The Sending

by Geoffrey Household

  When the Oxford term is over she retires there among her books. Sometimes she tells me about her research and asks my advice. She won’t take my ‘I don’t know’ for an answer and says that I am part of the land and aware by instinct of what my far ancestors would have thought. She insists that history is not about events but about what people thought— baron or yeoman or serf—and that the original sources have a value beyond the happenings which the author describes; they reveal the sort of mind he had and thus the sort of mind his contemporaries had. When I consider the masters of my craft I understand what she means. To know the man one must appreciate not only what he painted but what he wanted to paint and couldn’t—couldn’t because his vision was limited by the thought of his time.

  Suppose my Holy Well exists in five hundred years (I’ll guarantee the colours won’t fade) the painter who studies it will see what I was trying to do and will observe that I failed because I lived in an age drowned in too sudden a flood of material knowledge. So my mysticism will seem a reasonable and perhaps lovely shot at what to him is proved and established fact.

  But this is by the way. I am avoiding what was painful: the keeping of my secret from Rita.

  ‘You aren’t ill, Alfgif, are you?’ she asked.

  ‘Meg says I am not.’

  I let her loose. She started to climb Rita’s long leg—a desirable ladder—and was gently removed.

  ‘And what do you say?’

  ‘I may be pregnant with a painting.’

  ‘You are not worried by your own perception?’

  ‘There’s nothing mysterious about me at all.’

  ‘Isn’t there? Your family has lived here since Plantagenet days. Instead of coming home you stay on in India. And when you do come home you decide to be a painter and not a landowner.’

  I pointed out that we had owned the land for only three hundred years. Before that we were tenants of the Bishopric of Salisbury. She told me not to interrupt.

  ‘You have a fey relationship with animals,’ she went on. ‘You go about with Paddy’s familiar, and Paddy as everyone knows was a sort of faith healer for horses.’

  ‘He wasn’t a faith healer. He didn’t glide round with a pious expression laying on hands. He just knew a lot about horses and what makes them tick.’

  ‘And took good care not to be mysterious. So do you.’

  Meg, ecstatic with the moonlight, was dancing, mostly in leaps and circles and arching her caterpillar body, but sometimes taking a turn or two on her hind legs.

  ‘She looks as if she were dancing with someone,’ Rita said.

  ‘I don’t know whom she dances with.’

  ‘Would you expect to? Three hundred years ago, dear tenant of the Bishop of Salisbury, you’d have been burnt at the stake and Paddy too.’

  Witchcraft, yes. Some of our old farmers and farm hands would nod and wink without mentioning the word, but knowing very well that ancient medical and other knowledge is not wholly lost. Example: old Bill Freeman who can undoubtedly cure warts.

  Penminster, stuck to its car and its telly, laughs at such silly superstitions but has faith in flying saucers, doctor’s pills, the remains of myth, comforting or cruel, in the church services, and in herbalists who are not nearly so effective as a shaman because they omit the hypnotic dancing. Animals? If you want to understand them you must never forget that you are one. That is a built-in assumption of primitive man and an absurdity to the civilised, with a few exceptions like Paddy. He had only to hold out his hand with a few crumbs in the palm for any small bird to settle on it. I could not conceivably do that and I have never known anyone else who could.

  Witchcraft in Europe must have preserved some empirical knowledge of the control of mind over matter, or at least mind over mind, and assumed that all life is much the same. That was the belief of my blood brother. Though he himself offered praise to the Purpose by different rites he would have understood why a priest in a different environment attired himself in deerskin, horns and a tail—that gentle, dancing, herbivorous creature to whom the early Christian missionaries gave the title of the devil.

  Something of the sort I said to Rita. She replied that the Greeks did not consider Pan, that older incarnate God, as gentle. What about the word Panic?

