The Dean's Watch

by Elizabeth Goudge

  “Tomorrow morning,” said Isaac harshly, “you can take that to the Dean and tell him what you did. You need not come to work tomorrow. I shan’t want you.” And with the box holding the ruins of the clock under his arm he walked out of the room and out of the house, his footsteps echoing down the street.

  Job sat crouched over the fire. There had been a moment not long ago when he had seemed to wake suddenly from darkness to light. It had been the day that the Dean had come to St. Peter’s vicarage. But now the darkness was again as thick as death. Isaac would not forgive him for what had happened, and his love and Polly’s was soiled. That wicked old woman had flung it like a flower into the mud and now it would never be the same again. They would pick it up and make the best of it but it would never be the same again. He was so soaked in misery that he did not hear Polly come lightly into the room. He did not know she was there until she sat down beside him and slipped her arm around his neck. “I’m going to make a pot of tea,” she said cheerfully. “Where’s the cat?”

  “Lord, Polly, how should I know?” Job said irritably. “Surely there’s enough trouble without you fussing about the cat.”

  She laughed and leaned her cheek against his. “Mend the fire while I make the tea,” she said. “I’ll take a cup up to the mistress, poor soul, and then we’ll have ours here. Where’s Mr. Peabody?” She looked at the Time and Death clock. “Not closing time yet, and likely he’ll drink more than is good for him. I’ll sit up for him and when he comes back I’ll get him to bed with a nice hot brick to his feet. He’ll be himself in the morning if he don’t get asthma.”

  She went out and Job heard her singing softly to herself as she got the tea, and talking to Sooty, who had thought discretion the better part of valor and remained aloof from disturbance in the kitchen. Her equanimity in disaster, her immunity from the strains and miseries of the artistic temperament, the way evil ran off her like water off a duck’s back, were to exasperate him all their life together and yet be his delight and salvation also. Even now he found himself smiling as he heard the clink of china, and mending the fire as though it were important. All the material sources of comfort mattered extremely to Polly and one could not love her without in some sense loving them too, since all comfort seemed a part of her.

  He heard her take the tea to Emma and then she was back again with two steaming cups on a tray. “ ’Ot,” she said, and the word seemed the promise of all bliss. With their hands around the hot cups they sat together on the hearth rug and sipped the scalding liquid. Then Polly stretched out her left hand and the stones in her ring winked in the firelight. “Pretty, ain’t it?” she said. “While I’m working I’ll wear it on a bit of ribbon around my neck. It’ll never be off me, Job, never until I die. Don’t you think no more about the things Miss Peabody said. She got ’em off her mind and now she’s having a good cry and she’ll be herself in the morning.”

  Job doubted it, but he no longer doubted the texture of their love. It was no camellia flower to be bruised by a rough touch but tough as a heather stalk. They sat in silence when the tea was finished, leaning against each other. Then Polly said, “You’d best be going, Job. You don’t want to be here when Mr. Peabody comes in. Now don’t fret, lad. Sleep well and have a good breakfast in the morning and go and tell the Dean. He’ll tell you it don’t matter, just the breaking of a clock.”

  “Good night, Polly,” he whispered. “Good night, dearest Polly.”

  She went with him to the door and stood there as he walked down Angel Lane. He looked back several times, the last time at the top of the steps that would take him out of her sight, and she was still there, outlined against the light and waving to him. Presently she would go upstairs again to look after that horrible old woman, and then she would take care of a tipsy Isaac, and when at last she gained her hard little bed in the attic she would still be as cheerful as a cricket.

  16. The Cathedral

  1.

  THE cold increased during the night and by morning the wind was from the sea and the sky was gray and lowering. The Dean had difficulty with his breathing as he stood through the psalms at matins, for the Cathedral was intensely cold. It would be warmer for the carol service tonight when the lamps and candles had been lit and nearly the whole city was here, each body giving out its quota of warmth for the good of all. How unselfishly useful a warm body could be in the winter, as useful as a glowing spirit like that of the little Polly. He rubbed his cold hands together but he could no more comfort them than he could comfort himself. He was not like Polly. His sad spirit had warmed no one. That he had spent so much of his life in sadness seemed to him now the chief of his sins. If he had had the drive of joy he might not have failed the city.

