The Ironsides spent the rest of that day, and the next, in destruction. Every carved angel and haloed saint within reach, inside the Cathedral and out, had its head knocked off. The chantries of Phillippa and Rollo, and of Blanche, that were full of angels, were a shambles of angelic heads. The glorious carved and painted wooden screen, with its panels depicting the life and death of the Virgin, was hacked out entirely and burned on the green together with all the Cathedral vestments. At sight of the flames the citizens, Puritans though most of them were, remembered Harry Montague’s bonfire that had ushered in much suffering for the city, and they trembled.
High up in the Rollo tower Michael was beyond the reach of destruction. His haloed head safe upon his mailed shoulders he looked down in scorn upon the destroyers below, and the light of the flames seemed to glint upon his sword as though it was dipped in blood. At him too the citizens glanced anxiously, for there was something about his looks that they did not like. The Cathedral too, as the gray cold twilight of the second day drew on, had a menacing look. It seemed vaster than usual, colder, blacker, and yet terribly alive. Those whose duty compelled them to crawl about like ants beneath it had a feeling that it was towering up and up and might curve and break over them like an annihilating wave. Lieutenant General Cromwell and his men had meant to leave at dawn the next day, after a late afternoon spent in smashing the Cathedral windows, but they found they were pressed for time and decided to go at once, sparing the windows but taking Peter Rollard with them for incarceration in a safer, deeper place than the city prison. They clattered down through the cobbled streets with the Dean riding in the midst of them, a trooper leading his horse because only his left hand was of use to him. The last that his people heard of him was his unmusical voice singing the sixteenth verse of the sixty-eighth psalm as loudly as he could. “This is God’s hill, in the which it pleaseth Him to dwell; yea, the Lord will abide in it for ever.” His enemies feared to silence him; there was such a numinous terror upon them that evening that they were frightened of him. Dean Peter Rollard was another of those men whose vital, doughty spirit could be as daunting as the spirit of the Cathedral itself.
The years of the Commonwealth ground slowly by, and perhaps the sorrows of the citizens during that time were not really greater than is normal to human life, perhaps it was only their fancy that made them seem so, and swung their sympathies slowly over to the lost cause. They grieved over the death of their royalist Bishop in prison, shuddered at the murder of the King, and when his son returned to his own they rejoiced. But when Peter Rollard also came back to his own the whole city nearly went mad with joy. It was Christmas Eve, one of those springlike Christmases that do occasionally visit even the bleaker parts of England. The Commonwealth had suppressed Christmas as smacking of popery, and through the gray years there had been no Christmas services and no ringing of the bells. But upon this afternoon of the Dean’s return the bells rang again. It was a day of pale sunshine and in the morning the city had been permeated with the strange smell of violets that comes sometimes in a mild midwinter after shed rain, though there are no violets. All day it was very quiet except for the low hum of happy preparation. As the afternoon wore on, the pale sky deepened to a fen sunset, not one of the terrifying ones but a scattering of small pink clouds all over a sky of deepening blue. The river, and the pools and streams among the reeds, reflected the sky. The swans, seeing themselves lapped in color, floated in a mazed stillness. The great distance was very clear and the fen villages on their small hills could all be seen, their church towers rising black and clear. Very clear too were the little figures of two horsemen approaching far off upon the road from the north that curved itself about the villages as it approached the city. It was known that the Dean’s servant Tom Lumpkin, and he only, had gone to meet him at his special request, but even so the watchers on the city walls could not have been certain who these two were had they not heard bells pealing. So faint and lovely was the sound that it might have come from heaven itself, and for a moment or two the citizens looked at each other with wondering awe, before they realized that the village churches were ringing Peter Rollard home.
Then the bells of the Cathedral began to swing and soon their tremendous clamor was shaking the Rollo tower, and the citizens were streaming joyously out of the North Gate to welcome their Dean. He was not only their Dean, a courageous man who had endured much for the sake of the faith that was in him, but a figure who, whether they understood it or not, symbolized for them the spirit of this place. He was a descendant of those others, of Duke Rollo, Abbot William and Prior Hugh. Their mantle had fallen upon him. With him away the life of the city, and of the Cathedral upon the hill that was the reason for the city, had sickened, as it had in the days after the monks had gone away. Now, as the shuddering tower lifted its weight of music toward the city, the spirit of the place leaped upward into new life.
