They were pressing up the High Street now. There was no one about. It was a town of ghosts. By the Arden Gate Falk realised where he was and halted.
"Hullo! we're nearly home.... Well...good afternoon, Mr. Davray."
"Come into the Cathedral for a moment," Davray seemed to be urgent about this. "Have you ever been up into the King Harry Tower? I bet you haven't."
"King Harry Tower?..." Falk stared at the man. What did the fellow want him to do? Go into the Cathedral? Well, why not? Stupid to go home just now--nothing to do there but think, and people would interrupt.... Think better out of doors. But what was there to think about? He was not thinking, simply going round and round.... Who was this fellow anyway?
"As you like," he said.
They crossed the Precincts and went through the West door into the Cathedral. The nave was full of dusky light and very still. Candles glimmered behind the great choir-screen and there were lamps by the West door. Seen thus, in its half-dark, the nave bore full witness to the fact that Polchester has the largest Cathedral in Northern Europe. It is certainly true that no other building in England gives the same overwhelming sense of length.
In full daylight the nave perhaps, as is the case with all English Cathedrals, lacks colour and seems cold and deserted. In the dark of this spring evening it was full of mystery, and the great columns of the nave's ten bays, rising unbroken to the roof groining, sprang, it seemed, out of air, superbly, intolerably inhuman.
The colours from the tombs and the brasses glimmered against the grey, and the great rose-coloured circle of the West window flung pale lights across the cold dark of the flags and pillars.
The two men were held by the mysterious majesty of the place. Falk was lifted right out of his own preoccupied thoughts.
He had never considered the Cathedral except as a place to which he was dragged for services against his will, but to-night, perhaps because of his own crisis, he seemed to see it all for the first time. He was conscious now of Davray and was aware that he did not like him and wished to be rid of him--"an awful-looking tout" he thought him, "with his greasy long hair and his white long face and his spindle legs."