“The Dean, madam,” said Sarah.
He bowed over her hand, for he had an archaic courtesy not unlike Isaac’s. He still called every woman “ma’am.” “I hope you are well, ma’am? I trust you have not suffered from the damp?”
“Thank you, Mr. Dean, I am pretty well. And I hope you have fully recovered from your cold. Will you please sit in that chair? You will not feel the draught there.”
An exchange of courtesies flowed between them until Sarah had left the room, and for a short while after. There was never any intimacy in the manner, only in the matter of their conversation with each other. Not even in their thoughts did they use Christian names. The easy manners of the later generations would have shocked both of them.
“Is Mrs. Ayscough well?” asked Miss Montague, and then, with generous warmth in her voice, “I could see her from where I sat in the Cathedral last Sunday. I thought I had never seen her look more beautiful.”
For a moment the Dean’s face lit up almost miraculously, then settled again into its habitual somber sadness. “She is not too well. The harshness of our climate has never suited her. She has an extreme delicacy.”
Miss Montague had her own opinion of Elaine Ayscough’s extreme delicacy, but it lent no asperity to her gentle words of sympathy. She did not know which of the two she was sorrier for, the man whose habit of hopeless love no indifference seemed to be able to break or the woman who had to bear year in, year out, the ennui of his unwanted devotion. Their predicament saddened her and she turned thankfully to a happy subject.
“Did you enjoy Mr. Peabody? He told me of your conversation together.”
Again the Dean’s face lit up. “I am much obliged to you for suggesting that we should talk together. It was a great privilege. I had not known quite how to approach him but the opportunity for conversation presented itself happily.”
“I am delighted, Mr. Dean, that for once in your life you have condescended to allow Almighty God the happiness of giving you a little pleasure.”
The Dean was frequently startled by the unexpectedness of Miss Montague’s remarks, and also, once he had got over the first shock, by their insight. “You are right,” he said slowly. “You are quite right. Years ago I decided that joy was not for me. Yes, I see. The decision was my own, not His, and therefore most presumptuous.”
“Though most natural,” said Miss Montague. “With so many burdens to bear on your shoulders it must have been difficult to look about you. But now you must, for you’ve not much longer to gratify heaven by taking a little joy. I have discovered, Mr. Dean, that in old age God seems to delight in giving us what our youth longed for and was denied. You know what that was in your case.”
“And so do you, I expect,” said the Dean, smiling at her. “Sometimes, ma’am, I think that you know everything.”
“Certainly not,” she said a little tartly. “But I do know that you will hurt the feelings alike of heaven and Mr. Peabody if you do not make a real study of the art of horology.”
“I am certainly very ignorant of it,” said the Dean humbly, “and far too unobservant. I have heard the ticking of your clock but I have never looked at it.” He adjusted his eyeglasses, located the Michael Neuwers on the mantelpiece and got up and looked at it. “This is a very beautiful clock.”
“I will tell you only that it is three hundred years old,” said Miss Montague. “You must ask Mr. Peabody to tell you about the man who made it. My Lyre clock was made by Mr. Peabody himself. The city is very proud of Mr. Peabody’s clocks. Have you ever noticed my Lyre clock? Over there on my escritoire.” The Dean crossed to her escritoire and bent and peered at the little circle of enameled birds. “The little man made this lovely thing himself?” he ejaculated.
He came back to his chair and sat with one hand behind his ear while Miss Montague told him about the day when she had bought the Lyre clock and made the acquaintance of Isaac Peabody. Only with Miss Montague was he sufficiently at ease to betray the fact that he was deaf. He knew that she did not mind speaking slowly and distinctly, for she was so perfectly leisured. “I was in trouble at the time,” she said. “I believe that I had lost my faith. Then Isaac put his clock in the window and gradually I found that I had not lost my faith. I shall be delighted if you will laugh at me.”
