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A Duet With an Occasional Chorus

Arthur Conan Doyle

CHAPTER V--IN BRITAIN'S VALHALLA



They had discussed the rooms in their new house, and the bridesmaids'
dresses, and Maude's cooking, and marriage-presents, and the merits
of Brighton, and the nature of love, and volleying at tennis (Maude
was the lady-champion of a tennis club), and season tickets, and the
destiny of the universe--to say nothing of a small bottle of Perrier
Jouet.  It was reprehensibly extravagant, but this would be their
last unmarried excursion, and so they drank to the dear days of the
past, and the dearer ones of the future.  Good comrades as well as
lovers, they talked freely, and with pleasure.  Frank never made the
common mistake of talking down, and Maude justified his confidence by
eagerly keeping up.  To both of them silence was preferable to
conventional small talk.

'We'll just get down there after lunch,' said Frank, as he paid his
bill.  'You have not seen the Australians, have you?'

'Yes, dear, I saw them at Clifton four years ago.'

'But this is a new lot.  There are nine of the present team who have
never played in England before.'

'They are very good, are they not?'

'Very good indeed.  And the dry summer has helped them.  It is the
sticky English wickets which put them off.  The wickets are very fast
over there.  Giffen is their best all-round man, but Darling and
Iredale and young Hill are good enough for anything.  Well, then--O
Lord, what a pity!'

He had turned towards the window as he rose, and saw one of those
little surprises by which Nature relieves the monotony of life in
these islands.  The sun had gone, a ragged slate-coloured cloud was
drifting up from over the river, and the rain was falling with a soft
persistency which is more fatal than the most boisterous shower.
There would be no more cricket that day.

'Two coffees and two benedictines,' cried Frank, and they relapsed
into their chairs.  But a half-hour passed and the grey cloud was
thicker and the rain more heavy.  The cheerless leaden river flowed
slowly under drifting skies.  Beyond an expanse of shining pavement
the great black Abbey towered amidst the storm.

'Have you ever done the Abbey, Maude?'

'No, Frank; I should love to.'

'I have only been once--more shame to me to say so!  Is it not a sin
that we young Englishmen should be familiar with every music-hall in
London and should know so little of this which is the centre of the
British race, the most august and tremendous monument that ever a
nation owned.  Six hundred years ago the English looked upon it as
their holiest and most national shrine, and since then our kings and
our warriors and our thinkers and our poets have all been laid there,
until there is such an accumulation that the huge Abbey has hardly
space for another monument.  Let us spend an hour inside it.'

They made for Solomon's porch, since it was the nearest and they had
but the one umbrella.  Under its shelter they brushed themselves dry
before they entered.

'Whom does the Abbey belong to, Frank?'

'To you and me!'

'Now you are joking!'

'Not at all.  It belongs in the long-run to the British taxpayer.
You have heard the story of the Scotch visitor who came on board one
of our battleships and asked to see the captain.  "Who shall I say?"
said the sentry.  "One of the proprietors," said the Scotchman.
That's OUR position towards the Abbey.  Let us inspect our property.'

They were smiling as they entered, but the smile faded from their
lips as the door closed behind them.  In this holy of holies, this
inner sanctuary of the race, there was a sense of serene and
dignified solemnity which would have imposed itself upon the most
thoughtless.  Frank and Maude stood in mute reverence.  The high
arches shot up in long rows upon either side of them, straight and
slim as beautiful trees, until they curved off far up near the
clerestory and joined their sister curves to form the lightest, most
delicate tracery of stone.  In front of them a great rose-window of
stained glass, splendid with rich purples and crimsons, shone through
a subdued and reverent gloom.  Here and there in the aisles a few
spectators moved among the shadows, but all round along the walls two
and three deep were ranged the illustrious dead, the perishable body
within, the lasting marble without, and the more lasting name
beneath.  It was very silent in the home of the great dead--only a
distant footfall or a subdued murmur here and there.  Maude knelt
down and sank her face in her hands.  Frank prayed also with that
prayer which is a feeling rather than an utterance.

