This isn’t a ghost story. I wish it were. What I personally believe doesn’t come into this story. An organist has to subscribe to what the chapter believes or at least keep his mouth shut. Come to that, the chapter is rocky enough if you ask me, what with this reservation of the Sacrament and all the rest. Isn’t that in a rubric or flat against the thirty-nine articles or something?
I suppose Miss Pulkinhorn knew them by heart. What a woman! Understand me, I can think of a dozen women, fifty women connected with the cathedral, and all sincere, devout, and good. But Miss Pulkinhorn was an oddity. A cathedral always collects one like that, crazy with opinions and hate. You can even see a couple like her, hats perched up, feathers a-quiver, nodding and whispering away the reputation of half the city. They always believe in their own privileged goodness, of course – want their pennies and their buns: want to keep pride and vanity and hate and yet remain God’s own special chicken. She was one of that sort. She set about removing me because after all I’m a worldly creature even for an organist but she couldn’t catch me up to anything. And when I got my knighthood and became Sir Edward, I was canonized, so to speak – part of the dignity of the diocese – and she couldn’t touch me. Besides, I altered a little – what with music and glass for a hobby – I found it easy enough to conform. As I got interested in painted glass, year by year time slid away. Time doesn’t count in a cathedral even though this story stretches over a whole generation. When I first knew her I thought a church window was a hole to let in light. By the end, I was a knighted organist and something of an authority on painted glass and our own windows in particular; though with one exception they’re a shoddy lot. The exception is the Abraham window in the ambulatory and it’s part of this story in a very subtle way. But the time factor in a cathedral doesn’t affect the concentration, the unity of a story. Time ceases to be a dimension, drawing things apart. Two hundred years are nothing and what happened five hundred years ago is just round the corner. I see his strange involuntary association with Miss Pulkinhorn as a single thing that grew persistently and slowly as a great tree. When it was a seedling I was a cheerful young man with a tendency to – irregularities. When it ended, position and respectability lay on me like the dust on the tombs.
She was desperately poor, you know, and kept up appearances in a huge wreck of a house. Those were easy days for finding servants but all she ever had was a woman to help in the mornings. She was a great one for the cathedral and I don’t suppose she ever missed a service, but sat out the lot, simmering with disapproval. Between whiles she came into the cathedral once a day and swept round it in a – possessive manner; though not only the weather but the vestments, the candles, the images, must have been purgatory for her. Between the two wars when they re-dedicated the chapel of St Augustine and reserved the Sacrament there, I’m told she nearly left the diocese. She carried an ebony cane with a silver top and she was so tiny it seemed to reach her shoulder. She wore a black silk dress and a black silk coat that reached her instep. Her neck was enmeshed in black netting stiffened at the nape with wire. The netting spread down in front under the short ‘V’ of her dress-front which was fastened with an enormous topaz brooch. Her hat was a round black thing set exactly on top of her head and gleaming with feathers. She would come through the north-west door, go up the north aisle, her stick clicking as she went, and into the ambulatory. When she passed the chapel of the Sacrament she would lift her chin higher, and come as near as a lady should to a sniff. A light burns there whenever the Sacrament is present, and is put out if it’s not. She’d go on round the ambulatory, down the south aisle, across inside the great west door, and out again where she had come in. I labelled that round in my mind as ‘Miss Pulkinhorn’s tour of the estate’. I suppose she was going through the list of all the things that ought to be different, mentally removing everything that conflicted with her own peculiar conception of God.
Take a candle now. Is there anything prettier in the world than those little nests of lighted candles you’ll see – say in Chartres cathedral? There they are, alive and twinkling in the darkness with those unbelievable windows smouldering above them. I had the luck to hear Miss Pulkinhorn on the subject of candles. She struck her cane on the floor and hissed: ‘Like a Christmas Tree!’ Precisely. Miss Pulkinhorn didn’t understand Christmas. Anything more than the bare date was pretty high up on the list of her ‘superstitions’. She had some honorary position which gave her the chance to direct the future behaviour of fallen women, poor things. And she kept what she could of the city very, very clean. One night when I had her too much on my mind I totted up her list of triumphs; three wives, two school-masters, and a parson.
And, of course, him.
He was her masterpiece, her magnum opus, the crown of her life’s work. I don’t think she intended to do what she did. I’m sure she meant everything for the best. She wanted to teach him a lesson; and believe me, when so much bigotry and ignorance gets mixed up with jealousy on however high a plane, it curdles into a poison that can turn a woman into a witch. It can make a criminal trick feel like an act of charity. I’m sure she called it charity. She probably prayed for him with the dead top of her mind while everything underneath was festering.
