The Great Fog (19 page)

I arrived at St. Aidans on an autumn day. The journey is a tiring one—cross-country—with long junction waits, and the small town is the single line's terminus. I had risen early that morning, to arrive in time for evensong and, if possible, to get in a few studies and measurements before the service began, after which the cathedral would be locked up for the night. I did not want to ask any favor of the Dean; indeed, I understood he had resented the learned boycott so much that he might well have refused it. I would enter as a stranger within his gates. The whole visit opened with becoming drabness. In a last dribble of market-town passengers, I went down the small platform, past the tired little engine which had come to its daily standstill, confronting with its buffers those terminus buffers which always have the look of termination without finality. “This is the end,” they seem to indicate, “not because it is the goal, but because there's just nothing beyond worth going further for.” Even Ulysses, I reflected, would have turned back here, as at the barrier I gave up the outward half of my return ticket. I remember actually feeling a queer gleam of relief that I had a return. Think what it would mean if, instead of being an elderly man of active leisure, I had been a poor young tutor coming down here to be buried alive in this dismal little country corner “where all things are forgotten”—even the few that have ever been known.

Certainly, coming out from the train hutch in which we had been detrained, one felt all one's forebodings had been fulfilled. The day was one of those dismal western days which attain to a neutrality that is positively dreadful. The light was gray, shed or, rather, exuded from a sky which gave no shadows. And this perfectly dull illumination showed a scene that certainly deserved no better rendering—an area wide but not spacious had around its edge houses of weathered stucco, or gray-yellow stockbrick and one or two of a stone which managed to look as though it were a blend of the dismal brick and the dreary plaster. I took this inventory as I trudged across the “Railway Square,” which a rusty cast-iron plate fastened to a lamppost informed me the area had been christened, no doubt, in the fifties. My eye, like the dove out of the ark, looked across the inundation of ugliness, seeking some small space, some Georgian façade, on which it might rest. “No,” as the poem on suicide says, “No, there was none.” The only thing was to lift up one's eyes to one's goal. Yes, there it was and, in its way, as daunting as the town. St. Aidans may have had a tower but, if so, it had certainly been built of the local sandstone and had certainly collapsed. Bishop Creighton's witticism came into my mind: “As the verger says ‘Some of the chancel bays are twelfth-century,' the intelligent reply-question is, ‘When did the central tower fall?'”

Over the meaner roofs of the town rose the long leaden roof of the nave, like the back of a stranded whale. I left my bag at an inn which, like a hermit crab, had worked its way into part of the decayed cloister buildings and, from that coign, had put out its claws to catch the passing visitor. Once inside the cathedral, I experienced some relief; if not inviting, at least it was not as forbidding as the gaunt exterior. Further, I was allowed to make my measurements without interference. I was needing some allover circumferential reckonings, so that I did not enter the chancel itself. And the ambulatories—certainly one of the good modern innovations—were unguarded by that blind leader of the blind—the sixpenny-collecting verger guide. Indeed, I saw no one about—I supposed the verger was in the choir vestries getting ready for evensong—at least no official was on sentry go. Once or twice I thought I saw another visitor. Fortunately he seemed as busy as I with his own observations of the place. I own it did once enter my mind to speculate who he could be: Someone, evidently, investigating with scholarly care a cathedral which all normal scholars had long dismissed as hopeless? If he were a casual ignoramus, then why this careful scrutiny? If he were really as learned—yes, I had better be honest and record my full semiconscious vanity—as I, then why didn't I know him? I knew no one in Britain was as far advanced as I in this investigation. My theories were tolerated among the F.S.A. simply because my detailed knowledge was greatest—that is not vanity but fact. They would never have given me the hearing I had won unless my factual information had surpassed theirs. There were only two men who might possibly be on this clue—François Peliot and Karl Heiser. But I knew both of them by sight, and this man, though I only caught sight of him every now and then moving in the distance, was quite unlike Heiser's globular body or Peliot's little lobster-like form. He was certainly tall and free-moving. I recalled a doctor once showing me that it was really easier to judge a mental state by looking at a man in the distance than close up—carriage told so much about the attitude of mind. Indeed, I became vexed with myself at my lack of attention to the subject I had in hand.