Then they began to move round the short transept in which they found
themselves--a part of the Abbey reserved for the great statesmen.
Frank tried to quote the passage in which Macaulay talks about the
men worn out by the stress and struggle of the neighbouring
parliament-hall, and coming hither for peace and rest.  Here were the
men who had been strong enough to grasp the helm, and who, sometimes
wisely, sometimes foolishly, but always honestly, had tried to keep
the old ship before the wind.  Canning and Peel were there, with
Pitt, Fox, Grattan and Beaconsfield.  Governments and oppositions
moulder behind the walls.  Beaconsfield alone among all the statues
showed the hard-lined face of the self-made man.  These others look
so plump and smooth one can hardly realise how strong they were, but
they sprang from those ruling castes to whom strength came by easy
inheritance.  Frank told Maude the little which he knew of each of
them--of Grattan, the noblest Irishman of them all, of Castlereagh,
whose coffin was pursued to the gates of the Abbey by a raging mob
who wished to tear out his corpse, of Fox the libertine philosopher,
of Palmerston the gallant sportsman, who rode long after he could
walk.  They marvelled together at the realism of the sculptor who had
pitted Admiral Warren with the smallpox, and at the absurdity of that
other one who had clad Robert Peel in a Roman toga.

Then turning to the right at the end of the Statesmen's Transept,
they wandered aimlessly down the huge nave.  It was overwhelming, the
grandeur of the roof above and of the contents below.  Any one of
hundreds of these tombs was worth a devout pilgrimage, but how could
one raise his soul to the appreciation of them all.  Here was Darwin
who revolutionised zoology, and here was Isaac Newton who gave a new
direction to astronomy.  Here were old Ben Jonson, and Stephenson the
father of railways, and Livingstone of Africa, and Wordsworth, and
Kingsley, and Arnold.  Here were the soldiers of the mutiny--Clyde
and Outram and Lawrence,--and painters, and authors, and surgeons,
and all the good sons who in their several degrees had done loyal
service to the old mother.  And when their service was done the old
mother had stretched out that long arm of hers and had brought them
home, and always for every good son brought home she had sent another
forth, and her loins were ever fruitful, and her children loving and
true.  Go into the Abbey and think, and as the nation's past is borne
in upon you, you will have no fear for its future.

Frank was delighted with some of the monuments and horrified by
others, and he communicated both his joy and his anger to Maude.
They noticed together how the moderns and the Elizabethans had much
in common in their types of face, their way of wearing the hair, and
their taste in monuments, while between them lie the intolerable
affectations--which culminated towards the end of last century.

'It all rings false--statue, inscription, everything,' said Frank.
'These insufferable allegorical groups sprawling round a dead hero
are of the same class as the pompous and turgid prose of Doctor
Johnson.  The greatest effects are the simplest effects, and so it
always was and so it always will be.  But that little bit of Latin is
effective, I confess.'

It was a very much defaced inscription underneath a battered
Elizabethan effigy, whose feet had been knocked off, and whose
features were blurred into nothing.  Two words of the inscription had
caught Frank's eye.

'Moestissima uxor!  It was his "most sad wife" who erected it!  Look
at it now!  The poor battered monument of a woman's love.  Now,
Maude, come with me, and we shall visit the famous Poets' Corner.'

What an assembly it would be if at some supreme day each man might
stand forth from the portals of his tomb.  Tennyson, the last and
almost the greatest of that illustrious line, lay under the white
slab upon the floor.  Maude and Frank stood reverently beside it.


'"Sunset and evening Star
And one clear call for me."'


Frank quoted.  'What lines for a very old man to write!  I should put
him second only to Shakespeare had I the marshalling of them.'

'I have read so little,' said Maude.

