by Lord Dunsany
And she made it strong, and all had gone according to plan. Then they sat over their tea and talked; and the subject of the talk was the aquarium at Brighton, where the dwellers in many seas gaze through a sheet of plate glass and wonder at men, and men from the other side of it wonder back. And listening to stories of Brighton in the warm room, over the good tea that was stronger than usual, the past began to come back to Mrs. Tichener: she too had stories to tell, and of further away than Brighton, stories of years that were gone. In such a mood as this no tale of wonderful fishes was to be allowed to win; for in conversation as in cards there are winnings and losings, wonder and laughter and even awe are the points. She had her strange stories too; and, gently as the Arab guides his camel with the light cord only on one side of the neck, the vicar guided her reminiscences whither he wished them to go. He had silently progressed some way in his speculations during the last week, and had now come to Mrs. Tichener, believing that the old woman could lead them further. Her gossip was always local; but spreading it over a wider area would have made it no shrewder, nor enriched it much with more knowledge of the whims and the ways of man. They were speaking now of the time of the Reverend Arthur Davidson.
“I often remember hearing, Mrs. Tichener,” said the vicar, “how you saw Mr. Davidson one night in the vicarage garden.”
“Oh yes, sir,” said Mrs. Tichener.
“He was dancing I think,” said the vicar.
“Yes, sir. Dancing he was,” she said.
“And you told them about it in the village.”
“I told a few, sir.”
“And then Mr. Davidson left.”
“He left at once, sir. Left next day.”
“And was never heard of again.”
“Not to my knowledge, sir.”
“Now that was strange, Mrs. Tichener.”
“Yes, it was strange, sir. Strange enough.”
“You only told them you saw him dancing?”
“That was all, sir. I don’t hold with telling tales about people.”
“And yet he left?”
“Oh, yes. He left, sir.”
“Well that was all about it I suppose,” said the vicar. “There was nothing so very strange in his dancing.”
Simple words enough as you see them written, and yet a golden key, a spell to open instantly the lock on the tale of the past that lay in the old woman’s mind, a charm to arouse a mystery from its sleep which otherwise might have gone silent in a few more years to the grave.
“Nothing so very strange, sir?” said Mrs. Tichener.
“Oh, not if he cared for dancing,” said the vicar.
“Well, sir, you saw queer fishes when you were at Brighton,” she said, “but you never saw the like of that.”
“Really? Oh? Was it very strange?”
The doubt in his voice drove her onwards. He that had brought her strange tales from Brighton should hear strange things now.
“He wore spats, sir,” said Mrs. Tichener.
“Yes,” said the vicar. “I believe I heard he did.”
“And he had a joint, sir, below his spats as he danced.”
“Good gracious,” said the vicar, awed by her tone. “His ankle of course.”
“Yes, sir,” she said. “And he had another, just above.”
That was her moment of triumph: he had brought no stories like that back from Brighton.
“Good gracious’” he said.
“Yes, sir,” said Mrs. Tichener.
He had expected the curious events of today to have strange roots back in the past. He had looked for an odd tale from Mrs. Tichener; but not for this!
“And his knees, Mrs. Tichener?” he said.
“I couldn’t be sure, sir. They didn’t look right as he danced, and he always walked very stiff, but I couldn’t be sure. But the joints at each end of his spats, I saw them clear, sir. He was dancing high in the moonlight. Very short boots he always used to wear: neat and small.”
“You never saw anything like that before?” asked the vicar.
“No, sir,” said Mrs. Tichener. “Quiet and respectable he was always.”
“And he went away next day,” said the vicar, more to himself than Mrs. Tichener. So she would have no more to tell.
“Well, good-bye, Mrs. Tichener,” he said. “And what you’ve told me, you know, it’s best to tell no one else. It would only set them imagining all kinds of things. And it wouldn’t do any good.”
“I understand, sir,” she said, “I keep my tongue to myself. Thank you for the tea. It’s very good I’m sure. They must have wonderful things in Brighton.”