  Once again he had been beaten over the North Gate slums. For the whole of the last week he had been bitterly fighting the matter out again with the mayor and corporation and the landlords, but he had made no headway against their greed or the hatred of his old enemy Josiah Turnbull. How hardly shall a rich man enter into the kingdom of heaven. He was a rich man too and he shared their guilt, for if he had been able to put a little more of his own private fortune at the disposal of the city things might have gone better. He had not done so because he must leave Elaine enough, and more than enough, for the life she would enjoy in London after his death had set her free. Even at the expense of the city Elaine had to come first.

  His thoughts were wandering appallingly this morning. Usually it was not difficult for him to bring them back to the matter in hand but just lately his mind had felt like a battered bird that cannot find the window. He had not yet been able to concentrate sufficiently to finish his sermon for Christmas morning. “Much ashamed!” he said aloud, his ejaculation falling sadly into the pool of silence that had come as the aged canon in residence, at the lectern for the reading of the first lesson, searched for his spectacles. No one was startled for these ejaculations were a common occurrence at matins and evensong.

  The old canon found his spectacles and the Dean closed his eyes to concentrate better, but he could only mutter to himself of what he had to do today. He must finish his sermon. He must see Havelock at his office. He must see Albert Lee. He had promised Miss Montague that he would take Bella to see her. And then there were other duties belonging to Christmas Eve, all small things, yet they loomed up like nightmare apparitions and his mind beat about among them in growing panic until it blundered into the clock and suddenly found rest. The clock! He saw it against the darkness of his closed eyelids and knew without any doubt that Elaine would like it. This Christmas, at last, he would please her with his gift. He began to feel a little warmer and a little happier. Throughout the rest of matins he clung to the thought of the clock as to a life line.

  He came out through the south door, held open for him by Tom Hochicorn, and shivered as the cold air met him. His cloak had slipped a little and he groped for it uncertainly. Tom Hochicorn helped him. “Cold today, sir,” said Tom shyly. The Dean looked down at the old bedesman in his caped dark blue gown and Crimson skullcap. He too was shivering. His eyes were watering and his long white beard stirred in the draft. He bowed low, expecting the Dean to pass on quickly with his usual brief greeting. But the Dean did not pass on. Instead he adjusted his eyeglasses and smiled at Tom. Then he looked troubled. “You are cold here, Hochicorn,” he croaked. “You should sit inside in cold weather. It’s too cold for you outside. Why did I not think of it before? Much distressed. You must go inside, Hochicorn.”

  “No, sir,” said old Tom decidedly “I must be outside to open and close the door, and to see that no one unsuitable, thieves and such, goes for to push theirselves into the Cathedral. That’s my duty, sir.”

  “How many years have you been sitting on this hard bench?” asked the Dean.

  “Six years come next Michaelmas, sir.”

  “It’s a long time.”

  “It don’t seem so to me, sir.”

  “You are fond of the Cathedral?”

  “
’Tis my pride, sir,” said Tom.

  “Yes,” said the Dean, “I understand. God is my glory. But I wish you would go inside, Hochicorn.”

  “No, sir,” said Tom, a little vexed. “I must see who comes. Here’s a young fellow coming now, sir. Up to no good by the look of him.”

  The Dean peered down the narrow cloister and saw a slim boy mounting the steps. When he was nearly at the top he stopped and the Dean recognized him. “It’s Mr. Peabody’s apprentice, Hochicorn,” he said. “He will not harm the Cathedral.” He walked down the cloister and stood at the top of the steps peering down in Job’s face. “What has happened, Job?” he asked sharply. “Did you go to the Deanery to find me?”

  Job swallowed. “No, sir. I was afraid Mr. Garland would not let me in. Sir, I have broken the celestial clock.”

  “You have what?” asked the Dean.

  “The celestial clock is broken, sir, and it was my fault.”