  I wonder now if she could have meant more than she said. Could she have got a lead from Gargary and then, knowing me so well, suspected some hallucination due to …to what? If so, she is wrong. If I were to imagine I saw Pan I should not be in the least afraid. I should welcome him with the raised arms of worship as the saviour and interpreter of this Fear which is meant to preserve me and is killing me.

  Chapter Three

  June 12

  THE WORST HAS HAPPENED. Meg now is ill. She dances no more but mopes, eating only from habit and not from enjoyment; she tires quickly of her elf-like flittings and her explorations of every hole, cranny and skirting board. Oddest and most affecting is that she continually comes to me for comfort, sleeping in her pocket, gratefully nibbling the hand. Thank God it does not mean that she is receiving the Fear. If she were, she would back away from me like the vixen.

  Being sure of that, I called in George Midwinter. He said that so far as he could tell—having only experience of ferrets—there was nothing wrong with her. He could only recommend a change of diet. I should try letting her kill her own food in her own way.

  I didn’t confess that I had tried that, for I was a little ashamed of loosing two rabbits and a hen where they could not possibly escape from her. She showed no interest.

  ‘What would Paddy have done?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t know. Accepted that we all must die, I suppose.’

  ‘It’s as bad as that?’

  ‘Meg is getting on.’

  ‘Meg will die in a leap, a stab, a flash,’ I told him, ‘or killed clean.’

  ‘Well—if you know.’

  ‘Feel, not know, George. Anything so vividly, intensely alive cannot rot away like us.’

  ‘Can you still get what you called your temperature readings?’

  I answered that I had not tried, and that anyway I did not know how to use Meg for diagnosis. I only saw that it could be done, which George himself had admitted.

  ‘Any success was due to Paddy more than Meg,’ he said, ‘but Meg somehow tuned him in.’

  A good phrase and true. George left me obsessed by Paddy. I had to know still more about him. It seemed to me that the right source would be another practitioner of inexplicable folk medicine. I decided to call on Bill Freeman, the wart healer.

  I knew him but had never been to his cottage before. It lies to the west under the shadow of the downs, all alone at the start of a bridle path worn down by pack horses and the passing of herds, deep as a green river bed. I think it may once have been an ale-house for the drovers, and it still has a welcoming air under its thick thatch.

  Bill is a little man of about sixty with a small head on a slim body and a narrow, rather puritanical face relieved by a pleasant smile. His wife looks more like the conventional idea of a witch. She is dwarfish, sharp and eccentric with dirty grey hair hanging down in ringlets and, I suspect, some gipsy blood. She has a wide knowledge of herbs; they seemed violent remedies to judge by what she told me—expectorates, ointments, aperients and so forth, mostly containing sulphur. No familiar. Far from it. Her pair of tabby cats were abused for kitchen thieving, egg stealing and leaving kittens about. The relationship was armed neutrality on both sides.

  They greeted me with marked respect. I guessed that this was due to Meg and remembered how old Farrar had asked me to have a word with Bill about his cat and how I had wondered what else besides Meg I was supposed to have inherited. At first I led the conversation to Paddy, feeling that he might have taught Bill his art, though the curing of warts was not at all up Paddy’s street. As Rita had said, he was at pains not to be mysterio
us and to be known only as an unofficial horse doctor with a curious pet.

  Reminiscences of Paddy led naturally to George Midwinter and Farrar’s doomed cat.

  ‘It’s a ’ard job and prayerful,’ Bill said, ‘but that evil thing is smaller than t’were.’

  I congratulated him as if his report were all in the day’s work, hiding my surprise at the way he had put it. Then I told him how Meg had lost all spirit with nothing obviously wrong, adding that I was sure her trouble was not old age. Again Bill’s essential and unexpected Christianity came out.

  ‘You’ve been given a gift for the beasts, Mr Alfgif, and know that they ain’t no better than the rest of us. So I reckon that if there’s no earthly help we’ll both pray for ’er as we would for a Christian. “Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing,”’ he quoted, ‘“and one of them shall not fall to the ground without your Father.”’