I settled down to double-check on my measurements and their correlates, and they were interesting and satisfying enough to keep me so engrossed that, with a start, I realized the cathedral had come to life.

A bell was tolling—the chancel gates stood open—candles were alight in the sanctuary, and in the stalls there was a stir of feet, the sharp edges of the original sounds furred in the innumerable echoes. But under all these familiar sounds of an oncoming office was something else, quite unrecognizable—a sigh, but a sigh with a strange impetus in it. At times it most nearly resembled the sound which might be given by a huge aeolian harp, but at others the quality changed, and the note was like what I had once heard when an anthropologist from Australia had demonstrated for us the aborigine's siren, the “bull-roarer.” Then it took on again the strange volume I once heard pour from the twenty-foot-long Tibetan lama trumpet and finally it rose to a tone I have only heard once before, when a paleontologist blew into one of those paleolithic ocarinas—certainly man's oldest wind instrument. The sounds had been so unexpected that, until they ceased, I had not asked myself whence they could be coming, what could be emitting them. Then, of course, I realized—it must be the reconstructed Saxon organ.

After that I was resolved to stay to evensong and presented myself for admission at the choir gates. I was the only applicant, the only “congregation,” so I was promoted to one of the richly carved stalls on the north side. I was pleased at this, for it gave me a good coign from which to see the organ, which now had thoroughly aroused my interest. I own that for a moment I glanced about, wondering whether anyone else beside the choir and dignitaries would attend, and I remember casually wondering what had happened to my fellow investigator of the nave, wondering why he had not had the courtesy (which I own I had nearly omitted) to attend service after sight-seeing. My speculations were, however, suddenly answered, for when I turned my attention to what I had entered the choir to see and hear—the new organ—I could not doubt, though the figure was seen from the back, and the seat at the organ console was low and curtained, that there was the visitor whose tracks had crossed mine that afternoon. I was a little amused at my mistake of taking as more of an outsider than myself a chief official of the cathedral—but beyond that, and a casual wonder why a musician who must know the building, if anything, too well, and spend too much compulsory time in it, should spend a free early afternoon looking at it—I gave my attention to the instrument rather than the executant. Not that he was not remarkable. I could see that anyone who could so handle so strange a machine must be remarkably gifted. But at that moment the choir began to enter, the black-and-white “crocodile” composed of the usual complement of boys and men, with two vicars choral. A couple of full canons, like king penguins, waddled behind guided by their vergers, who dully penned or nested them, drew red curtains around them, and the service began.

Dean Bathurst, I was glad to see, was absent for the day. The responses did not reveal much. I could judge that the choir was well trained, and also suspected that there were some fine voices in it, but that I knew was to be expected—the further you go away from plastic beauty in the British Isles, the nearer you come to beauty of tone. The Celt was a master of sound, not of sight—the Welsh are natural singers, and singularly indifferent to beauty of form. The Psalms, however, were a revelation: it was not merely that the pointing was perfect. The strange instrument, with its unsuspected intervals, built up behind the chanted words a sense of volume which gave the words themselves a background that made one realize that one was listening to lamentations and exultations, despairs and aspirations, that were not merely old when Nineveh was new, but were dateless. The little human cry seemed to be breaking like a surface crest from a deep billow of universal desire and bafflement. The great breathing of the instrument rose and fell behind the voices. The only simile that I can think of which will at all describe the three-dimensional richness—the feeling that this music was, as it were, extending down time as well as filling space—is a crude one, I know. There are some frets which are pretty enough in themselves, but, place one behind the other, and there a sudden unsuspected richness of pattern is revealed.

