The Cathedral by Hugh Walpole

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"What kind of a thing, dear?"

"It's to do with the export trade. Travelling about. I should like that.
I'm a bit restless, I'm afraid. I should want to put some money into it,
of course, but the governor will let me have something.... He wants me to
go into Parliament."

"Parliament?"

"Yes," Falk laughed. "That's his latest idea. He was talking about it the
other night. Of course, that's foolishness. It's not my line at all. I
told him so."

"I wouldn't like you to go away altogether," she repeated. "It would make
a great difference to me."

"Would it really?" He had a strange mysterious impulse to speak to her
about Annie Hogg. The thought of his mother and Annie Hogg together showed
him at once how impossible that was. They were in separate worlds. He was
suddenly angry at the difficulties that life was making for him without
his own wish. "Oh, I'll be here some time yet, mother," he said. "Well, I
must get along now. I've got an appointment with a fellow."

She smiled and disappeared into her room.

All the way into Seatown he was baffled and irritated by this little
conversation. It seemed that you could not disregard people by simply
determining to disregard them. All the time behind you and them some force
was insisting on places being taken, connections being formed. One was
simply a bally pawn...a bally pawn....

But what was his mother thinking? Had some one been talking to her?
Perhaps already she knew about Annie. But what could she know? Girls like
Annie were outside her ken. What could his mother know about life? The day
did not help his dissatisfaction. The fog had not descended upon the town,
but it had sent as its forerunner a wet sea mist, dim and intangible,
depressing because it removed all beauty and did not leave even
challenging ugliness in its place.

On the best of days Seatown was not beautiful. I have read in books
romantic descriptions of Glebeshire coves, Glebeshire towns with the
romantic Inn, the sanded floor, fishermen with gold rings in their ears
and strange oaths upon their lips. In one book I remember there was a fine
picture of such a place, with beautiful girls dancing and mysterious old
men telling mysterious tales about ghosts and goblins, and, of course,
somewhere in the distance some one was singing a chanty, and the moon was
rising, and there was a nice little piece of Glebeshire dialect thrown in.
All very pretty.... Seatown cannot claim such prettiness. Perhaps once
long ago, when there were only the Cathedral, the Castle, the Rock, and a
few cottages down by the river, when, at night-tide, strange foreign ships
came up from the sea, when the woods were wild forest and the downs were
bare and savage, Seatown had its romance, but that was long ago. Seatown,
in these latter days, was a place of bad drainage, bad drinking, bad
living and bad dying. The men who haunted its dirty, narrow little streets
were loafers and idlers and castaways. The women were, most of them, no
better than they should be, and the children were the most slatternly and
ill-bred in the whole of Glebeshire. Small credit to the Canons and the
Town Councillors and the prosperous farmers that it was so, but in their
defence it might be urged that it needed a very valiant Canon and the most
fearless of Town Councillors to disturb that little nest. And the time
came when it was disturbed....

Even the Pol, a handsome river enough out beyond the town in the reaches
of the woods, was no pretty sight at low tide when there was nothing to
see but a thin, sluggish grey stream filtering through banks of mud to its
destination, the sea. At high tide the river beat up against the crazy
stone wall that bordered Pennicent Street; and on the further side there
were green fields and a rising hill with a feathery wood to crown it. From
the river, coming up through the green banks, Seatown looked picturesque,
with its disordered cottages scrambling in confusion at the tail of the
rock and the Cathedral and Castle nobly dominating it. That distant view
is the best thing to be said for Seatown.

To-day, in the drizzling mist, the place was horribly depressing. Falk
plunged down into Bridge Street as into a damp stuffy well. Here some of
the houses had once been fine; there were porticoes and deep-set doors and
bow-windows, making them poor relations of the handsome benevolent
Georgian houses in Orange Street. The street, top-tilting down to the
river, was slovenly with dirt and carelessness. Many of the windows were
broken, their panes stuffed with paper; washing hung from house to house.
The windows that were not broken were hermetically sealed and filled with
grimy plants and ferns, and here and there a photograph of an embarrassed
sailor or a smiling married couple or an overdressed young woman placed
face outward to the street. Bridge Street tumbled with a dirty absent-
mindedness into Pennicent Street. This, the main thoroughfare of Seatown,
must have been once a handsome cobbled walk by the river-side. The houses,
more than in Bridge Street, showed by their pillared doorways and their
faded red brick that they had once been gentlemen's residences, with
gardens, perhaps, running to the river's edge and a fine view of the
meadows and woods beyond. To-day all was shrouded in a mist that was never
stationary, that seemed alive in its shifting movement, revealing here a
window, there a door, now a chimney-pot, now steps that seemed to lead
into air, and the river, now at full tide and lapping the stone wall,
seemed its drunken bewildered voice.

