The Unsettled Dust Page 11

  He heard her pass onwards to the door. In the next room, the drawing room, her steps paused for many seconds, and he realised that she was looking at herself in the tall and stately glass which seemed to have come from some Italian palace. Then the steps resumed, more slowly he thought, as doubtless she drew on her furs; and soon he knew that he would never see or hear her again.

  THE CICERONES

  John Trant entered the Cathedral of Saint Bavon at almost exactly 11.30.

  An unexpected week’s holiday having come his way, he was spending it in Belgium, because Belgium was near and it was late in the season, and because he had never been there. Trant, who was unmarried (though one day he intended to marry), was travelling alone, but he seldom felt lonely at such times because he believed that his solitude was optional and regarded it rather as freedom. He was 32 and saw himself as quite ordinary, except perhaps in this very matter of travel, which he thought he took more seriously and systematically than most. The hour at which he entered the Cathedral was important, because he had been inconvenienced in other towns by the irritating continental habit of shutting tourist buildings between 12.00 and 2.0, even big churches. In fact, he had been in two minds as to whether to visit the Cathedral at all with so little time in hand. One could not even count upon the full half-hour, because the driving out of visitors usually began well before the moment of actual closure. It was a still morning, very still, but overcast. Men were beginning to wait, one might say, for the year finally to die.

  The thing that struck Trant most as he entered the vast building was how silent it seemed to be within; how empty. Other Belgian cathedrals had contained twenty or thirty scattered people praying, or anyway kneeling; priests importantly on the move, followed by acolytes; and, of course, Americans. There had always been dingy bustle, ritual action, and neck-craning. Here there seemed to be no one other, doubtless, than the people in the tombs. Trant again wondered whether the informed did not know that it was already too late to go in.

  He leant against a column at the west end of the nave as he always did, and read the history of the cathedral in his Blue Guide. He chose this position in order that when he came to the next section to be perused, the architectural summary, he could look about him to the best advantage. He usually found, none the less, that he soon had to move if he were to follow what the guide book had to say, as the architecture of few cathedrals can be apprehended, even in outline, by a newcomer from a single point. So it was now: Trant found that he was losing the thread, and decided he would have to take up the guide book’s trail. Before doing so, he looked around him for a moment. The Cathedral seemed still to be quite empty. It was odd, but a very pleasant change. Trant set out along the south aisle of the nave, holding the guide book like a breviary. ‘Carved oak pulpit,’ said the guide book, ‘with marble figures, all by Laurent Delvaux.’ Trant had observed it vaguely from afar, but as, looking up from the book, he began consciously to think about it, he saw something extraordinary. Surely there was a figure in the pulpit, not standing erect, but slumped forward over the preacher’s cushion? Trant could see the top of a small, bald head with a deep fringe, almost a halo, of white hair; and, on each side, widespread arms, with floppy hands. Not that it appeared to be a priest: the figure was wearing neither white nor black, but on the contrary, bright colours, several of them. Though considerably unnerved, Trant went forward, passed the next column in the arcade between the nave and the aisle, and looked again, through the next bay. He saw at once that there was nothing: at least there was only a litter of minor vestments and scripts in coloured bindings.

  Trant heard a laugh. He turned. Behind him stood a slender, brown-haired young man in a grey suit.

  ‘Excuse me,’ said the young man. ‘I saw it myself so don’t be frightened.’ He spoke quite clearly, but had a vague foreign accent.

  ‘It was terrifying,’ said Trant. ‘Out of this world.’

  ‘Yes. Out of this world, as you say. Did you notice the hair?’

  ‘I did indeed.’ The young man had picked on the very detail which had perturbed Trant the most. ‘What did you make of it?’

  ‘Holy, holy, holy,’ said the young man in his foreign accent; then smiled and sauntered off westwards. Trant was almost sure that this was what he had said. The hair of the illusory figure in the pulpit had, at the time, reminded Trant of the way in which nimbuses are shown in certain old paintings; with wide bars or strips of light linking an outer misty ring with the sacred head. The figure’s white hair had seemed to project in just such spikes.