Peter Rollard was much changed. His red beard was streaked with gray and his face was furrowed, and as he rode up through the city toward the Cathedral with his people exulting about him he actually wept. No one had ever expected to see Peter Rollard weep, and he had not himself expected that he would be so overcome and had taken no prevenient action. He was without a handkerchief and Tom Lumpkin had to supply one.
That Christmas Eve the villagers in the fens saw light shining from the Cathedral windows and heard organ music and the sound of a mighty singing. The whole city was inside the Cathedral, they judged, excepting only the sick and the babes and those who must care for them. Once more, after the dreary years when there had been no Christmas, they were welcoming Christ to His manger throne.
Peter Rollard lived for six years after his return, a much gentler man than he had been, and much beloved. A new Bishop was appointed, Josiah Farran, and he too was loved. These two died within a few weeks of each other and were buried in the south aisle of the Cathedral nave, and the sorrowing city caused beautiful effigies of them to be carved in colored marbles and laid upon their graves. On the afternoon of the day on which Dean Rollard died an old shepherd, coming in from the fen, looked up and thought he saw two swans far up in the sky. After a moment’s consideration he decided it was only his fancy because he had never known swans to fly so high.
4.
The years passed and the life of the city flowed on with no great upheavals. There were wars abroad and years of scarcity at home that took their toll of life, but there was never a day when the praises of God were not sung in the Cathedral, or a Sunday that the bells did not peal. Bishops and Deans and Canons lived and died in the old houses about the Cathedral, and some were holy and some were strong-minded and a few were both but none of them seemed quite to have the stature of the great men who were gone, none of them seemed quite to be the city. None of them, that is, until in the year eighteen hundred and sixty-five the terrible Adam Ayscough was appointed Dean.
He came to the city at a time when a miasma of evil had corrupted it. The city had endured onslaughts of evil before in its long history, for as a fortress of God it had always been especially obnoxious to the devil, but the attacks had been overt ones and recognized for what they were. This time there had been few robberies, no violent quarreling and murdering, but instead a creeping nastiness of sloth and deceit, indifference and self-indulgence, that most horribly seemed to emanate from the Cathedral close itself. The Dean at that time was a melancholic recluse and the Canons dined too well. There was no active wickedness among them, they were all too comfortable for that, but the absence of good left a vacuum that was quickly filled. The slimy film on the surface was not in itself alarming, merely a dirty Cathedral, gabbled services, soiled and torn surplices and insubordinate lay clerks and choirboys, and the only man who fully realized the satanic nature of what was beneath was the Bishop, an incorruptibly holy man but too old now to be able to come to grips with any problem except the almost overmastering one of shifting his aged body about its duties. Yet when the melancholic Dean died he knew what to do.
That very morning he had seen in The Times the announcement of Adam Ayscough’s resignation from the presidency of a famous college. He had met him only once or twice but he knew what manner of man he was. Adam Ayscough had already cleansed the Augean stables of a corrupt public school and made it the finest in England, and the college he was leaving had possessed neither virtue nor repute before he took it in his grip. If he could not through the grace of God cleanse the city no man could. The old Bishop wrote to him, inaugurating a long tussle between them, for Adam Ayscough’s mind was set upon retirement and it was not his habit to yield his will to another. Yet, surprisingly, the old Bishop won, and within a year Adam Ayscough had been installed as Dean.
