The Dean's Watch

by Elizabeth Goudge

2.

  It was Job who heard the heavy footsteps first, and he thought again that he knew now what Christmas was. It was expectancy. This time last year he had expected little except the dreary continuance of misery but now the horizon of his expectations was lost in glory.

  “You can put up the shutters now, Job,” said Isaac.

  “Just a minute, sir,” said Job, “there’s someone coming.”

  In another moment or two the black silhouette of the Dean’s cloaked and top-hatted figure had blocked out the crooked houses opposite, the sky and the stars. Isaac, with an exclamation of delight, was just starting forward when Job checked him. “He’s seen the clock!” he whispered.

  The Dean with his poor sight had not seen the two weary workmen inside the shop but he had indeed seen the clock. He took off his eyeglasses, polished them and put them on again. He stood perfectly still gazing at the clock, and his face was as still as his body. Both might have been carved out of dark and ancient wood. At first Isaac was disappointed, used as he was to the eager faces pressed against the window and the exclamations of delight. He was afraid the Dean did not like his clock. His expressionless stillness could only mean disapproval. Or else homage. It could not be homage. He watched intently and saw a smile creep about the Dean’s lips. He had seen that smile outside his shop window many times this last week but always on a young face, not an old one. The young men of the city, the ones with not much money, had looked like that when they had seen exactly the right heart-shaped pinchbeck locket to give their girl for Christmas, and then they had slouched in, blushing crimson, and counted out half their week’s poor wages on his counter. But it shocked him to see that same smile on an old face. Such an intensity of feeling could be borne through the time of courting and first love but he did not know how a man could support it through a lifetime.

  Then suddenly fear gripped him as he realized the meaning of the smile. The celestial clock was the one the Dean wanted to give to his wife and he would be content with nothing else. Isaac knew these lovers and their obstinacy. They wanted the one thing and the one thing only and there was no fobbing them off with something else. He would have to tell the Dean the clock was not for sale. What a fool he had been to put it in the window. What a fool! And now he would have to disappoint the one man of all others whom he most loved and admired; the only man, if it came to that, for though his love embraced the whole city he felt a deep personal love only for the Dean, Miss Montague, Polly and Job. He must do it quickly. He must tell the Dean as quickly as he could that the clock was not for sale. Get it over.

  Adam Ayscough had moved from the window and Job had leaped to open the door. Then the three of them were together in the shop exchanging the greetings of the season and only Isaac’s rang hollow. “You are well again, Mr. Peabody?” asked the Dean, peering at him a little anxiously.

  “Yes, sir,” said Isaac.

  “You must be much fatigued,” said the Dean. “Overburdened with customers. And I am yet another, and a late one. I was with Mr. Turnbull, our mayor, talking with him of a project that I have at heart, and I could not get away as early as I had intended. Much distressed.” He paused and then said as shyly as a schoolboy, “That clock for my wife, Mr. Peabody. There is one in the window, a very lovely clock. I do not think I have ever seen one I liked better.”

  Isaac wetted his lips. “Which one, sir?” he asked.

  “It is a clock of the heavens,” said the Dean.

  Isaac looked up at him. Now he must say it. No good beating about the bush. He must say it at once. The Dean’s eyes, usually rather dim, seemed boyishly bright in the lamplight. Isaac rehearsed in his mind what he had to say. “The celestial clock is not for sale, sir.” He rehearsed it several times and then swallowed and said, “Job, bring the celestial clock through to the workshop. Then put up the shutters and close the shop that we may be undisturbed.” He opened the workshop door and stood back. “Will you come this way, sir?”

  In the workshop he turned up one of the lamps and cleared a wide space on his workbench. “Put it here, Job,” he said. “You see, sir, there is more space here. You can stand back and get the effect as it will be when it stands on Mrs. Ayscough’s mantelpiece. I shall be proud indeed, sir, if you choose this one for her but would you like Job to bring any others through for you to see?”

  The Dean had taken off his hat and was standing before the clock. “I need not trouble Job,” he said quietly. “There is only one clock in the world that I want to give my wife.”

