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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
- Sprache: Englisch
Hugh Walpole's 'The Cathedral' is a richly woven narrative that examines the intricacies of human experience against the backdrop of the grand cathedral of King's Lynn. The novel's literary style is marked by its vivid descriptions and psychological depth, encapsulating the tension between the sacred and the secular. Walpole deftly utilizes a third-person omniscient narrator to explore the lives of a diverse cast of characters, each wrestling with personal conflicts that are often mirrored in the monumental architecture around them. The work is set in the early 20th-century England, reflecting both the societal changes of the period and the enduring quest for meaning in the face of modernity. Hugh Walpole, a prominent British novelist and playwright, was influenced by his rich literary background and experiences in both New Zealand and England. His idyllic, pastoral upbringing greatly informed his understanding of place, making the cathedral a powerful symbol of both aspiration and despair in his work. Throughout his career, Walpole grappled with themes of faith, art, and community, which are intricately interwoven in 'The Cathedral'. I highly recommend 'The Cathedral' to readers interested in literary fiction that melds personal and communal histories. Walpole's exploration of the human condition through the lens of monumental architecture offers profound insights that resonate with contemporary questions about purpose and belonging. It invites readers to reflect on their own experiences in the shadow of great achievements and spiritual quests. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
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The Cathedral
Table of Contents
Introduction
At its core, The Cathedral examines how private desires and public duties converge within the charged atmosphere of a revered institution. Hugh Walpole’s novel guides readers into a community organized around sacred ritual and civic pride, where influence circulates through choir stalls, drawing rooms, and shopfronts. The cathedral itself stands not merely as a building but as the moral and social axis of the town, shaping the rhythms of daily life. Against this backdrop, personal anxieties and ambitions test the limits of decorum, showing how the search for integrity unfolds under the gaze of tradition and the pressure of reputation.
The Cathedral is a work of realist fiction set in an English cathedral city, published in the early 1920s, a period marked by reassessment after the First World War. Walpole, an English novelist with a keen interest in moral psychology and social nuance, uses the setting to explore an institution that is at once spiritual, historical, and political. The novel belongs to the tradition of the social and psychological novel, closely observing the interplay between individual conscience and public expectation. Its world is provincial yet intricate, revealing how a specific place can reflect broader questions circulating in British life at the time.
The premise is simple yet fertile: tensions within the cathedral’s leadership and surrounding community unsettle the town’s delicate balance. Clergy, lay officials, families, and tradespeople become entangled in questions of authority, propriety, and allegiance, while the wider populace watches, judges, and takes sides. Without relying on sensational events, Walpole lets ordinary incidents accumulate moral weight, revealing how gestures and whispers can sway reputations. The narrative invites readers into parlors, vestries, and quiet lanes, attuned to how power is felt as much as exercised. The result is a slow-burning portrait of a place where public roles collide with private convictions.
Walpole’s voice is measured, observant, and psychologically attuned. The prose balances atmosphere—bells, stone, and weather—with crisp attention to motive and perception. An omniscient perspective allows the narrative to shift gracefully among viewpoints, clarifying how misunderstandings arise and why they persist. Scenes often hinge on nuance: a pause, an overheard remark, a remembered slight. The pacing is deliberate, rewarding patience with accumulative insight rather than abrupt twist. Tone and mood oscillate between affection for the town’s rituals and a clear-eyed appraisal of the limits of those rituals to contain human complexity. The novel’s style thus mirrors its subject: composed, layered, and resonant.
Several themes stand out. Tradition confronts the pressures of change, as institutional continuity meets evolving social expectations. Conscience and compromise are weighed daily, with characters testing how much of themselves they may yield to role or rank. The novel probes the uses and abuses of authority, showing how power is sustained by habit, reputation, and subtle forms of consent. It examines community as both shelter and constraint, illuminating the comforts of belonging alongside the risks of conformity. Faith, too, appears as lived practice rather than abstraction, refracted through duty, doubt, and the yearning for a coherent moral life in ambiguous circumstances.
For contemporary readers, The Cathedral offers a compelling study of institutional life that feels strikingly current. Organizational cultures still hinge on reputation, informal alliances, and the management of conflict; Walpole’s depiction of how influence accumulates and dissipates remains recognizable. The novel invites reflection on leadership—what it asks of a person, what it conceals, and when courage requires dissent. It considers how communities define their values and how individuals navigate competing obligations. In an age attentive to public image and private integrity, the book’s questions about accountability, empathy, and the costs of belonging retain genuine relevance and emotional bite.
Reading The Cathedral is an immersive experience in moral attention: the kind that reveals how small choices reverberate in shared spaces. Walpole offers a richly textured world, neither nostalgic nor cynical, in which characters are granted the dignity of complexity. The drama unfolds not through spectacle but through finely observed shifts in feeling and position, inviting readers to listen as closely as the townspeople do. Those who appreciate patient storytelling, layered characterization, and an anchoring sense of place will find much to admire. The novel’s enduring strength lies in its lucid portrayal of human beings defending, redefining, and sometimes discovering their ideals.
Synopsis
Set in the fictional cathedral city of Polchester, The Cathedral presents a close-knit community shaped by its great medieval church. The town’s lanes, marketplaces, and the quiet lawns of the Close form the backdrop for daily rhythms of worship, commerce, and social calls. Clergy, tradespeople, schoolboys, and old residents all move within a setting dominated by bells, processions, and the seasonal round of church festivals. The cathedral itself functions as both symbol and stage, gathering the town’s hopes, anxieties, and ambitions into one place. Against this enduring backdrop, the novel follows shifting loyalties and subtle contests for influence.
At the center stands the archdeacon, a commanding figure whose energy, confidence, and sense of duty have long organized life in the Close. He presides over committees, steers liturgical practice, and offers counsel, shaping decisions in ways both visible and discreet. The town respects his discipline and clarity, though some feel the weight of his authority. Through an even, restrained narration, the book shows how his habits of leadership have brought order but also rigidities that time may test. His family, household, and daily routines are sketched to reveal a life of public purpose embedded in private obligations.
