After the Dance

by Alan Warner

  He sat down and gazed for a long time at the huge golden cross which dominated the front of the church. The silence was oppressive. It was not at all like the churches at home. There was more ornament, it was less bare, more decorated. The churches at home had little colour and less atmosphere than this. He could feel in his bones the presence of past generations of worshippers, and then he heard the footsteps.

  He turned round to see a man in a black gown walking towards him. There was a belt of rope round his gown and his hands could not be seen as they seemed to be folded inside his gown. The face was pale and ill looking.

  ‘What do you want, my son?’ said the voice in English.

  He was so astonished that he could think of nothing to say. To find a priest speaking English here seemed suddenly nightmarish. For some reason the thought came into his mind of the most macabre sight he had seen in the war, a horse wearing a gas mask. ‘Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came . . . ’

  ‘You are admiring the church?’ said the minister or priest or whatever he was.

  ‘It is very beautiful,’ said Colin, and it seemed to him that his voice was echoing through the church.

  ‘It is very old,’ said the priest. ‘How did you find it?’

  ‘I was walking through the wood and I happened to . . . ’

  ‘Alone? I see,’ said the priest. ‘Would you like to see the rest of it? There is more of it, you know.’

  Colin looked round him uncomprehendingly.

  ‘Oh, it’s down below. There’s a stair that leads downwards. I keep some wine down there, you understand. If you would care for a glass?’

  ‘Well, I . . . ’

  ‘It will only take a minute. I would be glad of the company.’

  ‘If it’s all . . . ’

  ‘Certainly. Please follow me.’

  Colin followed him down some stone steps to what appeared to be a crypt which was lit by candles. The priest walked with his hands folded in front of him as all priests seemed to walk, slow and dignified.

  They arrived at a small room. ‘Here is my bed, you see,’ said the priest. ‘And here . . . ’

  All over the floor, bones were scattered, and there seemed to be an assortment of bloody animal traps.

  ‘Rabbit bones,’ said the priest smiling. ‘Bones of hares. It is not very . . . ’

  ‘You mean you . . . ’

  ‘This is how I live,’ said the priest. ‘I have no bread to offer you, I’m afraid. If you would please sit down?’

  ‘I think I had better . . . ’

  ‘I said please sit down. I shall tell you about myself. I have lived now for a year by myself. Alone. What do you think of that?’ The priest smiled showing blackened teeth. ‘You see, I couldn’t stand it any more.’

  ‘Stand what?’

  ‘The war, of course. I was in the trenches you see. And I couldn’t stand it. I wasn’t intended to be a soldier. I was studying for the ministry and they took me out here. I couldn’t stand the people one got in the trenches. I couldn’t stand the dirt and I couldn’t stand all that dying. What do I live on? I eat rabbits, anything I can find. One morning, you see, I ran away. I didn’t know where I was going. But I knew that I couldn’t stay there any longer. And I found this place. Perhaps God directed me. Who knows? I was frightened that someone would find me. But no one did. I used to hide in the crypt here. But today I felt very alone so I thought I would talk to you. Do you know what it is to be alone? Sometimes I wish to go back but it is impossible now. To hear the sound of one human voice again! One human voice. I needn’t have revealed I was here. If you had been German I wouldn’t have come out. I don’t speak German, you see, not at all. I’m not good at languages, though I did once study Hebrew. Now, shall we go up again?’

  ‘If you wish.’

  ‘I wish to preach. I have never preached. That is something I must do. Shall we go up? If you would go first? I was going to offer you something to eat but I think I should preach first. If you would please sit in the front row. You haven’t brought anyone else with you, have you?’

  Colin preceded him, knowing that he was in the presence of a madman. He sat down in the front seat and prepared to listen. He felt as if he were in a dream but then he had felt like that for a long time since he had taken the train south to join up in the first place.