Was he a saint? No, I’m certain he wasn’t. Read about the saints, even the least spectacular among them, and somewhere in their characters you’ll come across steel-sheer adamant, something that can’t be driven. He was a good man but a weak man; immeasurably better than most of us, and he lived, you’ll see, on the very fringe of lunacy. He was a self-deceiver, as successful in his line as Miss Pulkinhorn, but his deceit had a kind of innocence about it. I didn’t believe in his illuminated face, of course. That rumour began to float about and maddened Miss Pulkinhorn. I watched him, so I ought to know. You can see from the organ-loft across the chancel right into the chapel of the Sacrament. Glancing in my mirror as I played – my driving mirror, I call it – I could see the choir or the decani at least, and beyond them the Bohun chantry and Bishop Winne holding up two stumps. Beyond that I could see the light flickering by the Sacrament and shining on his bowed bald head. That was my daily life for a generation. Fill in the summer differences for yourself. If he’d started shining or levitating or any of the stock things, I should have spotted him in my mirror.
Then there’s the window. He didn’t notice things as a normal man does but he might have noticed Abraham unconsciously. Mind, I’m not doubting his belief. Day after day, year after year, you’d see him shambling up the north aisle, his bright, silly face tilted a little, his patched overcoat flapping round him, his broken shoes scraping over the stones. In summer that coat looked like a piece of dusty carpet that daylight discovers crumpled somewhere in a shed. In winter he moved in it a shadow among shadows. He was old, thirty years ago when I saw him first and he changed no more than Miss Pulkinhorn. Three times a day he went into the chapel of the Sacrament, knelt at the back, and worshipped what was reserved there. He came for a while in the morning after consecration or perhaps during the service and sometimes followed the Sacrament into the chapel. He’d come back at midday for a longer spell and then exactly at half past six in the evening. If the light was out he’d go away. What point was there in his staying? But you could set your watch by his half past six visit.
This is an indecent story. It trespasses on the privacies of two most unfortunate people. Yet I was woven into it and can’t escape my knowledge nor partial responsibility for what happened. What mercy we all need! Now I look back after these years I can feel nothing but remorse and shame for my lack of wit; and pity for them, pity for us all.
But this indecency – he wasn’t properly conscious, you know. Sometimes when the fit was on him he’d give things away with a kind of frantic eagerness. And some of his visits to the chapel were more successful than others. He’d be there, bowed and kneeling and occasionally his head would lift and his arms – and he’d look ecstatic. You see that gesture here and there in religious art as a symbol of revelation. There’s a figure like that in Chartres and one in Rheims. I’ve even seen it in a hieroglyphic four thousand years old and always meaning the same thing. But we’ve got it too, in the Abraham window. Some people object to the secondary colours, orange, purple, and mauve, that you get in fifteenth-century glass, but I enjoy it. There they are, God appearing from a great burst of colour, smiling in a friendly, fatherly way, and Abraham below in the right-hand light, smiling up with face and hands lifted.
Well, Miss Pulkinhorn disapproved of his habits publicly. I’m sure that privately she hated him. She came to hang all her feelings on his alleged superstition; and I think she was jealous – jealous of his simplicity and fervour; jealous of his devotion with all the dreadful energy of childless and ignorant women. She’d have called him an exhibitionist if she’d known the world, and perhaps in an innocent way he was. You see he could have got that gesture from Abraham. That was why I checked up on the rumour of his shining face. Like all people who don’t believe in miracles, I was very ready to accept one. But he remained as he was, time drifted past, and the tree of their relationship grew.