Change begins with the arrival of a new cleric to the cathedral chapter, a man whose warmth, modern instincts, and careful listening attract sympathies across the community. He does not directly oppose the archdeacon; rather, his different manner invites comparison. Conversations after services, small acts of pastoral attention, and thoughtful speeches at gatherings gradually build a following. The book carefully traces how this fresh voice, favoring persuasion over command, alters the town’s conversation. Without turning anyone into a villain, the narrative contrasts styles of leadership, hinting that the established order will be asked to justify itself anew.
The novel expands beyond the Close to map Polchester’s social web: afternoon teas, guild meetings, shop counters, and charity committees. A disagreement over music, a debate about seating, and a proposal for restoration become touchstones for deeper questions about tradition and change. Side characters—minor canons, a schoolmistress, a conscientious tradesman, devoted parish workers—reveal how public decisions ripple into private lives. The cathedral’s stones hold these threads together, accompanying the town through festivals and fasts. Through these vignettes, the book shows how modest controversies in a small place can gather force, shaping reputation, alliances, and the uses of authority.
Parallel to public affairs, the archdeacon’s household faces its own turning points. A dutiful spouse offers steadiness while the next generation weighs expectations against personal hopes. One child contemplates engagement and the future it promises; another, impatient with caution, tests boundaries and friendships. A cordial acquaintance crossing institutional lines brings the family into contact with those sympathetic to newer ideas. These scenes stress affection and restraint rather than melodrama, showing how loyalty, pride, and care for appearance can pull in different directions. Domestic pressures, though quieter than public debates, prove significant, setting choices that echo in the Close and beyond.
A major church season intensifies scrutiny. Preparations, rehearsals, and committees produce both common purpose and friction. Crowds fill the nave for a great service, and the town watches its leaders in action. An unforeseen incident during a public occasion exposes vulnerabilities, prompting swift decisions and revealing temperaments under stress. The cathedral’s grandeur makes these moments feel larger than life, yet the narration keeps close to everyday reactions: glances exchanged, hurried whispers, steadying gestures. The episode does not settle the underlying question of direction, but it clarifies what is at stake and how personalities shape the exercise of power.
Subsequent months bring a series of decisions about appointments, funds, and outreach. Each vote and committee report becomes a measure of influence. Rumors stir about an earlier episode in the archdeacon’s life, a matter quietly spoken of yet potent enough to affect confidence. No single revelation breaks the surface; rather, conversations accumulate, and the balance of opinion shifts. The newcomer’s tact contrasts with the archdeacon’s firmness, and allies on both sides calculate costs. The narrative keeps to outward events while registering hidden tremors, tracing how reputations can rise or falter on timing, tact, and the memory of past actions.
As the liturgical year turns through winter into solemn observances, the story moves toward a restrained climax. Candlelit services, organ thunder, and the hush of great crowds mirror private reckonings. A public gathering in the cathedral focuses attention, and a consequential choice is made that cannot be easily undone. The town, watching closely, senses that something essential has changed in its leadership and in the spirit of the Close. The book withholds spectacle, emphasizing the gravity of demeanor and the finality of words spoken in sacred space. Afterward, quiet conversations and altered routines suggest a new alignment.
The Cathedral concludes by affirming endurance rather than triumph. The building remains, holding a community that learns to temper zeal with humility. Leaders adapt or yield, families adjust, and old certainties make room for more generous interpretations. Without prescribing doctrine, the book conveys a central message: institutions gain strength when authority listens, and personal faith matures when pride gives way to conscience. The ending is measured, closing with the town’s life continuing under watchful towers and steady bells. Readers are left with the sense of a place tested and steadied, its conflicts absorbed into the breadth of its long memory.
Historical Context
Hugh Walpole’s The Cathedral unfolds in Polchester, a fictional English cathedral city commonly read as a composite of West Country centers (critics often cite Truro) during the 1910s and early 1920s. The novel’s time frame straddles the end of the Edwardian era, the First World War, and the unsettled postwar years, when provincial life felt the shock of national change. Its setting—the Cathedral Close, the Dean and Chapter, the town council, and the marketplace—mirrors real ecclesiastical governance in English sees, where deans, canons, and archdeacons balanced ritual, finance, and local prestige. Walpole uses this enclosed world to register broader British tensions over authority, class, and reform in the immediate aftermath of war.
Central to the book’s historical matrix are reforms reshaping the Church of England’s governance. The Welsh Church Act 1914 disestablished the Church in Wales, taking effect on 31 March 1920, signaling the weakening of Anglican privilege. The Enabling Act 1919 (Royal Assent 23 December 1919) created the National Assembly of the Church of England and Parochial Church Councils, transferring significant initiative from Parliament to church bodies. Simultaneously, the Parliament Act 1911 curbed the House of Lords, eroding old networks that protected ecclesiastical patronage. The Cathedral reflects these transitions in its portrait of competing clerical factions, anxious over autonomy, appointments, and the fading security of Crown-and-Parliament oversight that once buttressed cathedral chapters.
The First World War (1914–1918) fundamentally altered British society: approximately 886,000 British military deaths and around 1.6 million wounded transformed families, labor markets, and civic rituals. Demobilization in 1919 and the 1918–1919 influenza pandemic compounded grief. Cathedrals became centers of remembrance—hosting roll-of-honor services, installing memorial plaques, and participating in national rites such as the unveiling of the Cenotaph in 1920. Economic dislocation and returning veterans’ expectations unsettled traditional hierarchies in provincial towns. The novel’s atmosphere—heavily marked by bereavement, generational tension, and the testing of moral authority—echoes this landscape, using the cathedral’s music, processions, and Chapter debates to stage the era’s contested meanings of sacrifice, duty, and renewal.
Walpole’s own war and Russian experiences sharpen the novel’s sense of power and upheaval. He served in Russia during the Great War, working with relief and as a journalist, witnessing the 1917 revolutions—February’s collapse of the Romanov regime and the Bolshevik seizure in October under Lenin. His novels The Dark Forest (1916) and The Secret City (1919, winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize) distilled these encounters with bureaucratic paralysis, fervor, and ideological conflict. The Cathedral transposes that understanding into English ecclesiastical politics: the maneuvering of deans, canons, and lay dignitaries mirrors the fragile grammar of authority Walpole had seen unravel, recasting revolutionary anxieties as parochial, yet no less perilous, institutional struggles.