  The minister went up into the pulpit with great gravity and began to speak:

  ‘I shall not pray because that would mean closing my eyes. God will understand. After all, while I was closing my eyes you might run away. I shall talk about war.

  ‘Dearly beloved,’ he began, his voice growing more resonant, not to say rotund, as he continued:

  ‘May we consider who we are? What we are? When I was young I read books as so many of the young do about the legends of Greece and Rome. I believed in the gods. I believed that we are godlike. My favourite god was Mercury because of his great speed and power. Later my favourite hero was Hector because he was so vulnerable.

  ‘I grew up innocent and hopeful. One night when I was sixteen years old I went to a prayer meeting. A visiting preacher spoke of Christ’s sufferings and his mercy so vehemently, with such transparent passion, that I was transported into that world and I suffered the thorn and the vinegar in the land of Galilee. I thought that I should lay my life at the feet of a merciful God.

  ‘At the age of eighteen I was forced into the army to fight for what they call one’s country. I did not know what this was since my gaze was always directed inward and not outward. I was put among men whom I despised and feared – they fornicated and drank and spat and lived filthily. Yet they were my comrades in arms.

  ‘I was being shot at by strangers. I was up to my knees in green slime. I was harassed by rats. I entered trenches to find the dead buried in the walls. Once, however, on a clear starry night at Christmas time we had a truce. This lasted into the following day. We – Germans and English – showed each other our photographs, though I had none. We, that is, the others, played football. And at the end of it a German officer came up to us and said: “You had better get back to your dugouts: we are starting a barrage at 1300 hours.” He consulted his watch and we went back to our trenches after we had shaken hands with each other.

  ‘One day I could bear no more of the killing and I ran away. And I came here, Lord. And now I should like to say something to you, Lord. I was never foolish enough to think that I understood your ways. Nevertheless I thought you were on the side of the good and the innocent. Now I no longer believe so. You may strike me dead with your lightning – I invite you to do so – but I think that will not happen. All these years, Lord, you have cheated me. You in your immense absence.’ He paused a moment as if savouring the phrase. ‘Your immense absence. As for me, I have been silent for a year without love, without hope. I have lived like an animal, I who was willing to give my all to you. Lord, do you know what it is to be alone? For in order to live we need language and human beings.

  ‘I think, Lord, that I hate you. I hate you for inventing the world and then abandoning it. I hate you because you have not intervened to save the world.

  ‘I hate you because you are as indifferent as the generals. I hate you because of my weakness.

  ‘I hate you, God, because of what you have done to mankind.’

  He stopped and looked at Colin as if he were asking him, Am I a good preacher or not?

  ‘You have said,’ said Colin after a long time, ‘exactly what I would have said. I have no wish to . . . ’

  ‘Betray me? But you are an officer. It is your duty. What else can you do?’

  He looked at Colin from the pulpit and for the first time his hands came out from beneath the gown. They were holding a gun.

  In the moment before the gun was fired Colin was thinking: How funny all this is. How comical. Here I am in a church which is not like my own church with the golden cross and the effigy of the Virgin in front of me. Here I am, agreeing with everything he says. And it seemed to him for a moment
as if the gold cross wavered slightly in the blast of the gun. But that might have been an illusion. In any case it was very strange to die in that way, so far from home, and not even on the battlefield. It was so strange that he almost died of the puzzle itself before the bullet hit him and spun him around in the wooden pew.

  The Prophecy

  I may say at the very beginning of this story that I am a very worried man for it had never occurred to me before that what is up there or somewhere around may very well be a joker. In fact to be perfectly honest I hadn’t believed that there was anything much around at all. Some years ago I came to live in this village in Scotland (I am by the way an Englishman and my name is Wells). I have no connection at all with the Highlands: I am not an alien exploiter either. I am just a man who like others was fed up of the rat race as it is called reasonably correctly. In fact I am (or perhaps was) a psychologist. I am not very much now. Brilliance in psychology as in everything else belongs to a youth of energy and fire and by leaving the rat race I suppose I was signalling those days were over for me even though I thought of myself somewhat in the manner of those Chinese exiles from court who used to drink wine and write little poems in the cold mountains while they gazed at the road they would never travel again. I am also unmarried.