  Though I find it hard to define my religion the farthing’s worth of sparrows belongs in it, provided that for Father I may substitute the Purpose, thus admitting the universal power of prayer but begging the question of identity.

  Bill had now gone so far in accepting me that I could risk a direct question.

  ‘Is that how you cure warts?’

  ‘It’s my gift, Mr Alfgif, like old Paddy’s and maybe yours. And as warts is alive there ain’t no difference except that you cures and I kills.’

  ‘But how do you kill?’

  ‘You ain’t the first that ’as asked me that, and I can only tell you like I told Dr Gargary that I just thinks about ’em and they goes.’

  ‘Who taught you?’

  ‘Grandmother—she learned me. But never you go out to others, she said, let them as knows about it come to you! Don’t you talk about it and don’t you never take money for it! And you know who learned ’er?’

  I didn’t and said so.

  ‘Not your grandfather Alfgif, but your great-great-grandfather who was Alfgif too. Her ’usband was ’is shepherd.’

  By tradition the Saxon name has always skipped a generation. My father Henry, for example, was a much loved man, a pillar of the district, a magistrate and churchwarden, with his depths as honest and simple as the surface. My grandfather, Alfgif, was an immensely successful farmer and stockbreeder. It was said of him that he had only to look at a bull calf to see that its progeny would be prize dairy cows. There must have been some vision in him beyond the good eye for a beast of an experienced farmer. Great-grandfather I know very little about; he died young. And now here’s great-great-grandfather, Alfgif, curing warts and handing on his skill to the wife of one of his men. It’s curious. Can there be a gene responsible for this insight which skips a generation?

  These ancient villages around Penminster still keep a memory of so much that I never knew or that passed clean over my head as a boy. That’s what happens when a man pulls up his roots and chooses to serve a foreign government rather than his home. Paddy, now I come to think of it, must have known all this history very well, but never talked to me about it beyond a few references to my grandfather. It’s as if I had been on probation.

  Bill Freeman’s power of prayer or meditation interested me. I did not dare to tell him of what would be too terrible and complex for his simplicity, but I did ask him if he could cure sickness of the mind.

  ‘Not in myself or others, Mr Alfgif. That’s for a minister of religion, that is, and God be thanked for him!’

  ‘And what would happen if you tried to kill anything larger than a wart by thinking about it?’

  ‘I reckon nothing would happen, not if the creature was innocent as them sparrows. And t’would be a sin. Straight evil that would be.’

  The more I expand his thought, the more I see that he is right. Go back to the beasts, for example. If the tiger could kill its prey merely by thinking about it instead of using skill, cunning and muscle, it would be a denial of the whole Purpose. In fact, evil.

  Evil exists all right. It is here in the room where I sit. But it is a cloud, not a joyous creation of horns and hooves which would have pity on Meg and me.

  I am tormented. I cannot help either of us. I ought to grow accustomed to this unseen hound of hell as one gets used to pain, but I never do. When it is more than usually threatening I try to hide in any small space in the dark. A little ancestral mammal taking refuge in a hole? I have even cleaned a cupboard under the stairs so that there is room for me, and made the excuse to Ginny that I need a dry spot for legal and family documents.

  I don’t think Ginny suspects anything. Thank God my father made for her a cosy little flat in the old stable block so that she is completely independent. In the mornings when she is cleaning I can pretend to be busy in the studio, and in the evenings she is in the kitchen preparing a meal. I force myself never to miss our daily chat by which she sets great store. I too used to enjoy it for she is as good a source of news as the local paper—indeed rather better, being unperturbed by the threat of libel.

  Such healthy, earthy gossip! All this modern yap of permissiveness is a thing of urban middle classes. We have been magnanimously permissive round here since England was England; we only pretend to be shocked. In such a common-sense society, accustomed to accept enigmas in persons and houses as normal, whispers are out of character except among schoolchildren. Paddy, the town saddler, was a familiar figure who fitted his slot in country life. As for me, I am none the worse for the centuries-old reputation of the Hollastons as a funny lot. Yet to the outer world we are mysteries, not to be taken simply.