'We will read it all together after next week.  But it makes your
reading so much more real and intimate when you have stood at the
grave of the man who wrote.  That's Chaucer, the big tomb there.  He
is the father of British poetry.  Here is Browning beside Tennyson--
united in life and in death.  He was the more profound thinker, but
music and form are essential also.'

'What a splendid face!' cried Maude.

'It is a bust to Longfellow, the American.'  They read the
inscription.  'This bust was placed among the memorials of the poets
of England by English admirers of an American poet.'

'I am so glad to have seen that.  I know his poems so well,' said
Maude.

'I believe he is more read than any poet in England.'

'Who is that standing figure?'

'It is Dryden.  What a clever face, and what a modern type.  Here is
Walter Scott beside the door.  How kindly and humorous his expression
was!  And see how high his head was from the ear to the crown.  It
was a great brain.  There is Burns, the other famous Scot.  Don't you
think there is a resemblance between the faces?  And here are
Dickens, and Thackeray, and Macaulay.  I wonder whether, when
Macaulay was writing his essays, he had a premonition that he would
be buried in Westminster Abbey.  He is continually alluding to the
Abbey and its graves.  I always think that we have a vague intuition
as to what will occur to us in life.'

'We can guess what is probable.'

'It amounts to more than that.  I had an intuition that I should
marry you from the first day that I saw you, and yet it did not seem
probable.  But deep down in my soul I knew that I should marry you.'

'I knew that I should marry you, Frank, or else that I should never
marry at all.'

'There now!  We both had it.  Well, that IS really wonderful!'

They stood among the memorials of all those great people, marvelling
at the mysteries of their own small lives.  A voice at their elbows
brought them back to the present.

'This way, if you please, for the kings,' said the voice.  'They are
now starting for the kings.'

'They' proved to be a curiously mixed little group of people who were
waiting at the entrance through the enclosure for the arrival of the
official guide.  There were a tall red-bearded man with a very Scotch
accent and a small gentle wife, also an American father with his two
bright and enthusiastic daughters, a petty-officer of the navy in his
uniform, two young men whose attention was cruelly distracted from
the monuments by the American girls, and a dozen other travellers of
various sexes and ages.  Just as Maude and Frank joined them the
guide, a young fresh-faced fellow, came striding up, and they passed
through the opening into the royal burying-ground.

'This way, ladies and gentlemen,' cried the hurrying guide, and they
all clattered over the stone pavement.  He stopped beside a tomb upon
which a lady with a sad worn face was lying.  'Mary, Queen of Scots,'
said he, 'the greatest beauty of her day.  This monument was erected
by her son, James the First.'

'Isn't she just perfectly sweet?' said one of the American girls.

'Well, I don't know.  I expected more of her than that,' the other
answered.

'I reckon,' remarked the father, 'that if any one went through as
much as that lady did, it would not tend to improve her beauty.  Now
what age might the lady be, sir?'

'Forty-four years of age at the time of her execution,' said the
guide.

'Ah weel, she's young for her years,' muttered the Scotchman, and the
party moved on.  Frank and Maude lingered to have a further look at
the unfortunate princess, the bright French butterfly, who wandered
from the light and warmth into that grim country, a land of blood and
of psalms.

'She was as hard as nails under all her gentle grace,' said Frank.
'She rode eighty miles and hardly drew rein after the battle of
Langside.'

'She looks as if she were tired, poor dear!' said Maude; 'I don't
think that she was sorry to be at rest.'

The guide was narrating the names of the owners of the tombs at the
further end of the chapel.  'Queen Anne is here, and Mary the wife of
William the Third is beside her.  And here is William himself.  The
king was very short and the queen very tall, so in the sculptures the
king is depicted standing upon a stool so as to bring their heads
level.  In the vaults beyond there are thirty-eight Stuarts.'

Thirty-eight Stuarts!  Princes, bishops, generals, once the salt of
the earth, the mightiest of men, and now lumped carelessly together
as thirty-eight Stuarts.  So Death the Republican and Time the
Radical can drag down the highest from his throne.