And with difficulty he withdrew from the tongue that Mrs. Tichener kept to herself.
Tea was all over when he returned to the vicarage; and, as he saw the cold remains and the lonely cup, one of those regrets that will sometimes darken a moment came over him when he saw that he had missed that pleasant meal, the first one of their return after all that week. Yet, even if she saw the shadow that fell on so brief a moment, Mrs. Anwrel saw by some sign that was clear to her that the vicar had won some success on his quest to the village.
“There was something very queer about that man Arthur Davidson,” he said.
“They all think so in the parish,” she said.
“It was more than that,” he said. “Such appearances must be rare. But how often are they not recognised, or hushed up? It makes them seem rarer.”
“What was he?” she said.
“That we shall never know,” he answered.
And from this she guessed.
CHAPTER IX
THE FACTS OF THE CASE
THE vicar went to his study. And there were the little things with which he had surrounded himself long ago and which he had known for so many years; his quill pens, the knife with which he recut them when they got blunt; his ink-pots with black and red ink, the red for neat headings in his sermons; his collection of eoliths, the old brown debatable stones, whose yellow chippings some argued to be accidental and not the work of man; his palæoliths with one great blue axe-head that no one could doubt at all; a photograph of himself with ten other young athletes, all on the other shore of a gulf of thirty years; a pottery jar for tobacco that one of them gave him; his comfortable table; and many other small things brought lightly together by him, to become in a while his surroundings, a sort of inner line of defence, of which the Milky Way is the outer, against the drear emptiness of Space. He saw them all as he opened the door: there they were all just as he pictured them during every day of his absence; and they seemed too good to be true.
He went in and sat down at the table; and for a while he leaned back in his chair, full of the satisfaction of being again with his own things. Then taking his pen he sat up to the table and wrote, with little more than the savour of that satisfaction still tinging his mood. He wrote again to the Bishop.
“MY LORD, In writing again, in accordance with your lordship’s instructions, I am only too conscious of the deficiencies of my former letter. I have since then been able to obtain facts that I ought to have had in the first case, and I have found the week of leisure, that your lordship so kindly gave me, quite admirable for ordering and arranging all the details that I was possessed of which bore on the case. I realise now how necessary this interval was for the adequate preparation of a case that was to be put before your lordship. How strange a case I trust this letter will show.
The most important defect in my former letter was my omission to state, after full enquiry, the precise origin of that music, the nature of which I have already described so far as that is possible to me. It is partly to correct this omission that I now write.
In the first place then there are a farmer and his wife living not far from the village, with one son, living with them, aged about 17. The farmer is of a somewhat simple type, old yeoman stock of this county, with plenty of shrewd knowledge about farming on this particular soil, and without interests beyond that. His wife is really not remarkable in any way. The
y are both very good churchgoers. The son is very like the father, both in appearance and tastes; and I should have said like his mother too, were it not for this one extraordinary thing, for he is the boy who plays the tune on the hill. He has made some strange pipes; and I have seen him with them, and seen him slip away from his father’s farm at sunset, and have heard that music soon after. My week at Brighton gave me an admirable opportunity for going over all the facts in my mind, and my careful examination of them there led me to make certain enquiries of an old woman of this parish as soon as I returned this afternoon. Those enquiries have abundantly increased my store of facts that seem to bear on this case. They seem to establish in my mind, though I await your lordship’s ultimate decision, that this young man Thomas Duffin, the ordinary son of ordinary parents, has been affected to a terrible degree by some pre-natal influence from a perfectly shocking source. What possible curse or spell, or whatever it be, can have been cast over him I will carefully investigate further. But the facts that I have already learned are these. I hardly know how to tell them to your lordship. But the fact is that the Reverend Arthur Davidson, who lawfully married the lad’s parents, for there is no doubt that he had contrived to be ordained,”
The vicar held the pen till it nearly dried, then rose and walked about the little room, and still no words would come to him in which to tell what he had to tell to the Bishop. So he went through to the drawing-room and found his wife. “This is what I have written so far, Augusta,” he said.