“Why should I laugh?” asked the Dean. “Genius creates from the heart and when men put love into their work there is power in it, there is a soul in the body. You have never seen my watch, ma’am. Mr. Peabody thinks it remarkable. He tells me it has a most unusual watch cock.”
“Please to be so good as to hand me my magnifying glass from inside my escritoire,” said Miss Montague.
Five minutes later they were sitting side by side absorbed in the watch. Then Miss Montague looked from the watch to the window, where she could just make out the great shape of the Cathedral towering like a mountain against the last of the afterglow. They were both so intricately, beautifully, wisely and lovingly fashioned that the only real difference between them was the unimportant one of size. She had been told of people who could hold some beautiful object in their hands and it would reveal the past to them. How powerful they must be then, these things that had been created from the heart. What beneficence had this watch already wrought? What blessings had it yet to give before some idiot smashed it? A deep shudder went through her.
“You are cold?” asked the Dean.
“No. I just thought of destruction. Of evil. Nothing is safe, not even the Cathedral. I felt afraid for the Cathedral. I felt afraid suddenly for the world. When evil gets a grip on men it always drives them to destroy.”
“Evil has hard work to get its hands on what it really wants to destroy,” said the Dean. “Which has eternal value, this watch or the love that made it? The body or the soul? How extraordinary that I should be asking this question of you, of all people!”
Miss Montague smiled but did not answer. There was a silence in which each spoke to the other though not in words. Love. The only indestructible thing. The only wealth and the only reality. The only survival. At the end of it all there was nothing else.
8. Sunday Morning
1.
ON the following Sunday the crisp, beautiful autumn weather was still holding and there was something of an air of festivity over the city. It was a century when Sunday was still important, and a cleavage between weekday and holy day as real as noticeable. The bells seemed to ring all day and all respectable people went to church except a mere handful of unbelievers such as Isaac, and they felt so much in the minority that during the hours of divine service they incarcerated themselves in their kitchens or libraries behind the newspaper, defiant or uncomfortable according to temperament, and did not issue out until churchgoing was accomplished. Sunday clothes were very glorious in the city in those days, and Sunday dinners rich and succulent. A rustle of silk petticoats, a froufrou of frills and flounces, made a soft murmuring undercurrent to the music of bells and voices during churchgoing hours, and as the morning wore on, the mingled scents of roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, onions and apple pie became ever more delectable.
In the houses in Angel Lane, which for the most part boasted only one small maid like Polly and yet where the appearance and customs of gentility must be upheld, the strain contingent upon getting into one’s best clothes, getting the dinner and getting to church all in the space of a few morning hours was very great. It was especially great at number twelve because Emma felt it her duty to take Polly to church with her in the morning instead of leaving her at home to mind the joint. She feared to let Polly stay alone in the house with Isaac, lest he corrupt her with his terrible freethinking notions, and she also feared to let her go to church by herself in the evening lest she collect followers. Indeed she scarcely dared let Polly out of her sight all day on Sunday lest some sort of evil befall her. At least that was what she believed to be the motive in her ceaseless vigilance over her little maid. She was unaware of her own terrible jealousy of Polly. The sympathy,
laughter and comprehension that spun like sunlight between Isaac and Polly, as once they had spun between Isaac and his mother, was something she refused to know about. Nor would she know that the orphanage child had in her that vital glow that she had never had. She lived too close to despair to have any strength left for self-knowledge. She might have been able to acknowledge herself unloved but to know herself unloving was beyond her strength.
That Sunday morning Polly was hard at it from an early hour, lighting the fires, getting and clearing breakfast, washing up, making the beds, peeling the potatoes and onions, putting the joint in the oven and making custard. The pastry she had made the day before, and she had cleaned all the shoes and starched Emma’s Sunday petticoats. While she was darting here and there, trying not to dance and sing, Emma was laying the table with meticulous care and Isaac was winding the clock and trying not to get under foot. Usually he hated Sundays but this one he felt was going to be different. His spirit was as sensitive to such things as a barometer and this morning he was aware of a change in the wind, disturbing perhaps, but eventually beneficent. When Emma, who had been upstairs changing into her Sunday best, came into the parlor drawing on her black kid gloves he turned to smile at her, swallowed nervously and gulped out, “You look nice, Emma. Is that a new bonnet?”
