Men and Bretheren Read online

  MEN AND BRETHREN

  by

  JAMES GOULD COZZENS

  LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO. LONDON - NEW YORK - TORONTO

  longmans, green and co. ltd.

  6 & 7 CLIFFORD STREET, LONDON, W.I

  NICOL ROAD, BOMBAY, I 17 CHITTARANJAN AVENUE, CALCUTTA, 13 36A MOUNT ROAD, MADRAS, 2

  longmans, green and co. inc.

  55 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK, 3

  longmans, green and co.

  215 VICTORIA STREET, TORONTO, I

  First published March, 1936 Reprinted by Novographic Process 1948

  PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY LOWE AND BRYDONE PRINTERS LIMITED, LONDON, N.W.10

  CONTENTS

  PART I

  PART II

  PART I

  ERNEST let the telephone ring, peal on impatient, while he searched for a cigarette. He thrust it in the corner of his mouth and began a second search, for matches. Before he found them, he heard Lily take the call in the basement. Her piercing, aged, negroid voice chanted: "Saint Ambrose's Vicarage."

  Ernest lit the cigarette, filled his lungs with smoke, and dropped on the edge of the low divan bed. "Mr. Cudlipp!" Lily's voice climbed shrilly, "Mr. Cudlipp!"

  "All right!" he shouted. He plucked the instrument off the stand, lay back against the cushions, at the same time picking up the scraps of paper with pencilled messages which had been left on the table.

  "Ernest Cudlipp speaking," he said. The cigarette in the corner of his lips nodded lightly to the words. From Lily's execrable writing he learned that Doctor Lamb had called. Doctor Lamb would stop by about half-past ten.

  Ernest sighed. He could have guessed that from the glimpse of Mr. Hurst's car drawing up in refined splendour at the arches of the Parish House door just as Ernest left. Told all, Mr. Hurst had protested. Mr. Hurst would point out that the Bishop wouldn't like it. What would be the use? Holy Innocents' was not the sort of parish which relished a good rousing row. Mr. Cudlipp wasn't down at Saint Matthew's now. Let him attend to the work for which Holy Innocents' in its pious generosity had built and maintained the Chapel, and stop trying to —

  From the telephone a voice said: "Oh, Ernie! I've got to see you. I've really got to."

  Ernest tossed the first note aside and held up the second. "I'm sorry," he said, perplexed by Lily's spelling—Lord, it must be Lulu Merrick! She must have managed to get to town again. He inhaled smoke wearily. "I'm, sorry," he repeated, "this is a very bad connexion. I don't know who you are."

  "Oh. It's Geraldine. Mrs. Binney."

  "Of course. Now, what are you crying about, and why do you have to see me?"

  "I can't tell you on the phone. May I come down?"

  The third slip was in John's writing: Took five dollars out of your top drawer. J.

  "No, Geraldine," he said. "I've a dinner engagement. If you want to see me, I'll come up there about half-past nine.'' The cigarette, consuming itself, shortened. He narrowed his right eye against the smoke streaming thinly past it, squinted with his left, reading on the last slip: Dear Vicar. Mrs. Hawley very low in mind, though doctor says not immediate danger. Would like to see you personally if possible.— Johnston.

  "Yes," he said into the phone. "I want to have a talk with you, too, Geraldine. I've been meaning to have one for some time."

  "Oh. What about?"

  "About what you've got to see me about, I think. Now, go lie down."

  "Ernie, what's happened to him?"

  "Nothing. He's perfectly all right. I haven't seen him to-day, but there was a note from him."

  "What did he say—oh. I'm sorry."

  "Don't be. He said he was borrowing five dollars. He's perfectly all right. And so are you, Geraldine. Nine-thirty, or near it. God bless you." He dropped the telephone on the stand, stood up, picking away the hot fragment of cigarette from his lips, and lit another.

  Although it was after half past six, and the sun was in merciful decline, no breeze stirred. From the tall old-fashioned windows of his bedroom Ernest Cudlipp could see the narrow, barren backyards divided monotonously by broken, disproportionately high, board fences. Through them, a rank diseased growth of ailanthus trees distributed itself, sickly fronds lifted high into the maze of clothes-lines strung from flat windows to lofty bare poles. Every pole was more or less off the perpendicular. A shadow smelling of hot stone, hot rubbish, burnt gasolene, filled the disreputable interior of the block. Invisible, an elevated train passed. Its low roar came leisurely in hollow crescendo. Then it went deliberately, dying away down town.