  Trant pulled himself together and reached the south transept, hung high with hatchments. He sought out ‘Christ among the Doctors’. ‘The masterpiece of Frans Pourbus the Elder,’ as the guide book remarked, and set himself to identifying the famous people said to be depicted in it, including the Duke of Alva, Vigilius ab Ayatta, and even the Emperor Charles V himself.

  In the adjoining chapel, ‘The Martyrdom of St. Barbara’ by De Crayer proved to be covered with a cloth, another irritating continental habit, as Trant had previously discovered. As there seemed to be no one about, Trant lifted a corner of the cloth, which was brown and dusty, like so many things in Belgian cathedrals, and peered beneath. It was difficult to make out very much, especially as the light was so poor.

  ‘Let me help,’ said a transatlantic voice at Trant’s back. ‘Let me take it right off, and then you’ll see something, believe me.’

  Again it was a young man, but this time a red-haired cheerful looking youth in a green windcheater.

  The youth not only removed the cloth, but turned on an electric light.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Trant.

  ‘Now have a good look.’

  Trant looked. It was an extremely horrible scene. ‘Oh boy.’

  Trant had no desire to look any longer. ‘Thank you all the same,’ he said, apologising for his repulsion.

  ‘What a circus those old saints were,’ commented the transatlantic youth, as he replaced the worn cloth.

  ‘I suppose they received their reward in heaven,’ suggested Trant.

  ‘You bet they did,’ said the youth, with a fervour that Trant couldn’t quite fathom. He turned off the light. ‘Be seeing you.’

  ‘I expect so,’ said Trant smiling.

  The youth said no more, but put his hands in his pockets, and departed whistling towards the south door. Trant himself would not have cared to whistle so loudly in a foreign church.

  As all the world knows, the most important work of art in the Cathedral of St. Bavon is the ‘Adoration’ by the mysterious van Eyck or van Eycks, singular or plural. Nowadays the picture is hung in a small, curtained-off chapel leading from the south choir ambulatory; and most strangers must pay to see it. When Trant reached the chapel, he saw the notice at the door, but, hearing nothing, as elsewhere, supposed the place to be empty. Resenting wildly the demand for a fee, as Protestants do, he took the initiative and gently lifted the dark red curtain.

  The chapel, though still silent, was not empty at all. On the contrary, it was so full that Trant could have gone no further inside, even had he dared.

  There were two kinds of people in the chapel. In front were several rows of men in black. They knelt shoulder to shoulder, heads dropped, hip-bone against hip-bone, in what Trant took to be silent worship. Behind them, packed in even more tightly, was a group, even a small crowd, of funny old Belgian women, fat, ugly, sexless, and bossy, such as Trant had often seen in other places both devotional and secular. The old women were not kneeling, but sitting. All the same, they seemed eerily rapt. Strangest of all was their motionless silence. Trant had seen such groups everywhere in Belgium, but never, never silent, very far from it. Not a single one of this present group seemed even to be aware that he was there: something equally unusual with a people so given to curiosity.

  And in this odd setting not the least strange thing was the famous picture itself, with its enigmatic monsters, sybyls, and walking allegories, and its curious
ly bright, other-world colours: a totality doubtless, interpretable in terms of Freud, but, all the same, as dense as an oriental carpet, and older than Adam and Eve, who stand beside. Trant found the picture all too cognate to the disconcerting devotees.

  He let fall the curtain and went on his way, distinctly upset.

  Two chapels further round, he came upon the ‘Virgin Glorified’ by Liemakere. Here a choir-boy in a red cassock was polishing the crucifix on the altar. Already, he had thin black hair and a grey, watchful face.

  ‘Onze lieve Vrouw,’ said the choir-boy, explaining the picture to Trant.

  ‘Yes,’ said Trant. ‘Thank you.’

