The Cathedral Part 35

"Yes," he said, "I think it's better for you to go."

"And about G.o.d and Beauty?" Falk said, staring for a moment into Ronder's eyes, smiling shyly, and then turning away. "It's a long search, isn't it?

But as long as there's something there, beyond life, and I know there is, the search is worth it."

He looked rather wistfully at Ronder as though he expected him to confirm him again. But Ronder said nothing.

Falk went to the door: "Well, I must go. I'll show them that I was right to go my own way. I want father to be proud of me. This will shock him for a moment, but soon he'll see. I think you'll like to know, sir," he said, suddenly turning and holding out his hand, "that this little talk has meant a lot to me. It's just helped me to make up my mind."

When he had gone Ronder sat in his chair, motionless, for a while; he jumped up, went to the shelves, and found a book. Before he sat down again he said aloud, as though he were answering some accuser, "Well, I told him nothing, anyway."

Falk had, from the moment he left Ronder's door, his mind made up, and now that it _was_ made up he wished to act as speedily as possible. And instantly there followed an appeal of the Town, so urgent and so poignant that he was taken by surprise. He had lived there most of his days and never seen it until now, but every step that he took soon haunted him. He made his plans decisively, irrevocably, but he found himself lingering at doors and at windows, peering over walls, hanging over the Pol bridge, waiting suddenly as though he expected some message was about to be given to him.

The town was humming with life those days. The May weather was lovely, softly blue with cool airs and little white clouds like swollen pin- cushions drifting lazily from point to point. The gardens were dazzling with their flowers, the Cathedral Green shone like gla.s.s, and every door- k.n.o.b and bra.s.s knocker in the Precincts glittered under the sun.

The town was humming with the approaching Jubilee. It seemed itself to take an active part in the preparations, the old houses smiling to one another at the plans that they overheard, and the birds, of whom there were a vast number, flying from wall to wall, from garden to garden, from chimney to chimney, with the exciting news that they had gathered.

Every shop in the High Street seemed to whisper to Falk as he pa.s.sed: "Surely you are not going to leave us. We can offer you such charming things. We've never been so gay in our lives before as we are going to be now."

Even the human beings in the place seemed to be nicer to him than they had ever been before. They had never, perhaps, been very nice to him, regarding him with a quite definite disapproval even when he was a little boy, because he would go his own way and showed them that he didn't care what they thought of him.

Now, suddenly, they were making up to him. Mrs. Combermere, surrounded with dogs, stopped him in the High Street and, in a deep ba.s.s voice, asked him why it was so long since he had been to see her, and then slapped him on the shoulder with her heavy gloved hand. That silly woman, Julia Preston, met him in Bennett's book shop and asked him to help her to choose a book of poems for a friend.

"Something that shall be both True and Beautiful, Mr. Brandon," she said.

"There's so little real Beauty in our lives, don't you think?" Little Betty Callender caught him up in Orange Street and chattered to him about her painting, and that pompous Bentinck-Major insisted on his going into the Conservative Club with him, where he met old McKenzie and older Forrester, and had to listen to their golfing achievements.

It may have been simply that every one in the town was beside and above himself over the Jubilee excitements--but it made it very hard for Falk.

Nothing to the hardness of everything at home. Here at the last moment, when it was too late to change or alter anything, every room, every old piece of furniture seemed to appeal to him with some especial claim. For ten years he had had the same bedroom, an old low-ceilinged room with queer bulges in the wall, a crooked fireplace and a slanting floor. For years now he had had a wall-paper with an ever-recurrent scene of a church tower, a snowy hill, and a large crimson robin. The robins were faded, and the snowy hill a dingy yellow. There were School groups and Oxford groups on the walls, and the book-case near the door had his old school prizes and Henty and a set of the Waverley Novels with dark red covers and paper labels.

Hardest of all to leave was the view from the window overlooking the Cathedral Green and the Cathedral. That window had been connected with every incident of his childhood. He had leant out of it when he had felt sick from eating too much, he had gone to it when his eyes were br.i.m.m.i.n.g with hot rebellious tears after some scene with his father, he had known ecstatic joys gazing from it on the first day of his return from school, he had thrown things out of it on the heads of unsuspecting strangers, he had gone to it in strange moods of poetry and romance, and watched the moon like a plate of dull and beaten gold sail above the Cathedral towers, he had sat behind it listening to the organ like a m.u.f.fled giant whispering to be liberated from grey, confining walls, he had looked out of it on a still golden evening when the stars were silver b.u.t.tons in the sky after a meeting with Annie; he went to it and gazed, heart-sick, across the Green now when he was about to bid fare-well to it for ever.