  “I am glad, sir,” said Isaac. “When you have put up the shutters, Job, you may come back. I must tell you, sir, that I had Job’s help in making this clock. He was of great assistance to me.”

  “That increases the clock’s value,” said the Dean.

  Job went out to the street and put up the shutters in a state of great bewilderment. What ever had made Isaac part with the clock? It was to the Dean, of course. Yet he had thought that Isaac would have cut the heart out of his body sooner than part with the clock. The shutters in place, he came back to the workshop and stood in the shadows behind the two old men, who were talking in low voices of the glory of the clock. It was a glorious clock. It seemed to Job that until this moment he had not himself realized what a masterpiece had been achieved. It stood illumined by the lamplight, shining out against the shadows behind it as sometimes the setting sun is illumined against the dusk. The golden fret that hid the bell was the loveliest Isaac had ever made. The two swans were just rising from the reeds, one with wings fully spread, the other with his pinions half unfolded. Job could understand from experience, and the Dean through intuition, what an achievement it had been to form those great wings and curved necks into a pattern that was a fitting one for a clock fret and yet alive, but only Isaac knew how he had labored and sweated over it. This had been a costing clock. Yet the figures of the signs of the zodiac were as fresh and lively as though they had stepped with ease to the clock face. The ram, the bull, the heavenly twins, the crab, the lion, the scales, the scorpion, the archer, the sea goat and the man with the watering pot were bright as their own stars, gay as the little figures in an illuminated manuscript. But the virgin and the fish had something more than life and gaiety.

  “She stands in her blue robe at her own hour of vespers, full of the peace of that hour,” said the Dean. “Expectancy too. A great expectancy. Only six hours to midnight.”

  Isaac was startled. He had intended no Christian symbolism when he had painted his virgin in a blue robe. He had chosen blue merely to balance the blue of the watering pot at nine o’clock and the blue fillet that bound the archer’s head at three o’clock. But the pretty Christmas story was a part of him and had obtruded itself.

  “Six hours to midnight,” repeated the Dean. “There you have combined the two symbols very excellently, Mr. Peabody. The fish, the ancient Christian symbol of Christ our Lord, and the Sun of Righteousness, the Light of the World.”

  With a pang of something remarkably like jealousy Mr. Peabody realized that the Dean’s homage that he had seen through the window had not been entirely for his clock, if for his clock at all. And what had he been thinking of to put only one fish at twelve o’clock? Pisces, the sign of the zodiac, had two fish. He could only suppose that out of the deeps of his memory that one fish had come swimming up into the light, to remind him now suddenly of his father. For it was his father who had told him how the martyrs had painted that fish on the walls of the catacombs, and traced it in the dust that one Christian might recognize another.

  “My homage is a double one,” said the Dean, and Isaac’s spirits rose again until he remembered the virgin, when they sank, but lifted once more when the Dean added, “You are a master craftsman, Mr. Peabody. I hope the price you are asking for that clock is sufficient for its great merit.”

  “No price, sir,” said Isaac in a low voice.

  “What did you say, Mr. Peabody?” asked the Dean, and put his hand behind his ear.

  Isaac raised h
is voice. “I cannot let you pay me for that clock, sir. I shall be happy if Mrs. Ayscough will accept it.”

  He was looking very dejected. How could he explain to the Dean that he was only able to part with the clock if he could give it? It was himself. A man does not give himself to his friend for payment. The Dean, his hand still behind his ear, was looking at him in puzzled distress. But he could not explain. He had not got the words. Job, he noticed, was escaping quietly out of the room and he saw him go with panic. Now he was alone with the Dean and could not escape. It was not of the man himself that he was afraid but of that which reached out for him through his friend. The Dean’s huge shadow leapt up over the ceiling in the same sort of way that the Cathedral loomed up in the night sky. He began to cough.

  “Mr. Peabody,” said the Dean gently, “do you not wish to part with this clock? If that is the case I beg that you will tell me. I can assure you whatever your motives may be I shall understand them.”

  “I want to give you the clock,” mumbled Isaac. “That’s what I want.”

