He forged his way along the street as though against a high wind, talking to himself, seeing no one, his hat a little crooked and his stick whirling around and around in his hand. The rumor that the Dean was going queer in the head had whispered around the city after he had been seen wheeling a cuckoo clock across the market place in company with Isaac Peabody and Bella Havelock, and now it blew up in his wake like the rustle of autumn leaves, stirred by the wind of his peculiar passing. By nightfall it had curiously softened the city’s feelings toward him. Perhaps the great men of the Close were not as immune from worry as had been generally supposed. Perhaps even the great Dean had his troubles. And if he had them, he who was so curiously the city, were they not the city’s also?
The flight of steep steps that led down to Swithin’s Lane was well known to the Dean both in darkness and daylight, but in the strange pallid half-light that was creeping over the city on this autumn afternoon, the dirty twisting steps and the dark doorways on either side looked more than usually sordid and evil. It was a queer sort of light, yellow and murky. All day the clouds had been gathering and it had been obvious that the spell of calm and lovely weather was over. Was there going to be a storm? The Dean trusted that Elaine and Bella were safely within doors and was glad that the market was now over. A deluge upon those bright gay stalls was not to be desired. The market ended at two-thirty in the winter in order that the beasts might be driven home before dark. Albert Lee, the Dean hoped, would now be at his shop again.
He reached Swithin’s Lane and opposite him across the street was St. Nicholas at the North Gate. St. Nicholas was a daughter church of St. Matthew’s at the South Gate, so small as to be hardly more than a chapel and so old that it looked more like a rock than a building. It had been called after Saint Nicholas, the mariners’ saint, because the North Gate beside it had opened directly on the river steps where the great barges had in days gone by unloaded their gear. South Gate, East Gate and West Gate were only names now, their sites marked by the two foundations of Dobson’s and by the old pub that stood where once the South Gate had been, but the great arch of the North Gate still spanned the river steps, with the church on one side and on the other a portion of the old city wall that now formed one side of the tannery.
The Dean stood for a moment under the arch at the top of the steps. They were old and broken now and not at all salubrious, for the inhabitants of Swithin’s Lane could not be cured of a centuries-old habit of standing at the top of them and chucking garbage down to the water, but they still had a graceful curve. Just beyond the steps the river flowed with a strong calm power that was immensely impressive but not reassuring today, with the wide flood lit to a sulphurous yellow by the stormy light. In wet seasons the river could rage up the steps into Swithin’s Lane, flooding the houses and causing much illness and suffering among the people. There was little about suffering that the Swithin’s Lane people did not know, and thinking of them the Dean was back again in the heartbreak of his long fight to deliver them. Inbred, dug in, as violently attached to where they were as limpets to a rock, they had not wanted to be delivered, and selfish men had exploited their ignorance and fed their wealth upon it. It broke his heart that that bitter battle, of all his many battles in the city, should have been the only one he had ever lost.
Standing under the archway with the smell of the garbage and the tannery in his nostrils, the evil slums behind him and that menacing water lapping at the steps below, he suddenly straightened his sagging shoulders. He would reopen that fight. His plan had been a good one. The famous architect, his friend, who had helped him in the work on the Cathedral, had worked upon it with him and together they had designed well-built, simple and good-looking houses that built upon high ground beyond the West Gate would have been no blot upon the city’s beauty. The North Gate and the old church would have remained intact, and public gardens beside the river would have taken the place of the verminous cottages. He had planned those gardens himself and they were dear to him; he often dreamed of them. It would have cost a great deal but there was wealth in the city, not least his own, which would have been at its disposal. He’d fight again. Swithin’s Lane should no longer harbor Albert Lees to bludgeon young boys to flight and death.
Death? No! But he had no time to stand here planning fights to come, with this boy still in danger. It was Job now. Job. He did not know what he was going to say to Albert Lee, he felt tired and stupid, but experience had taught him that the mere fact of charging into the arena could most wonderfully clear the mind.
He forged his way through the tortuous tunnel of Swithin’s Lane. It was like an evil man’s mind, he sometimes thought, full of twists and turns, darkness and confusion. Even in sunlight, with the wind blowing in the opposite direction from the tannery, it never seemed wholesome. The tottering ruins of old houses that leaned across it shut in the smell and darkness. The hollows between the cobbles held filmed stagnant water, and rotting cabbage leaves and shreds of paper clogged the gutter. We want a good rain, thought the Dean. If there is a storm coming we need it. The lane seemed deserted, for the children were not yet back from school or the men from work, and so dim that already the pallid flicker of candlelight shone in a few of the grimy windows. When he reached the fish shop he found the gas flares already lighted.
