She looked at him in surprise. “I never thought of it. I am one of the antiquities of the city, and as such there are those who make a ridiculous fuss over me, but that does not give me the right to ask a busy woman to visit me just because I have a fancy for her company. Who am I that I should presume to do such a thing?”
He smiled. It was as he had always thought and she had not the slightest idea of what she was and what she did. That was as it should be, for to have begun to know her value would have been to begin to lose it. “Miss Peabody will come, I am sure of it,” he said. “I wish I could be as sure that Job will stop hating her.”
“He will,” said Miss Montague. “Do not forget to show him the Cathedral. I wish I could see Bella.”
“I will bring her to see you tomorrow, ma’am.”
“You will do no such thing. You will stay indoors tomorrow and see Tom Jenkins.”
“Not yet, ma’am!” said the Dean in alarm. “I have too much to do. There’s Albert Lee. That great hulking boy they’re sending him from the workhouse will suit, I think, but he needs to get about more. He’s a gypsy. He should, I think, have a little cart, with a smart pony, and drive to the villages two or three times a week with his fish. With more variety in his life he’d drink less. I must see to it. And Swithin’s Lane, ma’am, it must come down.” If he had not been so hoarse he would have shouted, and he brought his fist violently down upon the arm of his chair. It was no way to behave in a lady’s drawing room. “Ma’am!” he ejaculated in horror. “I must ask your pardon. I believe I spoke too loud. I had not intended, ma’am, I mean I was not aware—”
“You were hardly aware of what you were saying,” Miss Montague finished for him, “and should see Doctor Jenkins, as I said before.”
“It is impossible, ma’am.”
“I will not argue,” said Miss Montague. “I have not the right.”
Something in the tone of her voice startled the Dean. He got up and stood before the fire looking down at her. “Surely our long acquaintance gives you the right to say what you wish?”
“Not a very long acquaintance. Only a few years,” said Miss Montague. “Though time, I suppose, has nothing to do with it.”
“Nothing whatever,” said the Dean, and his voice took on sudden strength and depth. There was a silence in which he could not say what he wanted to say. To let it lengthen would have been painful, and also unnecessary since she had understood him. She chose to accept the fact that he was standing as his farewell and held out her hand. He bent over it, murmured the customary courtesies and went away.
14. Advent
1.
IT was after closing hours and Isaac and Job were in the workshop. It was a wild night in late November, with a northwester pouring icily across the fen. At times the gusts almost reached gale force, and sleet crashed against the small dark square of window. It was an eerie night, with the sort of tumult abroad that pulls the thoughts outward to itself, and most men and women in the city were very aware of the rushes lying flat in the wind, the ruffled water, bare branches twisting and turning and smoke torn from chimney tops like ripped lace. The clouds raced low, and about the towers of the Cathedral the roar and clamor of the wind was like waves breaking in a cave. When the clock struck, the boom of the great bell, usually so tremendous, was caught and cast away by the wind and the city scarcely heard it. This was the kind of night that usually terrified Isaac, filling him with a sense of doom and setting all his nerves jangling, for he hated noise, but tonight he was not afraid of the storm and Job was enjoying it because by contrast it increased his joy. He was out of it. He was in harbor.
The workshop, lamplit tonight, seemed to him a world to itself, a self-sufficient star swinging in the roaring blackness as unconcernedly as the planet that could be seen shining in the dark windowpane between one hailstorm and another. Job was aware of both stars, his awareness in itself a glowing thing, and thought to himself that that was how it was with him now; light held him and beckoned him and burned within him. What would happen if the three lights fused? What if the fire inside him could dart out into the glow that held him, and the two together could flame down the wind to the splendor of that planet? He laughed, suddenly, and Isaac looked up and smiled. He was used now to these sudden peals of laughter from Job. The first one had surprised him, for he had thought of Job as a quiet sort of chap. He knew better now. Job’s depression had had its roots in fish and frustration and had vanished with them. Quiet he would always be, so concentrated was his whole being on work that he adored, but his present quietness was as different from the other as life from death. His laughter, like most laughter, was occasioned by awareness of contrast, by the sudden striking of one thing upon another like flint upon tinder. It was the spurt of the happy flame.