They had followed the guide into another small chapel, which bore the
name of Henry VII. upon the door.  Surely they were great builders
and great designers in those days!  Had stone been as pliable as wax
it could not have been twisted and curved into more exquisite spirals
and curls, so light, so delicate, so beautiful, twining and turning
along the walls, and drooping from the ceiling.  Never did the hand
of man construct anything more elaborately ornate, nor the brain of
man think out a design more absolutely harmonious and lovely.  In the
centre, with all the pomp of mediaeval heraldry, starred and spangled
with the Tudor badges, the two bronze figures of Henry and his wife
lay side by side upon their tomb.  The guide read out the quaint
directions in the king's will, by which they were to be buried 'with
some respect to their Royal dignity, but avoiding damnable pomp and
outrageous superfluities!'  There was, as Frank remarked, a fine
touch of the hot Tudor blood in the adjectives.  One could guess
where Henry the Eighth got his masterful temper.  Yet it was an
ascetic and priest-like face which looked upwards from the tomb.

They passed the rifled tombs of Cromwell, Blake, and Ireton--the
despicable revenge of the men who did not dare to face them in the
field,--and they marked the grave of James the First, who erected no
monument to himself, and so justified in death the reputation for
philosophy which he had aimed at in his life.  Then they inspected
the great tomb of Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, as surprising and as
magnificent as his history, cast a glance at the covering of plucky
little George the Second, the last English king to lead his own army
into battle, and so onwards to see the corner of the Innocents, where
rest the slender bones of the poor children murdered in the Tower.

But now the guide had collected his little flock around him again,
with the air of one who has something which is not to be missed.
'You will stand upon the step to see the profile,' said he, as he
indicated a female figure upon a tomb.  'It is the great Queen
Elizabeth.'

It was a profile and a face worth seeing--the face of a queen who was
worthy of her Shakespeares upon the land and her Drakes upon the sea.
Had the Spanish king seen her, he would have understood that she was
not safe to attack--this grim old lady with the eagle nose and the
iron lips.  You could understand her grip upon her cash-box, you
could explain her harshness to her lovers, you could realise the
confidence of her people, you could read it all in that wonderful
face.

'She's splendid,' said Frank.

'She's terrible,' said Maude.

'Did I understand you to say, sir,' asked the American, 'that it was
this lady who beheaded the other lady, Queen of Scotland, whom we saw
'way back in the other compartment?'

'Yes, sir, she did.'

'Well, I guess if there was any beheading to be done, this was the
lady to see that it was put through with promptness and despatch.
Not a married lady, I gather?'

'No, sir.'

'And a fortunate thing for somebody.  That woman's husband would have
a mean time of it, sir, in my opinion.'

'Hush, poppa,' said the two daughters, and the procession moved on.
They were entering the inner chapel of all, the oldest and the
holiest, in which, amid the ancient Plantagenet kings, there lies
that one old Saxon monarch, confessor and saint, the holy Edward,
round whose honoured body the whole of this great shrine has
gradually risen.  A singular erection once covered with mosaic work,
but now bare and gaunt, stood in the centre.

'The body of Edward the Confessor is in a case up at the top,' said
the guide.  'This hollow place below was filled with precious relics,
and the pilgrims used to kneel in these niches, which are just large
enough to hold a man upon his knees.  The mosaic work has been picked
out by the pilgrims.'

'What is the date of the shrine?' asked Frank.

'About 1250, sir.  The early kings were all buried as near to it as
they could get, for it was their belief in those days that the devil
might carry off the body, and so the nearer they got to the shrine
the safer they felt.  Henry the Fifth, who won the battle of
Agincourt, is there.  Those are the actual helmet, shield, and saddle
which he used in the battle upon the crossbeam yonder.  That king
with the grave face and the beard is Edward the Third, the father of
the Black Prince.  The Black Prince never lived to ascend the throne,
but he was the father of the unfortunate Richard the Second, who lies
here--this clean-shaven king with the sharp features.  Now, ladies
and gentlemen, if you will turn this way, I will show you one of the
most remarkable objects in the Abbey.'