  It occurred to him that polishing was odd work for a choir-boy. Perhaps this was not a choir-boy at all, but some other kind of young servitor. The idea of being shortly ejected from the building returned to Trant’s mind. He looked at his watch. It had stopped. It still showed 11.28

  Trant shook the watch against his ear, but there were no recovering ticks. He saw that the polishing boy (he was at work on the pierced feet) wore a watch also, on a narrow black strap. Trant gesticulated again. The boy only shook his head more violently. Trant could not decide whether the boy’s own watch was broken, or whether, conceivably, he thought that Trant was trying to take it from him. Then, all in seconds, it struck Trant that, whatever else there was about the boy, he certainly did not appear alarmed. Far from it. He seemed as aloof as if he were already a priest, and to be refusing to tell Trant the time on principle; almost implying, as priests presume to do, that he was refusing for the other’s good. Trant departed from the chapel containing Leimakere’s masterpiece rather quickly.

  How much time had he left?

  In the next chapel was Rubens’s vast altar piece of St. Bavon distributing all his goods among the poor.

  In the next was the terrifying ‘Martyrdom of Saint Livinus’ by Seghers.

  After one more chapel, Trant had reached the junction of the north transept and the choir. The choir was surrounded by a heavy and impenetrable screen of black marble, like a cage for the imperial lions. The guide book recommended the four tombs of past bishops which were said to be inside; but Trant, peering through the stone bars, could hardly see even outlines. He shifted from end to end of the choir steps seeking a viewpoint where the light might be better. It was useless. In the end, he tried the handle of the choir gate. The gate had given every appearance of being locked, but in fact it opened at once when Trant made the attempt. He tiptoed into the dark enclosure and thought he had better shut the gate behind him. He was not sure that he was going to see very much of the four tombs, even now; but there they were, huge boxes flanking the high altar, like dens for the lions.

  He stood at the steps of the altar itself leaning across the marble rails, the final barricade, trying to read one of the Latin inscriptions. In such an exercise Trant made it a matter of principle not lightly to admit defeat. He craned his neck and screwed up his eyes until he was half-dazed; capturing the antique words one at a time, and trying to construe them. The matter of the cathedral shutting withdrew temporarily to the back of his mind. Then something horrible seemed to happen; or rather two things, one after the other. Trant thought first that the stone panel he was staring at so hard seemed somehow to move; and then that a hand had appeared round one upper corner of it. It seemed to Trant a curiously small hand.

  Trant decided, almost calmly, to see it out. There must obviously be an explanation, and anything like flight would make him look ridiculous, as well as leaving the mystery unsolved. An explanation there was; the stone opened further, and from within emerged a small, fair-haired child.

  ‘Hullo,’ said the child, looking at Trant across the black marble barrier and smiling.

  ‘Hullo,’ said Trant. ‘You speak very good English.’

  ‘I am English,’ said the child. It was wearing a dark brown garment open at the neck, and dark brown trousers, but Trant could not quite decide whether it was a boy or a girl. From the escapade a boy seemed likelier, but there was something about the child which was more like a girl, Trant thought.

  ‘Should you have been in there?’

  ‘I always go in.’

  ‘Aren’t you afraid?’

  ‘No one could be afraid of Bishop Triest. He gave us those candlesticks.’ The child pointed to four tall copper objects; which seemed to Trant to offer no particular confirmation of the child’s logic.

  ‘Would you like to go in?’ enquired the child politely.

  ‘No, thank you,’ said Trant.

  ‘Then I’ll just shut up.’ The child heaved the big stone slab into place. It was a feat of strength all the more remarkable in that Trant noticed that the child seemed to limp.

  ‘Do you live here?’ asked Trant.

  ‘Yes,’ said the child, and, child-like, said no more.

  It limped forward, climbed the altar rail, and stood beside Trant, looking up at him. Trant found it difficult to assess how old it was.

  ‘Would you like to see one of the other bishops?’

  ‘No thank you,’ said Trant.

  ‘I think you ought to see a bishop,’ said the child quite gravely.

  ‘I’d rather not,’ said Trant smiling.

  ‘There may not be another chance.’