  Ernest thumbed loose his clerical collar and detached the black linen stock, sailing them onto the top of the bureau stacked with books.

  At the window again, Ernest saw young Munson, his organist, come out the back two stories under him, proceed down the yard and through the gate. Munson had his shirt sleeves rolled up on his long pallid forearms and carried several bound scores. From his work as a sales clerk in a haberdashery store he came directly, hot and winded, to his real love. The gate banged. Munson passed with brisk little foot-falls along the grimy flank of Saint Ambrose's Chapel, trotted down the cement entry way, and into the choir room.

  Ernest took off his trousers, pulled his damp shirt over his head, dropping both on a chair. He was waiting, curious to hear what Munson began with. Munson had a developed taste in music, an admirable touch, and a minor, pleasant talent as a composer. It was perhaps a pity that he couldn't be paid enough to make selling neckties unnecessary; but, as likely as not, if he had more time, he would use it with less desperate devotion, do actually less work.

  Ventilating sections of the ugly stained glass were tilted open behind the metal netting which covered the chapel windows, and the low hum of electric power at the pump arose audibly. In the organ loft Munson touched his banked keys. Irrelevant, deep, sustained and sad, a B minor chord sounded; steady, mechanically prolonged. There was silence. Then with a resolute whoop, sobering to patient purpose, the first sententious notes of Bishop Doane's hymn for the Missions surged over the backyards.

  Ernest shook his head, recognizing Munson's rigid selection of duty before pleasure. On an evening as hot as this, duties of that lamentable sort must be almost beyond a musician's endurance. Mr. Johnston was to preach Sunday and the hymn was a favourite of his. Ernest shook his head again. He went in and turned on a shower.

  "Fling out the banner," he found himself unwillingly echoing, "let it float, seaward and skyward, high and wide—" But no, no! What senseless bombast! Angels did well to bend in anxious silence o'er the sign! There were no banners about poor Mr. Johnston. The nations, crowding to be born—did Eskimos crowd to Mr. Johnston to be born? More likely, Mr. Johnston crowded to them. From them he took reality, all that could be called his life.

  In the narrow loop of a parka hood unimaginable cold had calloused Mr. Johnston's forehead and cheeks. Of course he had worn a beard, Ernest realized suddenly; Mr. Johnston must have shaved it off because, no doubt largely white, it would make him look older than the hills. Mr. Johnston's eyes had been irreparably injured by snow glare. Ringed with the horn rims of his thick glasses, the lids were red, the magnified blue irises bleached. When he spoke his voice croaked weak and stiff. He often hesitated and stammered, as though his tongue, more familiar with—was it fourteen?—Indian and Eskimo dialects became uncertain and diffident, trying English. The sermon Sunday would necessarily be a horror, a genuine horror. He oughtn't to attempt it. Only, you could see, Mr. Johnston thought that if he didn't try, he would never be able to preach. He went at it with all his might; just as, eagerly, he made his round of calls with an awkward resolution easy to picture—the confused greetings, the stiff halting conversations, the embarrassed, probably too-long-delayed leave-t
akings. Mr. Johnston was determined to master the routine work of a city priest, to be useful to the vicar, to justify his position.

  Of course Mr. Johnston never could. He was hopeless. Even with a person of young Wilber Quinn's vast energy over from General Seminary—he was an ordained graduate student, full of the enthusiasm of his inexperience—to help out, the regular summer work didn't get done. In the fall, the work would never get done. The position of an Episcopal chapel in a district like this depended almost too plainly on the things, paid for out of the ample purse of Holy Innocents', which Saint Ambrose's could offer—the day nurseries and the dispensaries, the Chapel House activities, the summer camps. If more were to be accomplished, the clergy in charge had to accomplish it entirely through their own personalities.

  Mr. Johnston's personality was negative, for this purpose practically nonexistent. For twenty-five years he had brought the Gospel to southern Alaska and the Yukon Territory—to God, the doubtful glory; to him, largely destroyed eyesight; a ruined constitution; worst of all, what really seemed to be a mental impairment, a simplicity very close to silliness. No longer young or strong enough to continue working where his experience had value, where he could do what few white priests could, Mr. Johnston came back, tremulous and rheumy, almost provisionless, with few friends, with no abilities. Ernest stepped from the shower, turned a towel about his short compact body, and shining with cool water, went into his bedroom.

