spires of the city to the west, and the wooded slopes of Kent in the southern distance.
But now the churchyard was a solitary green clearing in a jungle of chimney-stacks and cranes—squeezed and jostled by massive concrete buildings that looked as if they had done their best to break the church from its ancient anchorage, and revenged themselves for their failure by darkening its windows and making it look as unwanted and as out of place as possible.
The scenes around him were new and interesting to Mr. Matthews. He watched the tugs with their long strings of barges swaying among the hidden eddies of the tide, and he admired the skill of the men who steered the big, ungainly vessels straight to their mooring places against the wharves when the tugs let go of them in midstream. He watched the cranes lift sacks of flour and swing them through the doors of the mill as lightly as if they had been sacks of feathers.
When he turned from the busy scene and entered the churchyard and walked up the flagged path between the ancient tombs and lolling grave-stones, he had the illusion of stepping from a roaring factory into the quiet shade of a country village. For a few yards the yews surrounded him and the illusion was complete, and then the farther end of the churchyard came to view and he saw a yard full of half-dismantled tram-cars, and the illusion ended.
The verger was waiting for him in the porch, and they went into the church.
It was an old foundation—reputedly Norman in its origin, but the interior had been refashioned and rebuilt during Woodbank’s palmy days in the solid, prosperous Georgian way. It still had its three-decker pulpit, and there was some stained glass of an earlier period, but the austere grey walls were smothered with ugly, obtrusive tablets and memorials of the Regency period, in highly polished, dead white marble that made them look like toilet fittings. But it was a good church—better than he had expected—although it smelt as if the river fog made too much use of it.
The verger was an elderly man with a bad cold in his head. He said he had risen from his sick bed to meet the new Vicar that morning, so Mr. Matthews confined himself to a brief discussion on routine and said he would come back in the afternoon and see the church alone.
As he was leaving he told the verger he would like to see the Church Hall. He had made up his mind to challenge Mrs. Bannister Paget’s threat to deprive him of it, and he told the old man to give him the keys and go home to nurse his cold.
But the verger seemed very much disturbed by this and began to make excuses.
“I don’t think you can, sir,” he said. “It’s all closed up and hasn’t been used for years.”
“I know,” replied Mr. Matthews. “But it’s going to be opened up again now, because I’m planning to use it quite a lot.”
This statement seemed to hit the verger like a bombshell. He stared at the Vicar in astonishment and dismay.
“I really don’t think we can get in, sir,” he mumbled—“the locks and keys … they’re … they’re all rusty and … and won’t turn.”
So Mrs. Bannister Paget has been at him already, thought the Vicar. “Give me the keys and I’ll see what I can do,” he said.
But the verger was determined not to give up the keys. He gripped them as if his life depended on them and when Mr. Matthews persisted, he looked as if he were going to cry. At last he gave in and muttered miserably, “I better come with you, sir.… I think I better.”
Mr. Matthews felt fairly sure that the verger had received some kind of orders to keep him out of the Church Hall. He was sorry for the old man, but a firm hand from the start was his only chance.
St. Peter’s Hall was opposite the tram depot: an ugly building of the Queen Victoria Jubilee period, of pale red brick with a steep slate roof. But it was big and solid, and looked a very adequate place for the club that Mr. Matthews had in mind.
There was a padlock and heavy chain round the tall iron gates and the gravelled path to the doors of the hall was covered in moss and weeds.
“I don’t have the key to the main door,” said the verger—“there’s a side entrance round here.”
“Where’s the key to the main door?” asked Mr. Matthews—but the old man, who was deaf on occasions, did not answer. He led the Vicar down a narrow side path almost blocked by the neglected laurels.
The side door opened into a passage with a row of small rooms leading off it. They were empty and dusty but in good condition.
“Dressing-rooms!” said Mr. Matthews—“you’ve got a real stage here, then?”
“Oh yes, sir, there’s a real stage, with a curtain and footlights and everything.”
Mr. Matthews had not expected this, and visions of a Musical and Dramatic Club grew bright and rosy. He was more determined than ever to get the Hall as he followed the verger up the steps on to the stage.
The stage was good, with deep wings and a heavy drop-curtain. “This is excellent!” he exclaimed: “the very thing I want!—Let’s have the curtain up for a look at the Hall.”
But the old man did not share the Vicar’s enthusiasm. He looked the picture of dejection and dismay.
“I don’t think we can, sir. It hasn’t been up for years.”
“Never mind!” said Mr. Matthews. “Have a try!”
The verger fumbled with the cords and pulleys, and presently the curtain went up slowly and creakily.
It revealed a spacious auditorium that would seat, thought Mr. Matthews, a good three hundred people, but he was astonished to see the whole place stacked and littered with a mass of furniture and junk that looked as if it had come from some kind of an office. There were old tables and desks and chairs—bundles of old books and dusty files—vast heaps of papers done up in red tape and a stack of black japanned deed-boxes painted with people’s names. There was so much of it that it blocked the windows and filled the air with a heavy odour of camphor and musty leather.
“What on earth’s all this?” he asked.
