“The Catholic clergy, anyhow. You see, our priests don’t swap about from one diocese to another; they are tied to the soil. Consequently they are local men, most of them, and a local man feels at home with them.”
“Still, for a man who had no religion particularly, isn’t it rather a challenge to be up against your faith like that? I should have thought a man was bound to react one way or the other.”
“Not necessarily. It’s astonishing what a lot of theoretical interest a man can take in the faith and yet be miles away from it practically. Why, Mottram himself, about three weeks ago, was pestering us all about the old question of ‘the end justifying the means.’ Being a Protestant, of course he meant by that doing evil in order that good may come. He worried the life out of the Bishop, urging the most plausible reasons for maintaining that it was perfectly right. He simply couldn’t see why the Bishop insisted you weren’t ever allowed to do what’s wrong, whatever comes of it. And the odd thing was, he really seemed to think he was being more Catholic over it than we were. However, all that bores you.”
“No, indeed. I want to know everything about Mottram; and it’s silly to pretend that a man’s religion doesn’t matter. Was he thinking at all, do you suppose, of becoming a Catholic?”
Eames shrugged his shoulders. “How can I tell? I don’t think he really shewed any dispositions. But of course he was a religious man in a way, he wasn’t one of your nogoddites, like Brinkman. You’ve met Brinkman?”
“Yes, I’m staying in the same hotel, you see. And I confess I’m interested in him too. What do you make of him? Who is he, or where did Mottram pick him up?”
“I don’t know. I don’t like the little man. I don’t even know what his nationality is; he’s spent a long time in Paris, and I’m pretty sure he’s not British. And mind you, he hated us. I think he had corresponded for some paper out in Paris; anyhow, he knew all the seedy anti-clericals; and I rather think he was asked to leave. Mottram seems to have taken him on on the recommendation of a friend; he had some idea, I think, of doing a history of the town; and of course Brinkman can write. But Brinkman very seldom came in here, and when he did he was like a dog among snakes. I daresay he thought the house was full of oubliettes. He’d got all that Continental anti-clericalism, you see. Here’s the house.”
They turned up a short drive which led them through a heavily walled park to the front door of a painfully mid-Victorian mansion. A mansion it must be called; it did not look like a house. Strange reminiscences of various styles, Gothic, Byzantine, Oriental, seemed to have been laid on by some external process to a red-brick abomination of the early seventies. Cream-coloured and slate-coloured tiles wove irrelevant patterns across the bare spaces of wall, Conservatories masked a good half of the lowest storey. It was exactly suited to be what it afterward became, a kind of municipal museum, in which the historic antiquities of Pullford, such as they were, could be visited by the public on dreary Sunday afternoons.
“Now,” said Eames, “does that give you Mottram’s atmosphere?”
“God forbid!” replied Bredon.