One foggy December night I let myself out of my house and walked briskly across the close to the cathedral. Nobody was about except the precentor who passed me by Saint Swithin’s Gate, and I felt chilly and lonely as I let myself in. The office had been said, as is usual on a Monday, and not sung. But Canon Blake was about as ill as he could be and next morning we were to have a special service of intercession for him. He was a great benefactor of the school and the hospital and a good friend to me, but Tuesday is my day in London, so our organ being what it is I was going to set the pistons for my new assistant and leave a note. Now I remember I wanted to try over an old prelude of mine that I’d turned up – yes, of course, otherwise I should never have warmed my hands as I did. I let myself in by the organist’s door and walked gratefully into the warmth. We’ve got eight great stoves in the cathedral and one stands just where the Norman work ends and the fifteenth-century addition begins. It’s by the chapel of the Sacrament and the flue goes straight up through the vaulting. I tucked my music under one arm, pulled off my gloves, and felt the stove gingerly. They’re pretty nearly red hot sometimes but this one had been shut down for the night and was only a very little too warm. The light was flickering away in the chapel and someone was moving in there at the back. It was Miss Pulkinhorn. She came out of the shadows and walked quickly towards the light. Then she saw me and stopped. We were almost alone in the cathedral, for it shuts at seven. Only old Rekeby was prowling round somewhere, moving chairs, shutting doors, and shining his electric torch into corners. Miss Pulkinhorn turned and walked out of the chapel, passing me without a word, and vanished into the shadows of the east end. She held her stick away from the pavement too. It didn’t click. Less than half a minute later the north-west door bumped and he came in, though it was long past his usual time. He fairly cantered up the aisle, talking to himself and fumbling with the buttons of his overcoat. He rushed past me into the chapel and slumped on his knees. Then and there with no preliminary cough or shuffle or settling down he went straight into that position, for all the world like Abraham in the window.
I stayed where I was, thinking less of music and more of what extraordinary things we are. And I was vaguely worried. Do you know those days of discomfort when you expect the worst without reason? Standing there, still mechanically caressing the stove, I felt a kind of expanding worry that I was unable to pin down. Usually when I saw him so, even when I took Abraham into account, I maintained a kind of interior respect for something I couldn’t understand. What was different now? I walked away across the chancel towards the steps that lead up to the organ loft, but my unformed worry went with me. I felt let down and didn’t know why. Something was cheapened. That was it. Something was cheapened and diminished. Then as I reached the top step, I remembered the precentor pacing through the close, going to visit Canon Blake on his death-bed, pacing along, a bell-shaped figure in his black cloak, and under the cloak the silvery pyx; and in the silver pyx the Reserved Sacrament.
At that moment I was pulling my hind foot a little breathlessly on to the top step. I’m a ruminative character and lack presence of mind, but I understood the situation in a black flash. There was Miss Pulkinhorn swallowed up in the shadows of the east end. Old Rekeby had locked all doors but the north-west one where he would let himself out and was trotting across the chancel, flicking his torch here and there, going towards the chapel of the Sacrament – and there he was on the pinnacle of his secret happiness, hands lifted, face tilted towards the light.
I turned back and pretty well hurled myself down the wooden stairs. As I came out of the chancel Rekeby was standing in the doorway by the stove. He never noticed him there at the back – it was past half past six you see. He bustled forward, bobbed to the altar, went up to the aumbry and bobbed again a bit doubtfully. He fumbled for his keys, opened the door, peered into the empty cupboard, and said in a vexed voice: ‘I thought so!’
He shut the door carefully. Completely unaware of the ecstatic at the back of the chapel he leaned forward and blew out the light.
I could have done something, I suppose, shouted ‘Stop!’ or ‘One moment, Rekeby!’ or thrown a fit. But while I was standing there, appalled and useless, Rekeby came out, said ‘Good night, Sir Edward’, and went back across the chancel, his torch flicking over the patterned stones. I suppose the chapel was silent for ten seconds. Then a voice laughed and choked and laughed and a shadow cannoned into the stove and reeled past me down the north aisle, laughing and crying till all the echoes got under way and answered. I groped after him, and Rekeby was shambling down the south aisle flashing his torch from the pavement to the roof and shouting, ‘What is it? What is it?’
I found him inside the west door sitting on the step. I put my arm across his shoulders and Rekeby shone the quivering circle over his feet. After a while he stopped crying, but he was quite infantile, and his fingers were moving about. We got him outside between us. I remember a great red moon was detaching itself from the fog and gave next to no light. Rekeby locked the door behind him and we carried him like a long sack to the verger’s cottage where we stretched him out on an old horse-hair sofa. Rekeby went to telephone the hospital so I myself had the job of getting the overcoat off him. He was nearly naked under it. All he had on was that pair of broken boots and his trousers and a cruel leather belt. And he knew nothing at all. The ambulance men were brisk and efficient – service couldn’t have been better. At the hospital he was put to bed, bathed, and tucked up. I went with him but he noticed nobody. I visited him a couple of times after that but I don’t suppose he noticed me. A month later he just guttered out.