The Magnificat and the Nunc Dimittis were really quite splendid—but stranger. The chants for the Psalter had been clear and consistent plain song, which owed its arresting quality to the fine and careful singing being backed and unbelievably enriched by the outstanding handling of this unique instrument. With the two Christian chorales I could not help feeling—though, as it will be seen, I am no musician—that some local composer—perhaps the odd organist-had developed a new composition. I had often been told that Bach's extraordinary achievement was due to the fact that he resolutely continued to develop polyphony when the more superficial masters were certain it was wholly worked out and hurried on to the newer lodes. It crossed my mind that in the music I was hearing some new “old master” was being even more radically conservative—he was going back to an even earlier mode and from an earlier level of music's development was restarting its progress. The way we have gone may seem to us inevitable, and even the best, but he is indeed provincial who believes the particular progress we have followed to be the only one. The anthem was even more remarkable. The libretto was St. Francis' famous hymn to the sun. I can only say that the music was certainly equal to those words, which have now about them an overtone of inspiration.

I was glad of the pause which the final prayers gave for recollection. But as the choir withdrew, another voluntary—the equal of that which had first surprised me—flowed out again. When it stopped I thought hours must have passed but, looking up, I saw the light was yet good—indeed, better, for the sun, as it westered, had evidently found apertures in the gray sky, and now, as I glanced up through the bare windows of the choir clerestory, I could see that it was sending its beams the length of the building. I also noticed with the same glance that in the upper trefoiling of the windows' traceries there still remained small fragments of the original stained glass. It was possible that the verger might not close the place until sundown, at least if he saw that someone was still seriously sight-seeing. I glanced down for a moment to see whether the organist were still
in situ
. Shouldn't I tell him what uncommon pleasure his playing had given me and inquire what composer's work he had been performing? But I hesitated. Experts, I had to own, are not always gracious toward ignorant admirers. Should I be risking a snub?

While I questioned, the light in the organist's small curtained bay went out, and the dim figure disappeared—he could evidently leave the choir from some small entrance by the console. Well, fate had decided. I was to stick to my last and leave amateur admiration alone. I went into the nave and certainly soon felt I was rewarded for my choice. The trefoiling of the clerestory contained a neat but not too difficult set of clues to the history of the building. There was the rebus of Abbot Blessington—a hand with two fingers raised, stuck out of a barrel or tun—Abbot Blessington, who had reared this gaunt clerestory. There, in another bay, were the white branching deer's horns with a little crucifix set in them. A window to St. Eustace had probably stood beneath, but the reference, no doubt, dated the window, for unhappy Edward II himself was said to have seen the silver stag of Cranborne Chase, a fact which first was taken as proving his oncoming doom but which, when his son had won the throne, supported the popular claim that he had been more than one-half a martyr.

Next, I was delighted to find a pure piece of medallion glass, glass, of course, much earlier than its actual fourteenth-century setting, a lovely little translucent mosaic of jeweled lumps of pure “pot metal,” set like an early Limoges enamel in a thick coiling of lead. There must have been some particular reason to induce Abbot Blessington—for I assume it must have been done under his orders—to salvage this medallion or, rather, three hearts of medallions (for the three topmost cusps of the window each carried a knot of this early glasswork). The color was fine but, of course, the whole style would have seemed to a fourteenth-century builder as old-fashioned and clumsy as Jacobean furniture seemed to Christopher Wren. No, it wasn't beauty which had saved these old hearts of a departed glory. But, if not beauty, then it must have been sense, significance? Anyhow, who, without the strong glasses I carried, could have enjoyed this minute jewelry?

That second question was the last I could frame, and it closed the inquiry, for all my antiquarianism gave me no clue. I ventured a random guess to myself that the right and left coils might be some form of notation, perhaps musical notation. I tried to satisfy my daunted scholar's pride by fancying that the center one might have been a mosaic design for a face, made—as sometimes twelfth- and thirteenth-century glassmakers did—of so many small pieces—tesserae, they may almost be called—that some slipped out from the clasp of the soft lead when the window glass was shifted, and that these fragments had been hoisted again and reframed.