She read the letter slowly.
“Really what I have to tell him,” he said, “is so very unusual that I find it hard to choose the right words. But I must do it. He must be told. I wonder if you would be able to word it for me.”
“I shouldn’t send this letter, dear,” she said.
“What?” said the vicar. “Not send it?”
“Not quite as it is,” she replied.
“But, but it’s a thing he must know,” he said.
“Then, whatever it is, I should tell him,” she said. “Go and see him, you know. But not write.”
“But why not write it?” he asked. He relied so much on her sense that he did not question her next remark although it much surprised him.
“I don’t think he wants a letter quite like that,” she said.
“He doesn’t want it?” was all he said.
“I don’t think so,” she said. “But of course you could tell him verbally.”
“But I can’t put it clearer than that in conversation: I couldn’t put it as clear.”
“But you could see how he was taking it,” she said.
“Go over to Snichester?” he said.
“I think that’s best,” she answered.
“Oh dear me,” said the vicar. He was thinking of all his friendly, familiar surroundings, and how he must take farewell of his knick-knacks again almost as soon as they had been restored to him.
“You need only go for one night,” she said. “You could take the 2.45 and put up at the Crozier.”
“If I went in the morning,” he said hopefully, “I could get back the same day.”
“The afternoon would be the time to see him,” she said.
She seemed to know, and he said no more. But, considering the dreadful nature of his news, he did think it a little strange that he should have to give it within conventional hours. He took back his letter and kept it to refer to, for as far as it went it contained his facts. The simple statement of Mrs. Tichener that he had not yet committed to writing he was not likely to forget, and did not in fact forget all the days of his life.
Augusta packed his bag for him. And next day, after a look through his eoliths and the fine palaeolithic axe-head, he drove away in his trap to Mereham and the 2.45.
And with him went Spelkins, his gardener-groom, to bring the horses home.
CHAPTER X
IN THE CATHEDRAL
WHEN Anwrel arrived at Snichester it was as yet too early for him to call on the Bishop. Or so his wife had told him. “It must be after four,” she had said. So he strolled through the old streets, past several shops of the vendors of genuine antiques, of which there were many important factories in that city.
Soon over one of these shops there appeared a white flash, like a smile, almost contemptuous; and there came into view, as must come to all travellers in Snichester, by whatever street they wander, the great battlements of the cathedral. Anwrel, who was no wayfarer, had never even seen Snichester till that day, and when that row of battlements came into view, as though lifting up sheer out of dreamland, he stood still for a moment and gasped at them. That anything so spiritual could have been made by masons astounded him. For the battlements were made, not of rock, but of pieces of blue sky, lightly framed in white sandstone. To compare all manner of armament, ancient or modern, with Christian virtues he was well accustomed, but to see metaphors made by a mason astonished him; and they were nothing else, for these square pieces of sky, shaped in their thin stone frames like the defences of rugged towers of bygone days, could have averted no material thing. He saw the great green roof, below the towers, making a vivid brightness against the sky, such as we often see all about us just before thunder. He went on until the cathedral stood before him, a great sheet of light glittering from white sandstone, making the very sources of light seem suddenly closer, as though he were standing now at the end of the world. He felt as the hunter or mountaineer may feel as he comes to a mountain top; though why he felt it he did not know, nor could he even quite have said what the feeling was, except that his emotions had found some altitude from which all the lesser cares seemed tiny and far. Then swifter than feet of hunter or mountaineer those emotions descended, and he was on the pavement gazing; for such altitudes are never for us for long. And the feeling came over him then that would come to him when he had lost something; but he had lost nothing at all, so the feeling was meaningless: there he stood while others went by him by ones and twos to enter the cathedral. Soon he joined their movement through sheer irresolution, as brown leaves seem to go with little runnels; and so came to a small black door that was all one piece of wood, hewn long ago from an oak that bygone men had dragged and carted there over other fields. It was not yet four and he had ample time before he need see the Bishop. He entered, and suddenly was in a coolness and dimness, with splendours of stone and glass