Emma stared at him. Her big black bonnet, with a sad black ostrich plume rearing up on top of it like a bedraggled cock about to crow, had been new five years ago. Her voluminous black bombazine gown was older still and she was glad to cover it with her mother’s cashmere shawl, old too but so soft that its long folds still retained their first beauty, and a whiff of the perfume that their mother had always used. Mrs. Peabody had kept all her maternal love for Isaac, and Emma, though nursing her mother with apparent devotion, had retaliated with many subtle cruelties, but she had persuaded herself now that there had always been perfect sympathy between them and she never failed to put orris root between the folds of the shawl.
“That is our mother’s shawl,” said Isaac.
Emma had been almost on the point of returning his smile but now a dead, shut look closed down over her sallow face. Isaac was always blind and stupid in all that concerned herself, instantly alert if anything recalled their mother. She turned from him in silence and took the big brassbound prayer book from a bookshelf. Then she rustled and crackled through the door calling, “Polly, I am waiting.” Polly came stepping very demurely down the stairs, but the demureness emphasized the gaiety of the crimson ribbons on her bonnet and the sparkle in her eyes, and as she came the bells began to ring. Isaac opened the front door and light and air and music poured in, broke against Emma like bright water against a dark rock, flowed around her, joined behind her, and to Isaac’s fancy filled the house. “Shut the door, Isaac,” said Emma sharply from the pavement. Isaac did so and then leaned against it chuckling. “Too late, Emma,” he said. “It’s in.”
He stayed where he was, almost too happy to move. The bells seemed to him to be ringing almost in the walls of the little house, and the reverberation of organ music came nearer and nearer. Two great eyes burned in the dimness of the passage, a majestic presence approached and the music boomed about his legs. A solid softness was pressed against him, now here, now there, as Sooty weaved and turned and hummed. There were now no women in the house, nor would be for a blessed ninety minutes. Sooty led the way to the kitchen and the two males ensconced themselves before the fire. Isaac took his coat off and sat in his shirt sleeves, his feet on the fender and his pipe in his mouth. Emma did not allow him to smoke, but he had discovered that if he left the window open fresh air and the smell of the roast counteracted the aroma of tobacco, and his sins did not find him out. He placed his spectacles upon his nose and opened the paper. He read and smoked a while. Sooty purred, then slept. From the garden the sharp, sweet, autumnal song of a robin pierced him and then ceased. He continued to hold his paper in front of his nose but he no longer read it. When the bells fell silent he always tried hard not to think of the city’s preoccupation at this hour, but he always did, with anger and guilt. Yet today he remembered it without anger, even with a certain nostalgic pleasure and one of those flashes of vision that came in his good times.
In all the old churches of the city the congregations had rustled to their knees. In St. Peter’s in the market place Emma was kneeling beside the black marble tablet on the wall that commemorated their father’s virtues, her sallow face hidden within her bonnet, with Polly beside her peeping bright-eyed through her interlaced fingers. In the Cathedral the Dean knelt with bowed head in his carved and canopied stall, his ugly strong hands clasped on the white page of the great book that lay open before him. Somewhere within the shadows was an old lady in a Bath chair, her mittened hands folded together on the rug that covered her knees. As quietness grew in Isaac he became aware of a multitude of men and women kneeling in churches all over the world, thousands of them, and heard the murmur of their prayer rising louder and louder like a mounting wind in forest trees; yet in the forefront of his seeing, those two pairs of clasped hands, old and misshapen, held his attention with a sense of symbolic strength and beauty. The wind shook him, coming from he knew not where and going he knew not where, but a harsh grating voice in his ears was audible to him above its power, speaking for him and for the city. “O Lord, have mercy upon us, miserable offenders. Spare thou them, O God, which confess their faults. Restore thou them that are penitent.” He would have tried to escape, as he had escaped from the Cathedral a few nights ago, but it was for the city, and he had opened the door to it himself. They were deceived, they prayed to a vacuum, to that dark shapelessness that terrified him, but the love with which they prayed had reality; he knew that, for he had experienced love.
