by Jane Rogers
‘Sister Hannah? Can I come in?’ I was decent; only my naked foot, protruding from beneath my long Israelite dress, dangling in the bowl of water.
‘What is the matter? I mean, yes, if you wish.’ I could feel myself beginning to blush, which tell-tale colouring I wish more than anything I could control. He entered the room, glanced at me, then went and stood by the window.
‘Is your foot feeling better?’
‘Yes – yes, thank you.’
‘Will you take anything to eat?’
‘I am not at all hungry, thank you.’
Another silence.
‘My foot is much better. I will dry it now and we can be on our way.’
Still he did not move.
‘Mr Wroe?’
‘Yes, Hannah?’
He did not call me sister.
I could not think what to say next. My foot was becoming very cold, so I lifted it out of the water. He remained completely still, staring fixedly out of the window. Then I said a stupid thing, I still do not know why, except that I could not stand the continuation of that hopeless silence between us. I said, ‘Why have you brought me here?’
He replied swiftly and easily, turning to me with a laugh, ‘Why, to make your foot better, of course. What on earth did you imagine, Sister Hannah?’ And laughing at me, he went out into the other room and down to settle with the landlord.
I could feel the blushes sweeping up and down my body in hot waves as I dried my foot and replaced my stocking and shoe. How could I say such a foolish thing? How dare he interpret it in the way he clearly had?
I felt so mortified I could not bring myself to look at him at all as he handed me up on to the gig; and I am sure he was still laughing. I found myself becoming angry, for even if what I had said were foolish – and wrong – clearly, a wrong and foolish thing to say; yet even so, is it so absurd as to be deserving of a whole hour’s laughter?
*
He talks about the end now, at every meeting. His talk is whipping up what amounts to a frenzy among the faithful. In May, and in June, it was always in the future, comfortably distant. Now it may well be tomorrow noon, to hear him speak. This holds no terrors for me since it is clearly nonsense: but I do fear his certainty. When other prophets have been moved to name a particular day or time, they have, inevitably, been forced to watch their power wane as the day of judgement arrives and passes with no more attention from the heavens than a scattering of rain or a few stiff gusts of wind. If he is as close as I think to naming a day, and that day to be soon, then he is deliberately seeking to bring down the edifice of his prophecy, if not the entire church.
Last night I asked him why he speaks of it as imminent.
‘Because it is.’
‘You believe that?’
‘Of course.’
‘Do you feel yourself ready?’
‘How can we ever be ready? First there is the question of souls, and prayer – we ourselves must be ready in our hearts. And then the Lost Tribes must be gathered: from both Papists and Jews, besides the rest; the Walls and Gatehouses must be complete and fortified: supplies must be laid up – can you conceive how we shall fare when the population is decimated? How we shall obtain the simplest necessities of life, food, clothing?’
‘Surely God will provide?’
‘He has given us brains and arms and legs so that we can provide for ourselves. Why do you think we have the ability to plan? What do you think we are doing, the Elders and I, in our daily meetings? Supply lines must be drawn up as for a war. Which indeed it is – a war between good and evil.’
‘But His reign will have begun – surely the Good will already be victorious?’
He threw down the papers he was holding and looked up angrily at me. ‘Why are you talking about this? You do not believe a word of it.’
It was some time after this that the most remarkable of our conversations occurred. I was walking back from Sanctuary where I had been engaged in polishing the candlesticks and other brasses; supposedly, with Leah, but she had stayed at Southgate, saying she needed to talk with Sister Joanna.
It was a cold blustery November day, and had rained earlier. Now the sky was full of low, round-bellied clouds rolling eastwards in a continuous stream. I sniffed at my fingers, which stank of the vinegar and wax I had been handling. The sudden vehemence of succeeding gusts of wind, which had at first struck shockingly cold, seemed in a short while invigorating, after the close, still, incense-ridden air of Sanctuary; and I stopped on the bridge to breathe deep. Turning to look back the way I had come, I saw Mr Wroe approaching me, also heading for Southgate. He slowed when he drew near, and we moved on together. He was having to hold his hat clamped on his head with his left hand, and looked absurd.
‘Why do you not remove your hat?’
Maybe the wind blew his answer away; but I think rather that he did not reply at all. Ahead of us, I could see the beeches along the lane bending and thrashing in the wind; the last leaves stripping from them as ripe grains of oats will slide from the stems, when you tug your fingers through their grassy heads.
Suddenly he said, shouting to be heard over the wind – but it had fallen into a sudden lull, so his words were almost deafening – ‘You do not believe the end of the world is near.’
It made me feel like laughing, but then I thought, where has he been? At the bedside of someone very sick, perhaps. ‘I do not know. It is like one’s own death: one cannot imagine it.’
He grimaced. ‘How lucky you are.’
‘Why?’