that at first bewildered him, till his eye wandering lost along those cliffs of masonry found emblems here and there that had meaning to him. He walked through the gloaming and the hush of the aisles, past old memorials in brass whose antique style seemed speaking sleepily across so many ages, past monuments in stone defaced so long ago that the very iconoclasm seemed hallowed now, past the quiet sleep of marble, ambition and dust, his attention almost drowsing in the dim silences, till all of a sudden like thunder he saw a cuirass and helmet once worn at Waterloo. This somewhat woke him, so that he ceased to wander from shadow to shadow of huge pillars, but sat down in one of the pews, and began to order each statement of the report that he had come to make to the Bishop. First of all the facts, to be clearly stated as such; then his deductions, of as much value as the facts, but to be kept separate from them, being a different class of information. He would describe as fully as possible the exact effect of that music upon himself, with no pretence of explaining its full power, but as an example of the impression that it was capable of making upon one mind. And then, having detailed facts, deductions, impressions, he would perhaps go over the ground again, giving briefly the story of the pipes of Wolding as far as he knew it at present. Whether the story he had made of all these facts and impressions were the accurate statement of the case would then be for the Bishop to say: he only hoped that he had exaggerated it.
As he ordered all his facts, carefully distinguishing between them and conjectures, a service began far away from him which he could not see, for the organ interposed between him and the altar where he sat near an end of the nave below a pale ice-blue window. So far off from him
was the service in this huge place that it did not at once take his thoughts from their occupation, and he continued to make a clear and logical story of his strange experience in Wolding during the last few weeks. But gradually the distant intonations soaring amongst far pillars lured all his thoughts from the tale he had come to tell. It was not the words that lured him far from his purpose, for he was not able to hear them, but a drone as of bees in limes too enormous for this small planet; and, in those colossal trees that the voice awoke in the vicar’s imagination, the ages seemed to be caught, humming mildly, with no room in their gentle melody for any tale such as his. He looked round him, trying to gather his thoughts again for the report he must soon make now. He saw a small window showing St. Ethelbruda, beating away the last of the pagans with a branch or a bunch of leaves. He raised his eyes from that to the great windows; one of them seemed like sheer moonlight, another like honey, a third reminded him of dawn, and a fourth baffled him for anything to which to liken it, unless to a great shout. He looked again at St. Ethelbruda in her gay dress beating the pagan; then to the gloom of the pillars; and nowhere could he find any support for the tale that he had to tell. A great bell struck. It was time now to start for the palace; yet the vicar did not rise. It seemed to have all been decided, once for all and long ago, in ritual, in glass and in stone, that this story of his was wrong. If he started at once he could pick up his bag at the station and catch the 5.10, and be home that night, and need not stop at the Crozier. And this was what he did.
CHAPTER XI
THE TUNE IN THE TWILIGHT
AT Mereham the vicar hired a fly, and was home in good time for supper. He explained to his wife that on thinking it all over he found that he had not sufficient information to lay the whole case clearly before the Bishop. And she troubled him with no further questions, seeing that they would have interfered with his great pleasure at being home again. But, supper over, he did not let that pleasure interfere with his duty, for he certainly had to write something to the Bishop. So he went at once to his study and sat down, and jotted down on a sheet of foolscap the simple facts of the case, avoiding very carefully any ominous phrases, and even words that had any sinister import attaching to them. It was a very plain statement that he was putting together. If anything dreadful seemed to hang over it all, or a strange danger to threaten Wolding, it was the Bishop that must put that construction upon it, for the vicar did not even hint at a menace. And now having finished his notes he drew a sheet of writing paper towards him. It was a warm moonlight night, as near as may be to midsummer. It was barely night at all, and a tinge of dawn would appear and awake the blackbirds before the last glow of the sunset was wholly lost from the hill. Scents of flowers from the vicarage garden were wandering down the air.