  Yesterday brought the oddest proof yet. I was pretending to myself that I was working in the garden while Meg slept in the sun, soundly enough to interest a hungry crow. In full form she would have had a leg off that fellow for daring to swoop over so close. A car drove up to the front door and I went to meet the unknown caller—a fair-haired chap with one of those slightly wizened, smiling horseman’s faces.

  ‘Excuse me!’ he began. ‘Am I speaking to Colonel Hollaston?’

  I have never used the title of colonel, which proved, first, that he was a stranger to the district and, second, that he had taken the trouble to look up my past.

  When he found I was the right man he introduced himself as von Pluwig, giving me the impression that he thought I would recognise the name. He was evidently German, though his English was near perfect. He apologised very courteously for his call and said he believed I had Mr Gadsden’s famous Meg. I agreed that I had, jumping to a conjecture that he could be a zoologist or park director who wanted to breed polecats from her—which might be good for her health.

  ‘I wonder if Mr Gadsden ever spoke to you about my stable of Hanoverians at Hildesheim?’

  No, I said, he had not. He was a close and dear friend, but I had little knowledge of horses and so we rarely talked about his business.

  ‘He used to stay with me occasionally.’

  ‘Yes, he once mentioned that he was going over to Germany and asked me to look after Meg. He was a wonderful craftsman and it’s extraordinary how his reputation spread from this little town.’

  ‘He was greatly respected by his friends in Germany.’

  I wondered how he knew of Meg’s existence, for Paddy never took her abroad since she would be clapped into quarantine on return.

  Von Pluwig, not surprisingly, seemed embarrassed by my lack of response. So to put him at his ease I asked if Paddy made the saddles for his Hanoverians.

  ‘No. But his understanding of horses was really remarkable.’

  ‘And he talked to you about Meg?’

  ‘Yes, indeed. And twice I met her when Mr Gadsden was kind enough to accompany me to hunter sales and give me his advice. Well, I am glad she has such a good home. May you both be happy in your—’ he hesitated for a word ‘your communion.’

  He drove off, after mentioning that two of his horses would be jumping at Wembley next week in t
he International Horse Show, and that if I were free and wanted tickets for any day I had only to telephone him at his hotel.

  This visit makes sense. Obviously Paddy had gone to Hildesheim as an unofficial veterinary consultant. An equine psychiatrist I think one might call him. And I, as the possessor of Meg, was supposed to have inherited Paddy’s skill.

  In all this there is nothing whatever supernatural; nor is there anything supernatural in Freeman’s curing of warts. He kills them by thinking about them, he says. Granted action of mind at a distance, his ‘thinking’ is as straight an attack as X-rays—which themselves were incredible magic one week and established scientific fact the next. But can such action be granted? Well, the biologists are sufficiently convinced to experiment. And chess masters, in spite of their closed mathematical minds, seem to accept that logical thought can be endangered by observers watching too intently.

  As for humanity in general, it has no doubt that telepathy exists. Action of mind on mind with a wall between them, or face to face as in hypnosis, is pretty well proved. Action at a distance of many miles seems less credible—not that I doubt for a moment the miracle of the centurion’s servant. But how does the sender establish the identity and position in space of the target? And since some form of energy must be involved, where does he get the power? My blood brother could at once have answered that last question if put to him in his own terms. Power is generated by dancing and the trance.

  Am I then to exhaust myself into trance in order to return Meg to the Purpose of polecats? Or can I do it no less efficiently by prayer, as Bill Freeman says? Well, unconsciously I could pray for her by using the only power I have. I shall try to paint her deep in the wood where in nature she would live.

  June 16

  At first it was impossible. She would not move except for the sharp muzzle questing here and there for the joy once known, like a snake in its spring resurrection. For two days all I could catch were some impressions of the background I wanted her to enter.