‘I imagine it all the time. It is more real than this cold wind – than this ground beneath my feet –’ Ducking suddenly, he scraped up a handful of wet earth, scooping it in to the palm of his hand with his fingernails. Rising, he held it out to me, squeezing his fingers into a fist so that the dark mud oozed out between them. ‘There is nothing else. Everything we do – every act, every speech, is pointless, in the face of that void. Our occupations are no more than distractions, toys which will be crushed and ripped away – leaving us naked, and alone.’
‘But you will not be alone. Your faith – your religion –’
He looked at me; hat still clasped to head, hair and beard fluttering in the wind, eyes black and intense, and one filthy hand extended before him – he looked indeed like a visitor from God, or from some other region.
‘What? My religion what?’
‘Well, it must comfort you. To know you will be saved. And that you have helped – so many –’ My words were lame. I could not think why he was making me say these things – knew I was unusually late in getting a feel for whatever trap or trick he had planned for me.
‘It does not help at all.’
‘Why – why not?’
‘Because it is a fantasy. It is no more real than the rest of the charade.’
‘I do not understand you.’
‘You are not listening. I said, there is nothing. Void. Nothing.’
‘But afterwards. Eternity. The tribes of Israel gathered. The woman clothed with the sun – all that.’
He was shaking his head.
‘What do you mean?’ I said.
‘No-thing.’ He said the word deliberately slowly, exaggerating his enunciation by pushing his lips forward over the ‘no’.
‘That is ridiculous. Your whole life-work consists in going around saying there is.’
‘Of course.’
I knew it was a game; when he said this I found myself laughing. ‘Well then!’
‘Hannah. Listen. You have your own way – do you not – of offering comfort?’ I stared at him.
‘To the world’s distress. You have your own notions of how the lot of the working people may be improved –’ (here he left a slight, ironical pause, and added) ‘by teaching them to read, for example.’
‘There is no need to mock me.’
‘I am not; listen, Hannah. Where is the point in labouring to achieve these things – these very difficult things – when any suc
cess you may have will be as ephemeral as that flash of sunlight on the hills just then, that the following cloud has already rolled over?’
‘Are you back to this again? A day of misery is long enough.’
‘No one is saved. No one is spared the amount of misery they can endure, in this life. And when they can endure it no more, they go out – like a candleflame.’
‘Really. Then what is the purpose of your mission?’
He stopped walking. We were close to the house, I glimpsed Martha by a downstairs window, and saw her move back out of sight.
‘You can provide material comforts – as one gives a crying child the tit: the vote, bread, shelter. Or you can provide spiritual comfort, mother’s milk for the imagination.’
‘Your religion is a mother’s dug?’
He did not laugh. ‘Yes. But elevated at least by the notion that it answers to the nobler and more far-reaching hungers of the imagination and soul, not the dung-heap needs of the body. It all comes to the same nothing in the end; but I would rather deal in visions of the imagination and leaps of faith, than in parsnips, or the carcases of turkeys.’
‘You could not speak as you do – you could not move and convince people as you do, if you did not yourself believe –’
‘There would be no point in doing it if I could not do it well.’
I turned away from his gaze, to look back towards Ashton. At that moment I think I half believed – I half hoped – to see it disintegrate before my eyes, to see his Day of Judgement really arrived.
‘You are making them prepare for the day of Judgement. You have had Gatehouses built –’
‘If you want people to believe a thing, it must seem certain. What is more certain than buildings?’
‘You are tricking them.’
‘Yes; they should count themselves fortunate. I would give a great deal, to be tricked myself.’ Suddenly he took my hand. ‘I am fond of you, Hannah. But …’ There was a silence. Both our hands were sticky with sweat, despite the cold wind. I tried to keep my fingers still.
‘But?’
He shrugged. ‘I am finished with the Israelites in Ashton now.’
‘Why?’
‘I cannot – I cannot sustain it any longer. I cannot keep inventing it for them.’
Then why …’ I do not know what happened to my question, what I had intended to say. My thoughts were distracted by a sudden memory of Edward, and how glad I was I had not gone with him, because it would have been necessary to act as if the world were as he wished it to be: because to have seen it as it is, would have destroyed him.
‘Look,’ I said – not knowing, really, what at, but suddenly wanting to pour out at his feet a whole treasury of comforts: of those round stones he gave me at Whitby; of my elation at the sound of my class puzzling their way through a maze of difficult sentences; of Sanctuary music; of his own deep warm voice mocking me, and of the wave of elation that lifted all in the General Union meeting – ‘look –’ And while I hesitated, reviewing their suitability as an offering, he dropped my hand and took a step back.
‘That is the trouble. You cannot show me anything which will fool me, Hannah.’
A torch of pure rage flared up inside me. ‘I cannot show you anything! I cannot! You yourself can see nothing! You dismiss life, because you cannot have it forever! Like a spoilt child, you throw the bauble out of the cot, because it is not given you for eternity.’ I could not stop myself. Tears of anger were spouting out my eyes. ‘I would not stoop to “fool” you. A woman would be mad, to set herself up as your saviour. To offer you love and companionship, while you sat in your gloomy superiority, not deigning to appreciate these treasures, because you know that at the end you must die. Your life is poisoned by your fear. I won’t show you anything that will fool you – no I won’t. If you cannot open your own eyes, you must remain in darkness.’
