The Singer Not The Song [antikvár]

Chapter One It would not be an easy interview. The Bishop was aware that the priest he appointed to the parish of Quantana might well be facing death. He touched a bell on his desk and said to the secretary who answered it, "I will see him in ten minutes." Beneath the Bishop's window the crowd jostled. It seemed in perpetual danger from the impatient congested traffic. There were times when it struck the Bishop as little short of a miracle that the scene below was not transformed into one colossal and fatal collision. There were times when he gritted his teeth looking down on the shining moving mass, appalled at the recklessness of a driver determined to outdo a rival. If he opened his windows the nőise feli into the room, almost solid in its deafening intensity. The Bishop, country born and bred, could never accustom himself to the nőise. He kept his windows closed against it whenever he wished to concentrate. He closed them himself before his interview with the priest. Amongst the more obvious, the parish of Quantana needed a quality upon which the Bishop found it diíficult to place his finger. He was not sure that it might not be summed up simply as common sense'-but it seemed an unimpressive virtue to ask of men who possessed so many more altruistic virtues, and who might through the very nature of them be justifiably convinced that it would rank as the least important. Nevertheless, in order that he might not lose sight of its value himself the Bishop had written a reminder upon his blotter-'Instinctive common sense, underlined it and sketched beside it for no particular reason a sword and a heart. He was a little ashamed of the drawing. He considered 'doodling' the self-indulgence of a fidgety mind. Yet he was an inveterate doodler. There were several occasions upon which the Bishop had felt obliged to return to his desk upon somé pretext or other, in order to remove from the eyes of the arid young man who was his secretary a series of capering pigs upon a sheet of green blottingpaper.