The Cathedral: A Novel

by Hugh Walpole

Soon the material was distributed and groups were formed round the room. A chatter arose like the murmur of bees. The sun as it sank lower behind the woods turned them to dark crimson and the river pale grey. The sun fell now in burning patches and squares across the room and the dim yellow blinds were pulled half-way across the windows. With this the room was shaded into a strong coloured twilight and the white frocks shone as though seen through glass. The air grew cold beyond the open windows, but the room was warm with the heat that the walls had stolen and stored from the sun.

Joan sat with Jane D'Arcy and Betty Callender. She was very happy to be at rest there; she felt secure and safe. Because in truth during these last weeks life had been increasingly difficult--difficult not only because it had become, of late, so new and so strange, but also because she could not tell what was happening. Family life had indeed become of late a mystery, and behind the mystery there was a dim sense of apprehension, apprehension that she had never felt in all her days before. As she sank into the tranquillity of the golden afternoon glow, with the soft white silk passing to and fro in her bands, she tried to realise for herself what had been occurring. Her father was, on the whole, simple enough. He was beginning to suffer yet again from one of his awful obsessions. Since the hour of her earliest childhood she had watched these obsessions and dreaded them.

There had been so many, big ones and little ones. Now the Government, now the Dean, now the Town Council, now the Chapter, now the Choir, now some rude letter, now some impertinent article in a paper. Like wild fierce animals these things had from their dark thickets leapt out upon him, and he had proceeded to wrestle with them in the full presence of his family. Always, at last, he had been, victorious over them, the triumph had been publicly announced, "Te Deums" sung, and for a time there had been peace. It was some while since the last obsession, some ridiculous action about drainage on the part of the Town Council. But the new one threatened to make up in full for the length of that interval.

Only just before Falk's unexpected return from Oxford Joan had been congratulating herself on her father's happiness and peace of mind. She might have known the omens of that dangerous quiet. On the very day of Falk's arrival Canon Ronder had arrived too.

Canon Ronder! How Joan was beginning to detest the very sound of the name! She had hated the man himself as soon as she had set eyes upon him. She had scented, in some instinctive way, the trouble that lay behind those large round glasses and that broad indulgent smile. But now! Now they were having the name "Ronder" with their breakfast, their dinner, and their tea. Into everything apparently his fat fingers were inserted; her father saw his rounded shadow behind every door, his rosy cheeks at every window.

And yet it was very difficult to discover what exactly it was that he had done! Now, whatever it might be that went wrong in the Brandon house, in the Cathedral, in the town, her father was certain that Ronder was responsible,--but proof. Well, there wasn't any. And it was precisely this absence of proof that built up the obsession.

Everywhere that Ronder went he spoke enthusiastically about the Archdeacon. These compliments came back to Joan again and again. "If there's one man in this town I admire----" "What would this town be without----" "We're lucky, indeed, to have the Archdeacon----" And yet was there not behind all these things a laugh, a jest, a mocking tone, something that belonged in spirit to that horrible day when the elephant had trodden upon her father's hat?

She loved her father, and she loved him twice as dearly since one night when on driving up to the Castle he had held her hand. But now the obsession had killed the possibility of any tenderness between them; she longed to be able to do something that would show him how strongly she was his partisan, to insult Canon Ronder in the market-place, to turn her back when he spoke to her--and, at the same time, intermingled with this hot championship was irritation that her father should allow himself to be obsessed by this. He who was so far greater than a million Ronders!

The situation in the Brandon family had not been made any easier by Falk's strange liking for the man. Joan did not pretend that she understood her brother or had ever been in any way close to him. When she had been little he had seemed to be so infinitely above her as to be in another world, and now that they seemed almost of an age he was strange to her like some one of foreign blood. She knew that she did not count in his scheme of life at all, that he never thought of her nor wanted her. She did not mind that, and even now she would have been tranquil about him had it not been for her mother's anxiety. She could not but see how during the last weeks her mother had watched every step that Falk took, her eyes always searching his face as though he were keeping some secret from her. To Joan, who never believed that people could plot and plan and lead double lives, this all seemed unnatural and exaggerated.

But she knew well enough that her mother had never attempted to give her any of her confidence. Everything at home, in short, was difficult and confused. Nobody was happy, nobody was natural. Even her own private history, if she looked into it too closely, did not show her any very optimistic colours. She had not seen Johnny St. Leath now for a fortnight, nor heard from him, and those precious words under the Arden Gate one evening were beginning already to appear a dim unsubstantial dream. However, if there was one quality that Joan Brandon possessed in excess of all others, it was a simple fidelity to the cause or person in front of her.