“Come along--and hurry. Few people have got originality enough to think of the expedition I have been planning, and still fewer could carry it out, maybe, even if they did think of it. Hurry, now. Cab at the door.”
It was past eleven o’clock and I was just going to bed. But this friend of mine was as reliable as he was eccentric, and so there was not a doubt in my mind that his “expedition” had merit in it. I put on my coat and boots again, and we drove away.
“Where is it? Where are we going?”
“Don’t worry. You’ll see.”
He was not inclined to talk. So I thought this must be a weighty matter. My curiosity grew with the minutes, but I kept it manfully under the surface. I watched the lamps, the signs, the numbers, as we thundered down the long streets, but it was of no use--I am always lost in London, day or night. It was very chilly--almost bleak. People leaned against the gusty blasts as if it were the dead of winter. The crowds grew thinner and thinner and the noises waxed faint and seemed far away. The sky was overcast and threatening. We drove on, and still on, till I wondered if we were ever going to stop. At last we passed by a spacious bridge and a vast building with a lighted clock tower, and presently entered a gateway, passed through a sort of tunnel, and stopped in a court surrounded by the black outlines of a great edifice. Then we alighted, walked a dozen steps or so, and waited. In a little while footsteps were heard and a man emerged from the darkness and we dropped into his wake without saying anything. He led us under an archway of masonry, and from that into a roomy tunnel, through a tall iron gate, which he locked behind us. We followed him down this tunnel, guided more by his footsteps on the stone flagging than by anything we could very distinctly see. At the end of it we came to another iron gate, and our conductor stopped there and lit a little bull’s-eye lantern. Then he unlocked the gate--and I wished he had oiled it first, it grated so dismally. The gate swung open and we stood on the threshold of what seemed a limitless domed and pillared cavern carved out of the solid darkness. The conductor and my friend took off their hats reverently, and I did likewise. For the moment that we stood thus there was not a sound, and the silence seemed to add to the solemnity of the gloom. I looked my inquiry!
“It is the tomb of the great dead of England--Westminster Abbey.”
(One cannot express a start--in words.) Down among the columns--ever so far away, it seemed--a light revealed itself like a star, and a voice came echoing through the spacious emptiness:
“Who goes there!”
“Wright!”
The star disappeared and the footsteps that accompanied it clanked out of hearing in the distance. Mr. Wright held up his lantern and the vague vastness took something of form to itself--the stately columns developed stronger outlines, and a dim pallor here and there marked the places of lofty windows. We were among the tombs; and on every hand dull shapes of men, sitting, standing, or stooping, inspected us curiously out of the darkness--reached out their hands toward us--some appealing, some beckoning, some warning us away. Effigies, they were--statues over the graves; but they looked human and natural in the murky shadows. Now a little half-grown black-and-white cat squeezed herself through the bars of the iron gate and came purring lovingly about us, unawed by the time or the place--unimpressed by the marble pomp that sepulchers a line of mighty dead that ends with a great author of yesterday and began with a sceptered monarch away back in the dawn of history more than twelve hundred years ago. And she followed us about and never left us while we pursued our work. We wandered hither and thither, uncovered, speaking in low voices, and stepping softly by instinct, for any little noise rang and echoed there in a way to make one shudder. Mr. Wright flashed his lantern first upon this object and then upon that, and kept up a running commentary that showed that there was nothing about the venerable Abbey that was trivial in his eyes or void of interest. He is a man in authority--being superintendent of the works--and his daily business keeps him familiar with every nook and corner of the great pile. Casting a luminous ray now here, now yonder, he would say: