After that there was a slow but steady decline. Tolnbridge was too isolated to play any part in the great political and ecclesiastical disturbances which spasmodically racked the country up to the end of the eighteenth century, though upon occasion little symbolic wars were fought out on these issues among the townspeople, only too often with violence and atrocities. The transition from Mariolatry to Protestantism was made without fuss, the more so, as some said, because the old religion was allowed to persist and become vile in secret and abominable rituals. Some emphasis was given to these suggestions by a frenetic outburst of witch trials in the early seventeenth century, and by the equally frenetic outburst of witchcraft and devil-worship which provoked them, and in which several clergy of the diocese were disgracefully involved. It is doubtful, indeed, if there was ever such a concentrated, vehement, and (by the standards of the day) well-justified persecution in the history of Europe; there were daily burnings on the cathedral hill, and, that curious feature of most witch trials, free confessions, given without torture, by some hundreds of women that they had had intercourse with the Devil and participated in the Black Mass. After a few years the commotion died down, as these things will, and left nothing behind but the blackened circle cut into the hillside and the iron post to which the women had been tied for burning. There were no further disturbances in Tolnbridge, of any kind; and by 1939 the town seemed to have settled down into a state of permanent inanition.
So at least Geoffrey maintained, in more forcible words, on his failing to get a taxi at the station. What he is actually recorded to have said is ‘What a damned hole!’
Now this was unjust, and Fielding, looking down past the cathedral at the roofs of the old town and the estuary beyond, felt it to be so. However, it was obviously not the time for argument. Geoffrey was smarting not only with physical pain (this had by now considerably abated), but also with a considerable mental irritation. There are limits beyond which human patience must not be tried; after a certain point, the crossword puzzle or cryptogram or riddle ceases to amuse and begins to infuriate. This point, in the present affair, Geoffrey had long since passed, and his last escape, far from leaving him pleased, maddened him with its pointlessness.
‘What I cannot understand,’ he said for the tenth time, ‘is why, when they had me exactly where they wanted me, without a chance to resist or cry out, they didn’t bang me on the head and shove me overboard.’
Fielding regarded gloomily an aged porter who was prodding tentatively at a trunk in the hope, apparently, of provoking it to spontaneous movement. ‘Perhaps they were interrupted,’ was all he said.
‘You can’t be interrupted when you’re locked in a lavatory.’
‘Perhaps they found you were the wrong person and sheered off.’
‘The wrong person!’
Fielding sighed. ‘No, it’s not likely. Their organization seems very good,’ he added with a sort of melancholy satisfaction. ‘Unless you imagined all that.’
‘Imagined it,’ said Geoffrey, nettled. ‘Of course I didn’t.’
‘He wasn’t just asking you the time?’
‘The time! You don’t follow people into lavatories and bolt the door simply in order to ask them the time,’
Fielding sighed again; he breathed out lengthily and noisily. The discussion, he thought, could not profitably be continued. ‘Is it far?’ he asked.
‘Yes; very far,’ said Geoffrey, annoyed at being thus crudely unseated from his hobby-horse; he thought, too, that he perceived the animal being led away. But something else had occurred to Fielding, for he turned abruptly and said:
‘Those letters.’
Geoffrey looked at him in silence for a moment, and then searched his pockets. The letters were gone.
‘Very thorough,’ said Fielding drily. ‘When they found you were coming here despite their warnings, they decided you shouldn’t have any clue to the machine they were typed on.’
‘So that was it. Damn. But it still doesn’t explain why I wasn’t knocked out.’
‘When you’re organizing a thing like this, you can’t give your agents a free hand to do whatever emergency dictates. Besides, this fellow may not even have known what was going on. I expect he was told simply to get the letters from you, and when you fainted there was no need to use violence.’ Fielding whistled gently. ‘They’re fairly thorough.’
The heat had grown somewhat less. Peace had made off, presumably towards the Precentor’s house, in another direction. The woman with the rug and the young clergyman had long since disappeared. Looking at his watch, Geoffrey found that the train had got in only seven minutes late. He and Fielding started off down the station hill, Fielding carrying both bags, and Geoffrey the inescapable butterfly-net. On their right stood the cathedral, serenely beautiful. The great rose window in the south transept glowed momently at them with a rich, red beauty, and the gulls wheeled and screamed about the slender octagonal spire.
The medley of tobacconists and second-rate pubs huddled round the station soon gave place to a rather dreary street of small villas; and this in turn to the squalid, beautiful houses of the old town. A little beyond the boundary of these two worlds they turned off to the right, and shortly arrived at the wrought-iron gates of the clergy-house, which had been built in the eighteenth century to replace the old clergy-house adjoining the north transept; this being now used for storing lumber, holding choir-practices, and other miscellaneous and untidy purposes. The gates, suspended on either side from pillars of soft, lemon-coloured stone, opened upon a depressing vista of shrubs and lawns, bisected by an overgrown gravel drive which curved round to the front-door, skirted the house, and led out beyond the extensive kitchen-gardens on to the cathedral hill itself. Geoffrey entered these regions with circumspection, peering intently at a withered laurel as though he expected it to contain springs, nets, and lime for his discomfort.
In this realm of celibacy, the first thing they heard was a girl’s voice. ‘Josephine!’ it called; then with more force, and a tinge of irritation: ‘Come back!’
There was a sound of running footsteps, and a young girl, plainly the object of these cries, came panting round the side of the house. She could not have been more than fifteen, and she was long, thin, and trembling, with curls of bright gold, tangled and disordered. Her face was red, not only with effort, but also with perceptible anger. She stopped short on seeing the strangers, and after staring at them for a moment, darted off into the shrubbery at one side, whence the diminishing rustle of innumerable graceless plants marked her retreat.
They toiled towards the portico, a little shaken by this welcome, and suspecting, with some dismay, a domestic upheaval. They had not gone more than a few steps before the owner of the voice they had heard appeared also, in unenergetic pursuit. And this at least, Geoffrey thought, was not what one expected