Postwar political enfranchisement and social legislation recalibrated local power. The Representation of the People Act 1918 expanded the electorate (all men over 21; many women over 30 meeting property criteria), while the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act 1919 opened professions to women. The Addison Housing Act 1919 funded municipal building; unemployment spikes in 1921 intensified demands for responsive governance. Within the Church, Parochial Church Councils (from 1919) brought lay voices into finance and mission. The Cathedral resonates with these developments: lay committees press the Chapter, middle-class townspeople assert civic influence, and the visibility of women in parish life disrupts the complacency of clerical elites accustomed to deference in a narrower electorate.
Educational policy also shaped cathedral life. The Education Act 1902 (Balfour) placed voluntary (including church) schools under local education authorities’ funding oversight, tightening public scrutiny. The Education Act 1918 (Fisher) raised the school-leaving age and expanded secondary provision, altering pipelines feeding cathedral choir schools and grammar institutions. These measures professionalized administration and curricula, pressing ecclesiastical foundations to modernize budgets, music training, and discipline. In The Cathedral, arguments over standards, endowments, and youth formation in the Close reflect national debates about the state’s role in schooling and the Church’s cultural authority, revealing how educational reform forced even venerable choral establishments to justify tradition against measurable public goods.
Anglican controversies over doctrine and worship provide another backdrop. The late Victorian–Edwardian ritualist disputes led to the Royal Commission on Ecclesiastical Discipline (1906), while Protestant agitators like John Kensit attacked “Romanizing” practices. The Kikuyu controversy (1913–1914) exposed fissures over intercommunion and missionary policy. After 1919, efforts to revise the Book of Common Prayer culminated in parliamentary defeats in 1927 and 1928, but the debates predate Walpole’s novel. The Cathedral channels these currents through its high-and-low church alignments, disputes over ceremonial emphasis, and anxieties about public scandal, presenting liturgical preference as a proxy for deeper struggles over identity, national loyalty, and the limits of ecclesial latitude.
By compressing national change into a cathedral precinct, the novel operates as a social and political critique of post-Edwardian Britain. It exposes the brittleness of clerical patronage, the opacity of elite decision-making, and the moral hazards of authority unexamined by a newly empowered public. Class divisions—between the Close and the town, old families and rising professionals, male clerics and increasingly visible women—are subjected to narrative stress-tests that reveal favoritism, complacency, and fear of accountability. The book argues, implicitly, that sanctity without service is untenable, and that institutions must absorb democratic energies and postwar grief or forfeit legitimacy to a citizenry attuned to fairness, participation, and truthful remembrance.
The Cathedral
Book I
Prelude
"Thou shalt have none other gods but Me."
Chapter I
Brandons
Adam Brandon was born at Little Empton in Kent in 1839. He was educated at the King's School, Canterbury[1], and at Pembroke College, Cambridge. Ordained in 1863, he was first curate at St. Martin's, Portsmouth, then Chaplain to the Bishop of Worcester[2]; in the year 1875 he accepted the living of Pomfret in Wiltshire and was there for twelve years. It was in 1887 that he came to our town; he was first Canon and afterwards Archdeacon. Ten years later he had, by personal influence and strength of character, acquired so striking a position amongst us that he was often alluded to as "the King of Polchester." His power was the greater because both our Bishop (Bishop Purcell) and our Dean (Dean Sampson) during that period were men of retiring habits of life. A better man, a greater saint than Bishop Purcell has never lived, but in 1896 he was eighty-six years of age and preferred study and the sanctity of his wonderful library at Carpledon to the publicity and turmoil of a public career; Dean Sampson, gentle and amiable as he was, was not intended by nature for a moulder of men. He was, however, one of the best botanists in the County and his little book on "Glebshire[4] Ferns" is, I believe, an authority in its own line.
Archdeacon Brandon was, of course, greatly helped by his magnificent physical presence. "Magnificent" is not, I think, too strong a word. Six feet two or three in height, he had the figure of an athlete, light blue eyes, and his hair was still, when he was fifty-eight years of age, thick and fair and curly like that of a boy. He looked, indeed, marvellously young, and his energy and grace of movement might indeed have belonged to a youth still in his teens. It is not difficult to imagine how startling an effect his first appearance in Polchester created. Many of the Polchester ladies thought that he was like "a Greek God" (the fact that they had never seen one gave them the greater confidence), and Miss Dobell, who was the best read of all the ladies in our town, called him "the Viking[3]." This stuck to him, being an easy and emphatic word and pleasantly cultured.
Indeed, had Brandon come to Polchester as a single man there might have been many broken hearts; however, in 1875 he had married Amy Broughton, then a young girl of twenty. He had by her two children, a boy, Falcon, now twenty-one years of age, and a girl, Joan, just eighteen. Brandon therefore was safe from the feminine Polchester world; our town is famous among Cathedral cities for the morality of its upper classes.
It would not have been possible during all these years for Brandon to have remained unconscious of the remarkable splendour of his good looks. He was very well aware of it, but any one who called him conceited (and every one has his enemies) did him a grave injustice. He was not conceited at all-- he simply regarded himself as a completely exceptional person. He was not elated that he was exceptional, he did not flatter himself because it was so; God had seen fit (in a moment of boredom, perhaps, at the number of insignificant and misshaped human beings He was forced to create) to fling into the world, for once, a truly Fine Specimen, Fine in Body, Fine in Soul, Fine in Intellect. Brandon had none of the sublime egoism of Sir Willoughby Patterne--he thought of others and was kindly and often unselfish--but he did, like Sir Willoughby, believe himself to be of quite another clay from the rest of mankind. He was intended to rule, God had put him into the world for that purpose, and rule he would--to the glory of God and a little, if it must be so, to the glory of himself. He was a very simple person, as indeed were most of the men and women in the Polchester of 1897. He did not analyse motives, whether his own or any one else's; he was aware that he had "weaknesses" (his ungovernable temper was a source of real distress to him at times--at other times he felt that it had its uses). On the whole, however, he was satisfied with himself, his appearance, his abilities, his wife, his family, and, above all, his position in Polchester. This last was very splendid.
His position in the Cathedral, in the Precincts, in the Chapter, in the Town, was unshakable.
