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....