"Bally pawns, that's what we are," Falk muttered again. It seemed to be
the logical conclusion of the thoughts that had worried him, likes flies,
during his walk. Some one lurched against him as he stayed for a moment to
search for the inn. A hot spasm of anger rose in him, so sudden and fierce
that he was frightened by it, as though he had seen his own face in a
mirror. But he said nothing. "Sorry," said a voice, and shadow faded into
shadow.

He found the "Dog and Pilchard" easily enough. Just beyond it the river
was caught into a kind of waterfall by a ridge of stone that projected
almost into mid-stream. At high tide it tumbled over this obstruction with
an astonished splash and gurgle. Even when the river was at its lowest
there was a dim chattering struggle at this point. Falk always connected
this noise with the inn and the power or enchantment of the inn that held
him--"Black Enchantment," perhaps. He was to hear that struggling chatter
of the river until his dying day.

He pushed through the passage and turned to the right into the bar. A damp
day like this always served Hogg's trade. The gas was lit and sizzled
overhead with a noise as though it commented ironically on the fatuity of
the human beings beneath it. The room was full, but most of the men--
seamen, loafers, a country man or two--crowded up to the bar. Falk crossed
to a table in the corner near the window, his accustomed seat. No one
seemed to notice him, but soon Hogg, stout and smiling, came over to him.
No one had ever seen Samuel Hogg out of temper--no, never, not even when
there had been fighting in the place and he had been compelled to eject
men, by force of arms, through the doors and windows. There had not been
many fights there. Men were afraid of him, in spite of his imperturbable
good temper. Men said of him that he would stick at nothing, although what
exactly was meant by that no one knew.

He had a good word for every one; no crime or human failing could shock
him. He laughed at everything. And yet men feared him. Perhaps for that
very reason. The worst sinner has some kind of standard of right and
wrong. Himself he may not keep it, but he likes to see it there. "Oh, he's
deep," was Seatown's verdict on Samuel Hogg, and it is certain that the
late Mrs. Hogg had not been, in spite of her husband's good temper, a
happy woman.

He came up to Falk now,--smiling, and asked him what he would have. "Nasty
day," he said. Falk ordered his drink. Dimly through the mist and
thickened air the Cathedral chimes recorded the hour. Funny how you could
hear them in every nook and corner of Polchester.

"Likely turn to rain before night," Hogg said, as he turned back to the
bar. Falk sat there watching. Some of the men he knew, some he did not,
but to-day they were all shadows to him. Strange how, from the moment that
he crossed the threshold of that place, hot, burning excitement and
expectation lapped him about, swimming up to him, engulfing him, swamping
him body and soul. He sat there drowned in it, not stirring, his eyes
fixed upon the door. There was a good deal of noise, laughter, swearing,
voices raised and dropped, forming a kind of skyline, and above this a
voice telling an interminable tale.

Annie Hogg came in, and at once Falk's throat contracted and his heart
hammered in the palms of his hands. She moved about, talking to the men,
fetching drinks, unconcerned and aloof as she always was. Seen there in
the mist of the overcrowded and evil-smelling room, there was nothing very
remarkable about her. Stalwart and resolute and self-possessed she looked;
sometimes she was beautiful, but not now. She was a woman at whom most men
would havel ooked twice. Her expression was not sullen nor disdainful; in
that, perhaps, there was something fine, because there was life, of its
own kind, in her eyes, and independence in the carriage of her head.

Falk never took his eyes from her. At that moment she came down the room
and saw him. She did not come over to him at once, but stopped and talked
to some one at another table. At last she was beside him, standing up
against his table and looking over his head at the window behind him.

"Nasty weather, Mr. Brandon," she said. Her voice was low and not
unpleasant; although she rolled her r's her Glebeshire accent was not very
strong, and she spoke slowly, as though she were trying to choose her
words.

"Yes," Falk answered. "Good for your trade, though."

"Dirty weather always brings them in," she said.

He did not look at her.

"Been busy to-day?"

"Nothing much this morning," she answered. "I've been away at my aunt's,
out to Borheddon, these last two days."

"Yes. I saw you were not here," he said. "Did you have a good time?"

"Middling," she answered. "My aunt's been terrible bad with bronchitis
this winter. Poor soul, it'll carry her off one of these days, I reckon."

