“Spit, my lord,” said Mr. Pollfax, changing to a coarser drill. “Sorry old man, if it slipped, but Mr. Pollfax is not to be beaten.”
The drill whirred again, skidding and whining; the cowls twirled on the chimneys, Mr. Pollfax’s knuckles were on my nose. What he was trying to do, he said, was to get a purchase.
Mr. Pollfax’s movements got quicker. He hung up the drill, he tapped impatiently on the tray, looking for something. He came at me with something like a button-hook. He got it in. He levered like a signal man changing points.
“I’m just digging,” he said. Another piece of tooth broke off.
Mr. Pollfax started when he heard it go and drew back.
“Mr. Pollfax in a dilemma,” he said.
Well, he’d try the other side. Down came the drill again. There were beads of sweat on his brow. His breath was shorter.
“You see,” exclaimed Mr. Pollfax suddenly and loudly, looking angrily up at his clock. “I’m fighting against time. Keep that head this way, hold the mouth. That’s right. Sorry, my lord, I’ve got to bash you about, but time’s against me.”
“Why, damn this root,” said Mr. Pollfax hanging up again. “It’s wearing out my drill. We’ll have to saw. Mr. Pollfax is up against it.”
His face was red now, he was gasping and his eyes were glittering. A troubled and emotional look came over Mr. Pollfax’s face.
“I’ve been up against it in my time,” exclaimed Mr. Pollfax forcefully between his teeth. “You heard me mention the Oedipus complex to you?”
“Blah,” I managed.
“I started well by ruining my father. I took every penny he had. That’s a good start, isn’t it?” he said, speaking very rapidly. “Then I got married. Perfectly happy marriage, but I went and bust it up. I went off with a French girl and her husband shot at us out in the car one day. I was with that girl eighteen months and she broke her back in a railway accident and I sat with her six months watching her die. Six ruddy months. I’ve been through it. Then my mother died and my father was going to marry again, a girl young enough to be his daughter. I went up and took that girl off him, ran off to Hungary with her, married her and we’ve got seven children. Perfect happiness at last. I’ve been through the mill,” said Mr. Pollfax, relaxing his chin and shining a torch down my mouth, “but I’ve come out in the end.”
“A good rinse, my noble lord,” said Mr. Pollfax.
“The oldest’s fourteen,” he said, getting the saw. “Clever girl. Very clever with her hands.”
He seized me again. Did I feel anything? Well, thank God for that, said Mr. Pollfax. Here we’d been forty minutes with this damned root.
“And I bet you’re thinking why didn’t Lord Pollfax let sleeping dogs lie, like the telephone operator said. Did I tell you that one about the telephone operator? That gum of yours is going to be sore.”
He was standing legs apart, chin trembling, eyes blinking, hacking with the button-hook, like a wrestler putting on a headlock.
“Mr. Pollfax with his back against the wall,” he said, between his teeth.
“Mr. Pollfax making a last-minute stand,” he hissed.
“On the burning deck!” he gasped.
“Whence,” he added, “all but he had fled.”
“Spit,” he said. “And now let’s have another look.” He wiped his brow. “Don’t say anything. Keep dead still. For God’s sake don’t let it hear you. My lords, ladies and gentlemen, pray silence for Mr. Pollfax. It’s coming, it isn’t. No, it isn’t. It is. It is. There,” he cried, holding a fragment in his fingers.
He stood gravely to attention.
“And his chief beside,
Smiling the boy fell dead.”
said Mr. Pollfax. “A good and final spit, my lord and prince.”
THE VOICE
A message came from the rescue party who straightened up and leaned on their spades in the rubble. The policeman said to the crowd: “Everyone keep quiet for five minutes. No talking, please. They’re trying to hear where he is.”
The silent crowd raised their faces and looked across the ropes to the church which, now it was destroyed, broke the line of the street like a decayed tooth. The bomb had brought down the front wall and the roof, the balcony had capsized. Freakishly untouched, the hymnboard still announced the previous Sunday’s hymns.