He trusted in God, of course, but, like a wise man, he trusted also in himself.[1q]
It happened that on a certain wild and stormy afternoon in October 1896 Brandon was filled with a great exultation. As he stood, for a moment, at the door of his house in the Precincts before crossing the Green to the Cathedral, he looked up at the sky obscured with flying wrack of cloud, felt the rain drive across his face, heard the elms in the neighbouring garden creaking and groaning, saw the lights of the town far beneath the low wall that bounded the Precincts sway and blink in the storm, his heart beat with such pride and happiness that it threatened to burst the body that contained it. There had not been, perhaps, that day anything especially magnificent to elate him; he had won, at the Chapter Meeting that morning, a cheap and easy victory over Canon Foster, the only Canon in Polchester who still showed, at times, a wretched pugnacious resistance to his opinion; he had met Mrs. Combermere afterwards in the High Street and, on the strength of his Chapter victory, had dealt with her haughtily; he had received an especially kind note from Lady St. Leath asking him to dinner early next month; but all these events were of too usual a nature to excite his triumph.
No, there had descended upon him this afternoon that especial ecstasy that is surrendered once and again by the gods to men to lead them, maybe, into some especial blunder or to sharpen, for Olympian humour, the contrast of some swiftly approaching anguish.
Brandon stood for a moment, his head raised, his chest out, his soul in flight, feeling the sharp sting of the raindrops upon his cheek; then, with a little breath of pleasure and happiness, he crossed the Green to the little dark door of Saint Margaret's Chapel.
The Cathedral hung over him, as he stood, feeling in his pocket for his key, a huge black shadow, vast indeed to-day, as it mingled with the grey sky and seemed to be taking part in the directing of the wildness of the storm. Two little gargoyles, perched on the porch of Saint Margaret's door, leered down upon the Archdeacon. The rain trickled down over their naked twisted bodies, running in rivulets behind their outstanding ears, lodging for a moment on the projection of their hideous nether lips. They grinned down upon the Archdeacon, amused that he should have difficulty, there in the rain, in finding his key. "Pah!" they heard him mutter, and then, perhaps, something worse. The key was found, and he had then to bend his great height to squeeze through the little door. Once inside, he was at the corner of the Saint Margaret Chapel and could see, in the faint half-light, the rosy colours of the beautiful Saint Margaret window that glimmered ever so dimly upon the rows of cane-bottomed chairs, the dingy red hassocks, and the brass tablets upon the grey stone walls. He walked through, picking his way carefully in the dusk, saw for an instant the high, vast expanse of the nave with its few twinkling lights that blew in the windy air, then turned to the left into the Vestry, closing the door behind him. Even as he closed the door he could hear high, high up above him the ringing of the bell for Evensong[5].
In the Vestry he found Canon Dobell and Canon Rogers. Dobell, the Minor Canon who was singing the service, was a short, round, chubby clergyman, thirty-eight years of age, whose great aim in life was to have an easy time and agree with every one. He lived with a sister in a little house in the Precincts and gave excellent dinners. Very different was Canon Rogers, a thin esthetic man with black bushy eyebrows, a slight stoop and thin brown hair. He took life with grim seriousness. He was a stupid man but obstinate, dogmatic, and given to the condemnation of his fellow-men. He hated innovations as strongly as the Archdeacon himself, but with his clinging to old forms and rituals there went no self-exaltation. He was a cold-blooded man, although his obstinacy seemed sometimes to point to a fiery fanaticism. But he was not a fanatic any more than a mule is one when he plants his feet four-square and refuses to go forward. No compliments nor threats could move him; he would have lived, had he had a spark of asceticism, a hermit far from the haunts of men, but even that withdrawal would have implied devotion. He was devoted to no one, to no cause, to no religion, to no ambition. He spent his days in maintaining things as they were, not because he loved them, simply because he was obstinate. Brandon quite frankly hated him.
In the farther room the choir-boys were standing in their surplices, whispering and giggling. The sound of the bell was suddenly emphatic. Canon Rogers stood, his hands folded motionless, gazing in front of him. Dobell, smiling so that a dimple appeared in each cheek, said in his chuckling whisper to Brandon:
"Ronder comes to-day, doesn't he?"
"Ronder?" Brandon repeated, coming abruptly out of his secret exultation.
"Yes...Hart-Smith's successor."
"Oh, yes--I believe he does...."
Cobbett, the Verger, with his gold staff, appeared in the Vestry door. A tall handsome man, he had been in the service of the Cathedral as man and boy for fifty years. He had his private ambitions, the main one being that old Lawrence, the head Verger, in his opinion a silly old fool, should die and permit his own legitimate succession. Another ambition was that he should save enough money to buy another three cottages down in Seatown. He owned already six there. But no one observing his magnificent impassivity (he was famous for this throughout ecclesiastical Glebeshire) would have supposed that he had any thought other than those connected with ceremony. As he appeared the organ began its voluntary, the music stealing through the thick grey walls, creeping past the stout grey pillars that had listened, with so impervious an immobility, to an endless succession of voluntaries. The Archdeacon prayed, the choir responded with a long Amen, and the procession filed out, the boys with faces pious and wistful, the choir-men moving with nonchalance, their restless eyes wandering over the scene so absolutely known to them. Then came Rogers like a martyr; Dobell gaily as though he were enjoying some little joke of his own; last of all, Brandon, superb in carriage, in dignity, in his magnificent recognition of the value of ceremony.
Because to-day was simply an ordinary afternoon with an ordinary Anthem and an ordinary service (Martin in F) the congregation was small, the gates of the great screen closed with a clang behind the choir, and the nave, purple grey under the soft light of the candle-lit choir, was shut out into twilight. In the high carved seats behind and beyond the choir the congregation was sitting; Miss Dobell, who never missed a service that her brother was singing, with her pinched white face and funny old- fashioned bonnet, lost between the huge arms of her seat; Mrs. Combermere, with a friend, stiff and majestic; Mrs. Cole and her sister-in-law, Amy Cole; a few tourists; a man or two; Major Drake, who liked to join in the psalms with his deep bass; and little Mr. Thompson, one of the masters at the School who loved music and always came to Evensong when he could.
There they were then, and the Archdeacon, looking at them from his stall, could not but feel that they were rather a poor lot. Not that he exactly despised them; he felt kindly towards them and would have done no single one of them an injury, but he knew them all so well--Mrs. Combermere, Miss Dobell, Mrs. Cole, Drake, Thompson. They were shadows before him. If he looked hard at them, they seemed to disappear....
