‘Now cast your glance upwards, sir. Is that what you would call a saintly shape and gesture?’
What appeared to represent an eagle was perched on the image’s lifted wrist – an eagle resembling a vulture. The head beneath it was poised at an angle of defiance – its ears abnormally erected on the skull; the lean right forearm extended with pointing forefinger as if in derision. Its stony gaze was fixed upon the stars; its whole aspect was hostile, sinister and intimidating. I drew aside. The faintest puff of milk-warm air from over the sea stirred on my cheek. ‘Ay, sir, and so with one or two of the rest of them,’ the old man commented, as he watched me, ‘there are other wills than the Almighty’s.’
At this, the pent-up excitement within me broke bounds. This nebulous insinuatory talk! – I all but lost my temper. ‘I can’t, for the life of me, understand what you are saying,’ I exclaimed in a voice that astonished me with its shrill volume of sound in that intense lofty quiet. ‘One doesn’t repair in order to destroy.’
The old man met me without flinching. ‘No, sir? Say you so? And why not? Are there not two kinds of change in this world? – a building-up and a breaking-down? To give strength and endurance for evil or misguided purposes, would that be power wasted, if such was your aim? Why, sir, isn’t that true even of the human mind and heart? We here are on the outskirts, I grant, but where would you expect the enemy to show himself unless in the outer defences? An institution may be beyond saving, sir: it may be being restored for a worse destruction. And a hundred trumpeting voices would make no difference when the faith and life within is tottering to its fall.’
Somehow, this muddle of metaphors reassured me. Obviously the old man’s wits had worn a little thin: he was the victim of an intelligible but monstrous hallucination.
‘And yet you are taking it for granted,’ I expostulated, ‘that, if what you say is true, a stranger could be of the slightest help. A visitor – mind you – who hasn’t been inside the doors of a church, except in search of what is old and obsolete, for years.’
The old man laid a trembling hand upon my sleeve. The folly of it – with my shoes hanging like ludicrous millstones round my neck!
‘If you please, sir,’ he pleaded, ‘have a little patience with me. I’m preaching at nobody. I’m not even hinting that them outside the fold circumstantially speaking aren’t of the flock. All in good time, sir; the Almighty’s time. Maybe – with all due respect – it’s from them within we have most to fear. And indeed, sir, believe an old man: I could never express the gratitude I feel. You have given me the occasion to unbosom myself, to make a clean breast, as they say. All Hallows is my earthly home, and – well, there, let us say no more. You couldn’t help me – except only by your presence here. God alone knows who can!’
At that instant, a dull enormous rumble reverberated from within the building – as if a huge boulder or block of stone had been shifted or dislodged in the fabric; a peculiar grinding nerve-wracking sound. And for the fraction of a second the flags on which we stood seemed to tremble beneath our feet.
The fingers tightened on my arm. ‘Come, sir; keep close; we must be gone at once’ the quavering old voice whispered; ‘we have stayed too long.’
But we emerged into the night at last without mishap. The little western door, above which the grinning head had welcomed me on my arrival, admitted us to terra firma again, and we made our way up a deep sandy track, bordered by clumps of hemp agrimony and fennel and hemlock, with viper’s bugloss and sea-poppy blooming in the gentle dusk of night at our feet. We turned when we reached the summit of this sandy incline and looked back. All Hallows, vague and enormous, lay beneath us in its hollow, resembling some natural prehistoric outcrop of that sea-worn rockbound coast; but strangely human and saturnine.
The air was mild as milk – a pool of faintest sweetnesses – gorse, bracken, heather; and not a rumour disturbed its calm, except only the furtive and stertorous sighings of the tide. But far out to sea and beneath the horizon summer lightnings were now in idle play – flickering into the sky like the unfolding of a signal, planet to planet – then gone. That alone, and perhaps too this feeble moonlight glinting on the ancient glass, may have accounted for the faint vitreous glare that seemed ever and again to glitter across the windows of the northern transept far beneath us. And yet how easily deceived is the imagination. This old man’s talk still echoing in my ear, I could have vowed this was no reflection but the glow of some light shining fitfully from within outwards.