  I worked in a university and quite frankly I got tired. If you wish to know what I got tired of I will tell you. I became enraged, literally enraged, by the contradictions which I saw in people’s personalities every day and which they seemed implacably to be unaware of. Let me give you one or two instances. One man I knew was always talking of ‘professional behaviour’ and yet at the same time he was the worst, most consistently destructive and rabid gossip I have ever seen. Another, a hard drinker, lectured on alcoholism as the manifestation of ultimate weakness. Another, a so-called devotee of pure research, was leaping on to the barbaric bandwagon of the quick Penguin for the masses.

  I became obsessed by this gap between the spoken word and the reality of the personality. I was losing my balance. I found that I was checking myself continually against my own standard of consistency and in doing so making myself more and more vulnerable. In other words I was coming to the conclusion that these contradictions are necessary to life and that he who sets out deliberately to erase them is in fact destroying himself. I found in other words that there is an enmity between consistency and life. This discovery was so shattering that for a long time I was incapable of working at all. For if this were true then an attempt to seek consistency and truth was in fact suicidal. Many nights I have sat staring at a book completely oblivious of my surroundings, and when I woke up from my daydream I found that I was still at the same page. The discovery I had made seemed to me utterly shattering. My mind roamed pitilessly in all directions. It seemed to me quite clear for instance that Christ was both violent and peaceful in his nature and that theologians in trying to eliminate the one in order to reinforce the other so as to create a perfectly consistent being without flaw were, in fact, being false to reality. Life is not reasonable, to live is to be inconsistent. To be consistent is to cease to live. That was the logical converse.

  Now, however it happened, I thought that I should try and find a place where there would be a greater simplicity than I had been used to and that there I would be able to test this new theory. In fact what of course had happened was very simple. My energy and fire had run out and I was merely escaping. That was the truth I was disguising in terms of my research and my love of truth. I understand perfectly why my love of truth is so great. I was brought up by possessive parents who married late and each day I was trying to justify myself to their unlimited love and pride. Never would it be possible for any human being to do that – to fill that gap with the continual victories of the virtuoso – but this did not mean that it was possible for me to stop trying. It was this hunger for justification that destroyed me. For it is clear to me now that an excessive consciousness is bound to be at the mercy of the mediocre and the satisfied. An immense hunger for truth and consistency is rare and cannot by its nature lead to happiness. Most men do not by a privileged mercy see their own contradictions. Gandhi was peaceful to the world but aggressive to his family. So was Tolstoy. Both these men among many others were impaled on the impossible attempt to make life consistent and truthful. This is impossible precisely because truth is abstract and static and life flows ceaselessly like a river.

  I arrived therefore in this village, in this country, the Highlands. I didn’t know very much of the Highlands when I came. Naturally I could appreciate its scenery, but scenery after all is only a reflection of the psyche. There were hills, lochs, rivers, broken fences and roads. It looked like a land to which much had been done, adversely. It looked a lonely land without sophistication or riches. It echoed with ghosts and waterfalls. It looked a broken land. And it suited me because that was what I was myself, a broken man. Quite literally, I was a signpost pointing nowhere. It wasn’t, I suppose, at all extraordinary that the Highlanders accepted me or at least didn’t show any hostility. I used to go out fishing and they would tell me the best bait. I was shown how to cut my own peats. I even used to tar and felt my own roof. All these things I learned from them. I imagine that what I was doing was using my psychological techniques so that they would like me. I took care not to offend them. The only thing was I never went to church but strangely enough they accepted that too on the grounds that a man must be loyal to his own church and since mine was presumably the Church of England I couldn’t be expected to betray it simply because I had put a number of miles between it and myself.