Within three years the small ecclesiastical world upon the plateau at the top of the hill had been scoured in every cranny. They were years of terror for all concerned. The Dean drove upon them like a gale from the sea. The fabric of the Cathedral was dangerously decayed in places, the roof was leaking, ladders and broken chairs blocked one chantry, the droppings from jackdaws’ nests littered a second, a new organ was needed and a new choir screen to replace the one destroyed by Cromwell. For a while, as the Dean attended to these things, masons, carpenters, wood carvers and the like descending upon the city, and dirt and debris flying in the air, it almost seemed as though Abbot William were building the Cathedral all over again. The human element was not neglected; concurrently with the flying of the dust the Dean was campaigning against those evils in it which had resulted in dirty surplices and gabbled services. He reorganized the choir school and the almshouses and dismissed a sadistic headmaster and an incompetent organist. He put the fear of God into the whole lot of them, from the Sub-Dean down to the smallest choirboy, and the battle of the plateau was watched with much enjoyment by the rest of the citizens down below.
And then, suddenly, it was their turn. It was of no use to protest that the affairs of the city were not the business of the Dean. Adam Ayscough was deaf. His terrible anger uncovered the deplorable state of the workhouse, and revealed to a horrified city the conditions under which women and girls worked in the labor gangs in the fens. He exposed graft, exploitation of children and the weak, hypocrisy and greed wherever he found them, and however bitter the opposition he encountered he nearly always beat it down. During the years of battle he was only seriously defeated once. The slums about the North Gate, where most of the basketmakers lived, were a breeding ground of sickness and misery, but their destruction, and the building of healthier homes on higher ground, was something that even he could not encompass. The slums, though appalling, were picturesque and contained some of the oldest houses in the city, and he had all the sentimentalists and antiquarians against him. He had the people of the district themselves against him, for the basketworkers had always lived by the North Gate, close to the osier beds, they were used to their dirt and squalor and were traditionalists to a man. But what finally defeated him was the fact that influential men owned property there, and the public houses that dominated every street corner were a source of income to the wealthiest man in the city, Alderman Turnbull the brewer, who lived in the market place. In his own way he was as much a colossus as the Dean and the fight they had over the slums was something the city never forgot.
But in all else the Dean triumphed, and for a period of some six or seven years it seemed that the city lay helpless in his grip, and then very slowly there came a strange stirring of new life, a springtide freshness and energy. Men and women did their work increasingly well, with growing pleasure and pride in what they did. The Cathedral became known all over England for its music and the dignity and beauty of its services. Its bells rang out with power. Its fabric was perfectly cared for and a spirit of good craftsmanship grew up in the city. All that was great in the past seemed very much alive and men and women looked with new hope to the future. It seemed to them that the one blight upon the place was the Dean himself. For years, after the battle of the North Gate slums, his enemies had carried on a campaign of vilification against him and he was cordially disliked. Yet the city was proud of him. When he plowed his way doggedly along the streets, his broad shoulders a little bowed beneath the weight of the ten years he had spent in the city, his craggy face set like granite and his unhappy eyes peering out beneath his shaggy gray eyebrows with no friendly recognition in them for any whom he passed, men and women felt a thrill of pride as well as dislike. He was, somehow, the city.
3. Angel Lane
1.
A TREMENDOUS music broke out over Isaac’s head, and for a moment he was startled nearly out of his wits, for standing looking out over the city his mind had gone back to other years. Then a thrill of awe went through him. He did not look up, though he was vividly aware of the mailed fist striking the great bell and the stern face of the Archangel, but remained looking out over the past. Nine times the great bell boomed out, the sound rolling over Isaac’s head and away over the city to the fens. Nine o’clock, the hour of the old curfew. Then far down below him he heard the homely church clocks striking. In all the houses of the city other little clocks were striking too, though he could not hear them. Then there was silence, deep and profound, and suddenly he was terrified. It seemed to him that time was opening at his feet and that he stood looking down into an abyss of nothingness. Behind him the Cathedral soared like a towering black wave that would presently crash down on him and knock him into the abyss. Unable to move he stood there sweating with terror, as helpless and hopeless as in those nightmares that visited him during his bad times. But this was not one of his bad times, it was a good time. His mind suddenly gripped that. He remembered what had happened an hour ago and the memory was like a cry for help. Again and again he cried for help and slowly the memory of love became love, welling up from the depths of him and quietly enveloping himself and the city, time and the abyss, all that was. He was set free.
