A vague impression that he had heard some such phrase somewhere before passed through him. But it was lost, for as he dwelled on the strange notion of this necessary fact, it was swamped by the recollection of Simon. Not that he was now afraid of Simon’s having any power over Lester. But if there was that newly visioned life, there was also—he had seen it—a creeping death that was abroad in the world. There was something that was not Lester, nor at all like her, issuing from that hideous little hall. Those who lay in that house, once sick, had been healed. Had they? He did not like to think of that healing. He would almost rather have remained unhealed; yes, but then he did not need healing. He thought uneasily of those who, themselves reasonably secure, urge the poor to prefer freedom rather than security. How could he have done it himself—have lived in pain? have perished miserably? Yet the cost of avoiding that was to be lost in the hypnotic mystery of the creeping death: an intolerable, an unforgivable choice! And perhaps, unless someone interfered, Simon would spread his miasma over the world: the nations swaying as he had seen men swaying. If even now—
The telephone interrupted him. Answering, he found at the other end a colleague of his at the Foreign Office, who began by asking whether Richard were (as he had said) coming back the next day. Richard said that he was. His colleague intimated that there was a particular reason and (pressed to say more) asked whether Richard were not acquainted with the activities of a certain Simon the Clerk. Richard began to take an interest.
“Well—no and yes,” he said. “I know of him and as it happens since this morning I may be said to know him. Why?”
“Since you’ve been away,” his friend said, “it’s become rather urgent to get into touch with him—unofficially, of course. It’s more and more felt here that if the allied discussions could—could infiltrate through him and the other popular leaders there might be a better chance of … of——”
“Of peace,” said Richard.
“Well, yes,” his colleague agreed. “They must, all three of them, be remarkable men to have such followings and there don’t seem, where they go, to be any minorities.… What did you say?”
“Nothing, nothing,” said Richard. “No minorities?”
“No—or practically none. And it’ll be in the best interests of the new World Plan that there should be no minorities. So that it’s been hinted that if a kind of—well, not a conference exactly but a sort of meeting could be adumbrated … Someone here thought you knew Simon.”
“I do,” said Richard. “And you want me to——”
“Well, since you know him,” his colleague answered, “it’d be easy for you to ask him indefinitely, as it were. Could you manage it, d’you think? You can see the kind of thing we want. The fact is that there’s a sort of pressure. Even the Russians are feeling it—and we hear a couple of Chinese armies have gone over complete to their own prophet. So the Government thinks it would rather deal with the three of them together than separately. If we could sound them——”
Richard was silent. This language was one he very well knew, but now it had a deeper sound than his colleague’s voice could give it. The Foreign Office did not mean badly; it was no more full of “darkness and cruel habitations” than the rest of the world; and when Oxenstierna had complained of the little wisdom with which the world was governed, he had not clearly suggested how anyone was to get more. But if the official governments were beginning to yield to pressure, to take unofficial notice of these world leaders, then those healed bodies behind Holborn must be only a few of a very great number, and those swaying shoulders the heralds of great multitudes of devotion: devotion to what? to the man who had smiled at the dead woman, and claimed to hold Lester at disposal, and knelt in some obscure effort by Betty’s bed, the man to whom the wicked little carved hand pointed. He himself might have been among the worshipers; he owed his salvation to his wife, for it was precisely the irreconcilability of his wife with Simon which had preserved him—and he most unworthy, given up to the social virtues, needing rebirth.
He did not know how great the multitudes were who followed those unreal Two; nor how unreal the Two were. He knew only the reports in the papers, and Simon. He seemed to feel again the light antennae-like touch on his cheek; he saw again the strange painting of the prophet preaching to insects: what insects? His colleague’s voice went on. “Furnival, are you still there? You’d better know that Bodge”—Bodge was the Foreign Secretary—“is giving it his personal attention. He isn’t here today, but he will be tomorrow. Couldn’t you just sound this Father Simon by then?”
Bodge—the Cabinet room—the swaying shoulders and the lifted faces, the backs of the English ministers rising in the air, the corridor down which the nations could go, the window through which the dead had come. He said abruptly, “I don’t know; I can’t say. I’ll be in tomorrow to report.… Yes; all right, I’ll see.… Oh yes, I understand how urgent it is.… No; I don’t promise anything. I’ll come tomorrow. Unless,” he added with a sudden absurd lightening of heart, “unless my wife interferes.”
