"Yes, I agree with you. My daughter is coming out at the Ball."
"Oh, is she? I'm sure she'll have a good time. She's so pretty. Every one's fond of her."
He waited, but apparently Mrs. Brandon had nothing more to say. There was a pause, then Mrs. Brandon, as though she had been suddenly pushed to it by some one behind her, held out her hand....
"Good evening, Canon Ronder."
He said good-bye and watched her for a moment as she went up past the neat little villas, her dress trailing behind her, her hat bobbing with every step. He looked up at the absurd figure on the top of the monument, the gentleman in frock-coat and tall hat commemorated there. The light had left him. He was not purple now but a dull grey. He, too, had doubtless had his romance, blood and tears, anger and agony for somebody. How hard to keep out of such things, and yet one must if one is to achieve anything. Keep out of it, detached, observant, comfortable. Strange that in life comfort should be so difficult to attain!
Climbing Green Lane he was surprised to feel how hot it was. The trees that clustered over his head seemed to have gathered together all the heat of the day. Everything conspired to annoy him! Bodger's Street, when he turned into it, was, from his point of view, at its very worst, crowded and smelly and rocking with noise. The fields behind Bodger's Street and Canon's Yard sloped down the hill then up again out into the country beyond.
It was here on this farther hill that the gipsies had been allowed to pitch their caravans, and that the Fair was already preparing its splendours. It was through these gates that the countrymen would penetrate the town's defences, just as on the other side, low down in Seatown on the Pol's banks, the seafaring men, fishermen and sailors and merchantmen, were gathering. Bodger's Street was already alive with the anticipation of the coming week's festivities. Gas-jets were flaming behind hucksters' booths, all the population of the place was out on the street enjoying the fine summer evening, shouting, laughing, singing, quarrelling. The effect of the street illumined by these uncertain flares that leapt unnaturally against the white shadow of the summer sky was of something mediaeval, and that impression was deepened by the overhanging structure of the Cathedral that covered the faint blue and its little pink clouds like a swinging spider's web.
Ronder, however, was not now thinking of the town. His mind was fixed upon his approaching interview with Foster. Foster had just paid a visit, quite unofficial and on a private personal basis, to Wistons, to sound him about the Pybus living and his action if he were offered it.
Ronder understood men very much better than he understood women. He understood Foster so long as ambition and religion were his motives, but there was something else in play that he did not understand. It was not only that Foster did not like him--he doubted whether Foster liked anybody except the Bishop--it was rather perhaps that Foster did not like himself. Now it is the first rule of fanaticism that you should be so lost in the impulse of your inspiration that you should have no power left with which to consider yourself at all. Foster was undoubtedly a fanatic, but he did consider himself and even despised himself. Ronder distrusted self- contempt in a man simply because nothing made him so uncomfortable as those moments of his own when he wondered whether he were all that he thought himself. Those moments did not last long, but he hated them so bitterly that he could not bear to see them at work in other people. Foster was the kind of fanatic who might at any minute decide to put peas in his shoes and walk to Jerusalem; did he so decide, he would abandon, for that decision, all the purposes for which he might at the time be working. Ronder would certainly never walk to Jerusalem.
The silence and peace of Canon's Yard when he left Bodger's Street was almost dramatic. All that penetrated there was a subdued buzz with an occasional shrill note as it might be on a penny whistle. The Yard was dark, lit only by a single lamp, and the cobbles uneven. Lights here and there set in the crooked old windows were secret and uncommunicative: the Cathedral towers seemed immensely tall against the dusk. It would not be dark for another hour and a half, but in those old rooms with their small casements light was thin and uncertain.