A small wind blew a smell of smouldering cloth across people’s noses from another street where there was another scene like this. A bus roared by and heads turned in passive anger until the sound of the engine had gone. People blinked as a pigeon flew from a roof and crossed the building like an omen of release. There was dead quietness again. Presently a murmuring sound was heard by the rescue party. The man buried under the debris was singing again.
At first difficult to hear, soon a tune became definite. Two of the rescuers took up their shovels and shouted down to encourage the buried man, and the voice became stronger and louder. Words became clear. The leader of the rescue party held back the others and those who were near strained to hear. Then the words were unmistakable:
“Oh Thou whose Voice the waters heard,
And hushed their raging at Thy Word.”
The buried man was singing a hymn.
A clergyman was standing with the warden in the middle of the ruined church.
“That’s Mr. Morgan all right,” the warden said. “He could sing. He got silver medals for it.”
The Rev. Frank Lewis frowned.
“Gold, I shouldn’t wonder,” said Mr. Lewis, dryly. Now he knew Morgan was alive he said: “What the devil’s he doing in there? How did he get in? I locked up at eight o’clock last night myself.”
Lewis was a wiry, middle-aged man, but the white dust on his hair and his eye-lashes, and the way he kept licking the dust off his dry lips, moving his jaws all the time, gave him the monkeyish, testy and suspicious air of an old man. He had been up all night on rescue work in the raid and he was tired out. The last straw was to find the church had gone and that Morgan, the so-called Rev. Morgan, was buried under it.
The rescue workers were digging again. There was a wide hole now and a man was down in it filling a basket with his hands. The dust rose like smoke from the hole as he worked.
The voice had not stopped singing. It went on, rich, virile, masculine, from verse to verse of the hymn. Shooting up like a stem through the rubbish the voice seemed to rise and branch out powerfully, luxuriantly and even theatrically, like a tree, until everything was in its shade. It was a shade that came towards one like dark arms.
“All the Welsh can sing,” the warden said. Then he remembered that Lewis was Welsh also. “Not that I’ve got anything against the Welsh,” the warden said.
“The scandal of it,” Lewis was thinking. “Must he sing so loud, must he advertise himself? I locked up myself last night. How the devil did he get in?” And he really meant: “How did the devil get in?”.
To Lewis, Morgan was the nearest human thing to the devil. He could never pass that purple-gowned figure, sauntering like a cardinal in his skull cap on the sunny side of the street, without a shudder of distaste and derision. An unfrocked priest, his predecessor in the church, Morgan ought in strict justice to have been in prison, and would have been but for the indulgence of the bishop. But this did not prevent the old man with the saintly white head and the eyes half-closed by the worldly juices of food and wine, from walking about dressed in his vestments, like an actor walking in the sun of his own vanity, a hook-nosed satyr, a he-goat significant to servant girls, the crony of the public-house, the chaser of bookmakers, the smoker of cigars. It was terrible, but it was just that the bomb had buried him; only the malice of the Evil One would have thought of bringing the punishment of the sinner upon the church as well. And now, from the ruins, the voice of the wicked man rose up in all the elaborate pride of art and evil.
Suddenly there was a moan from the sloping timber, slates began to skate down.
“Get out. It’s going,” shouted t
he warden.
The man who was digging struggled out of the hole as it bulged under the landslide. There was a dull crumble, the crashing and splitting of wood and then the sound of brick and dust tearing down below the water. Thick dust clouded over and choked them all. The rubble rocked like a cake-walk. Everyone rushed back and looked behind at the wreckage as if it were still alive. It remained still. They all stood there, frightened and suspicious. Presently one of the men with the shovel said: “The bloke’s shut up.”
Everyone stared stupidly. It was true. The man had stopped singing. The clergyman was the first to move. Gingerly he went to what was left of the hole and got down on his knees.
“Morgan!” he said, in a low voice.
Then he called out more loudly:
“Morgan!”
Getting no reply, Lewis began to scramble the rubble away with his hands.