The magical shape walked slowly along the Embankment. Hours had passed since it had emerged from the hidden place of its making into the streets of London; it had come out not by its own wish, for it could have no wish of its own, but under the compulsion of its lord in his last word, merely going, and anywhere. A poorly dressed, somewhat deformed woman went along the pavement. At first, following its maker’s preoccupation, it had gone northward towards the Highgate house. But as that preoccupation grew distant and was slowly lost, since he gave it no further guidance, it presently faltered and stood still and then began to turn westward. It could not return, for that would be to disobey him; it could not go directly on, for that would be to stress his influence too far. It swung therefore in a wide arc, going always against the sun and passing so down street after street and alley after alley. Sometimes, but not often, it faulted by taking a blind turning and had to retrace its steps, but in general, as if it sniffed its way through the lower air, it was wonderfully accurate. But when, in its southward course, it came to the river, it hesitated and did not cross and abruptly turned off towards the east along its own side, and so on, until somewhere by Blackfriars it could see (could it indeed have seen anything at all) the still-lifted cross of St. Paul’s. And there, a little way along Victoria Street, it ceased again and stood still.
It could not, for it was sensitive enough to some things, easily enter within the weight of those charged precincts. It avoided them precisely at the point where, had it been living woman, it might by sight or any other sense, have become conscious of them. So also those departed spirits who were now sealed to it were aware of its surroundings through what would have been its or their senses, had it or they lived. One of them had settled, almost happily, to such an existence. Evelyn (to give that spirit still the old name) was content merely to be again generally aware of earth; she did not care about the details. She was listening for its voice, even though at first that voice could only echo her own inaudible soliloquy. Perhaps afterwards it might even answer, and she and it would become an everlasting colloquy, but at the moment it did not. Those who passed it heard a kind of low croak coming from it, but not what it said. What it croaked to itself was a mass of comments and complaints:. “But you would think, wouldn’t you?” or “It’s not as if I were asking much” or “I did think you’d understand” or “After all, fair is fair” or “She might” or “He needn’t” or “They could at least” … and so on and on through all the sinful and silly imbecilities by which the miserable soul protects itself against fact. If this was Evelyn’s pleasure, this was the pleasure she could have.
But Lester also, for the first time since her death, was aware of what we call the normal world. At first she was conscious of this body as a man is of his own; it was not hers, but it was in that way she knew the dragging foot, the dank palms, the purblind eyes. She knew the spasmodic croakings, as a man may hear his own exclamations. She disliked its neighborh
ood, but there was no help for that, and by it alone she was aware of the material universe. So understood, that universe was agreeable to her. She knew and liked the feel of the pavement under the feet; she enjoyed through dim eyes the dull October day, and the heavy sky, and the people, and all the traffic. She seemed to be almost living again, for a little and by no insistence of her own, in the world she had left.
At first she had not seemed, and had hardly desired, to control this body as it went on its way. She was passive to its haste. But as that haste dwindled and as it began to circle round its center, she felt a sense of power. She saw still, as from above, the false body swinging round and it seemed improper that she herself should be so swung. The full sense of this came to her at almost the moment when that body hesitated by the river under the golden cross of the cathedral. As if from the height of the cross, Lester saw its circling path. There seemed—she almost thought it in human words—no sense in circling round and round Simon; he was no such attractive center. Indeed, from the height at which she looked down he was no center at all, except indeed that here and there in the streets she discerned a few forms engaged on precisely that wheeling worship. She knew them by their odd likeness to large beetles walking on their back legs. By an almost unconscious decision she checked the dwarf-woman just as it was about to move forward again. She said—and she just had to say, or at least to think, “No, no; the other way!” The shape tottered, twisted and was reluctantly forced round. It began, jerkingly and slowly, but certainly, to retrace its steps along the Embankment. It went as if against a high wind, for it was going with the sun and against all the customs of Goetia. Had it been a living witch of that low kind, it would have resisted more strongly; being what it was, it did but find difficulty in going. But it went on, plodding, croaking, jerking, back towards Westminster.
Of Evelyn, Lester was no longer immediately conscious. The magical form which united them also separated; through it they co-hered to each other but could not co-inhere. Lester had joined herself to this form for the sake of Evelyn, and Evelyn (so far as she could know) had been promptly removed. In fact, Evelyn no longer wanted her, for Evelyn was concerned only with her own refuge in this false shape, and with her own comfort in it. She did not much care whether it stayed or went, or how or where it went; she cared only that there should be, somewhere in the universe, a voice which, at first repeating, might presently come to respond to, her own. Lester was not unaware of the croaking voice and justly attributed it to Evelyn, but she saw no reason to stop it. Sounds now came to her through a new kind of silence, a sweet stillness which they did not seem to break; of all the London noises none came so near to breaking it as that croak, but the silence, or perhaps she herself, withdrew a little and the noise went about below it, as the dwarf-woman plodded below the clouds.