  I studied these people and their history. I knew what had made them and what they had become. I recognised their secretiveness and the reason for it. I sensed the balance of forces which is necessary to keep a village together. I recognised the need for rivalry between villagers. I was dimly aware of the vast spaces of their past and how they must be occupied. I noticed the economic differentiation between men and women. I was aware of the hidden rancours and joys. After all I had been a psychologist. These things were child’s play to me. I learned their language and read their books and poems. I had plenty of time to read and I read a lot. The local schoolmaster came to visit me.

  And this is what happened. Now I am ready to tell my story and I am sure that you must appreciate that it is a very odd one.

  This schoolmaster was a very odd psychological type. He was immersed in his children, I mean his pupils. He believed that his ideal work, what he was destined for, was to be among them. He was really rather a child himself with his rosy face and his impermeable surfaces. I could see what had happened to him, but after all that is the terror with which a psychologist must live, to see the gestures and know their real value and weight and meaning, to track a joke to its stinking lair. The schoolmaster was in fact one of the few people I could really talk to on a certain level since he had in fact read a little though in no sense deeply. Still he was useful to me since he knew a great deal of the lore and literature of the people, though of course not profoundly, being himself still inside that lore.

  One night we had a long discussion about predestination. It was disordered and random and without penetration. My mind had lost its edge and wandered vaguely round the edges of the real problem like someone who roams round a field at night. I knew that my mind had lost its edge and its conviction and it disturbed me. I knew that my mind was not powerful enough to make a proper analysis of such a concept though in relation to his it was in fact the mind of a giant. We drank much sherry since the schoolmaster would not drink whisky. I was sick of myself and only half listening when suddenly he said, ‘What do you think of this? Many years ago, in fact it must be over a hundred years ago, we had a prophet here who made some odd prophecies.’

  ‘And how many of them have come true?’ I said indifferently, purely automatically.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘it is rather difficult to say. They are set in such mysterious terms. For instance, he said that when the river ate t
he land stones would be raised. Some people think this refers to the storm of last year when that big wall was built.’

  Mechanically, I said, ‘That could be expected, surely, in a place which gets so much rain as this. I wouldn’t place much reliance on that.’ And I poured myself another sherry.

  Anyway he told me some more of his mysterious sayings but only one stayed in my mind. There is a reason for this which I did not see at the time but which will appear later.

  This saying went something like this: ‘When the wood is raised at the corner then wills will crash.’

  In my befuddled state I couldn’t make any sense of this, especially the last part. The first part could refer to a wooden building and the corner was a clear enough sign since there is a place at the end of the village called the Corner but as for the second part I was bemused. I said to him and I remember this clearly, ‘Surely that must really be “Wills will clash”, not “crash”.’

  ‘That’s how it has come down to us,’ he said looking at me. And that was that. I was sure that there had been an error in the manuscript or whatever and later found out that the manuscript if it had existed no longer did so. For that matter, perhaps the man had never existed at all. The schoolmaster however was very sure of the prophet’s existence and talked of him as a strange being who lived by himself, wore a beard and walked about in a dream most of the time.

  Anyway, the night passed and the schoolmaster went home and I went to bed half thinking about the phrase ‘Wills will crash’ and pretty certain that the word should have been ‘clash’. Otherwise the whole thing didn’t make any sense and naturally I wanted it to make sense. After all that was what I was, a man who wanted to make sense of things. I slept a dreamless sleep but when I woke up in the morning I was still thinking of this saying. I am sure it would have passed smoothly into my mind leaving no trace if it hadn’t contained what I considered to be a semantic inexactitude. I worried at it but could make no further sense of it. I tried to find out more about the prophet’s sayings but could discover little about him, no more in fact than the schoolmaster had told me. As it was winter time I had time on my hands and pursued my investigations and came up with a blank. It was at this point that the idea came to me, as Relativity must have come to Einstein.