  Lee Breen had said seven, naming the pretentious hotel where he was accustomed to stop because his reputation was good there for a great reduction in rates. It seemed hard to believe, but there really must be people who would go to an hotel in order to see Lee, or someone like him, in the lobby. Ernest tried to imagine who they were. He got into shorts and a vest, lit a cigarette, and took up a new quarto of German photographs of baroque and rococo churches—at Quito, Ecuador, the Compasua's carved and crusted doorway. Inside, solid gold plated every wall—trust the Jesuits! But here was San Francisco of Quito, the Friars Minor enthroned in dispendious humility. Trust them all! He studied the low decorated tower caps, the rich eruption of stonework on the square façade, the divided stairs rising in dignity from left to right.

  Flipping over the page, he paused, arrested, for Munson, duties done, suffused the evening air with Bach. The Saint John Passion flooded the backyards. With impressive skill, Munson was adapting for his organ the great contralto air, Es ist vollbracht, counterpointed with a simulated 'cello accompaniment.

  Ernest breathed deeper, satisfied. He began to sing, though he knew almost none of the German wording, and could not even be sure which were the voice parts. Sharply up the shadowed stairway cut the telephone bell.

  "Ta-ti-tum, ta; ta-tum —" he intoned, pulling a shirt over his head. He jammed his hands down the sleeves, his head emerged, thin brown hair upended, through the neck. He swung out an arm and caught off the telephone. "Ernest Cudlipp speaking."

  Lee Breen's clean, clear stage enunciation broke out, impatient. "Ernest, are you dead? Do you know what time it is?"

  "To the minute," he answered. "Seven thirty-two."

  "Well, come at once! Meyer may ring me. If he does, I'll have to go. I told you that."

  "As soon as I get my trousers on. Alice isn't ready, is she?"

  "Of course she is. And being very nasty, too.”

  "Lord! Apologize for me, will you? Tell her I'll see she has a dinner fit to eat finally."

  "Now, Ernest, we're going to eat here. I haven't time to go out —"

  "No, we're not. I shall probably die in a year or two and I'm not going to waste any of my few remaining meals swallowing gilded swill." He hung up, went into the hall and shouted, "Lily, get me a taxi!" Returning, he flung out on the bed a grey suit of thin flannel, bent, and spun the telephone dial. "Joseph," he said, "this is Mr. Cudlipp. Have a wonderful dinner for three for me a little after eight, and a cold wine. No, I don't want to hear about it now, I want to eat it when I get there. Yes." He tossed back the telephone.

  As though in protest, it immediately rang again.

  "Mr. Cudlipp, this is Bill Jennings. I tried to call but the line was busy."

  "Yes." Ernest let his eyes rest on the very old, much battered, but how beautifully executed wooden figure of Saint Ambrose standing on the little shelf built for it in the high corner of the room. On the left arm a miniature Milan Cathedral was held to the heart, the feet were on the beehive, the scroll of the Te Deum was broken off in the right hand. It was oak, about four feet high—supposedly, thirteenth-century work, and Lee, who had brought it back to him from Italy several years ago must have paid a good deal for it.

  "Well, what happened, sir, I found out, was that the crazy kid sent a money order to this firm—they advertise you can do that—for this revolver. It comes insured or registered, or something, so he has to sign for it. At the post office, they must tip them off; because, right away, as soon as Jimmy signs and the man gives it to him, a plain clothes man pinches him for violation of the Sullivan law —"

  "He's a minor, isn't he?"

  "Well, he's eighteen, Mr. Cudlipp. They can send him to Sing Sing, I think. They're holding him for bail."

  Ernest removed his eyes from Saint Ambrose's hoary haloed head. "Don't try to raise it. It might scare some sense into him to stay in jail a few days. But try not to let your father worry. I think we can get him out of it."

  "Taxi's waiting, Mr. Cudlipp," Lily screamed.

  "If there's anything else, call me again, later. Or I'll see you at the office in the morning. I can't stay now." He hung up, snatched a black knitted tie, knotted it under the attached collar of his soft shirt. He swung on the flannel coat, and clapping a panama on his head, ran downstairs. "Lily!" he said, "I'll try to be back at ten or a little after. If Mr. Quinn calls up, or comes in, tell him he needn't bother about the early service Sunday. I'll take it myself. But he must be sure I have a server, because there probably won't be anyone else there. Do you hear me?"

