Read Online Unconditional surrender by Evelyn Waugh - Free Book Online Page A

at Broome at half-past eleven and arrived almost on time.
     
    There is no scarcity of places of worship in this small village.
    In penal times Mass had been said regularly in the house and a succession of chaplains employed there in the guise of tutors. This little chapel is preserved as a place of occasional pilgrimage in honour of the Blessed Gervase Crouchback.
    The Catholic parish church is visible from the little station yard; a Puginesque structure erected by Guy’s great-grand-father in the early 1860’s at the nearer extremity of the village street. At the further end stands the medieval church of which the nave and chancel are in Anglican use while the north aisle and adjoining burying ground are the property of the lord of the manor. It was in this plot that Mr Crouchback’s grave had been dug and in this aisle that his memorial would later stand among the clustered effigies and brasses of his forebears.
    After the Act of Emancipation a wall had been built to divide the aisle from the rest of the church and for a generation it had served the Catholic parish. But the monuments left little room for worshippers. It was for this reason that Guy’s great-grandfather had built the church (which in the old style the Crouchbacks spoke of as ‘the chapel’) and the presbytery and had endowed the parish with what was then an adequate stipend. Most of the village of Broome is Catholic, an isolated community of the kind that is found in many parts of Lancashire and the outer islands of Scotland, but is very rare in the west of England. The Anglican benefice has long been united with two of its neighbours. It is served by a clergyman who rides over on his bicycle once a month and reads the service if he finds a quorum assembled. The former vicarage has been partitioned and let off as cottages.
    Broome Hall stands behind iron gates, its drive a continuation of the village street. Mr Crouchback used often, and not quite accurately, to assert that every ‘good house’, by which he meant one of medieval foundation, stood on a road, a river, or a rock. Broome Hall had been on the main road to Exeter until the eighteenth century when a neighbour who sat for the county in the House of Commons obtained authority to divert it through his own property and establish a profitable toll pike. The old right of way still runs under the walls of the Hall but it carries little traffic. It is a lane which almost invisibly branches off the motor-road, swells into the village street, runs for half a mile as a gravelled carriage-drive and then narrows once more amid embowering hedge-rows which, despite a rough annual cutting, encroach more and more on the little frequented track.
    When the convent came to Broome they brought their own chaplain and converted one of the long, panelled galleries into their chapel. Neither they nor their girls appeared in the parish church except on special occasions. Mr Crouchback’s funeral was such a one. They had met the body when it arrived from Matchet on the previous evening, had dressed the catafalque and that morning had sung the dirge. Their chaplain would assist at the Requiem.
     
    Angela Box-Bender was on the platform to meet the train. She had an air of gravity and sorrow.
    ‘I say, Angie,’ her husband asked, ‘how long is this business going to take?’
    ‘Not more than an hour. Father Geoghegan wanted to preach a panegyric but Uncle Peregrine stopped him.’
    ‘Any chance of anything to eat? I left the flat at six this morning.’
    ‘You’re expected at the presbytery. I think you’ll find something there.’
    ‘They don’t expect me to take any part, do they? I mean carry anything? I don’t know the drill.’
    ‘No,’ said Angela. ‘This is one of the times when no one expects anything of you.’
    The little parlour of the presbytery was much crowded. Besides their host, Uncle Peregrine and the chaplain from the convent, there were four other priests, one with the crimson of a