Installed therefore on a chair in front of a table bearing a shining black disc arranged in a sloping position, Adrian said anxiously:
“Now ask me what I can see.”
Gregory leant back in his chair opposite, fixed his eyes on Adrian, made an image of the stranger in his mind, and said slowly: “Can you see a tall man, with a grey suit on, and a soft hat?” He imposed the image on the child’s mind.
With hardly any hesitation Adrian answered: “Oh, yes, I can see him. He’s on a horse, and ever so many other people are all round him on horses, with long, long sticks. They’re all riding along. Oh, it’s gone.”
Gregory frowned a little. A cavalry regiment? Was his visitor merely a lieutenant in the Lancers? He concentrated more than ever. “What is he doing now?” he asked.
“He’s sitting on cushions,” Adrian poured out raptly. “And there’s a man in red and a man in brown. They’re both kneeling down. Oh, they’re giving him a piece of paper. Now he’s smiling, now they’re going. It’s gone again,” he ended in a tone of high delight.
Gregory brooded over this for some minutes. “Where does he come from?” he asked. “Can you see water or trains?”
“No,” said Adrian immediately, “but I can see a lot of funny houses and a lot of churches too. He’s coming out of one of the churches. He’s got a beautiful, beautiful coat on! And a crown! and there are a lot of people coming out with him, and they’ve all got crowns and swords! and flags! Now he’s on a horse and there are candles all round him and funny things going round in the air and smoke. Oh, it’s gone.”
Gregory, as delicately and as soon as possible, broke off the proceedings. There was something here he didn’t understand. He sent Adrian off to bed with promises of pleasant amusements the next day, and himself, after a short visit to Lionel, went out again into the grounds to await the doctor’s second call. Barbara, it seemed, was lying still; he wondered what exactly was happening. If the morphia was controlling her limbs, what about the energy that had wrung them? If it couldn’t work outward, was it working inward? Was the inner being that was Barbara being driven deeper and deeper into that flow of desire which was the unity and compulsion of man? What an unusual experience for a charming young housewife of the twentieth century! And perhaps she also would not be able to return.
Chapter Twelve
THE THIRD ATTEMPT ON THE GRAAL
Lionel Rackstraw leant by the open window and looked out over the garden. Behind him Barbara lay, in stillness and apparent sleep; below him at some distance Mr. Gregory Persimmons contemplated the moon. In an ordinary state of mind Lionel might have contemplated it too, as a fantasy less terrible than the sun, which appeared to him often as an ironical heat drawing out of the earth the noxious phantoms it bred therein. But the phantoms of his mind were lost in the horrible, and yet phantasmal, evil that had befallen him; his worst dreams were, if not truer than they had always been—that they could not be—at least more effectual and more omnipotent. The last barricade which material things offered had fallen; the beloved was destroyed, and the home of his repose broken open by the malice of invisible powers. Had she been false, had she left him for another—that would have been tolerable; probably, when he considered himself, he had always felt it. What was there about him to hold, in the calm of intense passion, that impetuous and adorable nature? But this unpredictable madness, without, so far as could be known, cause or explanation, this was the overwhelming of humanity by the spectral forces that mocked humanity. He gathered himself together in a persistent and hopeless patience.
He took out his case and lit a cigarette mechanically. She, he supposed, would never smoke cigarettes again, or, if she did, it would never be the same. At the same time, that question of ways and means which is never far from the minds of the vast majority of the English at any moment, which poisons their sorrows and modifies their joys, which insists on being settled before any experience can be properly tasted, and, if unsatisfactorily settled (as it most frequently is), turns love and death into dancing parodies of themselves, which ruins personal relationship and abstract thought and pleasant hours—this question presented itself also to him. What about money? what about Adrian? what about their home? what about the future? He couldn’t look after Adrian; he couldn’t afford to keep Barbara and a housekeeper; besides, he couldn’t, he supposed, have a housekeeper to live in the same house with Adrian and himself—unless she were old enough. And how did you get old housekeepers, and what did you pay them? Barbara might get better, but obviously after such an attack she couldn’t for a long time be left alone with Adrian; and if she didn’t get better? She had an aunt somewhere in Scotland—a strong Calvinistic Methodist; Lionel cursed as he thought of Adrian growing up in a Calvinistic household. Not, his irony reminded him, that he wasn’t something of a Calvinist himself, with his feeling about the universe; but his kind of Calvinism wouldn’t want to proselytize Adrian, and the aunt’s would. He himself had no available relations—and his friends? Well, friends were all very well, but you couldn’t dump a child on your friends indefinitely. Besides, his best friends—Kenneth, for instance—hadn’t the conveniences. What a world!
