by Lord Dunsany
So Elderick Anwrel, hoping for the change that a letter would sometimes bring to tired thoughts, asked for the post.
“The postman didn’t come today,” said Augusta.
“Didn’t he?” said the vicar. “But where’s yesterday’s post?”
“He didn’t come yesterday either,” she said with a tired voice.
“What. No letters for anyone?” he said. Spelkins, or Mrs. Tweedy? And none for you, by either post?”
“He didn’t bring any,” she said.
There were relations outside this story who should have written, and interests scarce worthy of chronicling that might have brought him a letter.
“That is strange,” he said.
But she made no comment.
They entered the dining-room. And there on the sideboard stood their silver tea-pot, that used at breakfast-time to add so much to the brightness of the morning, just catching the sunlight and throwing it dazzlingly back. They thought a good deal of that tea-pot. But now it stood there as dull as any part of the corner in which the side-board was.
“The tea-pot hasn’t been cleaned,” said Anwrel with some surprise.
“No,” said Augusta.
“What can Marion have been thinking of?” he said.
Would he not see that things were all different now?
She made no answer: she was waiting to hear if he had got help in Snichester. She could think of nothing else. A strained silence passed while she waited. But as soon as he was seated at the table and still had not spoken, she said to him: “Well? You saw Hetley?”
“Yes. Oh, yes,” he said.
“You’ll get help?” she asked.
“Well, no, not from him,” he replied.
“He won’t help us?” she gasped.
“Well, no,” he said. “You see he didn’t hear anything.”
“He didn’t hear anything,” she said.
“No. Not when he was here.”
“But he must have,” she said. “Tommy Duffin was playing the pipes every evening while we were away. He must have heard them.”
“I’m afraid not,” he said.
“Why! He must be deaf,” she said.
“I’m afraid so,” said Anwrel.
There was a long silence as though a blow had fallen on her. And she looked worn already. Then she found a hope with difficulty, and spoke again.
“You said you didn’t get help from him. But you got help?” she asked.
“Well, yes,” he said.
“From the Bishop?” she asked.
“Well, no,” said Anwrel.
“The chaplain?”
“No. No, I don’t think he’d help us.”
“We must have help,” came from her bitterly as a cry.
“Yes, indeed,” he said.
“Who’ll help us?” she asked.
“Well, there’s a man,” he answered, “who... Of course one can’t judge people by their dress.”
“No,” she said, puzzled.
“Nor by their reputation,” he went on: “the world’s judgment is not accurate enough for that. Nor by their appearance, for that’s setting our own judgment up too high. No, I trusted to the Bishop, and he sent us Hetley. I spoke to the chaplain and Hetley too. It’s the same everywhere. The thing’s too fantastic for them and we must look elsewhere.”
“But where?” she said.
“The man I told you of.”
“But what man?” she asked.
“A man I met in Snichester.”
“What’s he like?”
“It’s not by appearances we can judge him.”
“What kind of man is he?” she said.
“He’s one,” he replied, “who has seen all these things.”
“What things?” she asked.
“The things that are troubling us.”
“You mean...?”
“Yes,” he said. “The Reverend Arthur Davidson, if he pleases to call himself that. I met a man who has seen such.”
“But...” she gasped.
“There is no one else,” he said, “that can help us now.”
And then she wanted to know who he was and exactly how he would help them.
“He is named Perkin,” he said. “And he will come and give me advice as to how to deal with it.”
“When will he come?” she asked.
“Oh, in a week or so,” he said.
“A week!” she exclaimed. “We must have help at once.”
And the look of strain on her face increased, as though it were all a matter of hours.
“At once?” he said. “He can’t come at once. There is no really urgent hurry.”
“Can’t you see,” she said, “that they’ll all go over the hill? They’ll all go to the Old Stones and leave you!”
She glanced round as though at any moment the call to go might be sounded.
“They still come to church,” he said.
“Only because Tommy Duffin lets them,” she answered. “If he were to blow those pipes outside the church door...”
“The Bishop would have to take action then,” he said.
“It would be too late, then,” she said. “Too late.”
And she spoke with an impatience that sounded new to Anwrel “Mrs. Duffin must know all about it by now,” he said. “Perhaps she may knock it all out of him yet.”
“Go and see her,” she replied strangely.
What had made this change in Augusta? What could be happening?
“What are they doing now,” he asked, “down in the village?”
“Go and look,” she said, and said no more than that. And the strained look came back to her face as she sat silent.
“Very well. I will,” said Anwrel.
The vicar went down to the village pondering wearily as usual. He was wondering when help would come, and whether that strange man who had promised help, and had known the things that haunt the shadowy spaces of legend and guess, just out beyond the borders of human knowledge, would be able to save Wolding. He should be able to, for he had seen what most men could not see and others would not: he alone would not be fighting in the dark if he bore arms against Pan. But then again the enemy was so ancient: and it hardly seemed that an upstart visionary like Perkin, however much he had seen and known, could overthrow him now.