We paused together beside a flowering bush of fuchsia at the wicket-gate leading into his small square of country garden. ‘You’ll forgive me, sir, for mentioning it; but I make it a rule as far as possible to leave all my troubles and misgivings outside when I come home. My daughter is a widow, and not long in that sad condition, so I keep as happy a face as I can on things. And yet: well, sir, I wonder at times if – if a personal sacrifice isn’t incumbent on them that have their object most at heart. I’d go out myself very willingly, sir, I can assure you, if there was any certainty in my mind that it would serve the cause. It would be little to me if —’ He made no attempt to complete the sentence.
On my way to bed, that night, the old man led me in on tiptoe to show me his grandson. His daughter watched me intently as I stooped over the child’s cot – with that bird-like solicitude which all mothers show in the presence of a stranger.
Her small son was of that fairness which almost suggests the unreal. He had flung back his bedclothes – as if innocence in this world needed no covering or defence – and lay at ease, the dews of sleep on lip, cheek, and forehead. He was breathing so quietly that not the least movement of shoulder or narrow breast was perceptible.
‘The lovely thing!’ I muttered, staring at him. ‘Where is he now, I wonder?’ His mother lifted her face and smiled at me with a drowsy ecstatic happiness, then sighed.
And from out of the distance, there came the first prolonged whisper of a wind from over the sea. It was eleven by my watch, the storm after the long heat of the day seemed to be drifting inland; but All Hallows, apparently, had forgotten to wind its clock.
A RECLUSE
Which of the world’s wiseacres, I wonder, was responsible for the aphorism that ‘the best things in life are to be found at its edges’? It is too vague, of course. So much depends on what you mean by the ‘best’ and the ‘edges’. And in any case most of us prefer the central. It has been explored; it is safe; you know where you are; it has been amply, copiously corroborated. But, ‘Amusing? Well, hardly. Quite so!’ as my friend Mr Bloom would have said. But then, Mr Bloom has now ventured over the ‘borderline’.
He is, I imagine, interested in edges no longer.
I have been reminded of him again – as if there were any need of it! – by an advertisement in The Times. It announces that his house, which he had himself renamed Montrésor, is for sale by auction – ‘This singularly charming freehold Residential Property … in all about thirty-eight acres … the Matured Pleasure Grounds of unusual Beauty’. I don’t deny it. But was it quite discreet to describe the house as imposing? A pair of slippers in my possession prompts this query. But how answer it? It is important in such matters to be clear and precise, and, alas, all that I can say about Mr Bloom can be only vague and inconclusive. As, indeed, in some respects he was.
It was an afternoon towards the end of May – a Thursday. I had been to see a friend who, after a long illness, seemed now to be creeping back into the world again. We sat and talked for a while. Smiling, whispering, he lay propped up upon his pillows, gaunt and deathly, his eyes fixed on the green branches beyond his window, and that bleak hungry look on his face one knows so well. But when we fell silent, and his nurse looked covertly round the door and nodded her head at me, I rose with an almost indecent readiness, clasped his cold, damp, bony hand in mine, and said good-bye. ‘You look miles better,’ I assured him again and again.
It is a relief to leave a sick room – to breathe freely again aft
er that fumy and stagnant atmosphere. The medicine bottles, the stuffiness, the hush, the dulcet optimism, the gauche self-consciousness. I even found myself softly whistling as I climbed back into my cosy two-seater again. A lime-tree bower her garage was: the flickering leafy evening sunshine gilded the dust on her bonnet. I released the brake; she leapt to life.
And what wonder? Flora and her nymphs might at any moment turn the corner of this sequestered country road. I felt adventurous. It would be miserably unenterprising to go back by the way I had come. I would just chance my way home.
Early evening is, with daybreak, May’s most seductive hour; and how entrancing is any scene on earth after even a fleeting glance into the valley of shadows – the sun-striped, looping, wild-flowered lanes, the buttercup hollows, the parsleyed nooks and dusky coppices, the amorous birds and butterflies. But nothing lovely can long endure. The sickly fragrance of the hawthorns hinted at that. Drowsy, lush, tepid, inexhaustible – an English evening.