  “Come back with me into the Cathedral,” said the Dean. They turned back and Tom opened the door for them with another low bow. “Thank you, Hochicorn. Much obliged. If you won’t go inside you must have a brazier outside. A small one. Those inside are too large. A small brazier. I’ll see to it. We’ll go this way, Job.”

  He took Job into the chantry of the Duchess Blanche and they sat down where Miss Montague had sat so long ago. The vast Cathedral soared about them and high up in the shadows there was a great rood. Job could not see it properly because it was too dark. The organist was practicing for the festival. He was playing the Shepherd’s Music from Bach’s Christmas Oratorio. Its gentle heartbreaking loveliness contrasted strangely with the dreadfulness of the Cathedral and yet it seemed a part of it. Job began to tremble.

  “You are cold?” asked the Dean.

  “No, sir, but I have not been in the Cathedral before.”

  “No. I remember. I shall be obliged to you, Job, if you will tell me about the clock.”

  Job told him about it slowly and accurately, out loud to the vast darkness where they were all listening in their ranks. The sordid little story sounded very vile to his ears as he told it. When he had finished there was silence. The Dean seemed abstracted. Looking miserably up at him Job saw only his hand supporting his bent head. “That wasn’t the first time I hurt the clock, sir,” he said. “When I was gilding the stars I was thinking how much I hated Miss Peabody and my tool slipped and I scratched the firmament.”

  The Dean was still silent. Was he too angry to speak? The organist ceased playing and the echoes of his music died away and away down the dark aisles of the forest, out to the bleak fen and the cold sea.

  “It does not matter, Job,” said the Dean at last. “I mean it does not matter that the clock is broken. What matters is that the clock was made.”

  “There’s a bit left, sir,” said Job. “I’ve brought it for you.” He felt in his pocket and brought out something wrapped in his handkerchief. He took out the fret of the two swans and gave it to the Dean. He thought he could not have been more miserable but when he saw it gleaming in Adam Ayscough’s ugly strong hands he felt an added pang of twisting anguish.

  “I am obliged to you,” said the Dean. “The fret is in itself a thing of great beauty.” He put it in his pocket and went on: “I beg that neither you nor Mr. Peabody will distress yourself. It is Christmas and your hearts should be light.”

  “Mr. Peabody is very angry with me, sir,” said Job. “He told me not to come to the shop today.”

  “You should disregard that prohibition,” said the Dean. “You should go to the shop and offer your apology and assistance. He will need you on Christmas Eve.”

  “Yes, sir, especially if he was at the Swan and Duck last night. He’s very low the day after.”

  “Ah yes,” said the Dean. “I have no experience myself of the condition but I have observed it to be very distressing once the initial exhilaration is past. I do not think, Job, that you will find him angry today. Mr. Peabody is by nature a gentle man.”

  “Yes,” said Job in a low voice. “That is why the clock should not have been broken. He was at our mercy in his clock.”

  The Dean perceived that Job was about as wretched as a boy could be and he said, “Now we are here together shall we look at those carvings I told you of? The light is growing, I think.”

  “You are not busy, sir?”

  “No, Job. I am quite at liberty and there is nothing I should like better than to show you my Cathedral. I dare to call it mine, and I believe Tom Hochicorn does too. Our presumption appears great but the glory delights to be possessed as well as to possess.”

  He got up and moved out from the chantry to the nave and Job followed him, at first as passively and dumbly as a whipped dog, then with awed self-forgetfulness, and finally with surging excitement. As he walked with the Dean he was almost dancing with the compulsion he had to put upon himself not to outstrip the old man beside him. Who could have told it was like this inside the mountain? Who could have known such glory existed? Why had nobody told him? What a fool he had been not to come inside before! What a fool! If Isaac had felt he had a hawk with him in the workshop the Dean thought first of an eagle, so fierce and strong was the joy beside him, and then of a terrible young archangel, incapable of fatigue, the touch of whose hand against his shivering mortal flesh was a touch of fire. The boy had forgotten there had ever been a clock. All his sorrows were under his flaming feet and his joy set a nimbus about his head. Yet he retained his awe, listening to what the Dean said, glad to the depth of him that it was with this man and no other that he was for the first time in this place.