  "Yes, Mr. Cudlipp. I hear you."

  Ernest ran on down the brownstone front steps: The taxi driver opened the door and he scrambled in. "I'm in a hurry," he said. "Don't be too careful, it makes me nervous."

  Four blocks west the sun slanting level through the great cleft of buildings, shafted across the avenue to fall on the fine Byzantine masses of the new Holy Innocents. Reclining in his corner, Ernest gazed out the open taxi window at it, pleased—the solemn strong nave, the strong low dome of plain pendentives and sweeping smooth cupola on the crossing—it couldn't be better.

  Halted at the corner, he could observe the serenely balanced west front, the sunlight falling on the thick stone spokes of the big west window; the partly dismantled scaffolding around the porch. The porch and portals had just been added to complete the new building on the one hundredth anniversary of the founding of the parish. In the shadow of the remaining frame-work, three pairs of magnificent bronze doors were now in place. Above them, above the small triple pillars of coloured marble, the entablature was uncovered. On it, cut in a narrow diaglyphic band, the collect for the feast ran graven in stone. The effect was going to be good; but what a collect! O Almighty God—the noble letters marched from the side and turned across the front—who out of the mouths of babes and sucklings hast ordained strength, and modest infants to glorify thee by their deaths; Mortify and kill all vices in us. .. .

  Really, "madest infants to glorify thee by their deaths"! For once Doctor Lamb had clearly and unquestionably been caught napping. Wait until the scaffolding was finally cleared away next week and the old ladies got a good look at it! Ernest was willing to bet that within six months the lettering would be quietly effaced as the only possible way of keeping the parish peace —turning down the avenue he was given a last glimpse. The bulk of the Parish House behind; on the street below, Mr. Hurst's big car still waiting at the entrance vaults—Ernest wouldn't flatter himself by supposing that all this time had been spent on objections to the conduct of affairs at Saint Am
brose's, but no doubt it was objection of some sort to parish affairs of some kind. “As rector of a parish like this, I wouldn't last a year," Ernest reflected, "the truth is, I have no tact. It isn't that I wouldn't stand for it, it's that I couldn't. I don't know how." Once, the lack of the knowledge might have seemed to him a kind of compliment to some imaginary integrity; but now he could see it well enough as the flaw that it was, a defect in self-control— the scriptural dangers of judgment, of council, of hell-fire. He thought, "In forty-four—well, practically forty-five—years I have never found out how to agree with mine adversary quickly. That is really why I am where I am, why I will never be —"

  But he was there, he saw. In the lobby he went briskly down to the bar and glanced in. It was crowded, but there was no sign of Lee or Alice. Back at the long bright ornate desk they pushed a telephone over to him. Leaning on his elbows, he heard it answered finally. Alice said: "What?"

  "Come down and eat."

  "Hello, Ernie. I don't think I will. Where's Lee?"

  "I haven't the faintest idea."

  "Oh. Well, I suppose Meyer came around for him. All right, darling. I'll come."

  "Did you have a row?"

  "Nothing special. Only I don't like to be called a dirty little slut in public. It's partly your fault for being so late."

  "Well, come on, my dear. It's getting later."

  He crossed the lobby and sat down where he could see the elevator doors. He sat there, glum, because he was hungry—or was it because Lee depressed him, as a type or example? Lee must be thirty-eight or nine and you couldn't expect him to remain, in spite of it, a perpetual twenty-five. At twenty-five Lee had been intelligent, modest, unaffected; so time could not change him, as it changed many people of twenty-five, for the better. If Lee changed, he had to change for the worse. His success assured it. In the theatre, the place where there was plenty of room was at the bottom, not at the top. Only at the bottom was there leisure to be simple and natural, elbow-room to be generous and good-tempered. "The good old days!" Ernest thought, and the thought was derisive; for no one knew better than himself what a delusion that was. Yet the discouraged sense of them persisted—all the old days done with, all the charming people gone, or different; the hopes exploded; the exciting plans found only fatuous or unconsidered. In the distance he saw a pair of gilded elevator doors spring open. Alice stepped out.