So ran the swift troubled thoughts, which ever since the vicar first wrote to the Bishop had been always seeking help. Perhaps there had been a time when Anwrel would have relied more on himself, but now he needed help as a man in the grip of a torrent, and swept under, needs air. Full of his meditations, a dull figure to look on, yet alert with swift thoughts within, he nearly ran into old Hibbuts coming up the hill; Hibbuts the sexton, and secretary of the Horticultural Society, who year in year out had always come up to him at the Vicarage on the same date and with the same words, which began “About this Flower Show, sir...” And then they would go together over tiny absorbing details, during which the big hand of the clock would move round unnoticed, as though Time had seized this opportunity to steal an hour from Man: and next day the Wolding Flower Show would be announced. And that date was three days ago, last Saturday. And Hibbuts had never come. The vicar suddenly remembered it.
“Hullo Hibbuts,” he said.
“Good morning, sir,” said Hibbuts.
“You never came about the Flower Show, Hibbuts.”
“Didn’t I, sir?” said Hibbuts.
“No,” said the vicar. “We should have had the notices out by now.”
“So we should, sir.”
“But you never came,” said Anwrel.
“I must have forgotten it, sir,” said Hibbuts.
“I’ve never known you forget it before,” said the vicar. “Well, we’d better go over it this evening.”
“Why, yes, sir,” said Hibbuts. “We must have the Flower Show the same as ever.”
“Of course,” said the vicar.
“We must have something of the sort, sir; even if...�
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“Even if what?”
“Oh, nothing, sir,” said Hibbuts.
“Then you will come up after tea?”
“Oh, I don’t mind if I do, sir,” said Hibbuts.
The vicar looked at him, finding his answer strange. And, whether the man had secrets to hide from that steady gaze, or whether he resented the searching rays of it, he suddenly said to the vicar, “I don’t think there’ll be no Flower Show this year, sir.”
“No Flower Show? But there must be,” said the vicar.
“Yes, sir?” said Hibbuts.
“Why not?” said the vicar.
“Oh, I don’t know, sir,” said the sexton.
“Why not?” Anwrel asked again.
“I really couldn’t say, sir. I must be going on now.”
And Hibbuts went, and though the vicar called after him “Why?” he knew well enough: the old ways of Wolding were beginning to fall before customs older and stronger.
The vicar walked on, still uselessly pondering, and came to a field by the road, in which was a wealth of hay, starred by dog-daisies. He gazed out over it till he saw in a corner one man mowing a bit of it with a scythe. It was too far to hail him. But there was the fact; one man with a scythe in a field of thirty acres that should have all been cut already. There was no difficulty in obtaining a cutter: not every farmer had one of those machines, but Drover up on the hill always had one for hire, and there were plenty more.
The vicar walked on. And now he came to the first house in the village, a cottage whose white doorstep he knew as well as astronomers know some large star. The steps had not been whitewashed. And next he came to some children, at play in the street. But it was school-time! He went up to them and they rather moved away from him, as rooks move away from a man that is riding a horse, not scattering, as from one who walks, yet edging away. But he came up to one of them, a girl of eleven, feeling with all his heart as he came that he was a hostile figure to them. She faced him, with the sun on her bright locks, and a look of impudent courage, standing alone. “Why are you not in school, Nancy?” he said. “Mrs. End isn’t taking school this afternoon,” she said.
“Why not?” said the vicar.
“I don’t know. She isn’t here.”
“What did you learn this morning?” he asked, on the track of the truth of the matter.
“It was to have been arithmetic,” said Nancy. “Was to have been,” said the vicar. “But what did you learn?”
“Mrs. End said it wouldn’t matter.”
“Wouldn’t matter! Why?”
“She said, Mrs. End did,” said Nancy, “that we shouldn’t want arithmetic any more.”
CHAPTER XXVI
THE FIRE ON THE STONE
SO the vicar went on to the post office and took a telegraph form, and addressed it to Perkin, Snichester, and signed it The Vicar of Wolding, and added the one word Come.
Listlessly Mrs. Datchery, the post mistress, pushed a bundle of letters towards him that had been lying there all day, the letters for the Vicarage. The vicar took them and left.
He might have seen much more of the change that had come over the village, but he had seen enough; here the work of a day neglected in a garden, there the work of the year some while overdue in a hay-field; a listlessness everywhere; a rose, once trained to a wall, broken loose, and left to wave with the wind; a man’s tie all ill-tied and flapping loose over his coat; gates that should be shut left open; and everywhere an air of dreamy pre-occupation with something far from those fields, and far indeed from the quiet orderly ways that Wolding had known through Elderick Anwrel’s time, and far before that as long as there was any memory. One strange experience Wolding had had, and the fruits of it ripened now, filling Anwrel’s spirit with bitterness. He had seen enough, and he went back through the village, and felt as he walked there by the doors of his own parishioners, almost as the inhabitant of a conquered country might feel, walking in cities occupied by the victors; almost, but not quite yet, for he rested his hope on Perkin, to whom these terrible wonders were not strange.
