Coming to that, then, who the devil had he been taking such pains over? The question kept hammering at his mind day after day; it was still unanswered, showed no promise of an answer. And the Arcadian scene beyond the windows suddenly became an irony and a jeer. The unseen bird itself sang on in vulgar mockery: ‘Come off of it! Come off of it! Come off of it! Dolt, dolt, dolt!’
He turned away out of the brightness of the light, and fixed his eyes on the bulky brown-paper package that contained the printed volumes. It was useless to stay here any longer. He would open the package, but merely to take a look at a copy and assure himself that no ingenuity of the printer had restored any little aberration of spelling or punctuation which he himself had corrected three times in the proofs. He knew the poems – or some of them – by heart now.
With extreme reluctance he had tried one or two of them on a literary friend: ‘An anonymous thing, you know, I came across it in an old book.’
The friend had been polite rather than enthusiastic. After, cigarette between fingers, idly listening to a few stanzas, he had smiled and asked Alan if he had ever read a volume entitled Poems of Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell.
‘Well, there you are! A disciple of Acton’s, dear boy, if you ask me. Stuff as common as blackberries.’
And Alan had welcomed the verdict. He didn’t want to share the poems with anybody. If nobody bought them and nobody cared, what matter? All the better. And he wasn’t being sentimental about them now either. He didn’t care if they had any literary value or not. He had entrusted himself with them, and that was the end of the matter. What was Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba? What?
And what did it signify that he had less right to the things even than Mrs Elliott – who fortunately was never likely to stake out any claim? The moral ashbins old women can be, he thought bitterly. Simply because this forlorn young creature of the exercise book had been forced at last to make her exit from the world under the tragic but hardly triumphant arch of her own body this old woman had put her hand over her mouth and looked ‘volumes’ at that poor old hen-pecked husband of hers even at mention of her name. Suicides, of course, are a nuisance in any house. But all those years gone by! And what did they know the poor thing had done to merit their insults? He neither knew nor cared, yet for some obscure reason steadily wasted at least five minutes in untying the thick knotted cord of the parcel instead of chopping it up with his pocket-knife in the indignant fashion which he had admired when he visited the printers.
The chastest little pile of copies was disclosed at last in their grey-blue covers and with their enrichingly rough edges. The hand-made paper had been an afterthought. A further cheque was due to the printer, but Alan begrudged not a farthing. He had even incited them to be expensive. He believed in turning things out nicely – even himself. He and his pretty volumes were ‘a pair’!
Having opened the parcel, having neatly folded up its prodigal wrappings of brown paper, and thrown away the padding and hanked the string, there was nothing further to do. He sat back in Mr Elliott’s old Windsor chair, leaning his chin on his knuckles. He was waiting, though he didn’t confess it to himself. What he did confess to himself was that he was sick of it all. Age and life’s usage may obscure, cover up, fret away a fellow-creature at least as irrevocably as six feet of common clay.
When, then, he raised his eyes at some remote inward summons he was already a little hardened in hostility. He was looking clean across the gaily lit room at its other occupant standing there in precisely the same attitude – the high-heeled shoe coquettishly arched on the lowest of the three steps, the ridiculous flaunting hat, the eyes aslant beneath the darkened lids casting back on him their glitter from over a clumsy blur that was perfectly distinct on the cheek-bone in the vivid light of this June morning. And even this one instant’s glimpse clarified and crystallized all his old horror and hatred. He knew that she had seen the tender firstfruits on the table. He knew that he had surprised a gleam of triumph in her snakish features, and he knew that she no more cared for that past self and its literary exercises than she cared for his silly greenhorn tribute to them. What then was she after?
The darkening, glittering, spectral eyes were once more communicating with him with immense rapidity, and yet were actually conveying about as empty or as mindless a message as eyes can. If half-extinguished fires in a dark room can be said to look coy, these did. But a coyness practised in a face less raddled and ravaged by time than by circumstance is not an engaging quality. ‘Arch!’ My God, ‘arch’ was the word!