  ‘I expect not,’ said Trant, still smiling. He felt it was best to converse with the child at its own level, and make no attempt at adult standards of flat questioning and conventionalised reference.

  ‘Then I’ll take you to the crypt,’ said the child.

  The crypt was the concluding item in the guide book. Entered from just by the north-western corner of the choir, it was, like the ‘Adoration’, a speciality, involving payment. Trant had rather assumed that he would not get round to it.

  ‘Shall I have time?’ he asked, looking instinctively at his stopped watch, still showing 11.28.

  ‘Yes,’ said the child, as before.

  The child limped ahead, opened the choir-gate and held it for Trant, his inscriptions unread, to pass through. The child closed the gate, and led the way to the crypt entry, looking over its shoulder to see that Trant was following. In the rather better light outside the choir, Trant saw that its hair was a wonderful mass of silky gold; its face almost white, with the promise of fine bones; its lips unusually red.

  ‘This is called the crossing,’ said the child informatively. Trant knew that the term was sometimes applied to the intersection of nave and transepts.

  ‘Or the narthex, I believe,’ he said, plunging in in order to show who was the grown-up.

  The child, not unnaturally, looked merely puzzled.

  There was still no one else visible in the cathedral.

  They began to descend the crypt stairs, the child holding on to the iron handrail because of its infirmity. There was a table at the top, obviously for the collection of the fee, but deserted. Trant did not feel called upon to comment.

  In the crypt, slightly to his surprise, many of the lights were on. Probably the custodian had forgotten to turn them off when he or she had hurried forth to eat.

  The guide book described the crypt as ‘large’, but it was much larger than Trant had expected. The stairs entered at one corner, and columns seemed to stretch away like trees into the distance. They were built in stones of different colours, maroon, purple, green, grey, gold; and they often bore remains of painting as well, which also spread over areas of the vaulted stone roof and weighty walls. In the soft patchy light, the place was mysterious and beautiful; and all the more so because the whole area could not be seen simultaneously. With the tide of centuries the stone-paved floor had become rolling and uneven, but agreeably so. There were occasional showcases and objects on pedestals, and there was a gentle perfume of incense. As Trant entered, all was silence. He even felt for a moment that there was something queer about the silence; that only sounds of another realm moved in it, and that the noises of this world, of his own arrival for example, were in a different dimension and i
rrelevant. He stood, a little awed, and listened for a moment to the nothingness.

  The child stood too, or rather rested against a pillar. It was smiling again, though very slightly. Perhaps it smiled like this all the time, as if always happy.

  Trant thought more than ever that it might be a girl. By this time it was rather absurd not to be sure, but by this time it was more than before difficult to ask.

  ‘Bishop Triest’s clothes,’ said the child, pointing. They were heavy vestments, hanging, enormously embroidered, in a glass cabinet.

  ‘Saint Livinus’s ornament,’ said the child, and crossed itself. Trant did not know quite what to make of the ornament.

  ‘Animals,’ said the child. It was an early book of natural history written by a monk, and even the opened page showed some very strange ones.

  The child was now beginning positively to dart about in its eagerness, pointing out item after item.

  ‘Shrine of Saint Macarius,’ said the child, not crossing itself, presumably because the relic was absent.

  ‘Abbot Hughenois’s clothes.’ They were vestments again, and very like Triest’s vestments, Trant thought.

  ‘What’s that?’ asked Trant, taking the initiative and pointing. Right on the other side of the crypt, as it seemed, and now visible to Trant for the first time through the forest of coloured columns, was something which appeared to be winking and gleaming with light.

  ‘That’s at the end,’ replied the child. ‘You’ll be there soon.’

  Soon indeed, at this hour, thought Trant: if in fact we’re not thrown out first.

  ‘Via Dolorosa,’ said the child, pointing to a picture. It was a gruesome scene, painted very realistically, as if the artist had been a bystander at the time; and it was followed by another which was even more gruesome and at least equally realistic.

  ‘Calvary,’ explained the child.