So I avoided the cat tribe, and the asthma left me. Whenever I met David again he would ask me how I was, but I felt that he already half-knew and was for that reason less interested. I always hoped he would take me somewhere again (in fact I used to dream he would), but he never did, and our trip to Chancey became a strange memory in the end. Because I loved the little doctor, and it was because of me, partly, that he was hanged.

CHAPTER ONE

ONE COLD GUSTY NIGHT in December a boy rang the bell of the doctor’s house in Shawgate, and when Susan came to the door left word that there had been an accident to a dancer at the local theatre and would the doctor please come at once. Bestowing her usual skeptical scrutiny on such a messenger, Susan pressed for further details, but the boy could give none and ran off home, leaving her to waken David from the peacefulness of a last pipe in the surgery. He had had a busy day and was tired, but when she reported the message he nodded vaguely and began putting things in his bag.

“At the theatre, Susan? A dancer?”

“So the boy said. I don’t know why they should send for you, anyway — Dr. Cowell lives much nearer.”

“I’d better go.”

“It’s probably nothing much. Shall I light your bicycle lamp for you?”

“Oh, I think I’ll walk. It’s only over the hill past the Cathedral.”

“But it’s a rough night.”

“Do me good to get some fresh air. I can walk it in ten minutes.”

He put on his overcoat, wrapped a muffler round his neck, pulled the brim of his hat well down, and set out. He often walked if his destination were near the Cathedral, for the steepness of Shawgate made cycling hardly worth while. Besides, for a late evening call, it was a good way of waking up. Many times on similar occasions he had conquered the inertia of the body, moving in sheer automatism through the dark streets until physical effort or mental curiosity provoked a liveliness. And if anyone had said there was anything especially fine in such self-discipline, he would have answered that it was just a job, and that no one hated it sometimes more than he.

A rough night, indeed. There were few strollers in such weather, and the Cathedral, chiming the hour of ten, seemed to bowl the strokes along the corridors of the wind. It was one of those nights when, in imagination, the centuries slipped back and Calderbury was again a fortress of souls with a priestly garrison; every lighted window hinting at safety amidst peril, the warm, tranquil comfort of men who felt they were safe because they knew they were saved. Such an atmosphere had lingered from the age of Chaucer to the age of Dickens, and though modernity might seem to efface it in the daytime, there only needed a dark night for its return. It harbored, too, a feeling that earth and stones could hold some secret essence of all that had happened around and about them, so that after a thousand years a street became almost animate, leaning its walls a little forward to catch the sound of friendly footsteps. David felt that his own footsteps were friendly, both to past and to present; that he was a part of the continuous agony of existence that had clustered about this ancient hill since the first mason carved the first gargoyle. And even longer; for the whole span of centuries from cathedral to cinema was but a scratch upon the heritage of a million weather-beaten years.