it was in lichfield, now some months ago, that i stood by a wall that flanks the main road there and overlooks a fine wide pond, in which you may see the three spires of the cathedral mirrored.
as i so gazed into the water and noted the clear reflection of the stonework a man came up beside me and talked in a very cheery way. he accosted me with such freedom that he was very evidently not from europe, and as there was no insolence in his freedom he was not a forward asiatic either; besides which, his face was that of our own race, for his nose was short and simple and his lips reasonably thin. his eyes were full of astonishment and vitality. he was seeing the world. he was perhaps thirty-five years old.
i would not say that he was a colonial, because that word means so little; but he talked english in that accent commonly called american, yet he said he was a brittishur, so what he was remains concealed; but surely he was not of this land, for, as you shall presently see, england was more of a marvel to him than it commonly is to the english.
he asked me, to begin with, the name of the building upon our left, and i told him it was the[75] cathedral, to which his immediate answer was, was i sure? how could there be a cathedral in such a little town?
i said that it just was so, and i remembered the difficulty of the explanation and said no more. then he looked up at the three spires and said: “wondurful; isn’t it?” and i said: “yes.”
then i said to him that we would go in, and he seemed very willing; so we went towards the close, and as we went he talked to me about the religion of those who served the cathedral, and asked if they were episcopalian, or what. so this also i told him. and when he learnt that what i told him was true of all the other cathedrals, he said heartily: “is thet so?” and he was silent for half a minute or more.
we came and stood by the west front, and looked up at the height of it, and he was impressed.
he wagged his head at it and said: “wondurful, isn’t it?” and then he added: “marvlurs how they did things in those old days!” but i told him that much of what he was looking at was new.
in answer to this (for i fear that his honest mind was beginning to be disturbed by doubt), he pointed to the sculptured figures and said that they were old, as one could see by their costumes. and as i thought there might be a quarrel about it, i did not contradict; but i let him go wandering round to the south of it until he came to the figure of a knight with a moustache, gooseberry eyes, and in[76] general a face so astoundingly modern that one did not know what to say or do when one looked at it. it was expressionless.
my companion, who had not told me his name, looked long and thoughtfully at this figure, and then came back, more full of time and of the past of our race than ever; he insisted upon my coming round with him and looking at the image. he told me that we could not do better than that nowadays with all our machinery, and he asked me whether a photograph could be got of it. i told him yes, without doubt, and what was better, perhaps the sculptor had a duplicate, and that we would go and find if this were so, but he paid no attention to these words.
the amount of work in the building profoundly moved this man, and he asked me why there was so much ornament, for he could clearly estimate the vast additional expense of working so much stone that might have been left plain; though i am certain, from what i gathered of his character, he would not have left any building wholly plain, not even a railway station, still less a town hall, but would have had here and there an allegorical figure as of peace or of commerce—the figure of an abstract idea. still he was moved by such an excess of useless labour as stood before him. not that it did not give him pleasure—it gave him great pleasure—but that he thought it enough and more than enough.
we went inside. i saw that he took off his hat, a custom doubtless universal, and, what struck me[77] much more, he adopted within the cathedral a tone of whisper, not only much lower than his ordinary voice, but of quite a different quality, and i noticed that he was less erect as he walked, although his head was craned upward to look towards the roof. the stained glass especially pleased him, but there was much about it he did not understand. i told him that there could be seen there a copy of the gospels of great antiquity which had belonged to st. chad; but when i said this he smiled pleasantly, as though i had offered to show him the saddle of a unicorn or the tanned skin of a hippogriff. had we not been in so sacred a place i believe he would have dug me in the ribs. “st. who?” he whispered, looking slily sideways at me as he said it. “st. chad,” i said. “he was the apostle to mercia.” but after that i could do no more with him. for the word “saint” had put him into fairyland, and he was not such a fool as to mix up a name like chad with one of the apostles; and mercia is of little use to men.
however, there was no quarrelsomeness about him, and he peered at the writing curiously, pointing out to me that the letters were quite legible, though he could not make out the words which they spelled, and very rightly supposed it was a foreign language. he asked a little suspiciously whether it was the gospel, and accepted the assurance that it was; so that his mind, sceptical to excess in some matters, found its balance by a ready credence in[78] others and remained sane and whole. he was again touched by the glass in the lady chapel, and noted that it was of a different colour to the other and paler, so that he liked it less. i told him it was spanish, and this apparently explained the matter to him, for he changed his face at once and began to give me the reason of its inferiority.
he had not been in spain, but he had evidently read much about the country, which was moribund. he pointed out to me the unnatural attitude of the figures in this glass, and contrasted its half-tones with the full-blooded colours of the modern work behind us, and he was particularly careful to note the irregularity of the lettering and the dates in this glass compared with the other which had so greatly struck him. i was interested in his fixed convictions relative to the spaniards, but just as i was about to question him further upon that race i began to have my doubts whether the glass were not french. it was plainly later than the reformation, and i should have guessed the end of the sixteenth or beginning of the seventeenth century. but i hid the misgiving in my heart, lest the little trust in me which my companion still had should vanish altogether.
we went out of the great building slowly, and he repeatedly turned to look back up it, and to admire the proportions. he asked me the exact height of the central spire, and as i could not tell him this i felt ashamed, but he told me he would find it in a book, and i assured him this could be[79] done with ease. the visit had impressed him deeply; it may be he had not seen such things before, or it may be that he was more at leisure to attend to the details which had been presented to him. this last i gathered on his telling me, as we walked towards the inn, that he had had no work to do for two days, but that same evening he was to meet a man in birmingham, by whom, he earnestly assured me, he was offered opportunities of wealth in return for so small an investment of capital as was negligible, and here he would have permitted me also to share in this distant venture, had i not, at some great risk to that human esteem without which we none of us can live, given him clearly to understand that his generosity was waste of time, and that for the reason that there was no money to invest. it impressed him much more sharply than any plea of judgment or of other investments could have done.
though i had lost very heavily by permitting myself such a confession to him, he was ready to dine with me at the inn before taking his train, and as he dined he told me at some length the name of his native place, which was, oddly enough, that of a great german statesman, whether bismarck or another i cannot now remember; its habits and its character he also told me, but as i forgot to press him as to its latitude or longitude to this day i am totally ignorant of the quarter of the globe in which it may lie.
[80]during our meal it disturbed him to see a bottle of wine upon the table, but he was careful to assure me that when he was travelling he did not object to the habits of others, and that he would not for one moment forbid the use in his presence of a beverage which in his native place (he did not omit to repeat) would be as little tolerated as any other open temptation to crime. it was a wine called st. emilion, but it no more came from that sub-prefecture than it did from the hot fields of barsac; it was common algerian wine, watered down, and—if you believe me—three shillings a bottle.
i lost my companion at nine, and i have never seen him since, but he is surely still alive somewhere, ready, and happy, and hearty, and noting all the things of this multiple world, and judging them with a hearty common sense, which for so many well fills the place of mere learning.
