Rotting Hill Read Online Free PDF

social justice?”
        “Certainly!” he protested. “Don’t you?”
        “Well, you are a socialist.”
        “Call it that, if you like.”
        “Which of course would make Mr. Attlee ‘a red’.”
        “Exactly.”
        That was as far as I got upon that occasion. He did tell me a little later that he had “sat on the same platform” as the Red Dean (of Canterbury). I, of course, do not know everything. The farmer had a case, I suppose. He could be described as a “political priest”, no doubt, which is all, under certain circumstances, the farmer would need. But those circumstances did not exist as it happened.
        The Archdeacon, dispatched by the Cathedral the first time, unseen by Rymer, poked around the neighbourhood in his shabby clerical automobile, discussed with some the weather, with others the crops, learned that Rymer was a total abstainer, that he affected to smoke a pipe—but there was rarely any tobacco in it: that he had never been known to make passes at the maid at the rectory (there had never been any there). The Archdeacon had had some practice in mollifying parishioners on the score of the “redness” (or “liberalism”, as he had learned to call it) of their vicars. He had got rather to enjoy doing this, as people who play a game well welcome opportunities of displaying their skill.
        As for Anglo-Catholicism, that was apple-pie to the Archdeacon. One might almost say that he had been specially trained in the art of turning people’s minds away from the swinging of the censers in the churches of the diocese—and he had had reason to observe that a certain “redness” or “pinkness” was frequently associated with these liturgical eccentricities. The Bishop no one could accuse of a tendency to totalitarianism; on the other hand he was one of the “highest” bishops in the country. So of course this conjunction of the “pink” and the “high” was not invariable.
        As an ecclesiastical administrator the Bishop was no man of iron. A rather picturesque-looking aristocrat, he would listen, his eyes half-closed, the graceful silver-curling head bowed far more in sorrow than in anger, to the reports of his clerical watchdog—who was not a very fierce dog either. “Ah!” the Bishop would intone despondently as the Archdeacon uttered the dreadful word drink. “Mum!” the Bishop would softly ejaculate as the Archdeacon muttered young girls of fifteen (or choirboys in the Vestry ) as he reported his findings in connection with some poison pen letter, or on some accusation levelled at a curate who was said to use scent.
        But it is probable that were Rymer discovered (to make use of an extreme illustration), when the teller’s back was turned, with his hand in the till of the local branch bank in the nearby market-town, the Bishop would only murmur, “Rymer is an extremely impetuous clergyman, defective in judgement, I think. He is apt, don’t you agree, to forget that he is now a weighty and responsible incumbent and acts as wild curates sometimes do. In the present case he would undoubtedly have returned the bundle of five-pound notes later: for I assume he was testing the vigilance of the bank clerk. It is most like him to interfere in what does not concern him. Poor Rymer! Always his actions rather resemble those of the practical joker.” And were it further alleged that Rymer, when discovered, had produced a gun, which he pointed at the teller, the Bishop would have observed: “A revolver? Rymer would be more likely to blow himself up with such a weapon than to harm anyone else. It was clearly some prank—everything points to that, I think. Poor Rymer! I have often thought Rymer missed his vocation, he should have been an actor. However, I regard him as the right man for Bagwick, quite the right man. The people like him. And… as a living Bagwick is not a very attractive proposition.” Were Rymer on the other