"What's Borheddon like?" he asked.

"Nothing much. Nothing to do, you know. But I like a bit of quiet just for
a day or two. How've you been keeping, Mr. Brandon?"

"Oh, I'm all right. I shall be off to London to look for a job one of
these days."

He looked up at her suddenly, sharply, as though he wanted to catch her
interest. But she showed no emotion.

"Well, I expect this is slow for you, a little place like this. Plenty
going on in London, I expect."

"Yes. Do you ever think you'd like to go there?"

"Daresay I shall one of these days. Never know your luck. But I'm not
terrible anxious.... Well, I must be getting on."

He caught her eyes and held them.

"Come back for a moment when you're less busy. I've got something I want
to say to you."

Very slightly the colour rose in her dark cheek.

"All right," she said.

When she had gone he drew a deep breath, as though he had surmounted some
great and sudden danger. He felt that if she had refused to come he would
have risen and broken everything in the place. Now, as though he had, by
that little conversation with her, reassured himself about her, he looked
around the room. His attention was at once attracted by a man who was
sitting in the further corner, his back against the wall, opposite to him.

This was a man remarkable for his extreme thinness, for the wild lock of
black hair that fell over his forehead and almost into his eyes, and for a
certain sort of threadbare and dissolute distinction which hung about him.
Falk knew him slightly. His name was Edmund Davray, and he had lived in
Polchester now for a considerable number of years. He was an artist, and
had arrived in the town one summer on a walking tour through Glebeshire.
He had attracted attention at once by the quality of his painting, by the
volubility of his manner, and by his general air of being a person of
considerable distinction. His surname was French, but no one knew anything
with any certainty about him. Something attracted him in Polchester, and
he stayed. He soon gave it out that it was the Cathedral that fascinated
him; he painted a number of remarkable sketches of the nave, the choir,
Saint Margaret's Chapel, the Black Bishop's Tomb. He had a "show" in
London and was supposed to have done very well out of it. He disappeared
for a little, but soon returned, and was to be found in the Cathedral most
days of the week.

At first he had a little studio at the top of Orange Street. At this time
he was rather popular in Polchester society. Mrs. Combermere took him up
and found him audacious and amusing. His French name gave a kind of
piquancy to his audacity; he was unusual; he was striking. It was right
for Polchester to have an artist and to stick him up in the very middle of
the town as an emblem of taste and culture. Soon, however, he began to
decline. It was whispered that he drank, that his morals were "only what
you'd expect of an artist," and that he was really "too queer about the
Cathedral." One day he told Miss Dobell that the amount that she knew
about literature would go inside a very small pea, and he was certainly
"the worse for liquor" at one of Mrs. Combermere's tea-parties. He did
not, however, give them time to drop him; he dropped himself, gave up his
Orange Street studio, lived, no one knew where, neglected his appearance,
and drank quite freely whenever he could get anything to drink. He now cut
everybody, rather than allowed himself to be cut.

He was in the Cathedral as often as ever, and Lawrence and Cobbett, the
Vergers, longed to have an excuse for expelling him, but he always behaved
himself there and was in nobody's way. He was finally regarded as "quite
mad," and was seen to talk aloud to himself as he walked about the
streets.

"An unhappy example," Miss Dobell said, "of the artistic temperament, that
wonderful gift, gone wrong."

Falk had seen him often before at the "Dog and Pilchard," and had wondered
at first whether Annie Hogg was the attraction. It was soon clear,
however, that there was nothing in that. He never looked at the girl nor,
indeed, at any one else in the place. He simply sat there moodily staring
in front of him and drinking.

To-day it was clear that Falk had caught his attention. He looked across
the room at him with a queer defiant glance, something like Falk's own.
Once it seemed that he had made up his mind to come over and speak to him.

He half rose in his seat, then sank back again. But his eyes came round
again and again to the corner where Falk was sitting.

The Cathedral chimes had whispered twice in the room before Annie
returned.

"What is it you're wanting?" she asked.

"Come outside and speak to me."

"No, I can't do that. Father's watching."

"Well, will you meet me one evening and have a talk?"

"What about?"

"Several things."

"It isn't right, Mr. Brandon. What's a gentleman like you want with a girl
like me?"

"I only want us to get away a little from all this noise and filth."

Suddenly she smiled.

"Well, I don't mind if I do. After supper's a good time. Father goes up
the town to play billiards. After eight."

"When?"

"What about to-morrow evening?"

"All right. Where?"