Heart-sick but resolved, it seemed strange to him that after months of irresolution his mind should now be so firmly composed. He seemed even, prophetically, to foretell the future. What had rea.s.sured him he did not know, but for himself he knew that he was taking the right step. For himself and for Annie--outside that, it was as though a dark cloud was coming up enveloping all that he was leaving behind. He could not tell how he knew, but he felt as though he were fleeing from the city of Polchester, and were being driven forward on his flight by powers far stronger than he could control.

He fancied, as he looked out of his window, that the Cathedral also was aware and, aloof, immortal, waited the inevitable hour.

Coming straight upon his final arrangements with Annie, his reconciliation with his father was ironic. So deeply here were his real affections stirred that he could not consider deliberately his approaching treachery; nevertheless he did not for a moment contemplate withdrawal from it. It was as though two personalities were now in active movement within him, the one old, belonging to the town, to his father, to his own youth, the other new, belonging to Annie, to the future, to ambition, to the challenge of life itself. With every hour the first was moving away from him, reluctantly, stirring the other self by his withdrawal but inevitably moving, never, never to return.

He came, late in the afternoon, into the study and found his father, balanced on the top of a small ladder, putting straight "Christ's Entry into Jerusalem," a rather faded copy of Benjamin Haydon's picture that had irritated Falk since his earliest youth by a kind of false theatricality that inhabited it.

Falk paused at the door, caught up by a sudden admiration of his father.

He had his coat off, and as he bent forward to adjust the cord the vigour and symmetry of his body was magnificently emphasized. The thick strong legs pressed against the black cloth of his trousers, the fine rounded thighs, the broad back almost bursting the shiny stuff of the waistcoat, the fine neck and the round curly head, these denied age and decay. He was growing perhaps a little stout, the neck was a little too thick for the collar, but the balance and energy and strength of the figure belonged to a man as young as Falk himself....

At the sound of the door closing he turned, and at once the lined forehead, the mouth a little slack, gave the man his age, but Falk was to remember that first picture for the rest of his life with a strange poignancy and deeply affectionate pathos.

They had not met alone since their quarrel; their British horror of any scene forbade the slightest allusion to it. Brandon climbed down from his ladder and came, smiling, across to his son.

At his happy times, when he was at ease with himself and the world, he had the confident gaiety of a child; he was at ease now. He put his hand through Falk's arm and drew him across to the table by the window.

"I've had a headache," he said, rather as a child might complain to his elder, "for two days, and now it's suddenly gone. I never used to have headaches. But I've been irritated lately by some of the tomfoolery that's been going on. Don't tell your mother; I haven't said a word to her; but what do you take when you have a headache?"

"I don't think I ever have them," said Falk.

"I'm not going to stuff myself up with all their medicines and things.

I've never taken medicine in my life if I was strong enough to prevent them giving it to me, and I'm not going to start it now."

"Father," Falk said very earnestly, "don't let yourself get so easily irritated. You usedn't to be. Everybody finds things go badly sometimes.

It's bad for you to allow yourself to be worried. Everything's all right and going to be all right." (The hypocrite that he felt himself as he said this!)

"You know that every one thinks the world of you here. Don't take things too seriously."

Brandon nodded his head.

"You're quite right, Falk. It's very sensible of you to mention it, my boy. I usedn't to lose my temper as I do. I must keep control of myself better. But when a lot of chattering idiots start gabbling about things that they understand as much about as----"

"Yes, I know," said Falk, putting his hand upon his father's arm. "But let them talk. They'll soon find their level."

"Yes, and then there's your mother," went on Brandon. "I'm bothered about her. Have you noticed anything odd about her this last week or two?"

That his father should begin to worry about his mother was certainly astonishing enough! Certainly the first time in all these years that Brandon had spoken of her.

"Mother? No; in what way?"

"She's not herself. She's not happy. She's worrying about something."

"_You're_ worrying, father," Falk said, "that's what's the matter.

_She's_ just the same. You've been allowing yourself to worry about everything. Mother's all right." And didn't he know, in his own secret heart, that she wasn't?

Brandon shook his head. "You may he right. All the same----"

Falk said slowly: "Father, what would you say if I went up to London?"

This was a close approach to the subject of their quarrel of the other evening.

"When? What for?"

"Oh, at once--to get something to do."

"No, not now. After the summer we might talk of it."

He spoke with utter decision, as he had always done to Falk, as though he were five years old and could naturally know nothing about life.

"But, father--don't you think it's bad for me, hanging round here doing nothing?"

Brandon got up, went across to the little ladder, hesitated a moment, then climbed up.

"I've had this picture twenty years," he said, "and it's never hung straight yet."

"No, but, father," said Falk, coming across to him, "I'm a man now, not a boy. I can't hang about any longer--I can't really."

"We'll talk about it in the autumn," said Brandon, humming "Onward, Christian Soldiers," as he always did, a little out of tune.