The object in question proved to be nothing more singular than a
square block of stone placed under an old chair.  And yet as the
guide continued to speak, they felt that he had justified his words.

'This is the sacred stone of Scone upon which the kings of Scotland
have been crowned from time immemorial.  When Edward the First
overran Scotland 600 years ago, he had it brought here, and since
then every monarch of England has also sat upon it when crowned.'

'The present Queen?' asked some one.

'Yes, she also.  The legend was that it was the stone upon which
Jacob rested his head when he dreamed, but the geologists have proved
that it is red sandstone of Scotland.'

'Then I understand, sir, that this other throne is the Scottish
throne,' said the American gentleman.

'No, sir, the Scottish throne and the English throne are the same
throne.  But at the time of William and Mary it was necessary to
crown her as well as him, and so a second throne was needed.  But
that of course was modern.'

'Only a couple of hundred years ago.  I wonder they let it in.  But I
guess they might have taken better care of it.  Some one has carved
his name upon it.'

'A Westminster boy bet his schoolfellows that he would sleep among
the tombs, and to prove that he had done it, he carved his name upon
the throne.'

'You don't say!' cried the American.  'Well, I guess that boy ended
pretty high up.'

'As high as the gallows, perhaps,' said Frank, and every one
tittered, but the guide hurried on with a grave face, for the dignity
of the Abbey was in his keeping.

'This tomb is that of Queen Eleanor,' said he.

Frank twitched Maude by the sleeve.  'Eleanor of Charing Cross,' said
he.  'See how one little bit of knowledge links on with another.'

'And here is the tomb of her husband, Edward the First.  It was he
who brought the stone from Scone.  At the time of his death the
conquest of Scotland was nearly done, and he gave orders that his
burial should be merely temporary until Scotland was thoroughly
subdued.  He is still, as you perceive, in his temporary tomb.'

The big Scotchman laughed loudly and derisively.  All the others
looked sadly at him with the pitying gaze which the English use
towards the more excitable races when their emotion gets the better
of them.  A stream from a garden hose could not have damped him more.

'They opened the grave last century,' said the guide.  'Inside was an
inscription, which said, "Here lies the hammer of the Scots."  He was
a fine man, six feet two inches from crown to sole.'

They wandered out of the old shrine where the great Plantagenet kings
lie like a bodyguard round the Saxon saint.  Abbots lay on one side
of them as they passed, and dead crusaders with their legs crossed,
upon the other.  And then, in an instant, they were back in
comparatively modern times again.

'This is the tomb of Wolfe, who died upon the Heights of Abraham,'
said the guide.  'It was due to him and to his soldiers that all
America belongs to the English-speaking races.  There is a picture of
his Highlanders going up to the battle along the winding path which
leads from Wolfe's Cove.  He died in the moment of victory.'

It was bewildering, the way in which they skipped from age to age.
The history of England appeared to be not merely continuous, but
simultaneous, as they turned in an instant from the Georgian to the
Elizabethan, the one monument as well preserved as the other.  They
passed the stately de Vere, his armour all laid out in fragments upon
a marble slab, as a proof that he died at peace with all men; and
they saw the terrible statue of the onslaught of Death, which, viewed
in the moonlight, made a midnight robber drop his booty and fly
panic-stricken out of the Abbey.  So awful and yet so fascinating is
it, that the shuffling feet of the party of sightseers had passed out
of hearing before Maude and Frank could force themselves away from
it.