"Up to the Mill. Five minutes up from here."

"I'll be there," he said.

"Don't let father catch 'ee--that's all," she smiled down at him. "You'm a
fule, Mr. Brandon, to bother with such as I." He said 'nothing and she
walked away. Very shortly after, Davray got up from his seat and came over
to Falk's corner. It was obvious that he had been drinking rather heavily.
He was a little unsteady on his feet.

"You're young Brandon, aren't you?" he asked.

In ordinary times Falk would have told him to go to the devil, and there
would have been a row, but to-day he was caught away so absolutely into
his own world that any one could speak to him, any one laugh at him, any
one insult him, and he would not care. He had been meditating for weeks
the advance that he had just taken; always when one meditates for long
over a risk it swells into gigantic proportions. So this had been; that
simple sentence asking her to come out and talk to him had seemed an
impossible challenge to every kind of fate, and now, in a moment, the gulf
had been jumped...so easy, so strangely easy....

From a great distance Davray's words came to him, and in the dialogue that
followed he spoke like a somnambulist.

"Yes," he said, "my name's Brandon."

"I knew, of course," said Davray. "I've seen you about." He spoke with
great swiftness, the words tumbling over one another, not with eagerness,
but rather with a kind of supercilious carelessness. "Beastly hole, isn't
this? Wonder why one comes here. Must do something in this rotten town.
I've drunk enough of this filthy beer. What do you say to moving out?"

Falk looked up at him.

"What do you say?" he asked.

"Let's move out of this. If you're walking up the town I'll go with you."

Falk was not conscious of the man, but it was quite true that he wanted to
get out of the place now that his job in it was done. He got up without a
word and began to push through the room. He was met near the door by Hogg.

"Goin', Mr. Brandon? Like to settle now or leave it to another day?"

"What's that?" said Falk, stopping as though some one had touched him on
the shoulder. He seemed to see the large smiling man suddenly in front of
him outlined against a shifting wall of mist.

"Payin' now or leavin' it? Please yourself, Mr. Brandon."

"Oh--paying!" He fumbled in his pocket, produced half-a-crown, gave it to
Hogg without looking at him and went out. Davray followed, slouching
through the room and passage with the conceited over-careful walk of a man
a little tipsy.

Outside, as they went down the street still obscured with the wet mist,
Davray poured out a flow of words to which he seemed to want no answer.

"I hope you didn't mind my speaking to you like that--a bit
unceremonious. But to tell you the truth I'm lonely sometimes. Also, if
you want to know the whole truth and nothing but the truth, I'm a bit
tipsy too. Generally am. This air makes one feel queer after that stinking
hole, doesn't it? If you can call this air. I've seen you there a lot
lately and often thought I'd like to talk to you. You're the only decent-
looking fellow in the whole of this town, if you'll forgive my saying so.
Isn't it a bloody hole? But of course you think so too. I can see it in
your face. I suppose you go to that pub after that girl. I saw you talking
to her. Well, each man to his taste. I'd never interfere with any man's
pleasure. I loathe women myself, always have. They never appealed to me a
little bit. In Paris the men used to wonder what I was after. I was after
Ambition in those days. Funny thing, but I thought I was going to be a
great painter once. Queer what one can trick oneself into believing--so I
might have been if I hadn't come to this beastly town. Hope I'm not boring
you...."

He stopped as though he had suddenly realised that his companion had not
said a word. They were pushing now up the hill into the market-place and
the mist was now so thick that they could scarcely see one another's face.
Falk was thinking. "To-morrow evening.... What do I want? What's going to
happen? What do I want?"

The silence made him conscious of his companion.

"What do you say?" he asked.

"Hope I'm not boring you."

"No, that's all right. Where are we?"

"Just coming into the market."

"Oh, yes."

"If I talk a lot it's because I haven't had any one to talk to for weeks.
Not that I want to talk to any one. I despise the lot of them. Conceited
set of ignorant parrots.... Whole place run by women and what can you
expect? You're not staying here, I suppose. I heard you'd had enough of
Oxford and I don't wonder. No place for a man, beautiful enough but spoilt
by the people. _Damn_ people--always coming along and spoiling
places. Now there's the Cathedral, most wonderful thing in England, but
does any one know it? Not a bit of it. You'd think they fancied that the
Cathedral _owes_ them something--about as much sense of beauty as a
cockroach."

They were pressing up the High Street now. There was no one about. It was
a town of ghosts. By the Arden Gate Falk realised where he was and halted.