“Feeling good, Job?” he asked.
“I feel like God,” said Job.
For a moment Isaac the unbeliever was slightly scandalized. Then he realized that Job, with exquisite precision, was indeed engaged in embedding stars in the firmament. Seated at Isaac’s workbench, with the candle behind its globe of water giving added light, he was at work upon the celestial clock. Isaac could not have believed that he would ever have allowed another to touch his masterpiece, and indeed for a few weeks after he and Job had started working together he had tried not to see Job’s longing glances, to be unaware that the boy was eaten up with hunger to get his hands on the exquisite thing. He had worked steadily at the simple tasks that Isaac had considered within his capacity and Isaac had worked at the clock, his back turned on the boy except at such times as Job needed his help and instruction. But Job had learned so rapidly that Isaac had been almost terrified. It was like having a young hawk with him in the workshop, for the boy swooped upon knowledge like a wild thing on its prey, and devoured it like flame running through dry grass. Isaac had been a little angry at first, resentful and jealous. This was not at all the conventional apprentice, running meekly upon errands and grateful for any crumbs of knowledge that his master might vouchsafe to impart to him. Job did not mind the errands, and he was not ungrateful, but he had suddenly discovered his own power. He was a finer craftsman even than Isaac, and he knew it, and so, presently, did Isaac.
There was a greatness in Isaac. One evening at supper, between one bite of sausage and another, he was able to acknowledge that it was so. “He must increase, but I must decrease,” he said to himself. He did not know where the quotation came from, or that in taking it to himself he had taken a fence at which many balked or fell. He finished the sausage without having the slightest idea that he was not the same man that he had been when he embarked upon it. The next morning he smiled at Job and asked him if he would like to help him with his clock. Job went crimson to the roots of his hair and unable to speak bent to pick up a tool he had dropped under the workbench. When he reappeared he was no more able to speak than he had been before, but his face was shining like the morning sun. From that moment the two increasingly loved each other.
They worked now in that companionable silence, broken by an occasional word or two, which between two who are as attached to the work they do together as they are to each other is one of the most satisfactory things in life. Love of the work strengthened the love of each other. Love of each other enriched the work. This is good, thought Job. There will never be anything better than this. Me and the old codger together. It’s good. Aloud he said, glancing at the working drawing at his elbow, “Sir, why did you put the sun behind the fish? Wouldn’t it have been better balancing the moon?”
“It wouldn’t stay there,” said Isaac.
This ridiculous answer was one that Job understood. Polly had once wanted him to make her a dabchick with its head under its wing. But it wouldn’t put its head under its wing. It wanted to preen a feather in the center of its back. Though Polly had not minded she had laughed at him and had not been able to understand that though he talked about carving the bird from wood that was only a manner of speech. What he really d
id was to set free the living bird imprisoned in the wood. That dabchick had been unusually lively, and Miss Peabody had burned it. His face hardened. She was being nice to him now, letting him come into the kitchen, even allowing him to have supper there with Polly once a week, asking him how he did, making him sit with her and Polly in church, and he tried to be polite for Polly’s and Isaac’s sake, but still he hated her. The hatred surged up in him now, and his tool slipped. He laid it down. A moment before there had been such quietness in him but now it had gone. He could not go on working until he had it again.
Isaac, working at a second bench at his fret of the two swans, felt the sudden disturbance of peace and looked over his shoulder. “Tired, boy?”
“No, sir.” Job swallowed, trying to push the hatred down out of sight, below the quiet reeds and water. He asked, “Does the sun behind the fish mean anything, sir?”
“I don’t know,” said Isaac. “I shall in time.”