The clouds indeed were heavy in the sky. The river ran equally heavily with the weight of its murk. A few boats rode on it; the Thames traffic, at this height of its course, had not renewed itself. Lester’s attention turned to it, and the dwarf, folding her arms, paused conformably and leaned on the parapet. The Thames was dirty and messy. Twigs, bits of paper and wood, cords, old boxes drifted on it. Yet to the new-eyed Lester it was not a depressing sight. The dirtiness of the water was, at that particular point, what it should be and therefore pleasant enough. The evacuations of the City had their place in the City; how else could the City be the City? Corruption (so to call it) was tolerable, even adequate and proper, even glorious. These things also were facts. They could not be forgotten or lost in fantasy; all that had been, was; all that was, was. A sodden mass of cardboard and paper drifted by, but the soddenness was itself a joy, for this was what happened, and all that happened, in this great material world, was good. The very heaviness of the heavy sky was a wonder, and the unutilitarian expectation of rain a delight.
The river flowed steadily on. Lester saw it, as if through the dwarf’s eyes, and rejoiced. But she was aware that she was at the same time seeing some other movement, within or below it. She was looking down at it also. A single gull, flying wildly up beyond Blackfriars, swooped, wheeled, rose and was off again downstream. London was great, but that gull’s flight meant the sea. The sea was something other than London or than the Thames. Under the rush of the bird’s flight—seen as once by another river other watchers had seen a dove’s motion skirr and vanish—Lester, looking down, saw in the river the subsurface currents and streams. Below the exquisitely colored and moving and busy surface, the river by infinitesimal variations became lucid. On earth men see through lucidity to density, but to her it was as easy to see through density to lucidity. To her now all states of being were beginning to be of their own proper kind, each in itself and in its relationships, and not hampering the vision of others. So the Thames was still the Thames, but within it the infinite gradations of clarity deepened to something else. That other flow sustained and carried the layers of water above it; and as Lester saw it she felt a great desire to discover its source, and even that was mingled with the sudden human recollection that she and Richard had intended one day to set out to find for themselves the first springs of the Thames. So that even here she felt a high, new, strange and almost bitter longing mingle still with the definite purposes of her past.
She looked—but now no longer from a height above the seagull, but only from her instrument’s eyes on the Embankment—she looked up the river. But now she could not see past the great buildings of the Houses and the Abbey; and even those instituted masses seemed to her to float on that current of liquid beauty. As she looked at them the premonition of a pang took her; a sense of division, as if it was at that point that the lucid river flowed into the earthly river, so that beyond that point the way divided, and the source of the Thames was one thing and the springs of the sustaining tributary another. At that point or indeed at any; but always the same division at each. She was suddenly afraid. The strong current below the surface scared her. It flowed from under the bridge, cold and frightening, worse than death. The bridge above it where she and Richard had met this time and that was so frail. They had met above the surface Thames, but they had not guessed what truly flowed below—this which was different from and refused all earthly meetings, and all meetings colored or overlooked by earth. Oh vain, all the meetings vain! “A million years?” not one moment; it had been the cry of a child. Her spiritual consciousness knew and shuddered. She could never exclaim so again; however long she waited, she only waited to be separated, to lose, in the end. The under-river sang as it flowed; all the streets of London were full of that sweet inflexible note—the single note she had heard in Betty’s room, the bed on which she had safely lain. This was it—bed and note and river, the small cold piercing pain of immortal separation.
It passed. The time was not yet, though it was quite certain. The cruel clarity flowed by. She was left with a sense that she had better make the most of the present moment. She had thought she might be of use to Evelyn, but clearly she was not being; all she knew of Evelyn were these spasmodic croaks. What then? something she must do. Betty? Richard? Richard—with this body? She made herself aware of it. It would be revolting to him; it was almost revolting to her, even now, to think of going to her lover in this disguise. Yet if she could—? if they could speak? The shape was not so revolting, for what was it, after all? nothing. Before that great separation came, to take and give pardon and courage … if …
She was not clear how far she was responsible for what followed. Certainly she acted, but there was a pure precision about the process which surprised and delighted her, so that, had Betty or Richard been there, she could have laughed. She turned in herself again to the contemporary City, and the dwarf-woman, starting up, began again to walk. It came presently opposite Charing Cross Tube Station. There it stopped and turned and looked. Lester knew herself anxious to forewarn, to prepare, her husband; and she thought, not unnaturally, of the telephone. Matter to matter; might not this earthly shape use the things of earth? S
he did not dichotomize; mechanics were not separate from spirit, nor invention from imagination, nor that from passion. Only not even passion of spirit could create the necessary two pennies. She might be (she thought in a flash) immortally on her way to glory, but she had not got two pennies. She recollected the Good Samaritan who had, and with laughter in her heart she tossed a hand towards that sudden vivid image. She was not like Simon; she could not make two pennies. If she were to have them, someone would have to give them to her. She remembered, but not as a claim, that she too had given pennies in her time.
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