The exultation that he had felt as he stood outside his house-door increased with every moment that passed. It was strange, but he had never, perhaps, in all his life been so happy as he was at that hour. He was driven by the sense of it to that, with him, rarest of all things, introspection. Why should he feel like this? Why did his heart beat thickly, why were his cheeks flushed with a triumphant heat? It could not but be that he was realising to-day how everything was well with him. And why should he not realise it? Looking up to the high vaulted roofs above him, he greeted God, greeted Him as an equal, and thanked Him as a fellow- companion who had helped him through a difficult and dusty journey. He thanked Him for his health, for his bodily vigour and strength, for his beauty, for his good brain, for his successful married life, for his wife (poor Amy), for his house and furniture, for his garden and tennis-lawn, for his carriage and horses, for his son, for his position in the town, his dominance in the Chapter, his authority on the School Council, his importance in the district.... For all these things he thanked God, and he greeted Him with an outstretched hand.
"As one power to another," his soul cried, "greetings! You have been a true and loyal friend to me. Anything that I can do for You I will do...."
The time came for him to read the First Lesson. He crossed to the Lectern and was conscious that the tourists were whispering together about him. He read aloud, in his splendid voice, something about battles and vengeance, plagues and punishment, God's anger and the trembling Israelites. He might himself have been an avenging God as he read. He was uplifted with the glory of power and the exultation of personal dominion...
He crossed back to his seat, and, as they began the "Magnificat," his eye alighted on the tomb of the Black Bishop. In the volume on Polchester in Chimes' Cathedral Series (4th edition, 1910), page 52, you will find this description of the Black Bishop's Tomb: "It stands between the pillars at the far east end of the choir in the eighth bay from the choir screen. The stone screen which surrounds the tomb is of most elaborate workmanship, and it has, in certain lights, the effect of delicate lace; the canopy over the tomb has pinnacles which rise high above the level of the choir- stalls. The tomb itself is made from a solid block of a dark blue stone. The figure of the bishop, carved in black marble, lies with his hands folded across his breast, clothed in his Episcopal robes and mitre, and crozier on his shoulder. At his feet are a vizor and a pair of gauntlets, these also carved in black marble. On one finger of his right hand is a ring carved from some green stone. His head is raised by angels and at his feet beyond the vizor and gauntlets are tiny figures of four knights fully armed. A small arcade runs round the tomb with a series of shields in the spaces, and these shields have his motto, 'God giveth Strength,' and the arms of the See of Polchester. His epitaph in brass round the edge of the tomb has thus been translated:
"'Here, having surrendered himself back to God, lies Henry of Arden. His life, which was distinguished for its great piety, its unfailing generosity, its noble statesmanship, was rudely taken in the nave of this Cathedral by men who feared neither the punishment of their fellows nor the just vengeance of an irate God.
"'He died, bravely defending this great house of Prayer, and is now, in eternal happiness, fulfilling the reward of all good and faithful servants, at his Master's side.'"
It has been often remarked by visitors to the Cathedral how curiously this tomb catches light from all sides of the building, but this is undoubtedly in the main due to the fact that the blue stone of which it is chiefly composed responds immediately to the purple and violet lights that fall from the great East window. On a summer day the blue of the tomb seems almost opaque as though it were made of blue glass, and the gilt on the background of the screen and the brasses of the groins glitter and sparkle like fire.
Brandon to-day, wrapped in his strange mood of almost mystical triumph, felt as though he were, indeed, a reincarnation of the great Bishop.
As the "Magnificat" proceeded, he seemed to enter into the very tomb and share in the Bishop's dust. "I stood beside you," he might almost have cried, "when in the last savage encounter you faced them on the very steps of the altar, striking down two of them with your fists, falling at last, bleeding from a hundred wounds, but crying at the very end, 'God is my right!'"
As he stared across at the tomb, he seemed to see the great figure, deserted by all his terrified adherents, lying in his blood in the now deserted Cathedral; he saw the coloured dusk creep forward and cover him. And then, in the darkness of the night, the two faithful servants who crept in and carried away his body to keep it in safety until his day should come again.
Born in 1100, Henry of Arden had been the first Bishop to give Polchester dignity and power. What William of Wykeham was to Winchester, that Henry of Arden was to the See of Polchester. Through all the wild days of the quarrel between Stephen and Matilda he had stood triumphant, yielding at last only to the mad overwhelming attacks of his private enemies. Of those he had had many. It had been said of him that "he thought himself God--the proudest prelate on earth." Proud he may have been, but he had loved his Bishopric. It was in his time that the Saint Margaret's Chapel had been built, through his energy that the two great Western Towers had risen, because of him that Polchester now could boast one of the richest revenues of any Cathedral in Europe. Men said that he had plundered, stolen the land of powerless men, himself headed forays against neighbouring villages and even castles. He had done it for the greater glory of God. They had been troublous times. It had been every man for himself....
He had told his people that he was God's chief servant; it was even said that he had once, in the plenitude of his power, cried that he was God Himself....
His figure remained to this very day dominating Polchester, vast in stature, black-bearded, rejoicing in his physical strength. He could kill, they used to say, an ox with his fist....
The "Gloria" rang triumphantly up into the shadows of the nave. Brandon moved once more across to the Lectern. He read of the casting of the money-changers out of the Temple.
His voice quivered with pride and exultation so that Cobbett, who had acquired, after many years' practice, the gift of sleeping during the Lessons and Sermon with his eyes open, woke up with a start and wondered what was the matter.
Brandon's mood, when he was back in his own drawing-room, did not leave him; it was rather intensified by the cosiness and security of his home. Lying back in his large arm-chair in front of the fire, his long legs stretched out before him, he could hear the rain beating on the window- panes and beyond that the murmur of the organ (Brockett, the organist, was practising, as he often did after Evensong).
The drawing-room was a long narrow one with many windows; it was furnished in excellent taste. The carpet and the curtains and the dark blue coverings to the chairs were all a little faded, but this only gave them an additional dignity and repose. There were two large portraits of himself and Mrs. Brandon painted at the time of their marriage, some low white book-shelves, a large copy of "Christ in the Temple"--plenty of space, flowers, light.