When I got home from the hospital that first night I went to bed but I couldn’t sleep. I went over and over the years and what I knew of them both till my throat was dry and my brain as useless as a pumpkin. I’ve told you I’m a fairly slow sort of fellow. Do you know, two o’clock struck before it dawned on me that she was still locked in the cathedral? I shot out of bed then and ran to the window. There the cathedral was, huge and squat, with the moonlight glistening icily on the windows. She was inside somewhere, a tiny upright figure in that vast darkness: and by the time I’d got my clothes on I’d come to see that I couldn’t let her out.
I wonder how she did it? I suppose she nipped in when the Precentor left, lit the light, and sat right at the back waiting for him to come in. She’d have let him pray to it, I think, and then broken to him gently and lovingly that he was a superstitious fool for his pains and the cupboard was bare. But things went wrong for both of them – he didn’t come, you see, so when she thought he was stopping away she went forward to blow out the light – and saw me. If her little wit had been quick enough she could have trumped up some excuse and still put it out – but she lacked presence of mind. She hurried past me not knowing what to say and hid in the east end, trying to think. Then he came after all – late but divinely happy with the one possible excuse for lateness at that appointment. Can you see? Imagine the tramp or labourer stopping him in the foggy back street, asking for the price of a bed, and backing away from the gift of a jacket and grubby shirt pulled off then and there, thrust upon him! So he was late – but think of the tidal wave of joy and triumph that hurried him up the aisle into the chapel and flung him on his knees!
I wonder what she thought standing there in the darkness listening to the end of his humanity? From where I stood in my bedroom I could see the east end and the chapel of the Sacrament. Of course, I thought, in sober fact she could get out whenever she wanted to – switch on the light or ring the five-minute bell. But no. How could so much warped respectability run the slightest risk of being connected with a scandal like that? And I could do nothing without letting her know that I was on to her game. I had to pretend ignorance. She must sit there, a tiny upright figure, while the moon moved down the walls and the effigies crept into the light.
I made tea and sat smoking. There is a kind of justice, isn’t there? But I’ve never known it so apt to the occasion. So she kept her vigil and I kept it with her, so to speak, parallel, till the moon faded and you could see that roofs were red.
My assistant was surprised to see me next day. I’d forgotten the note and the pistons and in the end I put off the academy and played for the service myself. That wasn’t entirely on Canon Blake’s behalf either. I was too interested in Miss Pulkinhorn. I wanted to see if she would have the nerve to come, and what the night had done to her. And what effect was apparent, should you say? None. Absolutely none. Brave, blind, indomitable woman! She sat, stood, knelt, opened and closed her mouth exactly as she’d done for twenty years back – a timeless woman. Really I began to think I’d imagined the whole thing, and of course his death made no more stir than the fall of a sparrow. The shadows were much the same, the light burned peacefully in his chapel that was so often empty now.
A few months later the effect broke in Miss Pulkinhorn. I was coming up the north aisle, hurrying because I was near enough late for Evensong. I caught my heel on the step up to the ambulatory and the confounded thing came off and wrenched my ankle. I picked the heel up and went limping and muttering past his chapel, and I heard a little shriek inside and a chair fell over. Miss Pulkinhorn came out with great dignity and her usual lapidary expression. But the topaz brooch shivered and jumped and would not be still. I stood back to let her pass and we stopped for a moment, eye meeting eye. Nothing passed between us and everything; an awareness, almost a mutual flinch; and over us both the knowledge that I knew the whole dreadful story from beginning to end. Miss Pulkinhorn in that chapel; Miss Pulkinhorn kneeling before that light; Miss Pulkinhorn watching her defences broken down, abandoning her one by one! Even a rock crumbles. Little by little, day by day, the stick began to shake, and the head. The dress was the same but the woman inside it was destroyed piece by piece. I avoided her from a kind of shame at knowing so much. Going about my business in the cathedral I took to circling and keeping an eye lifted to see if she was in my path. But she made a meeting for us.
One night after I’d kept the choir back to run through the anthem for Sunday morning I tried that prelude of mine over again; so the choir had gone and the congregation when I had finished, and I thought the way was safe. But when I came down the stairs from the organ loft Miss Pulkinhorn was sitting on one of the rush-bottom chairs, waiting. She lifted her chin and fastened her eyes on my face and we stood so for – well, it seemed a long time even in a cathedral. There was a little water on her chin which fell when she spoke.
Her words were very slow and distinct.
‘Sir Edward. My conscience is perfectly clear.’
She turned to go, leaving me as still as the carven figures round us. As she tapped shakily away over the stones I heard her repeating the words to herself.
‘– perfectly clear.’
A week later she was dead.