The Lees were home from the market and busy in the shop; on Saturday nights they did a brisk trade in fried fish. The cod and whiting that had gone off in the market were fried in a loathly kind of oil flavored with onions, and sold cheap for Swithin’s Lane suppers. A nauseous preparatory stench took the Dean by the throat as he walked into the circle of gaslight, took off his top hat to Keziah and asked if he might be allowed to speak a few words to Mr. Albert Lee. Keziah stopped what she was doing and stared, her slack old mouth dropping open. Albert emerged from the back of the shop and came warily closer, shoulders hunched like an advancing prize fighter, one eye closed up within its purple bruises, the other fixed on the Dean with a gimlet stare of mixed misery and insolence. They knew him well by sight, for he had been continually up and down Swithin’s Lane during the years when he had been fighting for its demolition, and it had been Albert who had flung the egg which upon one occasion had splashed his immaculate top hat with rottenness. It was the remembrance of that egg that was making Albert’s approach so wary.
The Dean, as he stood in the flaring yellow gaslight with the darkness of the coming storm behind him, was a formidable figure. Even with his top hat in his hand he seemed to touch the ceiling; his long black cloak added to his breadth of shoulder and was thrown about him like a thundercloud. Yet when he spoke, his voice, even though harsh and grating, brought a sudden sense of quietness to the tumultuous wretchedness that was Albert’s habitual state of mind when, as now, he happened to be completely sober.
“I owe you an apology, Mr. Lee. I fear I have been the cause of your losing a valuable apprentice.”
Albert looked stupidly at the large clean hand held out to him, then wiped his own on his greasy trouser leg and took it. The strong grip further steadied him. “And you, too, Mrs. Lee,” said the Dean, and bowed to her. “I fear you will miss Job.” Keziah was too awed to speak. Her lips worked nervously and her dirty hands kept folding and unfolding themselves in her dirtier apron. She was a terrible old creature to look at, with her mumbling mouth and rheumy eyes and the pitiful strands of her greasy hair falling over her face from beneath a battered black bonnet, more repulsive even than the drink-sodden, brutal Albert. Yet the Dean was repulsed by neither of them. They had that childlikeness that makes so many criminals less repulsive than the sophisticated worldly sinners. They were ruined creatures, both of them, but there had once been something to ruin. The woman’s face retained its beauty of bone, and the man still had a queer panther grace and strength. Gypsies, the Dean thought, whom greed for money had brought from the wilds to the town, and separated from their kind they had suffered the fate of so many exiles. Loneliness made or ruined a man. It frightened him
so that he must either sing and build in the face of the dark, like a bird or a beaver, or hide from it like a beast in his den. There were perhaps always only the two ways to go, God or the jungle. And all men were exiles. It was a common bond between them, the bond between himself and this man and woman.
“It was I who asked Mr. Havelock if he could arrange a transference for Job,” said the Dean. “I did it because of the boy’s great skill as a craftsman. I had been shown some excellent little birds that he had whittled out of wood and they showed, I thought, that he had it in him to become a better clockmaker than a fishmonger. But I fear I showed insufficient consideration for yourself, Mr. Lee, and for that I offer you my apologies.” Albert growled something under his breath. In spite of that quietness he was not to be won over by a few courteous phrases. “I confess I had another reason. You knocked that boy about too much, Mr. Lee.”
Albert looked up sharply, instantly on the insolent defensive, and met the Dean’s glance. With his closed-up eye struggling to open and aid the other he stood and looked at the Dean, right into his unhappy eyes and beaky, bony face. It was queer how he had to go on looking at the ugly old codger. And what he said was not in the least what he had meant to say.
“That bloody lawyer, ee proper got me back up, the way ee talked. I took it out of the boy.”
“Not for the first time,” said the Dean.
“You’re right, sir. Scraggy, whey-faced, stubborn little beast that ee was, you see, sir.”
“Yes, I know,” said the Dean in what sounded almost like a tone of sympathy and understanding. “Weak enough to be at your mercy yet kept his mouth shut when you skinned him. They egg a man on, that sort. What you need, Mr. Lee, is a boy who’ll yell and kick your shins. Give as good as he gets.” He eyed Albert’s black eye speculatively. “Or did he, at the end?”
“Yes, sir,” said Albert in almost confidential tones. “Couldn’t ’ave believed it. I stops to get me breath, an’ sudden ee ups and gives it me straight in the eye. Then ee was up the stairs to the attic, where ee sleeps, before I could stop ’im. When me ma went to rouse ’im in the mornin’ ee’d gorn. Out the attic winda. Sheer drop it is. She thought she’d see ’im there with all ’is bones broke. But ee weren’t there, sir. Queer, it was.”
“He won’t come back,” said the Dean.
“No, sir,” said Albert slowly. “There’s the river out the back. Ee couldn’t swim.”
“He is, I trust, alive,” said the Dean. “But he will not come back. You went too far. I believe I could find you a boy of the type you need, Mr. Lee. He would not have Job’s artistic skill, which I know you have found invaluable, but he would drive you to drink less often. I think, weighing one thing with another, your business would not suffer in the exchange.” He took a small packet from his pocket and laid it on the filthy chopping block beside him. “Mr. Lee, Mr. Havelock offered you compensation if you would forgo your legal claim upon the boy. Slightly more than the amount he offered you is there. Will you accept it with my apology for the inconvenience I have caused you, giving me your word that if Job is found you will not force him to return to you? I ask for no assurance except your word.”