He walked quietly down the steps, wiping his face with his handkerchief and vowing that never again would he go near the terrible Cathedral in moonlight. He went across the green and under the Porta, crossed Worship Street and was in Angel Lane, and presently he was so far recovered that he started whistling the “Bells of St. Clements,” shakily but with enjoyment. He was still whistling when he went up the two worn stone steps to the front door of number twelve, where he lived with Emma, and did not begin to run down until he stood in the dark little passage taking off his muffler and his greatcoat, and remembered suddenly that it was long past suppertime. The silence in the house was ominous and even though it was one of his good times he fumbled stupidly with the handle of the parlor door, and nearly lost his footing on the wool mat on the threshold. Emma had a little wool mat made by herself before every door in the house. They were her pride and joy and it must have been Isaac’s fault that they always slid from beneath him, for Emma herself never lost her footing on them.
As her brother came in she rose silently from her hard chair and pulled the long tasseled bell rope that hung beside the fire. The bell clanged like a fire alarm in the kitchen next door, a signal to their little maid Polly to bring in the overcooked supper. Their evening meal was supposed to be at eight but Emma always waited for Isaac however late he was. That was one of her principles. Another of them was that she never reproached Isaac however maddening he might be. She had accepted him as her cross and she carried him uncomplainingly, for she was a very virtuous woman. “Wash your hands,” was all she said now.
Isaac slunk back again into the passage, slipping this time on the kitchen mat, for he had to pass through the kitchen to the scullery. As he came in, Polly straightened up from before the kitchen range and she and Isaac smiled at each other, but did not speak for fear Emma should hear them. Isaac tiptoed through to the scullery and lit the candle there, and a moment later Polly popped up at his elbow with a jug of water. “ ’Ot,” she whispered. He looked down into her round greenish-hazel eyes, bright with laughter in a plain freckled little face from which the ginger hair was drawn back to be hi
dden beneath a big mobcap. He was small but she was smaller, reaching only to his shoulder. She was a brat from the city orphanage and Emma had got her cheap. She was sixteen years old, tough as a pit pony and a wonderful worker. But she did not find drugdery monotonous and she was possibly the happiest person in the city. She adored and protected Isaac, she adored Sooty the cat and would have protected him had it been necessary. She pitied Emma. She had never hated anyone, not even those who in the past had cruelly misused her. She was intuitive and looking up now into Isaac’s face she knew it was one of his good times. While he soaped his work-soiled hands she darted back into the kitchen and returned with a rough towel which she had been warming in front of the fire. “ ’Ot,” she whispered again, and felt in her own body the glow of Isaac’s happiness and of his hot water and hot towel. Warmth was acceptable in the scullery, for it was cold and dreary there. The kitchen regions of the picturesque old houses of Angel Lane were stone-floored and damp, the happy hunting ground of black beetles and mice, and the cats who had to be kept to keep down the mice. However scrupulously clean they were kept, and Polly scrubbed the stone floors of number twelve every day, they retained their distinctive smell: damp, mice, beetles and tomcat flavored with onion.
“Thankee, Polly,” said Isaac, and pinched her cheek. “What’s for supper?’’
“Shepherd’s pie,” said Polly. “ ’Ot.”
Polly’s pies, even when kept waiting too long in the oven, were good, and Isaac stepped across the kitchen with alacrity, his mouth watering. But seated at the round table in the parlor, opposite Emma, he found that he was not hungry any more. It was odd, the way he always felt hungry in the kitchen with Polly but unable to eat much in the parlor with Emma. And yet Emma was always solicitous about his meals and subsequent indigestion. It was another of her principles that a man’s stomach should be a woman’s first care. Emma presiding over a meal was like a high priestess offering sacrifice at the altar of a pitiless god. Grimly, as she and Isaac sat waiting for Polly to bring in the pie, she looked the table over to make sure that everything required for the coming ritual was in place. The oil lamp in the center was trimmed to perfection, the white tablecloth, exquisitely darned and laundered, was spotless, the thin old table silver highly polished. The cruets were not quite at the right angle but she adjusted them. Isaac’s postprandial bismuth mixture was by his glass.
The Dean's Watch Page 4