Small causes produce lasting results, and the lives of many people would have been changed had Falk caught his father that night in another mood.
The Archdeacon did not look up at the sound of the closing door. He was sitting at his big table writing letters, the expression of his face being that of a boy who has been kept in on a fine afternoon to write out the first fifty lines of the Iliad. His curly hair was ruffled, his mouth was twisted with disgust, and he pushed his big body about in his chair, kicked out his legs and drew them in as though beneath his concentration on his letters he was longing to spring up, catch his enemy by the throat, roll him over on to the ground and kick him.
"Hullo, governor!" Falk said, and settled down into one of the big leather arm-chairs, produced a pipe from his pocket and slowly filled it.
The Archdeacon went on writing, muttering to himself, biting the end of his quill pen. He had not apparently been aware of his son's entrance, but suddenly he sprang up, pushed back his chair until it nearly fell over, and began to stride up and down the room. He was a fine figure then, throwing up his head, flinging out his arms, apostrophising the world.
"Gratitude! They don't know what it means. Do you think I'll go on working for them, wearing myself to a shadow, staying up all night--getting up at seven in the morning, and then to have this sort of return? I'll leave the place. I'll let them make their own mistakes and see how they like that. I'll teach them gratitude. Here am I; for ten years I've done nothing but slave for the town and the Cathedral. Who's worked for them as I have?"
"What's the matter, father?" Falk asked, watching him from the chair. Every one knows the irritation of coming to some one with matters so urgent that they occupy the whole of your mind, and then discovering that your audience has its own determined preoccupation. "Always thinking of himself," Falk continued. "Fusses about nothing."
"The matter?" His father turned round upon him. "Everything's the matter. Everything! Here's this Jubilee business coming on and everything going to ruin. Here am I, who know more about the Cathedral and what's been done in the Cathedral for the last ten years than any one, and they are letting Ryle have a free hand over all the Jubilee Week services without another word to anybody."
"Well, Ryle is the Precentor, isn't he?" said Falk.
"Of course he is," the Archdeacon answered angrily. "And what a Precentor! Every one knows he isn't capable of settling anything by himself. That's been proved again and again. But that's only one thing. It's the same all the way round. Opposition everywhere. It'll soon come to it that I'll have to ask permission from the Chapter to walk down the High Street."
"All the same, father," Falk said, "you can't be expected to have the whole of the Jubilee on your shoulders. It's more than any one man can possibly do."