Albert looked at the hand held out to him, once more placed his own within it and mumbled an agreement. He had not understood more than half of what the Dean had said to him but that grip seemed now to hold not only his hand but his being. It was as though he had been turned around to face in a different direction.
“I will find you that new apprentice,” said the Dean. “You can rely on me. Much obliged. Good afternoon, Mrs. Lee. Much obliged.”
He bowed, replaced his hat and walked out of the shop. Albert Lee, after a moment of stupefaction, let flow a flood of language so lurid that even old Keziah had never heard it surpassed. He’d been foozled, had the bloody wool pulled over his eyes and he as sober as a judge. His opinion of the Dean, and of all the grinders of the faces of the poor the world over, echoed up and down Swithin’s Lane and in no time at all a crowd was at the shop. He did a brisk trade that night, his fury and his language sauce to the fried fish. Yet all the time that grip held him. Shutting up shop that night he was suddenly silent, and when he had given Keziah one on the ear and kicked the cat he went to his bed with extraordinary meekness and lay awake till dawn.
4.
The Dean walked back down Swithin’s Lane toward the North Gate. He was utterly exhausted, drained of strength and virtue. Yet the hidden tussle with the soul of the man had not been as hard as he had expected. He was not entirely evil yet. Nor was the old crone. Cruel, yes, but who was not? Down at the bottom of the most crystal cup there seemed always to be left a few dregs of the poison. He could remember how, flogging boys, there had once or twice spurted up in him a desire to lay it on a bit harder, get a whimper out of a stubborn culprit, and then he had instantly dropped the cane in horror and revulsion and when the boy had gone he had repented and prayed. He himself was a cracked and polluted vessel. What could one do? Nothing. Only repent and pray and love and await God’s mercy.
He reached the North Gate and walked down the dirty steps to the path at the edge of the river, then turned to walk along it behind the Swithin’s Lane houses, for he wanted to see the attic window from which Job had escaped. The backs of these houses always made him feel as though he were in a nightmare. The broken windows, stuffed here and there with rags or boarded up to keep out the bitter wind that swept across the fens, looked out on filthy back yards and poor little patches of ground running down to the river path, filled with nettles, cabbage stalks, broken glass and crockery. The path was strewn with rubbish and the river water that lapped against it was always oily and foul. It was here that Dean had planned his beloved garden, with grass and flowering shrubs, and seats beside a clean and wholesome river. He could see it in his mind’s eye now as he picked his way among the cabbage stalks and bits of broken crockery, and his mouth set almost savagely in determination.
When fishbones and decaying fish heads made a slime under his feet he knew that he had reached the back of the shop and stopped and looked up. He saw the attic window, a crazy little dormer window that appeared about to fall out of the roof. The central wooden bar had been wrenched away and the two casements hung drunkenly outward. There would have been room for a slim boy to squeeze through and drop into the bed of nettles below. It was a considerable drop and the Dean wondered that he had not injured himself. Perhaps he had. If so, where was he? The Dean turned to look at the scum on the river, which here looked almost solid with decay, and the sight reassured him. Job was not the boy to plunge down into that filth. Adam Ayscough was experienced in the vagaries of humanity. He knew well that the desperate can sometimes entirely forget those who love them and yet be influenced in what they do by old habits of fastidiousness. Habit in times of misery can be stronger than love. “Many waters cannot quench love” was said of divine, not human, love, which the Dean knew was not always tough enough to survive the indifference of misery. That was one of the chief reasons why he so struggled to do away with misery. He had been aware of fastidiousness in Job and of aspiration like a flame. Indeed there had been something flamelike in the boy’s whole appearance, in his flickering nervous movements, in his genius that seemed to come and go like some spiritual presence, like some other boy looking out of his eyes. He could see Job plunging into fire but not into scummy water.
He lifted his eyes from the filth and looked across the river to the stretch of the fen beyond and up to the great sky, and the sight was so amazing that he stood where he was. The storm clouds were massed overhead, blue-black and motionless. They had crept up stealthily from the east but they had not yet covered the sky. To the west there was a break over the horizon and through this the light of a wild sunset streamed across the fen, lighting the pools and waterways to gold against the darkness of the shadowed land. Where the Dean stood the air was breathless but out in the fen puffs of hot wind seemed darting this way and that, uneasy as evil spirits, frig
htening the rushes and ruffling the water, a surface of restless fear moving upon the leaden stillness of the crouching earth. There were no birds to be seen or heard. Usually one of the joys of the river and the fen were the birds, the swans and herons, the ducks, dabchicks and moor hens, wagtails and sedge warblers. There was always a rustling and a thin sharp piping, a quacking and fluting, and sometimes the tremendous beat of the swans’ wings as they passed overhead. But the birds had disappeared. They had all hidden in the rushes. The loneliness and silence of land and water without them was strange, like a ship with sails reefed and passengers below hatches. To the north there was still a band of gold between earth and sky, and against this the village on the hill that Job had seen rose starkly from a thicket of silver willows, its tall church spire black as ebony against the narrow band of light. It was one of the loneliest of the fen villages, it was Willowthorn, and it had about it a courage that riveted the Dean’s attention.