  “Much distressed,” murmured the Dean, and indeed he was groping in a fog of distress. One thing however was clear to him, and that was that Isaac was speaking the truth and that for the moment at any rate he must humbly accept the clock. After Christmas, he trusted, God’s guidance would show him some happy way of persuading Isaac to accept payment, or if that was not possible, then some way of service to his friend that should reveal without patronage or pride the depth of his gratitude.

  “I want it too,” he said quietly. “For my beloved wife. With all my heart I thank you, Mr. Peabody. I cannot just now express my feelings as I would. I shall hope to do so at some future time when I have a little collected myself. My friend, may I stay for a few moments and talk with you?”

  “It is getting late, sir,” said Isaac. “Dark too. You should be at home.”

  “To be here with you is a pleasure,” said the Dean, “and to walk home in the dark will be no burden. The city at night is a continual joy to me. Do you fear the dark?”

  “Not of the city at night,” said Isaac.

  “Of death?” asked the Dean. “If so you are not alone in your fear, for the dark auditorium with its unseen crowd of witnesses is a frightening thing, pressing in upon our poor little garish stage, frightening because we know nothing of it. Yet when our play is ended and the house lights go up we shall see many kindly faces. It is a house, remember, a friendly place. There is a prayer by the great Dean John Donne that I often repeat to myself. ‘Bring us, O Lord God, at our last awakening, into the house and gate of heaven, to enter into that gate and dwell in that house where there shall be no darkness or dazzling, but one equal light; no noise nor silence, but one equal music; no fears nor hopes, but one equal possession; no ends nor beginnings, but one equal eternity; in the habitations of Thy glory and dominion, world without end!’ ”

  To Isaac this seemed just another finely spun web of words. Men made so many to hang between themselves and their fear. They glittered in the eyes but the dark was still behind them. He was perched tensely on his work stool and the Dean was sitting in the old battered chair. He had dreamed of having the Dean here like this, sitting with him in the soft lamplight of the workshop, and now that it had happened he only wanted to escape. He was very much afraid one of his bad times was coming. That would happen, just at Christmas. They always came just when he was planning to enjoy himself. He coughed, pressing his thin hands together between his knees, dreadfully sorry for himself. The Dean went on talking, saying the first thing that came into his head. “ ‘The house and gate of heaven.’ I always say that to myself when I go into the Cathedral, especially when I go in through the west door. Men think of heaven under so many symbols. The garden of paradise, the green pastures and so on. I think simply of the Cathedral, for within it I have so often found my God. Before my illness I told Job I would show him the carvings in the Cathedral. I would like to redeem my promise this Christmas. Will you come too, Mr. Peabody?”

  He turned to smile at Isaac and was astonished to see terror in the little man’s bright blue eyes. “No, sir, no! I have never been in the Cathedral.”

  “Never been in the Cathedral?” The Dean could scarcely believe his deaf ears.

  “No, sir,” said Isaac hoarsely.

  “Did not your father take you there as a child?”

  “He tried to take me but I would not go. He beat me but still I would not go.”

  “Why not, Mr. Peabody?”

  “It is too big. Too dark. If it fell on you it would crush you to powder.” And Isaac began to cough again.

  “Dreadful as your father’s God,” said the Dean. Isaac stopped coughing and looked at him in amazement. “Do not misunderstand me, Mr. Peabody. I know your father was an excellent man whose memory is revered in the city. But we always tend to make God in our own image and your father was perhaps a man of stern rectitude. Is that so?”

  “I hated him,” whispered Isaac. “When I was a child I hoped he’d die. That’s murder.” It was out. He had never said that to anyone before. Nor had he ever told anyone about his father thrashing him because he would not go inside the Cathedral. He suddenly began to cry in the manner of the child that he was and then stopped crying as abruptly as he had begun. He twisted his red knobbly hands together in his misery. Now the Dean would get up and go away and leave him and never speak to him again.

  “And no doubt as a boy you hated God as much as you hated your father,” said the Dean calmly. “But all your hatred, Mr. Peabody, God took into His own body that it might die with Him. You now are free of it.”