Again Job understood him. Once he had whittled out of a bit of cherry wood a bird he had never seen. A fortnight later he had seen his first gold-crested wren in the Willowthorn drove. He wondered if poets ever wrote of experiences with which they had not yet caught up. Time as one understood it seemed oddly nonexistent when one made things. “The Dean would know,” he said.
“We’ll ask him,” said Isaac, and his voice was warm with delight. Job’s hatred disappeared without any further effort on his part and he picked up his tool again and went on working. Beneath their contentment in work and in each other they had tonight a deeper satisfaction. This morning Garland had let it be known that the Dean was up though not down. He would, Garland trusted, be down shortly and out for Christmas. The news had spread through the city by midday and the city breathed again.
The Dean had had laryngitis followed by an attack of pneumonia, which though mild Doctor Jenkins had pronounced to be touch and go owing to the Dean’s age. When the specialist had arrived from London a curious dismay had fallen upon the city; curious because of the Dean’s unpopularity. Day by day they had prayed for him in the Cathedral, and from the Canon in residence to the smallest choirboy they had attended to what the precentor was saying when he intoned the prayer for all sorts and conditions of men, and impeccable musician though he was, neither he nor anyone else had noticed that emotion invariably sent him a semitone flat when he reached “those who are anyways afflicted, or distressed, in mind, body or estate.” Michael had struck the hours as usual, but the youngest choir-boy, looking up at him as the choristers in their black gowns and mortarboards scuttled two by two up the steps for matins and evensong, had not thought he looked himself. Through the days of anxiety the invariable greeting of people meeting each other in shops and streets had been: “Vile weather. Have you heard how the Dean is today?” They had all agreed that the weather, which since the day of that extraordinary thunderstorm had been consistently abominable, made it somehow worse. The city had seemed like a ship riding out a dangerous storm, and when they had looked up at the captain’s bridge it was empty. That tall grim stooping figure had been no longer there. The Bishop, who had been away, came home, though there was nothing he could do except prowl about and be disagreeable to everybody. Several people who had been away came home, they had not quite known why. On the night when Garland had let it be known that the crisis was at hand no one had slept very much, least of all Garland, and when it was past the Bishop had ejaculated, “Reprieved, thank God!” as though, his butler had reported, he himself had expected to mount a scaffold at noon. Still, for a few days, anxiety had continued. There was this thing referred to by Doctor Jenkins as “the Dean’s age.” The harmless phrase had an ominous ring about it, as though it were not what it seemed.
But today, in spite of the weather, hearts had been light in the city, and all the afternoon little bursts of gaiety had kept blowing up here and there like the fires of spring. Faces had smiled under dripping umbrellas and in the shops people had lingered and gossiped and laughed. The muffin man had done a brisk trade, for everyone suddenly had a fancy for muffins for supper. The Dean was up and would be down shortly. At the Christmas Eve carol service in the Cathedral, the glory and climax of the city’s year, he would be in his stall as usual and he would read the lesson as usual. Not to hear his ugly voice grating out, “In the beginning was the Word,” would have been, well, there was no need now to think what it would have been.
“When he’s down,” said Job to Isaac, “could I go with you to wind the clocks?”
Isaac looked at him. He found this a hard request to grant. There had been no time as yet for the Dean and himself to combine clock winding with instruction on horology, as they had planned to do, though he had sent the Dean some books to break up the fallow ground of his ignorance. They would, he thought, begin as soon as the Dean was down, and he did not want Job there. “He must increase and I must decrease.” He swallowed his disappointment and said, “Yes, Job. You should learn to wind the clocks. If I was to be taken poorly at anytime I’d like to think you knew them all. You’ve come on fine. Job. I’d trust you even with Miss Montague’s Michael Neuwers and the Jeremiah Hartley in the Dean’s study. More than that, Job, I could not say.”