Mr. Persimmons, turning from the moon, looked up at the house, saw him, waved a hand, and walked towards the door. It crossed Lionel’s mind that it would be very satisfactory if Adrian could stop at Cully. It was no use his saying that he had no right to think of it; his fancy insisted on thinking of it, and was still doing so when Gregory, entering softly, joined him at the window.
“All quiet?” he asked in a low voice.
“All quiet,” Lionel answered bitterly.
“It occurred to me,” Gregory said—“I don’t know, of course—but it occurred to me that you might be worrying over the boy. You won’t, will you? There’s no need. He can stop with me, here or in London, as long as ever you like. He likes me and I like him.”
“It’s very kind of you,” Lionel said, feeling at once that this would solve a problem, and yet that the solving it would leave him with nothing but the horror of things to deal with. Even such a worrying question as what to do with Adrian was a slight change of torment. But that, he reflected sombrely, was selfish. Selfish, good heavens, selfish! And, after a long pause he said again, “It’s very kind of you.”
“Not a bit,” Gregory answered. “I should even—in a sense—like it. And you must be free. It’s most unfortunate. It seems sometimes as if there was an adverse fate in things—lying in ambush.”
“Ambush?” Lionel asked, relieved yet irritated at being made to talk. What did people like Gregory know of adverse fate? “Not much ambush, I think. It’s pretty obvious, once one’s had a glimpse of the world.”
Religion normally has a mildly stupefying effect on the minds of its disciples, and this Gregory had not altogether escaped. He had thought it would give him half an hour’s pleasant relaxation to worry Lionel, and he had not realized that Lionel was, even in his usual state, beyond this. He went on accordingly: “There seems a hitch in the way things work. Happiness is always just round the corner.”
“No hitch, surely,” Lionel said. “The whole scheme of things is malign and omnipotent. That is the way they work. ‘There is none that doeth good—no, not one.’”
“It depends perhaps on one’s definition of good,” Gregory answered. “There is at least satisfaction and delight.”
“There is no satisfaction and no delight that has not treachery within it,” Lionel said. “There is always Judas; the name of the world that none has dared to speak is Judas.”
Gregory turned his head to see better the young face from which this summary of life issued. He felt perplexed and uncertain; he had expected a door and found an iron barrier.
“But,” he said doubtfully, “had Judas himself no delight? There is an old story that there is rapture in the worship of treachery and malice and cruelty and sin.”
“Pooh,” Lionel said contemptuously; “it is the ordinary religion disguised; it
is the church-going clerk’s religion. Satanism is the clerk at the brothel. Audacious little middle-class cock-sparrow!”
“You are talking wildly,” Gregory said a little angrily. “I have met people who have made me sure that there is a rapture of iniquity.”
“There is a rapture of anything, if you come to that,” Lionel answered; “drink or gambling or poetry or love or (I suppose) satanism. But the one certainty is that the traitor is always and everywhere present in evil and good alike, and all is horrible in the end.”
“There is a way to delight in horror,” Gregory said.
“There is no way to delight in the horrible,” Lionel answered. “Let us pray only that immortality is a dream. But I don’t suppose it is,” he added coldly.
A silence fell upon them, and Gregory was suddenly conscious that he felt a trifle sick. He felt dizzy; he shut his eyes and leant against the wall to save himself lurching. Lionel’s face, as it looked out over the garden, frightened him; it was like a rock seen very far off. He opened his eyes and studied it again, then he glanced back over his shoulder at Barbara lying on the bed. This was Cully; Adrian was asleep in his room; he had overthrown Barbara’s mind. And now he was driven against something else, something immovable, something that affected him as if he had found himself suddenly in a deep pit of smooth rock. Lionel, who had been pursuing his own thoughts, began to speak suddenly, in the high voice of incantation with which he was given to quoting poetry,
“Which way I fly is hell, myself am hell,
And in the lowest deep a lower deep
Still gaping to devour me opens wide,
To which the hell I suffer seems a heaven.”