  “I don’t believe in God,” said Isaac obstinately.

  “I wish I could believe you,” said the Dean. “I should be thankful to believe you had parted company with the God of your boyhood. But I fear he is with you still in a darkness that shadows your mind at times. Disbelieve in him, Mr. Peabody. Believe instead in love. It is my faith that love shaped the universe as you shape your clocks, delighting in creation. I believe that just as you wish to give me your clock in love, refusing payment, so God loves me and gave Himself for me. That is my faith. I cannot presume to force it upon you, I can only ask you in friendship to consider it. I believe I have your affection, Mr. Peabody. You are aware I think how deeply you have mine.”

  Isaac surreptitiously dried his eyes and began to feel a little better. The last sentence was the only one he had really got hold of, the only one that had really done him any good.

  “I have been so interested in reading of Plato’s water clock that he introduced into Greece,” said the Dean. “I had no idea Plato was a horologist. And Holbein too. I wish I could see one of his sundials. And the Dean of Ely, Richard Parker, carried a horologium in the top of his walking stick. All good men. Soon, Mr. Peabody, I shall have no opinion of any man who is not a horologist.”

  “Sir, I could make you a walking stick with a horologium,” said Isaac eagerly.

  The Dean laughed. “A celestial clock is enough for now, Mr. Peabody. More than enough. No man ever received a more princely gift or was more deeply grateful or more profoundly touched by its reception. Can you explain to me, Mr. Peabody, the mechanism of a falling ball timekeeper? I have not a mechanical mind and in my recent study of horology have found myself much handicapped by the lack of it.”

  Isaac’s face lit up. The phrase was literally true in his case, for his cheeks and the tip of his nose shone rosily and his blue eyes were suddenly as flooded with light as sapphires held to the sun. In the country of his mind the advancing shadows were halted and rolled back upon themselves like the fen mists when the wind suddenly freshened from the sea. He glowed and the Dean felt a pang of sadness. What would this man have been, what would he have done, had he not been so wrenched from the true by the sufferings of his boyhood? Yet perhaps without them he would not have been Bella’s fairy man. Such twistings sometimes forced out poison but at other times honey. It depended what was at the heart of a man.
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br />   “Come into the shop, sir,” said Isaac eagerly. “I will show you all my clocks. Their mechanism will be easier to understand with the living thing before your eyes. Come this way, sir.”

  For nearly an hour Isaac instructed the Dean in horology and Adam Ayscough was no longer amazed at the rapidity with which Job had learned his craft. The schoolmaster in him delighted in Isaac’s lucid explanations, and he delighted too in this experience of being shut in with all these ticking clocks. The sheltered lamplit shop was like the inside of a hive full of amiable bees who had no wish to sting, only to display for his delight the beauty of their gold-dusted filigree wings and gold brown bodies. They spoke to him with their honeyed tongues of this mystery of time that they had a little tamed for man with their hands and voices and the beat of their constant hearts, and yet could never make less mysterious or dreadful for all their friendliness. How strange it was, thought the Dean, as one after another he took the busy little bodies into his hands, that soon he would know more about the mystery than they did themselves.

  Michael struck his bell above the buzzing of the lesser bees and he remembered the sacred hour of dinner. Elaine must not be kept waiting, however great his pleasure here in the hive. “I must go,” he said. “I am obliged to you, Mr. Peabody, for a most enjoyable hour. I do not recollect having spent a happier.” Isaac brought him his hat and cloak and he put them on. “I wish, Mr. Peabody, that I could give you something of the same pleasure that you have given me. I wish I could show you my Cathedral as you have shown me your clocks. Will you not give me that privilege?” Isaac, looking at him, looked hastily away again, for the Dean’s longing to take him to the Cathedral was plain to see and he did not wish to see it. He mumbled something, shaking his head, then opened the shop door for the Dean to go out.

  “I’ll send up the celestial clock to the Deanery before Christmas, sir,” he said.

  The Dean was outside on the pavement in the moonlight, his hat in his hand. “My deep gratitude, Mr. Peabody,” he said sadly. “My deep gratitude. God bless you.”