It was the proudest moment in Job’s life. He was aware that there was a sudden quietness behind their small warm world of clockmaking, not a lull in the storm but the ending of it. He could see a whole cluster of stars in the windowpane and in the silence Michael began to strike seven, his notes no longer torn away but round and full and golden. The man and boy smiled at each other, laid down their tools and listened. All the clocks of the city were striking now and hard upon their heels came the chiming of the clocks in the shop.
“Next week,” said Job, “the celestial clock will be finished.”
2.
The following morning the world was blue and rain-washed, rather as though the azure of the sky had fallen into the rain and faintly tinctured all that the rain had touched. The trees, stripped by the storms of the last vestige of their leaves, were shadowed with blue and the houses were limned with it as though a paintbrush loaded with blue had underlined each sill and lintel and molding, and splashed pools of bluebell color under the eaves. Even the Cathedral towers seemed drenched with the sky and the vast fen was like an inland sea. The pale gold of sunlight, the orange-tawny and brown and lavender that stained the blue about the boles of the trees, the rosy glow of roofs and chimney pots, were subordinate colors, for it was not their hour.
“We shall have a green Christmas,” said Doctor Jenkins, at the window of the Dean’s room, and was not surprised when Adam Ayscough answered, “Why do we talk about the green earth? In this painted manuscript of a world the color varies with each turn of the page and green, to my mind, does not predominate. I should like a white Christmas this year. I remember them in my childhood but none since. Is that the universal experience? It never rained in the summer when I was a child either. Memory is not wholly reliable.”
Doctor Jenkins turned from the window and there was an almost imperceptible tautening of his whole frame. The Dean, with a slight smile, pushed aside the papers that littered his counterpane, for they were now coming to business. It always amused him to watch Tom Jenkins turning from man to doctor. A little chat about the weather was the correct thing when he entered the room, and he was hesitant, even a little in awe of his distinguished patient. Then it seemed that something clicked and he moved smoothly into action, concentrated and wholly happy. Something of the same sort of process was familiar to the Dean when he settled down to the writing of a book. A wave of self-loathing, of self-distrust, would go over him at first. Who was he that he should dare to take a pen into his hand? And how puerile was the result when he had done it. He would struggle wearily through a page or two and then forget himself, coming to the surface an hour later knowing that his book was his artifact, and whatever the result he could no more not make it than fail to breathe.
“Breathe deeply, please,” said Doctor Jen
kins curtly.
The Dean did meekly all that he was told and straightened his nightcap. He was not yet up all day. During the morning hours he sat upright in his curtained four-poster like an ogre in his cavern, gazing out balefully upon all comers and goers, for his convalescence had now reached the point when he was having a little difficulty with a slight irritability of temper. For reading or writing in bed he was obliged to put on his eyeglasses, which in conjunction with a nightcap would have made a comic figure of a lesser man. But the Dean retained his immense dignity quite unimpaired.
“What’s all this, Mr. Dean?” demanded Doctor Jenkins with a touch of anger, indicating the papers on the counterpane.
“Architectural plans, correspondence and estimates relating to the new houses beyond the West Gate,” said the Dean. “Plans and sketches of the garden beside the river at the North Gate. You will remember that this important work was momentarily abandoned a few years ago owing to the opposition encountered in the city. As soon as possible the whole question must be reopened. You know as well as I do that this work is essential for the well-being of the city.”
Doctor Jenkins was standing at the foot of the bed. The Dean poised his eyeglasses on the summit of his nose and they glared at each other. “You are right,” said Tom Jenkins. “Those slums are foul. But you will do no work upon those plans at present.”
“In this one instance, Doctor Jenkins, you must allow me the exercise of my own judgment,” said the Dean. “Time is short.”
“And if you labor too soon at those plans,” retorted Doctor Jenkins, “it will be shorter.”
He caught himself up. Before the Dean attempted to plunge back into active life it would have to be said, but not yet. But he had checked himself too late; or else had fallen into a trap deliberately laid for him by his patient.