Mrs. Brandon was, at this time, a woman of forty-two, but she looked very much less than that. She was slight, dark, pale, quite undistinguished. She had large grey eyes that looked on to the ground when you spoke to her. She was considered a very shy woman, negative in every way. She agreed with everything that was said to her and seemed to have no opinions of her own. She was simply "the wife of the Archdeacon." Mrs. Combermere considered her a "poor little fool." She had no real friends in Polchester, and it made little difference to any gathering whether she were there or not. She had been only once known to lose her temper in public--once in the market-place she had seen a farmer beat his horse over the eyes. She had actually gone up to him and struck him. Afterwards she had said that "she did not like to see animals ill-treated." The Archdeacon had apologised for her, and no more had been said about it. The farmer had borne her no grudge.
She sat now at the little tea-table, her eyes screwed up over the serious question of giving the Archdeacon his tea exactly as he wanted it. Her whole mind was apparently engaged on this problem, and the Archdeacon did not care to-day that she did not answer his questions and support his comments because he was very, very happy, the whole of his being thrilling with security and success and innocent pride.
Joan Brandon came in. In appearance she was, as Mrs. Sampson said, "insignificant." You would not look at her twice any more than you would have looked at her mother twice. Her figure was slight and her legs (she was wearing long skirts this year for the first time) too long. Her hair was dark brown and her eyes dark brown. She had nice rosy cheeks, but they were inclined to freckle. She smiled a good deal and laughed, when in company, more noisily than was proper. "A bit of a tomboy, I'm afraid," was what one used to hear about her. But she was not really a tomboy; she moved quietly, and her own bedroom was always neat and tidy. She had very little pocket-money and only seldom new clothes, not because the Archdeacon was mean, but because Joan was so often forgotten and left out of the scheme of things. It was surprising that the only girl in the house should be so often forgotten, but the Archdeacon did not care for girls, and Mrs. Brandon did not appear to think very often of any one except the Archdeacon. Falk, Joan's brother, now at Oxford, when he was at home had other things to do than consider Joan. She had gone, ever since she was twelve, to the Polchester High School for Girls, and there she was popular, and might have made many friends, had it not been that she could not invite her companions to her home. Her father did not like "noise in the house." She had been Captain of the Hockey team; the small girls in the school had all adored her. She had left the place six months ago and had come home to "help her mother." She had had, in honest fact, six months' loneliness, although no one knew that except herself. Her mother had not wanted her help. There had been nothing for her to do, and she had felt herself too young to venture into the company of older girls in the town. She had been rather "blue" and had looked back on Seafield House, the High School, with longing, and then suddenly, one morning, for no very clear reason she had taken a new view of life. Everything seemed delightful and even thrilling, commonplace things that she had known all her days, the High Street, keeping her rooms tidy, spending or saving the minute monthly allowance, the Cathedral, the river. She was all in a moment aware that something very delightful would shortly occur. What it was she did not know, and she laughed at herself for imagining that anything extraordinary could ever happen to any one so commonplace as herself, but there the strange feeling was and it would not go away.
To-day, as always when her father was there, she came in very quietly, sat down near her mother, saw that she made no sort of interruption to the Archdeacon's flow of conversation. She found that he was in a good humour to-day, and she was glad of that because it would please her mother. She herself had a great interest in all that he said. She thought him a most wonderful man, and secretly was swollen with pride that she was his daughter. It did not hurt her at all that he never took any notice of her. Why should he? Nor did she ever feel jealous of Falk, her father's favourite. That seemed to her quite natural. She had the idea, now most thoroughly exploded but then universally held in Polchester, that women were greatly inferior to men. She did not read the more advanced novels written by Mme. Sarah Grand and Mrs. Lynn Linton. I am ashamed to say that her favourite authors were Miss Alcott and Miss Charlotte Mary Yonge. Moreover, she herself admired Falk extremely. He seemed to her a hero and always right in everything that he did.
Her father continued to talk, and behind the reverberation of his deep voice the roll of the organ like an approving echo could faintly be heard.
"There was a moment when I thought Foster was going to interfere. I've been against the garden-roller from the first--they've got one and what do they want another for? And, anyway, he thinks I meddle with the School's affairs too much. Who wants to meddle with the School's affairs? I'm sure they're nothing but a nuisance, but some one's got to prevent the place from going to wrack and ruin, and if they all leave it to me I can't very well refuse it, can I? Hey?"
"No, dear."
"You see what I mean?"
"Yes, dear."
"Well, then--" (As though Mrs. Brandon had just been overcome in an argument in which she'd shown the greatest obstinacy.) "There you are. It would be false modesty to deny that I've got the Chapter more or less in my pocket And why shouldn't I have? Has any one worked harder for this place and the Cathedral than I have?"
"No, dear."
"Well, then.... There's this new fellow Ronder coming to-day. Don't know much about him, but he won't give much trouble, I expect--trouble in the way of delaying things, I mean. What we want is work done expeditiously. I've just about got that Chapter moving at last. Ten years' hard work. Deserve a V.C. or something. Hey?"
"Yes, dear, I'm sure you do."
The Archdeacon gave one of his well-known roars of laughter--a laugh famous throughout the county, a laugh described by his admirers as "Homeric," by his enemies as "ear-splitting." There was, however, enemies or no enemies, something sympathetic in that laugh, something boyish and simple and honest.
He suddenly pulled himself up, bringing his long legs close against his broad chest.
"No letter from Falk to-day, was there?"
"No, dear."
"Humph. That's three weeks we haven't heard. Hope there's nothing wrong."
"What could there be wrong, dear?"
"Nothing, of course.... Well, Joan, and what have you been doing with yourself all day?"
It was only in his most happy and resplendent moods that the Archdeacon held jocular conversations with his daughter. These conversations had been, in the past, moments of agony and terror to her, but since that morning when she had suddenly woken to a realisation of the marvellous possibilities in life her terror had left her. There were other people in the world besides her father....
Nevertheless, a little, her agitation was still with her. She looked up at him, smiling.
"Oh, I don't know, father.... I went to the Library this morning to change the books for mother--"
"Novels, I suppose. No one ever reads anything but trash nowadays."