In the base of the statue is an iron door, which has been thrown
open, and the sculptor's art has succeeded wonderfully in convincing
you that it has been thrown open violently.  The two leaves of it
seem still to quiver with the shock, and one could imagine that one
heard the harsh clang of the metal.  Out of the black opening had
sprung a dreadful thing, something muffled in a winding-sheet, one
bony hand clutching the edge of the pedestal, the other upraised to
hurl a dart at the woman above him.  She, a young bride of twenty-
seven, has fallen fainting, while her husband, with horror in his
face, is springing forward, his hand outstretched, to get between his
wife and her loathsome assailant.

'I shall dream of this,' said Maude.  She had turned pale, as many a
woman has before this monument.

'It is awful!'  Frank walked backwards, unable to take his eyes from
it.  'What pluck that sculptor had!  It is an effect which must be
either ludicrous or great, and he has made it great.'

'Roubillac is his name,' said Maude, reading it from the pedestal.

'A Frenchman, or a man of French descent.  Isn't that characteristic!
In the whole great Abbey the one monument which has impressed us with
its genius and imagination is by a foreigner.  We haven't got it in
us.  We are too much afraid of letting ourselves go and of giving
ourselves away.  We are heavy-handed and heavy-minded.'

'If we can't produce the monuments, we can produce the men who
deserve them,' said Maude, and Frank wrote the aphorism down upon his
shirt-cuff.

'We are too severe both in sculpture and architecture,' said he.
'More fancy and vigour in our sculptors, more use of gold and more
ornament in our architects--that is what we want.  But I think it is
past praying for.  It would be better to subdivide the work of the
world, according to the capacity of the different nations.  Let Italy
and France embellish us.  We might do something in exchange--organise
the French colonies, perhaps, or the Italian exchequer.  That is our
legitimate work, but we will never do anything at the other.'

The guide had already reached the end of his round, an iron gate
corresponding to that by which they had entered, and they found him
waiting impatiently and swinging his keys.  But Maude's smile and
word of thanks as she passed him brought content into his face once
more.  A ray of living sunshine is welcome to the man who spends his
days among the tombs.

They walked down the North Transept and out through Solomon's Porch.
The rain-cloud had swept over, and the summer sun was shining upon
the wet streets, turning them all to gold.  This might have been that
fabled London of which young Whittington dreamed.  In front of them
lay the lawns of vivid green, with the sunlit raindrops gleaming upon
the grass.  The air was full of the chirping of the sparrows.  Across
their vision, from the end of Whitehall to Victoria Street, the black
ribbon of traffic whirled and circled, one of the great driving-belts
of the huge city.  Over it all, to their right, towered those
glorious Houses of Parliament, the very sight of which made Frank
repent his bitter words about English architecture.  They stood in
the old porch gazing at the scene.  It was so wonderful to come back
at one stride from the great country of the past to the greater
country of the present.  Here was the very thing which these dead men
lived and died to build.

'It's not much past three,' said Frank.  'What a gloomy place to take
you to!  Good heavens, we have one day together, and I take you to a
cemetery!  Shall we go to a matinee to counteract it?'

But Maude laid her hand upon his arm.

'I don't think, Frank, that I was ever more impressed, or learned
more in so short a time, in my life.  It was a grand hour--an hour
never to be forgotten.  And you must not think that I am ever with
you to be amused.  I am with you to accompany you in whatever seems
to you to be highest and best.  Now before we leave the dear old
Abbey, promise me that you will always live your own highest and
never come down to me.'

'I can very safely promise that I will never come down to you,' said
Frank.  'I may climb all my life, and yet there are parts of your
soul which will be like snow-peaks in the clouds to me.  But you will
be now and always my own dear comrade as well as my sweetest wife.
And now, Maude, what shall it be, the theatre or the Australians?'

'Do you wish to go to either very much?'

'Not unless you do.'

'Well, then, I feel as if either would be a profanation.  Let us walk
together down to the Embankment, and sit on one of the benches there,
and watch the river flowing in the sunshine, and talk and think of
all that we have seen.'
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