Chapter VI

He left the restaurant and, having enquired the way, proceeded along Cheapside towards Fleet Street. There was nothing of interest to him in Cheapside, and so, in spite of its memories of Richard Whittington and Robert Herrick, he hurried out of it. He turned into St. Paul's Churchyard, eager to see the Cathedral, but as he did so, his heart fell. The Eastern end of the Cathedral does not impress the beholder. John ought to have seen St. Paul's first from Ludgate Hill, but, coming on it from Cheapside, he could not get a proper view of it. He had expected to turn a corner and see before him, immense and wonderful, the great church, rich in tradition and dignity, rearing itself high above the houses like a strong man rising up from the midst of pigmies ... and he had turned a corner and seen only a grimy, blackened thing, huddled into a corner ... jostled almost ... by greedy shopkeepers and warehousemen. A narrow passage, congested by carts, separated the eastern end of the cathedral from ugly buildings; a narrower passage separated the railings of the churchyard from shops where men sold baby linen and women's blouses and kitchen ranges and buns and milk....

His Uncle Matthew had told him that the dome of St. Paul's could be seen from every part of London. "If ever you lose yourself in London," he had said, "search the sky 'til you see the dome of St. Paul's and then work your way towards it!" And here, in the very churchyard of the Cathedral, the dome was not visible because the shop-keepers had not left enough of room for a man to stand back and view it properly. John wondered whether the whole of London would disappoint him so much as St. Paul's had done. The English seemed to have very little regard for their cathedrals, for they put them into cramped areas and allowed merchants to encircle them with ugly shops and offices. In Southwark, he had seen the church where Shakespeare prayed, hidden behind a hideous railway bridge, with its pavement fouled by rotting cabbage leaves and the stinking debris of a vegetable market. And here, now, was St. Paul's surrounded by dingy, desolating houses, as if an effort were being made to conceal the church from view.

He hurried through the churchyard until he reached the western end of the Cathedral, where some of his disappointment dropped out of his mind. The great front of the church, with its wide, deep steps and its great, strong pillars, black and grey from the smoke and fog of London, filled him with a sense of imperturbable dignity. Men might build their dingy, little shops and their graceless, scrambling warehouses, and try to crowd the Cathedral into a corner, but the great church would still retain its dignity and strength however much they might succeed in obscuring it. He walked across the pavement, scattering the pigeons as he did so, undecided whether to enter the Cathedral or not, until he reached the flagstone on which is chiselled the statement that "Here Queen Victoria Returned Thanks to Almighty God for the Sixtieth Anniversary of Her Accession. June 22, 1897." As he contemplated the flagstone, he forgot about the Cathedral, and remembered only his Uncle Matthew. On this spot, a little, old woman had said her thankful prayers, the little, old woman for whom his Uncle, who had never seen her, had cracked a haberdasher's window and suffered disgrace; and she and he were dead, and the little, old lady was of no more account than the simple-minded man who had nearly been sent to gaol because of his devotion to her memory. Many times in his life, had John heard people speak of "the Queen" almost in an awe-stricken fashion, until, now and then, she seemed to him to be a legendary woman, a great creature in a heroic story, someone of whom he might dream, but of whom he might never hope to catch a glimpse. It startled him to think that she had human qualities, that she ate and drank and slept and suffered pain and laughed and cried like other people. She was "the Queen": she owned the British Empire and all that it contained. She owned white men and black men and yellow men and red men; she owned islands and continents and deserts and seas; a great tract of the world belonged to her ... and here he was standing on the very spot where she had sat in her carriage, offering thanks in old quavering accents to the Almighty God for allowing her to reign for sixty years. The fact that he was able to stand on that very spot seemed comical to him. There ought to have been a burning bush on the place where "the Queen" had said her prayers. Uncle Matthew would have expected something of that sort ... but there was nothing more dramatic than this plainly-chiselled inscription. And the little, old woman was as dusty in her grave as Uncle Matthew was in his....