"Hullo! we're nearly home.... Well...good afternoon, Mr. Davray."

"Come into the Cathedral for a moment," Davray seemed to be urgent about
this. "Have you ever been up into the King Harry Tower? I bet you
haven't."

"King Harry Tower?..." Falk stared at the man. What did the fellow want
him to do? Go into the Cathedral? Well, why not? Stupid to go home just
now--nothing to do there but think, and people would interrupt.... Think
better out of doors. But what was there to think about? He was not
thinking, simply going round and round.... Who was this fellow anyway?

"As you like," he said.

They crossed the Precincts and went through the West door into the
Cathedral. The nave was full of dusky light and very still. Candles
glimmered behind the great choir-screen and there were lamps by the West
door. Seen thus, in its half-dark, the nave bore full witness to the fact
that Polchester has the largest Cathedral in Northern Europe. It is
certainly true that no other building in England gives the same
overwhelming sense of length.

In full daylight the nave perhaps, as is the case with all English
Cathedrals, lacks colour and seems cold and deserted. In the dark of this
spring evening it was full of mystery, and the great columns of the nave's
ten bays, rising unbroken to the roof groining, sprang, it seemed, out of
air, superbly, intolerably inhuman.

The colours from the tombs and the brasses glimmered against the grey, and
the great rose-coloured circle of the West window flung pale lights across
the cold dark of the flags and pillars.

The two men were held by the mysterious majesty of the place. Falk was
lifted right out of his own preoccupied thoughts.

He had never considered the Cathedral except as a place to which he was
dragged for services against his will, but to-night, perhaps because of
his own crisis, he seemed to see it all for the first time. He was
conscious now of Davray and was aware that he did not like him and wished
to be rid of him--"an awful-looking tout" he thought him, "with his greasy
long hair and his white long face and his spindle legs."

"Now we'll go up into King Harry," Davray said. But at that moment old
Lawrence came bustling along. Lawrence, over seventy years of age, had
grown stout and white-haired in the Cathedral's service. He was a fine
figure in his purple gown, broad-shouldered, his chest and stomach of a
grand protuberance, his broad white flowing beard a true emblem of his
ancient dignity. He was the most autocratic of Vergers and had been
allowed now for many years to do as he pleased. The only thorn in his
flesh was Cobbett, the junior Verger, who, as he very well realised, was
longing for him to die, that he might step into his shoes. "I do believe,"
he was accustomed to say to Mrs. Lawrence, a little be-bullied woman,
"that that man will poison me one of these fine days."

His autocracy had grown on him with the size and the whiteness of his
beard, and there were many complaints--rude to strangers, sycophantic to
the aristocracy, greedy of tips, insolent and conceited, he was an
excellent example of the proper spirit of the Church Militant. He had,
however, his merits. He loved small children and would have allowed them
to run riot on the Cathedral greens had he not been checked, and he had a
pride in the Cathedral that would drive him to any sacrifice in his
defence of it.

It was natural enough that he should hate the very sight of Davray, and
when that gentleman appeared he hung about in the background hoping that
he might catch him in some crime. At first he thought him alone.

"Oh, Verger," Davray said, as though he were speaking to a beggar who had
asked of him alms. "I want to go up into King Harry. You have the key, I
think."

"Well, you can't, sir," said Lawrence, with considerable satisfaction.
"'Tis after hours." Then he saw Falk.

"Oh, I beg your pardon, Mr. Brandon, sir. I didn't realise. Do you want to
go up the Tower, sir?"

"We may as well," said Falk.

"Of course for you, sir, it's different. Strangers have to keep certain
hours. This way, sir."

They followed the pompous old man across the nave, up the side aisle, past
"tombs and monuments and gilded knights," until they came to the King
Harry Chapel. This was to the right of the choir, and before the screen
that railed it off from the rest of the church there was a notice saying
that this Chapel had been put aside for private prayer and it was hoped
that no one would talk or make any noise, were some one meditating or
praying there. The little place was infinitely quiet, with a special air
of peace and beauty as though all the prayers and meditations that had
been offered there had deeply sanctified it; Lawrence pushed open the door
of the screen and they crossed the flagged floor. Suddenly into the heart
of the hush there broke the Cathedral chimes, almost, as it seemed,
directly above their heads, booming, echoing, dying with lingering music
back into the silence. At the corner of the Chapel there was a little
wooden door; Lawrence unlocked it and pushed it open. "Mind how you go,
sir," he said, speaking to Falk as though Davray did not exist. "'Tis a
bit difficult with the winding stair."

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