riences. He had
never entered the Cathedral alone, and now, as he saw it facing him, so
vast and majestic and quiet, across the sun-drenched green, he felt
a sudden fear and awe. He found a ring in a stone near the west end
through which he might fasten Hamlet's lead, then, slowly pushing back
the heavy door, he passed inside. The Cathedral was utterly quiet. The
vast nave, stained with reflections of purple and green and ruby, was
vague and unsubstantial, all the little wooden chairs huddled together
to the right and left, leaving a great path that swept up to the
High Altar under shafts of light that fell like searchlights from the
windows. The tombs and the statues peered dimly from the shadow, and the
great east end window, with its deep purple light, seemed to draw
the whole nave up into its heart and hold it there. All was space and
silence, light and dusk; a little doll of a verger moved in the far
distance, an old woman, so quiet that she seemed only a shadow, passed
him, wiping the little chairs with a duster.

It seemed to Jeremy that he had never been in the Cathedral before; he
stood there, breathless, as though in a moment something must inevitably
happen. Although he did not think of it, the moment was one of a
sequence that had come to him during the year--his entry into the
theatre with his uncle, his first conversation with the sea-captain,
the hour when his mother had been so ill, the evening on the beach when
Charlotte had been frightened, the time when Hamlet had been lost and
he had slept with him under a tree. All these moments had been something
more than merely themselves, had had something behind them or inside
them for which simply they stood as words stand for pictures. He
analysed, of course, nothing, being a perfectly healthy small boy, but
if afterwards he looked back these were the moments that he saw as one
sees stations on a journey. One day he would know for what they stood.

He simply now waited there as though he expected something to happen.
Thoughts slipped through his mind quite casually, whether Hamlet were
behaving well outside, what the old lady did when she was tired of
dusting, who the stone figure lying near him might be, a figure very
fine with his ruff and his peaked beard, his arms folded, his toes
pointing upwards, whether the body were inside the stone like a mummy,
or underneath the ground some-where; how strangely different the nave
looked now from its Sunday show, an