He knocked his pipe out. His paper rustled to the floor and his spectacles slid down his nose. His hands, red and shiny, lay relaxed on his knee. He abandoned himself to the quietness and the warmth of sun and fire. Autumn was a strange paradoxical time of the year. It was the season when he was happiest and yet it was the season when he was most vulnerable and most aware, and that was not always a happiness. Yet he liked autumn. As he dropped asleep he heard again the sharp, sweet, robin’s song.
He woke and saw a mouse on the floor, by the coal scuttle, not three feet from where Sooty slept. He looked at it for several minutes, admiring the delicate ears and the curve of its tail, happy with it, until it slowly dawned upon him that this close juxtaposition of himself, Sooty and a mouse, was unusual. He stirred Sooty with his foot, woke him up and indicated the mouse. Sooty yawned, looked at the mouse, glanced contemptuously in Isaac’s direction and went to sleep again. Isaac leaned forward and poked the mouse with his pipe stem. It did not run away. He leaned still farther forward and picked the mouse up by its tail. Then he carried it to the window and stood there holding it, excitement mounting in him. It was a wooden mouse with a tarred string tail, a common enough toy but fashioned with such love of mouse that it was almost more mouselike than a real one. It revealed, so to speak, the essence of mouse, swift and slinking, endearing and alarming all at once. Who had made it? Not Polly. She was of the pelican breed, not the beaver kind. She was not creative. But this craftsman was such another as he was himself. He could have made this mouse and its creator could have fashioned the cuckoo that flew out of the clock in the shop window. Isaac’s face was pink with pleasure. He was not a man to begrudge another proficiency in his own craft. He had never felt jealous in his life. He wrapped the mouse carefully in his clean Sunday handkerchief and put it in his pocket. Emma must not see it. She was perfectly capable of putting it in the dustbin. What had Polly been thinking of to leave it lying on the floor? For it must belong to Polly.
He went back to his chair, lit his pipe again and looked at the clock. Three quarters of an hour had passed and stillness held the city. It must be sermon time. He saw Polly sitting very upright on the hard bench, her eyes fixed on the preacher’s face, her own small countenance rather wickedly demur
e within her bonnet, for her thoughts were not where they should be. He shrunk away from the dark figure of Emma beside her; he did not want to see Emma. Instead he tried to see the Dean sitting in his high canopied stall. But he was not sitting, he was kneeling, his face hidden in his hands. To his side came a man in a black gown, bearing a golden wand, and the Dean rose and followed him. They paced slowly beneath the huge shadowed roof from which the sunbeams fell like spears, and then the Dean was mounting up and up as though, Isaac thought, to some scaffold, or to some high place that was as fearful to him as a scaffold would have been. The pulpit, thought Isaac, the pulpit. I did not know he hated to preach. Isaac was distressed. What could he do? There was nothing he could do and he was suddenly so unhappy that he opened the paper and immersed himself in the sporting news.
2.
Polly did not dislike churchgoing, indeed she loved it, though she could not read the prayer book in which Emma so carefully found the places for her, or understand a word of the Reverend Augustus Penny’s rambling sermon; in fact few people could, so ancient was Mr. Penny and so muddled in his head. She loved it because sometimes, when she and Emma came in, she saw a shabby figure at the back of the church, hidden in a dark corner by a dusty marble monument. Job. Walking in behind Emma she dared not even smile at him and when she came out again he was always gone, but even that much of Job was enough to make her day glorious.