Now he returned to the vicarage to wait for Hibbuts, whom he had told to come up after tea.
“Well?” said Augusta.
“Yes, it’s all changed,” he said. “All changed.”
“What will you do?” she asked anxiously.
“I’ve sent for Perkin,” he said. “The man I told you of.”
“Will he be able to stop it?” she said.
“I told you,” he said. And then more patiently and slowly he went on: “It’s like this, Augusta: this thing that is happening isn’t like ordinary things. It doesn’t happen in other parishes. It isn’t in modern books. It should have all died out thousands of years ago. I wish to Heaven it had! But it isn’t in modern thought at all. And it isn’t studied now; so able scholars can’t help me.”
“The Bishop should have helped us for all that,” sighed Augusta.
“No,” said Anwrel. “It was impossible. It’s outside modern thought. He feared that I might be mad, and he examined me to see. And even now I think he isn’t sure. If I asked him for help again he would have no doubt of it.”
“Then I don’t see how Perkin can help,” she said.
“Can’t you see?” he said. “Can’t you see? Perkin has known these things. He’s the very man that can help.”
“Know them?” she said. “How can he know them?”
“He sees them all round him,” said the vicar.
“But. But is he mad?” she said.
“Oh, can’t you see,” said poor Anwrel, “that sanity cannot save us?”
She thought a long while over that. “No,” she said, “no. It never will.”
They kept silence then, such a silence as beleaguered troops might keep, sitting down to eat rats. They seemed nearing their last extremity.
And then she asked: “When will he come?”
“He said a week,” he answered.
Then they sat silent again.
“I told Hibbuts to come up after tea,” he said at last. “We are going to talk over the Flower Show.”
“He’ll never come,” she said.
And they had tea, and they waited; but Augusta was right and Hibbuts never came. And instead of Hibbuts came that awful messenger, the music that had strayed from Arcadian slopes and down the long ages, to float over fields of England from Tommy Duffin’s pipes. It came with its clear message to them both, to leave that house and all that the vicarage stood for, and all that the last two thousand years had taught, and to turn again and remember the Old Stones. And what was there to know of the Old Stones? “Come and I’ll tell you. Come and I’ll tell you. Come and I’ll tell you,” sang the strange tune like chimes.
Augusta gripped both arms of her chair, and her face went tense and white. The vicar watched her reproachfully. “You too?” he said gravely when the music stopped.
“I didn’t go,” she almost screamed.
“Go, indeed!” said the vicar. “No, of course not.”
The idea of Augusta going had never entered his mind; though the thought of going himself had come, however manfully he cast it out; had come often.
She did not answer and Anwrel said no more. So they sat silent.
Again she asked him when Perkin would come, and again he told her a week.
“But when he gets your wire,” she urged.
“He will walk,” he said. “He’ll start today and should be here on Monday.”
“But why can’t he come by train?” she asked.
It was hard for him to explain. Man has imagined many things: some of them he has put forth in iron and steel, and others have remained within his imagination. Both kinds are equally wonderful; but the things of iron and steel attract the more attention because they parade continually before our eyes and our ears, and indeed all our five senses, and the mind is always having reports of them from these alert five; while the things that have remained within the imagination, and that, but for an occ
asional statue or work on bronze, have never been clothed with matter, lurk in the vastnesses of the skull with all that man has known, and are only seen now and then by the inner eye amongst the lumber of ages. It was with these things that Perkin was concerned, not with the other wonders, nor did Anwrel wish that his ally’s restless thoughts should be turned from the matter in hand to consider the mystery of such things as trains.
But it was hard to explain all this to one who had never seen Perkin, though once you had seen him and talked with him it was obvious. So he merely said, “Oh, Perkin would never come by train.”
And this she accepted.
The influence of the pipes had gone far and deep. Here was the vicarage gloomy and silent because of them, that only a while ago was a cheery little house.
A week of waiting before any help would come. And that look on Augusta’s face. The vicar rose and went to his study and began to turn over his collection of flint implements, every one numbered on a little square piece of sticking-paper, and a note-book with date and place against every number, recalling old journeys over high brown fields of clay above the hills of chalk. But they brought him no solace today. They did not lure his thoughts from the ruin of Wolding, nor calmed his fears busy with guesses of how the end would be. Only the old blue palaeolith seemed glancing towards him, sideways out of its hollows, with a crudely familiar look, as though he were coming nearer and nearer to this blunt primitive thing, across a gap in the ages. About supper time the vicar rose from his flints and went away from the house. He was not hungry; and a troubled mind drove him out to walk swiftly, as though with plodding feet there came some scrap of harmony between body and brain, that would not come to him sitting still in a chair while his thoughts raced on and on. And the theme of his thoughts was the same old theme that comes to all minds in trouble, a balance, always shifting, between the evil as one fears it and the help as one hopes it. How bad were things with the village? How soon would Perkin come? Nothing else occupied his mind all the evening.