“Morgan!” he shouted. “Can you hear?” He snatched a shovel from one of the men and began digging and shovelling the stuff away. He had stopped chewing and muttering. His expression had entirely changed. “Morgan!” he called. He dug for two feet and no one stopped him. They looked with bewilderment at the sudden frenzy of the small man grubbing like a monkey, spitting out the dust, filing down his nails. They saw the spade at last shoot through the old hole. He was down the hole widening it at once, letting himself down as he worked. He disappeared under a ledge made by the fallen timber.
The party above could do nothing. “Morgan,” they heard him call. “It’s Lewis. We’re coming. Can you hear?” He shouted for an axe and presently they heard him smashing with it. He was scratching like a dog or a rabbit.
A voice like that to have stopped, to have gone! Lewis was thinking. How unbearable this silence was. A beautiful proud voice, the voice of a man, a voice like a tree, the soul of a man spreading in the air like the cedars of Lebanon. “Only one man I have heard with a bass like that. Owen the Bank, at Newtown before the war. Morgan!” he shouted. “Sing! God will forgive you everything, only sing!”
One of the rescue party following behind the clergyman in the tunnel shouted back to his mates.
“I can’t do nothing. This bleeder’s blocking the gangway.”
Half an hour Lewis worked in the tunnel. Then an extraordinary thing happened to him. The tunnel grew damp and its floor went as soft as clay to the touch. Suddenly his knees went through. There was a gap with a yard of cloth, the vestry curtain or the carpet at the communion rail was unwound and hanging through it. Lewis found himself looking down into the blackness of the crypt. He lay down and put his head and shoulders through the hole and felt about him until he found something solid again. The beams of the floor were tilted down into the crypt.
“Morgan. Are you there, man?” he called.
He listened to the echo of his voice. He was reminded of the time he had talked into a cistern when he was a boy. Then his heart jumped. A voice answered him out of the darkness from under the fallen floor. It was like the voice of a man lying comfortably and waking up from a snooze, a voice thick and sleepy.
“Who’s that?” asked the voice.
“Morgan, man. It’s Lewis. Are you hurt?” Tears pricked the dust in Lewis’s eyes and his throat ached with anxiety as he spoke. Forgiveness and love were flowing out of him. From below the deep thick voice of Morgan came back.
“You’ve been a hell of a long time,” it said. “I’ve damn near finished my whisky.”
“Hell” was the word which changed Mr. Lewis’s mind. Hell was a real thing, a real place for him. He believed in it. When he read out the word “Hell” in the Scriptures he could see the flames rising as they rise out of the furnaces at Swansea. “Hell” was a professional and poetic word for Mr. Lewis. A man who had been turned out of the church had no right to use it. Strong language and strong drink, Mr. Lewis hated both of them. The idea of whisky being in his church made his soul rise like an angered stomach. There was Morgan, insolent and comfortable, lying (so he said) under the old altartable, which was propping up the fallen floor, drinking a bottle of whisky.
“How did you get in?” Lewis said, sharply, from the hole. “Were you in the church last night when I locked up?”
The old man sounded not as bold as he had been. He even sounded shifty when he replied, “I’ve got my key.”
“Your key. I have the only key of the church. Where did you get a key?”
“My old key. I always had a key.”
The man in the tunnel behind the clergyman crawled back up the tunnel to the daylight.
“O.K.,” the man said. “He’s got him. They’re having a ruddy row.”
“Reminds me of ferreting. I used to go ferreting with my old dad,” said the policeman.
“You should have given that key up,” said Mr. Lewis. “Have you been in here before?”
“Yes, but I shan’t come here again,” said the old man.
There was the dribble of powdered rubble, pouring down like sand in an hour-glass, the ticking of the strained timber like the loud ticking of a clock.
Mr. Lewis felt that at last after years he was face to face with the devil and the devil was trapped and caught. The tick-tock of the wood went on.
“Men have been risking their lives, working and digging for hours because of this,” said Lewis. “I’ve ruined a suit of …”
The tick-tock had grown louder in the middle of the words. There was a sudden lurching and groaning of the floor, followed by a big heaving and splitting sound.