Alan was shivering. How about the ravages that life’s privy paw had made in his own fastidious consciousness? Had his own heart been a shade more faithful would the horror which he knew was now distorting his rather girlish features and looking out of his pale blue eyes have been quite so poisonously bitter?
Fortunately his back was turned to the window, and he could in part conceal his face with his hand before this visitor had had time to be fully aware what that face was saying. She had stirred. Her head was trembling slightly on her shoulders. Every tinily exquisite plume in the mauve ostrich feathers on her drooping hat trembled as if in sympathy. Her ringed fingers slipped down from the door to her narrow hip; her painted eyelids narrowed, as if she were about to speak to him. But at this moment there came a sudden flurry of wind in the lilac tree at the window, ravelling its dried-up flowers and silky leaves. She stooped, peered; and then, with a sharp, practised, feline, seductive nod, as bold as grass-green paint, she was gone. An instant or two, and in the last of that dying gust, the door above at the top of the narrow staircase, as if in a sudden access of bravado, violently slammed: ‘Touch me, tap at me, force me, if you dare!’
The impact shook the walls and rattled the windows of the room beneath. It jarred on the listener’s nerves with the force of an imprecation. As abrupt a silence followed. Nauseated and slightly giddy he got up from his chair, resting his fingers automatically on the guileless pile of books, took up his hat, glanced vacantly at the gilded Piccadilly maker’s name on the silk lining, and turned to go. As he did so, a woeful, shuddering fit of remorse swept over him, like a parched-up blast of the sirocco over the sands of a desert. He shot a hasty strangulated look up the narrow empty staircase as he passed by. Then, ‘O God,’ he groaned to himself, ‘I wish – I pray – you poor thing, you could only be a little more at peace – whoever, wherever you are – whatever I am.’
And then he was with the old bookseller again, and the worldly-wise old man was eyeing him as ingenuously as ever over his steel-rimmed glasses.
‘He isn’t looking quite himself,’ he was thinking. ‘Bless me, sir,’ he said aloud, ‘sit down and rest a bit. You must have been overdoing it. You look quite het up.’
Alan feebly shook his head. His cheek was almost as colourless as the paper on which the poems had been printed; small beads of sweat lined his upper lip and damped his hair. He opened his mouth to reassure the old bookseller, but before he could utter a word they were both of them caught up and staring starkly at one another – like conspirators caught in the act. Their eyes met in glassy surmise. A low, sustained, sullen rumble had come sounding out to them from the remoter parts of the shop which Alan had but a moment before left finally behind him. The whole house shuddered as if at the menace of an earthquake.
‘Bless my soul, sir!’ cried the old bookseller. ‘What in merciful heaven was that!’
He hurried out, and the next instant stood in the entry of his parlour peering in through a dense fog of dust that now obscured the light of the morning. It silted softly down, revealing the innocent cause of the commotion. No irreparable calamity. It was merely that a patch of the old cracked plaster ceiling had fallen in, and a mass of rubble and plaster was now piled up, inches high, on the gate-leg table and the chair beside it, while the narrow laths of the ceiling above them, a few of which were splintered, lay exposed like the bones of a skeleton. A thick film of dust had settled over everything, intensifying with its g
rey veil the habitual hush of the charming little room. And almost at one and the same moment the old bookseller began to speculate first, what damages he might have been called upon to pay if his young customer had not in the nick of time vacated that chair, and next, that though perhaps his own little stock of the rare and the curious would be little the worse for the disaster, Alan’s venture might be very much so. Indeed, the few that were visible of the little pile of books – but that morning come virgin and speckless from the hands of the binders – were bruised and scattered. And as Mr Elliott eyed them, his conscience smote him: ‘Softly now, softly,’ he muttered to himself, ‘or we shall have Mrs E. down on this in pretty nearly no time!’