The verger hesitated. “Mrs. Bannister Paget had it put here,” he said. “It came from the lawyer’s office—Paget, Bannister and Paget. They were lawyers in Woodbank for hundreds of years, but when Mr. Richard died—that was Mrs. Bannister Paget’s husband—there was nobody to carry on, and the firm ended. It was very sad after all those years, sir, and Mrs. Bannister Paget had everything put in here, because some of the papers might be needed, she said.”
“How long has it been here?”
“About fifteen years, sir.”
“But why is it in the Church Hall?—why not a furniture depository?”
The old man looked pained. “It didn’t seem right to put such precious, private things in a depository,” he said.
“And presumably Mrs. Bannister Paget has the key to the main door?”
The verger looked dreamily at the litter of untidy rubbish. “Mrs. Bannister Paget said the papers were very private and not for prying eyes,” he said. “She told me never to let anybody in.”
“But the hall belongs to the church!” said Mr. Matthews.
“In a manner of speaking, sir,” replied the verger—“one might say it does—but Mrs. Bannister Paget’s father built it and gave it to the church. They were a fine family, sir—so good and generous—and Mrs. Bannister Paget is the last of them. She’s wonderful to the church, sir, and we couldn’t do without her. It only seems right to let her husband’s things be in the hall.”
Mr. Matthews went back to lunch and told his wife about it.
“Whether I’ve a right to use the hall over the heads of the Council I don’t know,” he said, “but I do know that woman has no earthly right to use it as a free depository for all that old junk of hers, and I’m going to tell her so.”
“I’d be careful,” said Ruth. “I wouldn’t if I were you—at least, not yet.”
“But she’s kept a perfectly good public hall locked up and full of her own rubbish for fifteen years! I’ve never heard of such a thing!”
“I know,” said Ruth—“but I’d wait till you definitely want the hall before you do anything. It’ll look like a bit of cheap revenge if you do it now, and you’ll put them all against you more than ever. I’ve got a feeling there’s a big fight ahead with Mrs. Bannister Paget. At present she’s got all the big guns and there’s no point in running into them till you’re ready.”
They spent the afternoon unpacking books and hanging the pictures. Mr. Goatley came in to help, and promised to get them a load of stable manure from the Brewery. At four o’clock Mr. Matthews went off to meet Mr. Watson the organist, who was a teacher at the local school and also the choirmaster.
Mr. Watson was a languid young man with a thin pale face and a lot of dry, dusty black hair. He was off-hand and insolent. He gave Mr. Matthews to understand that he was paying St. Peter’s Church a considerable compliment in playing the organ and running the choir. He had high qualifications, he said: he had studied music in Germany and should really be filling a considerably higher post, although he left in doubt the reason why he wasn’t. He made a few complaints about the dirtiness and scarcity of choirboys and the poor quality of the organ, and went home.
“Well,” said Mr. Matthews over dinner. “I’ve met them all now: the charlady—the verger—the organist—the sides-men—the churchwardens and the council, and if I’m not very mistaken, Mrs. Bannister Paget has got the whole roaring lot of them in her pocket. There isn’t one of them who’d lift a finger until she gives the word.”
“We’re orphans in the storm,” said Ruth—“two against the world.”
After dinner they sat down to talk things over.
“It’s going to be a hard job,” said Mr. Matthews.
“With the Council dead against me I’m tied up like a trussed chicken.”
“There’s only one thing for it,” said Ruth. “You must turn them out and get a new Council that’ll back you up.”
“And how, my dear, does one do that when one’s an orphan in the storm and trussed up like a chicken?”
“It may not be so difficult,” she answered. “That woman’s got the Council in her pocket—and people like the verger and the organist—but that’s about all. We know that only forty people come to church, so that’s about the strength of her party. But there are eight thousand people in Woodbank. There must be a few among those eight thousand who keep away from church because of this gang that runs it, and if you go about it the right way you can get them on your side. Suppose you only got one in a hundred—that’s eighty—and eighty is double the number she’s got.”
Mr. Matthews began to brighten up. He saw the idea and wondered why he had not thought of it himself. “Ruth” he said, “you’ve got something—a sort of putsch—a coup d’état!”
“It’s not that,” said Ruth, “because it’s perfectly democratic and legal. There may be no need to have a war against this woman at all. As far as she and her satellites are concerned, you will be a model Vicar. You will conduct the services at St. Peter’s Church with dignity and decorum, like the good Mr. Todhunter. That’s a normal thing to do in any case—but meanwhile you go to work in the parish, building up your own party—younger people—fresh ideas—new blood. Then at Easter next year comes the re-election of the Church Council. The new people put up their own candidates with a two to one majority in their favour. Out goes the old gang and in comes a new Council that backs you to the hilt.”
“Wonderful!” exclaimed Mr. Matthews.—“But it sounds a bit too wonderful: there must be a snag somewhere.”
“Don’t you think you can get one in a hundred of these people behind you?”
“If I can’t—then I’m no good. In the name of reason I ought to get one in a hundred.”
“The only snag that I can see,” said Ruth, “is the Bannister Paget gang getting wind of what you’re doing and running their own campaign to raise their numbers. I don’t think they could do much in any case. They’re out of touch with the parish. They live in a world of their own—and I don’t imagine any of the outside people would back them up.”
