The Cathedral: A Novel

by Hugh Walpole

When Joan arrived, then, in the Deanery dining-room there was a fine gathering. Very unsophisticated they would all have been considered by the present generation. Lady Rose and Lady Mary, who were both of them nearer forty than thirty, had of course had some experience of London, and had been even to Paris and Rome. Of the "Others," at this time, only Betty Callender, who had been born in India, and the Forresters had been farther, in all their lives, than Drymouth. Their lives were bound, and happily bound, by the Polchester horizon. They lived in and for and by the local excitements, talks, croquet, bicycling (under proper guardianship), Rafiel or Buquay or Clinton in the summer, and the occasional (very, very occasional) performances of amateur theatricals in the Assembly Rooms.

Moreover, they were happy and contented and healthy. For many of them Jane Eyre was still a forbidden book and a railway train a remarkable adventure.

Polchester was the world and the world was Polchester. They were at least a century nearer to Jane Austen's day than they were to George the Fifth's.

Joan saw, with relief, so soon as she entered the room, that the St. Leath women were absent. They overawed her and were so much older than the others there that they brought constraint with them and embarrassment.

Any stranger, coming suddenly into the room, must have felt its light and gaiety and happiness. The high wide dining-room windows were open and looked, over sloping lawns, down to the Pol and up again to the woods beyond. The trees were faintly purple in the spring sun, daffodils were nodding on the lawn and little gossamer clouds of pale orange floated like feathers across the sky. The large dining-room table was cleared for action, and Gladys Sampson, very serious and important, stood at the far end of the room under a very bad oil-painting of her father, directing operations. The girls were dressed for the most part in white muslin frocks, high in the shoulders and pulled in at the waist and tight round the neck--only the McKenzie girls, who rode to hounds and played tennis beautifully and had, all three of them, faces of glazed red brick, were clad in the heavy Harris tweeds that were just then beginning to be so fashionable.

Joan, who only a month or two ago would have been devoured with shyness at penetrating the fastnesses of the Sampson dining-room, now felt no shyness whatever but nodded quite casually to Gladys, smiled at the McKenzies, and found a place between Cynthia Ryle and Jane D'Arcy.

They all sat, bathed in the sunshine, and looked at Gladys Sampson. She cleared her throat and said in her pounding heavy voice--her voice was created for Committees: "Now all of you know what we're here for. We're here to make two banners for the Assembly Rooms and we've got to do our very best. We haven't got a great deal of time between now and June the Twentieth, so we must work, and I propose that we come here every Tuesday and Friday afternoon, and when I say here I mean somebody or other's house, because of course it won't be always here. There's cutting up to do and sewing and plenty of work really for everybody, because when the banners are done there are the flags for the school-children. Now if any one has any suggestions to make I shall be very glad to hear them."

There was at first no reply to this and every one smiled and looked at the portrait of the Dean. Then one of the McKenzie girls remarked in a deep bass voice:

"That's all right, Gladys. But who's going to decide who does what? Very decent of you to ask us but we're not much in the sewing line--never have been."

"Oh," said Gladys, "I've got people's names down for the different things they're to do and any one whom it doesn't suit has only got to speak up."