“It’s going,” said Morgan with detachment from below. “The table leg.” The floor crashed down. The hole in the tunnel was torn wide and Lewis grabbed at the darkness until he caught a board. It swung him out and in a second he found himself hanging by both hands over the pit.
“I’m falling. Help me,” shouted Lewis in terror. “Help me.” There was no answer.
“Oh, God,” shouted Lewis, kicking for a foothold. “Morgan, are you there? Catch me. I’m going.”
Then a groan like a snore came out of Lewis. He could hold no longer. He fell. He fell exactly two feet.
The sweat ran down his legs and caked on his face. He was as wet as a rat. He was on his hands and knees gasping. When he got his breath again he was afraid to raise his voice.
“Morgan,” he said quietly, panting.
“Only one leg went,” the old man said in a quiet grating voice. “The other three are all right.”
Lewis lay panting on the floor. There was a long silence. “Haven’t you ever been afraid before, Lewis?” Morgan said. Lewis had no breath to reply. “Haven’t you ever felt rotten with fear,” said the old man, calmly, “like an old tree, infested and worm-eaten with it, soft as a rotten orange?
“You were a fool to come down here after me. I wouldn’t have done the same for you,” Morgan said.
“You would,” Lewis managed to say.
“I wouldn’t,” said the old man. “I’m afraid. I’m an old man, Lewis, and I can’t stand it. I’ve been down here every night since the raids got bad.”
Lewis listened to the voice. It was low with shame, it had the roughness of the earth, the kicked and trodden choking dust of Adam. The earth of Mr. Lewis listened for the first time to the earth of Morgan. Coarsened and sordid and unlike the singing voice, the voice of Morgan was also gentle and fragmentary.
“When you stop feeling shaky,” Morgan said, “you’d better sing. I’ll do a bar, but I can’t do much. The whisky’s gone. Sing, Lewis. Even if they don’t hear, it does you good. Take the tenor, Lewis.”
Above in the daylight the look of pain went from the mouths of the rescue party, a grin came on the dusty lips of the warden.
“Hear it?” he said. “A ruddy Welsh choir!”
AUNT GERTRUDE
The name of the street where my Aunt Gertrude lived was Dorinda Gardens. The house was a new one with builders’ putty, a tin of undercoating and a roll of wallpaper in the attic. A smell of paint and size was on the stairs, and a shop smell still in
the carpets, the upholstery and the new furniture. Uncle owned the house, too, as a mortgagee, and that, Aunt said, was a new thing for him. There was the pride of being one of a regiment in this house, for it was one of several hundred, each with a small white balcony over the front door. The balcony had seduced Uncle. He said one could have breakfast on it “like they did on the Riveera”, and in his imagination I am sure he did so, though there was room for only one person to stand on it and certain there was no room for a table. A railway lay in a shallow green cutting at the end of the back garden and in front were two plots of waste land which had not yet been sold. From the bedroom, where I sometimes went in the afternoon when Aunt Gertrude was lying down, one could see a hoarding standing in the field, with the words Easipay Estates Ltd. Ideal Sites for Ideal Houses. The waste grass was spiked with thistles, lumpy with old horse manure, where yellow flies congregated. From Uncle we understood we were in Ideal Surroundings, but to us three boys the paddock was the snag of evil. Its wildness fascinated us and we loosened a paling in order to creep in and smoke our first cigarettes among its dungy stench, feeling that here was the native place of sin. Rusted kettles, a sour heap of old rags and the sight of a prowling dog which looked savage, as it ran sniffing in the hot climate of this enclosure, gave us the fright we longed for. One day as we looked through, Harold said, “There’s a man”. The man was making water in a corner. We moved off. The man had confirmed our belief in the horror of the place.
There was a small passe-partout picture in the hall of my aunt’s house which defined our lives. It was a picture of a letter-box with a letter sticking out of it and on the letter in good writing was the address:
Messrs Sell and Repent,
Prosperous Place,
The Earth.
“Some sell and wish they hadn’t” said Uncle Smith, cocking a shrewd, pleased eyebrow at the picture.
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