I broke away and ran for Southgate; ran until I was scarcely able to draw breath, and my lungs were on fire. Never in my life have I felt so angry as I did at that moment.
Leah
On the night of All Souls, the spirits of all who in the coming year should die within the parish appear in bodily form at the church. My Aunt Catherine told me she watched for my Uncle Abraham, the year he was sick; though she had no need to, for it was plain in daylight that the man was dying.
I was not sure whether to go alone or take a companion. At the last I asked Rebekah, who never seems to be afraid, and we set out together at eleven, when the household was asleep.
A clear, cold night, with a moon waxing near to full, and the beginnings of a frost underfoot. I have my woollen stockings over the cotton pair, and the black greatcoat to keep me warm, but I am chilled to the marrow when we reach St Michael’s. We passed a few stragglers outside the inn, but no one else to speak of. As we come into the graveyard Rebekah takes my arm, whispering that she has no fear of spirits, but is eager to avoid any mortal company which may frequent the place.
We stand clutching each other in the shadow of the wicket gate, staring at the stillness of the scene before us. The flat stone slabs are pale in the moonlight, rimed with frost. Between them shadows lie so black and deep it seems the tombs are floating on a bottomless dark sea. There is no sound. Stillness: a thousand times worse than their threatened day of Judgement, with its fire and thunder. Stillness: crosses and boxes of stone, glittering in the moonlight.
An empty cot.
The world of things stands, perfect in our absence.
I wish we might hear the muffled chink of the Resurrectionists at their digging – to know that something living stirs besides us. Holding fast to one another, Rebekah and I creep toward the church porch. The saying goes that the spirits are visible ‘at the church’, and in the porch we must surely see them, going in or coming out. But the porch is blacker than a pit, both seats completely shaded – the moon standing by now almost directly overhead. So we settle ourselves on a large tombstone over to the right, out of sight of whoever might be lurking in the porch, and yet still able to keep our eyes fixed on that entrance.
The chill of the stone striking up at us makes us ache. We dare not speak, or move, for fear of disturbing whatever might come – but after a while the ache in my thighs and backside turns into a cramp which pains me so severely that I have no choice but to hobble to my feet. The sound of the night watch calling midnight comes as clearly to us, through the still air, as if he was on the next grave. I move from foot to foot on the spot, trying to ease the stabbing pains in my right thigh and clenched calf.
And as I raise my head, from looking down to what is underfoot – I see them. Not what I imagined. Not one by one, walking fast or slow, up the pathway to the church, in order of their time of death – a trickle of individuals. No – not as I imagined.
I see them suddenly, all at once, pressing in on me. Filling my entire vision, crowded five and six to a gravestone, squeezed into the dark cracks between, some towering, some dwarfed, pressing in so tight there is no room to put a pin between them – staring at me, some fearfully and some with seeming anger – the greatest crush of humanity I have ever witnessed, wedged from church-side to the end of my vision, too many to count. The front ranks are perhaps twenty paces from me, and will surely crush me with their onward movement, as stampeding cattle trample everything in their path. I turn to seize Rebekah.
‘Leah? What are you –?’
Without looking back I run, dragging her after me, stumbling over stones and into cracks of darkness on my way – on into the blackness of the church mouth. There we stand, backs against the big studded door, hearts leaping at our throats. When she has her breath, she gasps, ‘What was it? What did you see?’
She saw nothing. At last we creep forward to the edge of the porch where the empty graveyard lies before us, still as ever in the moonlight.
‘There is nothing there.’
‘No.’
There is nothing there. Only the empty graveyard. Cold stone in the moonlight
.
Absence.
And will we all die? Not ones or twos but hundreds on thousands, wave on wave, the living piling in after the dead, like grains of earth into a pit? The whole population of Ashton in this coming year? Will it be the end he prophecies?
To nothing? Leaving an empty cot?
Am only I afraid?
I never used to be afraid. In the night-time churchyard with Anne and Ruth – were we fourteen? fifteen? Come to find out who our husbands would be. Round the church thrice at midnight, scattering hempseeds.
Hemp-seed I sow, hemp-seed I sow
And he that must my true love be –
Come after me and mow.
Giggling so hard breathing hurt, shivering and glancing over our shoulders at every shadow that moved, yet knowing nothing of fear.
That night the graveyard told the truth. Anne and Ruth both saw young men. And both of them are married. Me, I saw nothing, nothing behind but black emptiness. Whereat I laughed heartily and charged them with invention.
Now I laugh again. No, I am not afraid. The end is his prophecy. It has been his aim, to make me nothing.
Though this is true: though blackness comes behind to swallow me, and takes the sweetest first. Though blackness makes me nothing while the horde of them who will believe his cant go streaming up to heavenly light: yet I am. And in the here and now, before darkness swallow this last crack of light, I shall harm him. Here, in this world, I have a little power.