"They hadn't anything that mother put down. They never have. Miss Milton sits on the new novels and keeps them for Mrs. Sampson and Mrs. Combermere."
"Sits on them?"
"Yes--really sits on them. I saw her take one from under her skirt the other day when Mrs. Sampson asked for it. It was one that mother has wanted a long time."
The Archdeacon was angry. "I never heard anything so scandalous. I'll just see to that. What's the use of being on the Library Committee if that kind of thing happens? That woman shall go."
"Oh no! father!..."
"Of course she shall go. I never heard anything so dishonest in my life!..."
Joan remembered that little conversation until the end of her life. And with reason.
The door was flung open. Some one came hurriedly in, then stopped, with a sudden arrested impulse, looking at them. It was Falk.
Falk was a very good-looking man--fair hair, light blue eyes like his father's, slim and straight and quite obviously fearless. It was that quality of courage that struck every one who saw him; it was not only that he feared, it seemed, no one and nothing, but that he went a step further than that, spending his life in defying every one and everything, as a practised dueller might challenge every one he met in order to keep his play in practice. "I don't like young Brandon," Mrs. Sampson said. "He snorts contempt at you...."
He was only twenty-one, a contemptuous age. He looked as though he had been living in that house for weeks, although, as a fact, he had just driven up, after a long and tiresome journey, in an ancient cab through the pouring rain. The Archdeacon gazed at his son in a bewildered, confused amaze, as though he, a convinced sceptic, were suddenly confronted, in broad daylight, with an undoubted ghost.
"What's the matter?" he said at last. "Why are you here?"
"I've been sent down," said Falk.
It was characteristic of the relationship in that family that, at that statement, Mrs. Brandon and Joan did not look at Falk but at the Archdeacon.
"Sent down!"
"Yes, for ragging! They wanted to do it last term."
"Sent down!" The Archdeacon shot to his feet; his voice suddenly lifted into a cry. "And you have the impertinence to come here and tell me! You walk in as though nothing had happened! You walk in!..."
"You're angry," said Falk, smiling. "Of course I knew you would be. You might hear me out first. But I'll come along when I've unpacked and you're a bit cooler. I wanted some tea, but I suppose that will have to wait. You just listen, father, and you'll find it isn't so bad. Oxford's a rotten place for any one who wants to be on his own, and, anyway, you won't have to pay my bills any more."
Falk turned and went.
The Archdeacon, as he stood there, felt a dim mysterious pain as though an adversary whom he completely despised had found suddenly with his weapon a joint in his armour.
Chapter II
Ronders
The train that brought Falk Brandon back to Polchester brought also the Ronders--Frederick Ronder, newly Canon of Polchester, and his aunt, Miss Alice Ronder. About them the station gathered in a black cloud, dirty, obscure, lit by flashes of light and flame, shaken with screams, rumblings, the crashing of carriage against carriage, the rattle of cab- wheels on the cobbles outside. To-day also there was the hiss and scatter of the rain upon the glass roof. The Ronders stood, not bewildered, for that they never were, but thinking what would be best. The new Canon was a round man, round-shouldered, round-faced, round-stomached, round legged. A fair height, he was not ludicrous, but it seemed that if you laid him down he would roll naturally, still smiling, to the farthest end of the station. He wore large, very round spectacles. His black clerical coat and trousers and hat were scrupulously clean and smartly cut. He was not a dandy, but he was not shabby. He smiled a great deal, not nervously as curates are supposed to smile, not effusively, but simply with geniality. His aunt was a contrast, thin, straight, stiff white collar, little black bow-tie, coat like a man's, skirt with no nonsense about it. No nonsense about her anywhere. She was not unamiable, perhaps, but business came first.
"Well, what do we do?" he asked.
"We collect our bags and find the cab," she answered briskly.
They found their bags, and there were a great many of them; Miss Ronder, having seen that they were all there and that there was no nonsense about the porter, moved off to the barrier followed by her nephew.
As they came into the station square, all smelling of hay and the rain, the deluge slowly withdrew its forces, recalling them gradually so that the drops whispered now, patter-patter--pit-pat. A pigeon hovered down and pecked at the cobbles. Faint colour threaded the thick blotting-paper grey.
Old Fawcett himself had come to the station to meet them. Why had he felt it to be an occasion? God only knows. A new Canon was nothing to him. He very seldom now, being over eighty, with a strange "wormy" pain in his left ear, took his horses out himself. He saved his money and counted it over by his fireside to see that his old woman didn't get any of it. He hated his old woman, and in a vaguely superstitious, thoroughly Glebeshire fashion half-believed that she had cast a spell over him and was really responsible for his "wormy" ear.
Why had he come? He didn't himself know. Perhaps Ronder was going to be of importance in the place, he had come from London and they all had money in London. He licked his purple protruding lips greedily as he saw the generous man. Yes, kindly and generous he looked....
They got into the musty cab and rattled away over the cobbles.
"I hope Mrs. Clay got the telegram all right." Miss Ronder's thin bosom was a little agitated beneath its white waistcoat. "You'll never forgive me if things aren't looking as though we'd lived in the place for months."
Alice Ronder was over sixty and as active as a woman of forty. Ronder looked at her and laughed.
"Never forgive you! What words! Do I ever cherish grievances? Never... but I do like to be comfortable."
"Well, everything was all right a week ago. I've slaved at the place, as you know, and Mrs. Clay's a jewel--but she complains of the Polchester maids--says there isn't one that's any good. Oh, I want my tea, I want my tea!"
They were climbing up from the market-place into the High Street. Ronder looked about him with genial curiosity.
"Very nice," he said; "I believe I can be comfortable here."
"If you aren't comfortable you certainly won't stay," she answered him sharply.
"Then I must be comfortable," he replied, laughing.
He laughed a great deal, but absent-mindedly, as though his thoughts were elsewhere. It would have been interesting to a student of human nature to have been there and watched him as he sat back in the cab, looking through the window, indeed, but seeing apparently nothing. He seemed to be gazing through his round spectacles very short-sightedly, his eyes screwed up and dim. His fat soft hands were planted solidly on his thick knees.
The observer would have been interested because he would soon have realised that Ronder saw everything; nothing, however insignificant, escaped him, but he seemed to see with his brain as though he had learnt the trick of forcing it to some new function that did not properly belong to it. The broad white forehead under the soft black clerical hat was smooth, unwrinkled, mild and calm.... He had trained it to be so.
