“I believe I’ve met,” I said, “your Trenchards of Garth. George Trenchard. … She was a Faunder. They have a house in Westminster. There’s a charming Miss Trenchard with whom I danced.”
“Yes, those are the George Trenchards,” he answered with eagerness and delight, as though I had formed a new link with him. “Fancy your knowing them! How small the world is! My father was a cousin, a first cousin, of George Trenchard’s. The girl—you must mean Millie—is delightful. Katherine, the elder sister, is married now. She too is charming, but in a different, graver way.”
He spoke of them all with a serious lingering pleasure, as though he were summoning them all into the dusty, stuffy corridor, carrying them with him into these strange countries and perilous adventures.
“They always laughed at me—Millie especially; I’ve stayed sometimes with them at Garth. But I didn’t mean really to talk about them—I only wanted to show you how deeply Glebeshire matters to the Trenchards, and whatever happens, wherever a Trenchard goes, he always really takes Glebeshire with him. I was born in Polchester, as I said. My father had a little property there, but we always lived in a little round bow-windowed house in the Cathedral Close. I was simply brought up on the Cathedral. From my bedroom windows I looked on the whole of it. In our drawing-room you could hear the booming of the organ. I was always watching the canons crossing the cathedral green, counting the strokes of the cathedral bell, listening to the cawing of the cathedral rooks, smelling the cathedral smell of cold stone, wet umbrellas and dusty hassocks, looking up at the high tower and wondering whether anywhere in the world there was anything so grand and fine. My moral world, too, was built on the cathedral—on the cathedral ‘don’ts’ and ‘musts,’ on the cathedral hours and the cathedral prayers, and the cathedral ambitions and disappointments. My father’s great passion was golf. He was not a religious man. But my mother believed in the cathedral with a passion that was almost a disease. She died looking at it. Her spirit is somewhere round it now, I do believe.”
He paused, then went on:
“It was the cathedral that made me so unpractical, I suppose. I who am an only child—I believed implicitly in what I was told and it always was my mother who told me everything.”
He was, I thought, the very simplest person to whom I had ever listened. The irritation that I had already felt on several occasions in his company again returned. “My father’s great passion was golf” would surely in the mouth of another have had some tinge of irony.
In Trenchard’s mild blue eyes irony was an incredible element. I could fancy what he would have to say to the very gentlest of cynics; some of the sympathy I had felt for him during the afternoon had left me.
He’s very little short of an idiot,
I thought. He’s going to be dreadfully in the way.
“I was the only child, you see,” he continued. “Of course I was a great deal to my mother and she to me. We were always together. I don’t think that even when I was very young I believed all that she told me. She seemed to me always to take everything for granted. Heaven to me was so mysterious and she had such definite knowledge. I always liked things to be indefinite … I do still.” He laughed, paused for a moment, but was plainly now off on his fine white horse, charging the air, to be stopped by no mortal challenge. I had for a moment the thought that I would slip from my seat and leave him; I didn’t believe that he would have noticed my absence; but the thought of that small stuffy carriage held me.
But he was conscious of me; like the Ancient Mariner he fixed upon my arm his hand and stared into my eyes:
“There were other things that puzzled me. There was, for instance, the chief doctor in our town. He was a large, fat, jolly red-faced man, clean-shaven, with white hair. He was considered the best doctor in the place—all the old maids went to him. He was immensely jolly, you could hear his laugh from one end of the street to the other. He was married, had a delightful little house, where his wife gave charming dinners. He was stupid and self-satisfied. Even at his own work he was stupid, reading nothing, careless and forgetful, thinking about golf and food only all his days. He was a snob too and would give up anyone for the people at the Castle. Even when I was a small boy I somehow knew all this about him. My father thought the world of him and loved to play golf with him. … He was completely happy and successful and popular. Then there was another man, an old canon who taught me Latin before I went to Rugby, an old, untidy, dirty man, whose sermons were dull and his manners bad. He was a failure in life—and he was a failure to himself; dissatisfied with what he used to call his ‘bundle of rotten twigs,’ his life and habits and thoughts. But he thought that somewhere there was something he would find that would save him—somewhere, sometime … not God merely—‘like a key that will open all the doors in the house.’ To me he was fascinating. He knew so much, he was so humble, so kind, so amusing. Nobody liked him, of course. They tried to turn him out of the place, gave him a little living at last,