But Mrs E. had not heard. No footfall sounded above; nothing stirred; all remained as it might be expected to remain. And Alan, who meanwhile had stayed motionless in the outer shop, at this moment joined the old bookseller, and looked in on the ruins.
‘Well, there, sir,’ Mr Elliott solemnly assured him, ‘all I can say is, it’s a mercy you had come out of it. And by no more than a hair’s-breadth!’
But Alan made no answer. His mind was a void. He was listening again – and so intently that it might be supposed the faintest stirrings even on the uttermost outskirts of the unseen might reach his ear. It was too late now – and in any case it hadn’t occurred to him – to add to the title-page of his volume that well-worn legend: ‘The heart knoweth his own bitterness; and a stranger doth not intermeddle with his joy.’ But it might at least have served for his own brief apologia. He had meant well – it would have suggested. You never can tell.
As they stood there, then, a brief silence had fallen on the ravaged room. And then a husky, querulous, censorious voice had broken out behind the pair of them: ‘Mr E., where are you?’
ALL HALLOWS
‘And because time in itselfe … can receive no alteration, the hallowing … must consist in the shape or countenance which we put upon the affaires that are incident in these days.’
Richard Hooker
It was about half-past three on an August afternoon when I found myself for the first time looking down upon All Hallows. And at glimpse of it, fatigue and vexation passed away. I stood ‘at gaze’, as the old phrase goes – like the two children of Israel sent in to spy out the Promised Land. How often the imagined transcends the real. Not so All Hallows. Having at last reached the end of my journey – flies, dust, heat, wind – having at last come limping out upon the green sea-bluff beneath which lay its walls – I confess the actuality excelled my feeble dreams of it.
What most astonished me, perhaps, was the sense not so much of its age, its austerity, or even its solitude, but its air of abandonment. It lay couched there as if in hiding in its narrow sea-bay. Not a sound was in the air; not a jackdaw clapped its wings among its turrets. No other roof, not even a chimney, was in sight; only the dark-blue arch of the sky; the narrow snowline of the ebbing tide; and that gaunt coast fading away into the haze of a west over which were already gathering the veils of sunset.
We had met, then, at an appropriate hour and season. And yet – I wonder. For it was certainly not the ‘beauty’ of All Hallows, lulled as if into a dream in this serenity of air and heavens, which was to leave the sharpest impression upon me. And what kind of first showing would it have made, I speculated, if an autumnal gale had been shrilling and trumpeting across its narrow bay – clots of wind-borne spume floating among its dusky pinnacles – and the roar of the sea echoing against its walls. Imagine it frozen stark in winter, icy hoar-frost edging its every boss, moulding, finial, crocket, cusp!
Indeed, are there not works of man, legacies of a half-forgotten past, scattered across this human world of ours from China to Peru, which seem to daunt the imagination with their incomprehensibility? Incomprehensible, I mean, in the sense that the passion that inspired and conceived them is incomprehensible. Viewed in the light of the passing day, they might be the monuments of a race of demi-gods. And yet, if we could but free ourselves from our timidities, and follies, we might realize that even we ourselves have an obligation to leave behind us similar memorials – testaments to the creative and faithful genius not so much of the individual as of Humanity itself.
However that may be, it was my own personal fortune to see All Hallows for the first time in the heat of the Dog Days, after a journey which could hardly be justified except by its end. At this moment of the afternoon the great church almost cheated one into the belief that it was possessed of a life of its own. It lay, as I say, couched in its natural hollow, basking under the dark dome of the heavens like some half-fossilized monster that might at any moment stir and awaken out of the swoon to which the wand of the enchanter had committed it. And with every inch of the sun’s descending journey it changed its appearance.
That is the charm of such things. Man himself, says the philosopher, is the sport of change. His life and the life around him are but the flotsam of a perpetual flux. Yet, haunted by ideals, egged on by impossibilities, he builds his vision of the changeless; and time diversifies it with its colours and its ‘effects’ at leisure. It was drawing near to harvest now; the summer was nearly over; the corn would soon be in stook; the season of silence had come, not even the robins had yet begun to practise their autumnal lament. I should have come earlier.