And as I bowled idly on, I overtook a horseman. So far as I can see he has nothing whatever to do with what came after – no more, at most, than my poor thin-nosed, gasping friend. I put him in only because he put himself in. And in an odd way too. For at first sight (and at a distance) I had mistaken the creature for a bird – a large, strange, ungainly bird. It was the cardboard box he was carrying accounted for that.
Many shades lighter than his clothes and his horse, it lay on his back cornerwise, suspended about his neck with a piece of cord. As he trotted along he bumped in the saddle, and his box bumped too. Meanwhile, odd mechanical creature, he beat time to these bumpings on his animal’s shoulder-blade with the little leafy switch poised between his fingers. I glanced up into his face as I passed him – a greyish, hairy, indefinite face, like a miller’s. To mistake a cardboard box for a bird! He amused me. I burst out laughing; never dreaming but that he was gone for ever.
Two or three miles further on, after passing a huddle of tumbledown cottages and a duck-pond, I caught my first glimpse of Mr Bloom’s house – of Montrésor. And I defy anybody with eyes in his head to pass that house unheeded. The mere quiet diffident looks of it brought me instantly to a standstill. ‘Imposing’!
And as I sat on, looking in on it through its high wrought-iron gates, I heard presently the hollow thump of a horse’s hoofs in the muffling dust behind me. Even before I glanced over my shoulder, I knew what I should see – my man on horseback. These narrow lanes – he must have taken a short cut.
There rode a Miller on a horse,
A jake on a jackass could do no worse –
With a Hey, and a Hey, lollie, lo!
Meal on his chops and his whiskers too –
The devil sowed tares, where the tare-crop grew –
With a Hey, and a Hey, lollie, lo!
Up he bumped, down he bumped, and his leafy switch kept time. When he drew level, I twisted my head and yelled up at him a question about the house. He never so much as paused. He merely lowered that indiscriminately hairy face of his a few inches nearer me, opened his mouth, and flung up his hand with the switch. Perhaps the poor fellow was dumb; his rawboned horse had coughed, as if in sympathy. But, dumb or not, his gesture had clearly intimated – though with unnecessary emphasis – that Montrésor wasn’t worth asking questions about, that I had better ‘move on’. And, naturally, it increased my interest. I watched him out of sight. Why, as I say, I have mentioned him I scarcely know, except that for an instant there he was, at those gates – Mr Bloom’s – gates from which Mr Bloom himself was so soon to depart. When he was completely gone and the dust of him had settled, I turned to enjoy another look at the house – a protracted look too.
To all appearance it was vacant; but if so, it could not have been vacant long. The drive was sadly in need of weeding; though the lawns had been recently mown. High-grown forest trees towered round about it, overtopping its roof – chiefly chestnuts, their massive lower branches drooping so close to the turf they almost brushed its surface. They were festooned from crown to root with branching candelabra-like spikes of blossom. Now it was daylight; but imagine them on a still, pitch-black night, their every twig upholding a tiny, phosphoric cluster of tapers!
Not that Montrésor (or rather what of its façade was in view) was an old or even in itself a very beautiful house. It must have been built about 1750 and at second sight was merely of pleasing proportions. And then one looked again, and it looked back – with a furtive reticence as if it were withholding itself from any direct scrutiny behind its widespread blossoming chestnut trees. ‘We could if we would,’ said its windows, as do certain human faces; though no doubt the queer gesture and the queerer looks of my cardboard-boxed gentleman on horseback accounted for something of its effect.
A thin haze of cloud had spread over the sky, paling its blue. The sun had set. And a diffused light hung over walls and roof. It suited the house – as powder may suit a pale face. Even nature appeared to be condoning these artifices – the hollow lawns, the honeyed azaleas.
How absurd are one’s little hesitations. All this while I had been debating whether to approach nearer on foot or to drive boldly in. I chose the second alternative, with the faint notion in my mind perhaps that it would ensure me, if necessary, a speedier retreat. But then, premonitions are apt to display themselves a little clearer in retrospect! Anyhow, if I had walked up to the house, that night would not have been spent with Mr Bloom. But no, the house looked harmless enough, and untenanted. I pushed open the gates and, gliding gently in under the spreading chestnut trees towards the entrance, again came to a standstill.