  He would see them all in years to come, Canterbury, York, Ely, Chartres, Notre-Dame, San Marco and the golden churches of Palermo, but none of them would exalt and wring him quite as this one did today. The light grew and there were shafts of silver through the gloom. He remembered how he had dreamed of walking in a forest, where from the great-girthed boles of the trees the branches leapt to the sky, and of looking up at the dark stone cliffs of the mountain and wondering what such walls could hold, and of being below the sea where the tides washed in and out of the green gloom of caverns. Marvelous colors glowed in the windows far above him, the deep jewel colors of very old glass. There were lords and ladies here, angels and haloed saints, bishops and knights lying on their tombs, figures such as he had seen in some of Mr. Penny’s old books, and fabulous creatures such as lions and unicorns, dolphins and griffins. Sometimes there was music, sounding like wind in the trees or water falling from the heights of the mountain, and sometimes silence and the far sound of a bell. There was dust here, for when he unconsciously put out his hand to feel the shape of a dolphin his long fingers came away coated with the friendly stuff. And under the miserere seats there were plain men and boys and creatures such as he knew, woodcutters and millers and plowmen and young thieves stealing apples, foxes and owls, and small birds such as he made himself. From these he could not tear himself away. To him they were the best of all. They made him laugh and yet they brought him nearer to weeping than anything else because the men who had made them had been dead for centuries and he could not know these men. The whole world was in this place, the earth, the sky and the sea, angels, men and creatures. He looked up often at the great rood, but that he did not understand, except that it seemed to him that nothing else could have been here without that.

  “It is all here,” he said.

  “It is all here in microcosm,” said the Dean. “The whole work of God.”

  He lowered a miserere seat and sat down, for he was trembling with exhaustion and the saints in the window above him seemed to be emptying buckets of cold water over his head. He hoped he might be forgiven for keeping the tireless Job in ignorance of the existence of the Lady chapel, the crypt and the chapter house.

  The boy was kneeling beside him, his head bent, intent upon a man and two yoked oxen plowing a field. The furrows of the black fen earth shone as though newly turned and at the plowman’s right a
bird was singing in a thornbush under a high midday sun, as though to cheer the laboring man and toiling beasts. The scene was full of the sense of hard driving effort. Every muscle of man and beasts seemed at full stretch. With his finger tips he lightly touched the bird and the plowman’s bent back. “I think it is the best of all,” he murmured.

  “I think I am most attached to the one I am sitting on,” said the Dean. “The shepherd with his sheep. But then I have always wished that I could have been a shepherd. You no longer fear the Cathedral?”

  “Not now I know these are here, sir,” said Job. “I don’t see how anyone could come here for the first time and not be afraid, but then this bird is here and it’s no bigger than my thumb.” He paused, placing his hands one on each side of the carving. “This is just the one man but the Cathedral is filled with them all.”

  The Dean was a little startled. “You mean filled with the men who made it?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The Dean sought about in his battered mind for the words he wanted, and then fell back in relief upon the words of another man. “If you remember, Job, I showed you a bishop with miter and crosier carved on the capital of a pillar in the south transept and told you he was Saint Augustine, a man born in Africa fifteen centuries ago, long before a stone of this Cathedral was laid in place. He said this: ‘And who is that God but our God, the God who made heaven and earth, who filled them because it is by filling them with Himself that He has made them.’ Man is made in the image of God and as you said just now what he makes he fills with himself, either with his hate or with his love.”

  Job did not answer. He sprang lightly to his feet and moved up and down before the long line of exquisite small carvings, as though he could not bring himself to leave them. The Dean got up unsteadily and raised his seat so that Job might look again at the shepherd bringing his sheep home to their fold. He carried a crook and had a dog at his heels and a lamb over his shoulder, and above his head the sickle moon hung in the sky. The scene was as full of peace as the other of stress. The Dean glanced from one to the other and suddenly realized something that he had not noticed before. The toiling plowman and the peaceful shepherd were the same man. He had the same stooped shoulders, the same tall hat and heavy serf’s boots. He was Everyman. He pointed this out to Job.