The High Street was like any High Street of a small Cathedral town in the early evening. The pavements were sleek and shiny after the rain; people were walking with the air of being unusually pleased with the world, always the human expression when the storms have withdrawn and there is peace and colour in the sky. There were lights behind the solemn panes of Bennett's the bookseller's, that fine shop whose first master had seen Sir Walter Scott in London and spoken to Byron. In his window were rows of the classics in calf and first editions of the Surtees books and Dr. Syntax. At the very top of the High Street was Mellock's the pastry- cook's, gay with its gas, rich with its famous saffron buns, its still more famous ginger-bread cake, and, most famous of all, its lemon biscuits. Even as the Ronders' cab paused for a moment before it turned to pass under the dark Arden Gate on to the asphalt of the Precincts, the great Mrs. Mellock herself, round and rubicund, came to the door and looked about her at the weather. An errand-boy passed, whistling, down the hill, a stiff military-looking gentleman with white moustaches mounted majestically the steps of the Conservative Club; then they rattled under the black archway, echoed for a moment on the noisy cobbles, then slipped into the quiet solemnity of the Precincts asphalt. It was Brandon who had insisted on the asphalt. Old residents had complained that to take away the cobbles would be to rid the Precincts of all its atmosphere.
"I don't care about atmosphere," said the Archdeacon, "I want to sleep at night."
Very quiet here; not a sound penetrated. The Cathedral was a huge shadow above its darkened lawns; not a human soul was to be seen.
The cab stopped with a jerk at Number Eight. The bell was rung by old Fawcett, who stood on the top step looking down at Ronder and wondering how much he dared to ask him. Ask him too much now and perhaps he would not deal with him in the future. Moreover, although the man wore large spectacles and was fat he was probably not a fool.... Fawcett could not tell why he was so sure, but there was something....
Mrs. Clay was at the door, smiling and ordering a small frightened girl to "hurry up now." Miss Ronder disappeared into the house. Ronder stood for a moment looking about him as though he were a spy in enemy country and must let nothing escape him.
"Whose is that big place there?" he asked Fawcett, pointing to a house that stood by itself at the farther corner of the Precincts.
"Archdeacon Brandon's, sir."
"Oh!..." Ronder mounted the steps. "Good night," he said to Fawcett. "Mrs. Clay, pay the cabman, please."
The Ronders had taken this house a month ago; for two months before that it had stood desolate, wisps of paper and straw blowing about it, its "To let" notice creaking and screaming in every wind. The Hon. Mrs. Pentecoste, an eccentric old lady, had lived there for many years, and had died in the middle of a game of patience; her worn and tattered furniture had been sold at auction, and the house had remained unlet for a considerable period because people in the town said that the ghost of Mrs. Pentecoste's cat (a famous blue Persian) walked there. The Ronders cared nothing for ghosts; the house was exactly what they wanted. It had two panelled rooms, two powder-closets, and a little walled garden at the back with fruit trees.
It was quite wonderful what Miss Ronder had done in a month; she had abandoned Eaton Square for a week, worked in the Polchester house like a slave, then retired back to Eaton Square again, leaving Mrs. Clay, her aide-de-camp, to manage the rest. Mrs. Clay had managed very well. She would not have been in the service of the Ronders for nearly fifteen years had she not had a gift for managing....
Ronder, washed and brushed, came down to tea, looked about him, and saw that all was good.
"I congratulate you, Aunt Alice," he said--"excellent!"
Miss Ronder very slightly flushed.
"There are a lot of things still to be done," she said; nevertheless she was immensely pleased.
The drawing-room was charming. The stencilled walls, the cushions of the chairs, the cover of a gate-legged table, the curtains of the mullioned windows were of a warm dark blue. And whatever in the room was not blue seemed to be white, or wood in its natural colour, or polished brass. Books ran round the room in low white book-cases. In one corner a pure white Hermes stood on a pedestal with tiny wings outspread. There was only one picture, an excellent copy of "Rembrandt's mother." The windows looked out to the garden, now veiled by the dusk of evening. Tea was on a little table close to the white tiled fireplace. A little square brass clock chimed the half-hour as Ronder came in.
"I suppose Ellen will be over," Ronder said. He drank in the details of the room with a quite sensual pleasure. He went over to the Hermes and lifted it, holding it for a moment in his podgy hands.
"You beauty!" he whispered aloud. He put it back, turned round to his aunt.
"Of course Ellen will be over," he repeated.
"Of course," Miss Ronder repeated, picking up the old square black lacquer tea-caddy and peering into it.
He picked up the books on the table--two novels, Sentimental Tommy, by J. M. Barrie, and Sir George Tressady, by Mrs. Humphry Ward, Mr. Swinburne's Tale of Balen, and The Works of Max Beerbohm. Last of all Leslie Stephen's Social Rights and Duties.
He looked at them all, with their light yellow Mudie labels, their fresh bindings, then, slowly and very carefully, put them back on the table.
He always handled books as though they were human beings.
He came and sat down by the fire.
"I won't see over the place until to-morrow," he said. "What have you done about the other books?"
"The book-cases are in. It's the best room in the house. Looks over the river and gets most of the light. The books are as you packed them. I haven't dared touch them. In fact, I've left that room entirely for you to arrange."
"Well," he said, "if you've done the rest of this house as well as this room, you'll do. It's jolly--it really is. I'm going to like this place."
"And you hated the very idea of it."
"I hated the discomfort there'd be before we settled in. But the settling in is going to be easier than I thought. Of course we don't know yet how the land lies. Ellen will tell us."
They were silent for a little. Then he looked at her with a puzzled, half- humorous, half-ironical glance.
"It's a bit of a blow to you, Aunt Alice, burying yourself down here. London was the breath of your nostrils. What did you come for? Love of me?"
She looked steadily back at him.
"Not love exactly. Curiosity, perhaps. I want to see at first hand what you'll do. You're the most interesting human being I've ever met, and that isn't prejudice. Aunts do not, as a rule, find their nephews interesting. And what have you come here for? I assure you I haven't the least idea."
The door was opened by Mrs. Clay.
"Miss Stiles," she said.