A wide, low, porte-cochère, supported by slender stone columns, sheltered the beautiful doorway. The metalwork of its fanlight, like that of the gates, was adorned with the device of a pelican feeding her young. The owner’s crest, no doubt. But in spite of the simplicity of the porch, it was not in keeping, and may have been a later addition to the house. Its hollow echoings stilled, I sat on in the car, idly surveying the scene around me, and almost without conscious thought of it. What state of mind can be more serene – or more active?
No notice whatever seemed to have been taken of my intrusion. Silence, silence remained. Indeed, in spite of the abundant cover around me, there was curiously little bird-song – only a far-away thrush calling faintly, ‘Ahoy! ahoy! ahoy! Come to tea! Come to tea!’ And after all it was the merry month of May, and still early. But near at hand, not even a wren shrilled. So presently I got out of the car, and mooned off to the end of the shallow, stone-vased terrace, stepping deliberately from tuft to tuft of grass and moss. Only a dense shrubbery beyond: yew, ilex, holly; a dampish winding walk. But on this – the western aspect of the house – there showed faded blinds to the windows, and curtains too – bleached by numberless sunsets, but still rich and pleasant in colour.
What few live things may have spied out the intruder had instantly withdrawn. I sighed, and turned away. The forsaken pierces quicker to the heart than by way of the mind. My green-winged car looked oddly out of place – even a little homesick – under the porch. She was as grey with dust as were my odd horseman’s whiskers. I had come to the conclusion – quite wrongly – that for the time being, at least, the place was unoccupied; though possibly at any moment caretaker or housekeeper might appear.
Indeed, my foot was actually on the step of the car, when, as if at a definite summons, I turned my head and discovered not only that the door was now open, but that a figure – Mr Bloom’s – was standing a pace or so beyond the threshold, his regard steadily fixed on me. Mr Bloom – a memorable figure. He must have been well over six feet in height, but he carried his heavy head and heavy shoulders with a pronounced stoop. He was both stout and fat, and yet his clothes now hung loosely upon him, as if made to old measurements – a wide, black morning-coat and waistcoat, and brown cloth trousers. I noticed in particular his elegant boots. They were adorned with what I had supposed was an obsolete device – imitation laces. A well-cut pair of boots,
nonetheless, by a good maker. His head was bald on the crown above a fine lofty forehead – but it wore a superfluity of side hair, and his face was bushily bearded. With chin drawn up a little, he was surveying me from under very powerful magnifying spectacles, his left hand resting on the inside handle of the door.
He had taken me so much by surprise that for the moment I was speechless. We merely looked at one another; he, with a more easily justifiable intentness than I. He seemed, as the saying goes, to be sizing me up; to be fitting me in; and it was his voice that at length set the porch echoing again – a voice, as might have been inferred from the look of him, sonorous but muffled, as if his beard interfered with its resonance.
‘I see you are interested in the appearance of my house,’ he was saying.
The greeting was courteous enough; and yet extraordinarily impersonal. I made the lamest apologies, adding some trivial comment on the picturesqueness of the scene, and the general ‘evening effects’. But of this I am certain; the one thing uppermost in my mind, even at this stage in our brief acquaintance, was the desire not to continue it. Mr Bloom had somehow exhausted my interest in his house. I wanted to shake him off, to go away. He was an empty-looking man in spite of his domed brow. If his house had suggested vacancy, so did he; and yet – I wonder.
Far from countenancing this inclination, however, he was inviting me not to leave him. He was welcoming the interloper. With a slow comprehensive glance to left and right, he actually stepped out at last under the porch, and – with a peculiar tentative gesture – thrust out a well-kept, fleshy hand in my direction, as if with the intention of putting me entirely at my ease. He then stood solemnly scrutinizing my tiny car, which, with him as solitary passenger, would appear more like a perambulator!
At a loss for any alternative, I withdrew a pace or so, and took another long look at the façade – the blank windows, their red-brick mouldings, the peeping chimney-stacks, the quiet, serene sufficiency of it all. There was, I remember, a sorry little array of half-made, abandoned martins’ nests plastered up under the narrow jutting of the roof. But this craning attitude was fatiguing, and I turned and looked back at Mr Bloom.
Out of the Deep: And Other Supernatural Tales Page 20