The distance was of little account. But nine flinty hills in seven miles is certainly hard commons. To plod (the occupant of a cloud of dust) up one steep incline and so see another; to plod up that and so see a third; to surmount that and, half-choked, half-roasted, to see (as if in unbelievable mirage) a fourth – and always stone walls, discoloured grass, no flower but ragged ragwort, whited fleabane, moody nettle, and the exquisite stubborn bindweed with its almond-burdened censers, and always the glitter and dazzle of the sun – well, the experience grows irksome. And then that endless flint erection with which some jealous Lord of the Manor had barricaded his verdurous estate! A fly-infested mile of the company of that wall was tantamount to making one’s way into the infernal regions – with Tantalus for fellow-pilgrim. And when a solitary and empty dung-cart had lumbered by, lifting the dumb dust out of the road in swirling clouds into the heat-quivering air, I had all but wept aloud.
No, I shall not easily forget that walk – or the conclusion of it – when footsore, all but dead beat – dust all over me, cheeks, lips, eyelids, in my hair, dust in drifts even between my naked body and my clothes – I stretched my aching limbs on the turf under the straggle of trees which crowned the bluff of that last hill, still blessedly green and verdant, and feasted my eyes on the cathedral beneath me. How odd Memory is – in her sorting arrangements. How perverse her pigeon-holes.
It had reminded me of a drizzling evening many years ago. I had stayed a moment to listen to an old Salvation Army officer preaching at a street corner. The sopped and squalid houses echoed with his harangue. His penitents’ drum resembled the block of an executioner. His goatish beard wagged at every word he uttered. ‘My brothers and sisters,’ he was saying ‘the very instant our fleshly bodies are born they begin to perish; the moment the Lord has put them together, time begins to take them to pieces again. Now at this very instant if you listen close, you can hear the nibblings and frettings of the moth and rust within – the worm that never dies. It’s the same with human causes and creeds and institutions – just the same. O, then, for that Strand of Beauty where all that is mortal shall be shed away and we shall appear in the likeness and verisimilitude of what in sober and awful truth we are!’
The light striking out of an oil-and-colourman’s shop at the street corner lay across his cheek and beard and glassed his eye. The soaked circle of humanity in which he was gesticulating stood staring and motionless – the lassies, the probationers, the melancholy idlers. I had had enough. I went away. But is is odd that so utterly inappropriate a recollection should have edged back into my mind at this moment. There was, as I have said, not a living soul in sight. Only a few sea-birds – oyster-catch
ers maybe – were jangling on the distant beach.
It was now a quarter to four by my watch, and the usual pensive ‘lin-lan-lone’ from the belfry beneath me would soon no doubt be ringing to evensong. But if at that moment a triple bob-major had suddenly clanged its alarm over sea and shore I couldn’t have stirred a finger’s breadth. Scanty though the shade afforded by the wind-shorn tuft of trees under which I lay might be – I was ineffably at peace.
No bell, as a matter of fact, loosed its tongue that stagnant half-hour. Unless then the walls beneath me already concealed a few such chance visitors as myself, All Hallows would be empty. A cathedral not only without a close but without a congregation – yet another romantic charm. The Deanery and the residences of its clergy, my old guide-book had long since informed me, were a full mile or more away. I determined in due time, first to make sure of an entry, and then having quenched my thirst, to bathe.
How inhuman any extremity – hunger, fatigue, pain, desire – makes us poor humans. Thirst and drouth so haunted my mind that again and again as I glanced towards it I supped up in one long draught that complete blue sea. But meanwhile, too, my eyes had been steadily exploring and searching out this monument of the bygone centuries beneath me.
Out of the Deep: And Other Supernatural Tales Page 16