Gregory stamped his foot, and managed to change it into a mere shifting of position. After all, he wasn’t going to quarrel with Lionel just now, though if he had time he would smash him into splinters. A clerk at a brothel!
“Well,” he said, “there’s just one thing I should like to say. If the doctor doesn’t seem much good when he comes, I have been thinking that I know an old man in London who’s seen some curious things and has funny bits of knowledge. I’ll get him on the telephone to-morrow and ask him to come down. He mayn’t be any good, but he may.”
“It’s really very kind of you,” Lionel said. “But how can anyone do anything?”
“Well, we shall see,” Gregory answered cheerfully. “Hallo, there is the doctor. And Sir Giles. Shall we go and meet them?”
Sir Giles, who had been out all day on an antiquarian visit, had run into the doctor at the gates. They walked up the drive a little distance apart, and at the door he made to annex Persimmons, who, however, put him aside till he had spoken with the doctor. A new examination of the patient brought no new light. The doctor, who refused to stay for the night, but promised to call again in the morning, went off. Lionel returned to his vigil, and Gregory, having patted him on the shoulder, and said cheerfully, “Well, well, don’t despair. We’ll ring up old Manasseh first thing,” went off with Sir Giles to his own room.
“What’s the idea?” Tumulty asked. “And who is old Manasseh, anyhow?”
“Ah, you don’t know everyone yet,” Gregory answered in high glee. “Pity you weren’t here; you’d have liked to see how Mrs. Rackstraw went on. Quite unusual, for an English lady. Unusual for an English doctor, too. Did you think he was a bit bewildered, Tumulty? But you’ll meet Manasseh in the morning.”
“Coming down, is he?” Sir Giles asked. “Well, there’s someone else down here too.”
“Yes,” Gregory said. “The masquerading fellow in grey? Now, if you can tell me who he is——”
“I knew you’d go mad,” Sir Giles said, with satisfaction. “What fellow in grey? I don’t know what hell’s clothes he was wearing, something from his own suburban tape-twister, I expect.”
“Why suburban?” Gregory asked. “He didn’t look to me like the suburbs. And what did he mean by his name being John?”
“His name may be Beelzebub,” Sir Giles answered, “but the man is that lump-cheeked inspector who’s trying to find out who committed the murder. He’s down here.”
Gregory stared. “What, that?” he said. “Why, I thought they’d dropped all that. There’s absolutely nothing to show——What does he want here?”
“Probably either me or you,” Sir Giles answered. “Well, I told you at the beginning, Persimmons, I’m going to damn well see to it he doesn’t have me. I don’t care what insane May dance you get up to, but I’m not going to be dragged in. If the police are after you, they can have you for all I care. I’m leaving to-morrow, and I’m off to Baghdad next week. And, if he asks me anything, I shall tell him.”
“Tell him that you told me you were going to ask Rackstraw to have lunch with you, so that the room——” Gregory began.
“Tell him you’ve been waking up in the night shrieking ‘blood, blood,’ if it’s necessary,” Sir Giles said. “The English police are corrupt enough, of course, but the trouble is one doesn’t know where they’re corrupt, and you may hit on the wrong man. Besides, I’ll see that lurching sewer-rat in Hinnom before I spend good money on him.”
“You’re making a ridiculous fuss,” Gregory said. “You don’t really think he’s got evidence?”
“I don’t care a curse,” Sir Giles answered. “You’re not interesting enough to run any risks for, Persimmons; you’re merely an overgrown hobbledehoy stealing beer—the drainings in other people’s pots. And I’m not going to have to poison myself for you. And now who’s this reptile in grey you’re bleating about?”
Gregory had grown used to neglecting half of Sir Giles’s conversation, but for a moment he remembered Lionel’s remark earlier in the evening, and looked nastily across at the other. However, he pulled himself in, and said carelessly, “Oh, a mad fellow we met in the drive. Talked like a clergyman and said he knew seventy kings.”
