Mr Jones sat staring at his paper, while his bacon and eggs grew colder and colder, unheeded, on his plate.
THE DEAN’S BARGAIN
Dermot Chesson Spence
One of the most neglected pre-war fantasy writers is Dermot Chesson Spence, now remembered only for his short stories ‘The House on the Rynek’ and ‘Little Red Shoes’ (which first appeared in Nightmare by Daylight, a 1936 anthology, under the pseudonym ‘Gordon Chesson’). His own collection Little Red Shoes, and other tales of the odd and unseen (1937) was ‘dedicated to my predecessors and superiors, Fryn Tennyson Jesse, Montague Rhodes James, and William Hope Hodgson, in humble emulation’.
It was after the Puffin-Mandragora wedding that the Dean of Avon unburdened himself to me.
I have always, said the Dean, been an amateur collector of old books, and you yourself know how the closes of cathedral cities abound—on their outskirts, of course—with cobwebbed windows through which divinity calf gleams dully, and open trays which offer you the wealth of the world’s best brains for sixpence. An embarrassing choice between Temple’s Sermons—incomplete; Gray, in Johnson’s series, unbacked and badly foxed; and Tarzan the Anthropoid, cheap edition, mint. Well, you admit the fascination? It is now four years since I last bought an old book, and you might be interested to know why. Collecting is a virus in the blood, and it takes more than effort of the will or a shortness in the purse to eradicate it . . . but a shock may!
Fifteen years ago, when I was a minor canon of Avon, a theologian and a bibliophile, I had agents with little commissions of mine on the look-out at all local sales. But it was at Olyfathers in the ‘entry dark’ that I myself found the book, a small duodecimo volume, that was to change my outlook on life. I was rummaging among Olyfathers’s dustiest shelves when I found this little old Bible and prayer book. It had, of course, been ruthlessly cut down, even encroaching on the type area itself . . . Some enthusiast had ruled out the chapter-heads of the bible in red ink—a conscientious, neat piece of rubricating, and more or less contemporary. Two things attracted me: at the end were the metrical psalms of Sternold and Hopkins, the earlier version and the tunes with their four-line staves and the attractive diamond-headed crotchets—but I must be boring you with these minutiae. Suffice it to say that I bought the little book for a not very large sum and took it home.
You will also have realized that I am—or rather, was—of a curious and enquiring turn of mind, and when I found that the fly-leaves at the beginning of my seventeenth-century Bible were pasted firmly down, it naturally became my one desire to unpaste them and see why this had been done. There was, for instance, no suggestion in the condition of the book of weakness in the binding to warrant it!
As a good churchman I should, I suppose, have been very shocked at what I found, for what was written there was a Commination or Curse, neatly set out in a clerkly hand, and still superbly legible. For many reasons I will not repeat the text of the course, one being that it was in monkish Latin, and that I myself still do not know what several of the words mean. But above the text was written in a different and more Italianate hand, Maledictus Maledicat (May the Accursed One Curse), and at the end, ‘This have I found most operative. Jos. Damm, 1667. Maledictus Maledicatur’ (May the Accursed One be Accursed). Joseph Damm, I may add, was a minor canon at the time, and later became a bishop. He died rather suddenly towards the end of Charles the Second’s reign. The Curse—which nothing will induce me to repeat—was short and to the point, calling upon some body unknown to me to blast a designated object or person in the name of a third person whom we all know under various other names. Doctor Joseph Damm seems otherwise to have been a very religious sort of man, and the sermons, which he later published, show mainly a tendency to overstatement as to the probable fate of all who subscribed to, or even acquiesced in, the continuance of the licence of the Metropolis. It is almost an obsession of his! But he seems to have been a capable man according to his lights. Something in the wording of the Curse seemed to indicate that a common allegiance was a condition of the contract. However fascinating this might be, it was certainly no concern of a good twentieth-century churchman, and I determined to put it out of my mind, as doubtless Joseph Damm did after he wrote his note and cautiously pasted down the fly-leaf. ‘Most operative.’ That was a queer thing to say, and a dangerous one. It smelled of the faggot!
I did succeed in forgetting, and my life went on placidly enough until, some three years later, I was asked to give a series of Ember-day sermons in one of our outlying parishes. I have always liked St Barnaby’s, as the church is called. It is a symphony in cool Gothic and they have avoided the temptation to ‘darken council’ by putting in modern stained glass. Petrie—the vicar—had thanked Heaven for this appointment after his slum parish. He was, I may say, doing equally good work here in the heart of the country. It was the first time I had ever preached in his little church, though I had helped to marry two most marriageable nieces there in the past. Careless bachelor though I am, I do take my vocation seriously, and like my sermons to be as helpful as may be. A good delivery is important, and in a small church nothing is easier than to thunder too loudly. One becomes ludicrous, the congregation restless, and the Truth is lost in a welter of sound. Excuse me for riding my hobby before you . . . Anyway, I went down to Deepdale the week before just to try out the ‘acoustics’.
I had stepped up into the pulpit to recite First Corinthians Thirteen from memory to Petrie, down by the font, when my eye lit upon the Horror. I have mentioned before the still beauty of this grey old church, and the quiet contribution to the whole peaceful atmosphere supplied by the thin windows of white glass. Now all this concord was shattered. Midway down the decani side was a hodge-podge, a fruit-salad, a kaleidoscope of coloured glass, and what colours! Rich pillar-box reds, vivacious yellows and umbers, and an imperial purple to top the lot. When I got down from the pulpit, I seized Petrie and rushed him out in the wholesome sunshine. I told him that I didn’t think I could preach with that monstrosity of ill-taste before my eyes. How could he ever have allowed it to be erected? Had he no sense of responsibility for the beautiful house that was his care? ‘The church-wardens think it very tasty,’ he said gloomily, ‘and there’s more to come; the balance of the national saints of Britain by the same artist. It was a dying bequest from one of my villagers who went away to Leeds and “made good”. Don’t, for pity’s sake, think that I have done anything to make it easy for them. But the village likes it. It encourages them to “go and do likewise”’.