“Only seventy?” Sir Giles asked. “No other introduction?”
“I didn’t like him,” Gregory admitted, “and he made Ludding foam at the mouth. But he wasn’t doing anything except wander about the drive. He mentioned he was a priest and king himself.” He dropped his voice and came a little nearer. “I wondered at first whether he was anything to do with—the shop. You know what I mean. But somehow he didn’t fit in.”
Sir Giles sat erect. “Priest and king,” he said, half sceptically. “You’re sure you’re not mad, Persimmons?” He stood up sharply. “And his name was John?” he asked intently.
“He said so,” Gregory answered. “But John what?”
Sir Giles walked to the window and looked out, then he came back and looked with increasing doubt at Gregory. “Look here,” he said, “you take my advice and leave that damned bit of silver gilt trumpery alone. Ludding told me about your all going off after it. You may be up against something funnier than you think, Master Gregory.”
“But who is he?” Gregory asked impatiently yet anxiously. “What’s he got to do with the—the Graal?”
“I’m not going to tell you,” Sir Giles said flatly. “I never knew any good come of trying to pretend things mightn’t be when they might. I’ve heard tales—lies, very likely—but tales. Out about Samarcand I heard them and down in Delhi too—and it wasn’t the Dalai Lama either that made the richest man in Bengal give all he had to the temples and become a fakir. I don’t believe in God yet, but I wonder sometimes whether men haven’t got the idea of God from that fellow—if it’s the same one.”
“What have I to do with God?” Gregory said.
“I don’t know whether the Graal belongs to him or he belongs to the Graal,” Sir Giles went on, unheeding. “But you can trace it up to a certain point and you can trace it back from a certain point, and someone had it in between. And if it was he, you’d better go and ask the Archdeacon to pray for you—if he will.”
“Will you tell me who he is?” Gregory asked.
“No, I won’t,” Sir Giles said. “I’ve seen too much to chatter about him. You dro
p it, while there’s time.”
“I suppose it’s Jesus Christ come to look for His own property?” Gregory sneered.
“Jesus Christ is dead or in heaven or owned by the clergy,” Sir Giles answered. “But they say this man is what he told you—he is king and priest and his name is John. They say so. I don’t know, and I tell you I funk it.” He looked at the open window again.
“Well, run then,” Gregory said. “But I and my great lord will know him and meet him.”
“So you may, for me,” Sir Giles answered, and with no more words disappeared to his own room.
The child Adrian slept long and peacefully, and only his angel, in another state of the created universe, knew what his dreams were. But, except for him and the servants, the night was, for those in Gully, empty of sleep. Lionel lay on the couch that had been hastily made up, watching and listening for any movement from his wife. How far she slept none could tell. She lay motionless, but Lionel doubted, when he was near her, whether it were more than a superimposed and compulsory immobility. Her eyes were shut, but her breath trembled as if some interior haste shook it, and every now and then there issued from her lips a faint and barely perceptible moan, faint but profound. Lionel brooded over this companion of his way, torn apart into the depths of some jungle whose terror he could not begin to conceive. He himself would have been, to however small an extent, prepared; but that Barbara, with her innocent concentration on window-curtains and the novels of Mr. Wodehouse and Adrian’s meals, should be plunged into it, was a fatality against which even his pessimism felt the temptation to rebel.
Not far from his room Sir Giles also lay wakeful, considering episodes and adventures of his past. Brutal with himself no less than with others, he did not attempt to hide from himself that the new arrivals in the village caused him some anxiety. He had known, in his exploration of that zone of madness which encloses humanity, certain events which had been referred by those who had spoken of them to a mysterious power whose habitation was unknown and whose interference was deadly. Once indeed, in a midnight assembly in Beyrout, he had, he thought, dimly seen him; there had been panic and death, and in the midst of the shrinking and alarmed magicians a half-visible presence, clouded and angry and destructive. At the time he had thought that he also had been affected by a general hallucination, but he knew that hallucination was a word which, in these things, meant no more than that certain things seemed to be. Whether they were or not … He promised himself again to leave England as soon as possible, and to leave Cully certainly to-morrow.
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