Dick’s gaze angled swiftly over the silver candlesticks upon the altar, the snow-white linen, the rich silk embroidered frontal, with its design in gold thread – I.H.S., the flat hueless shields of hothouse flowers. ‘Yes, I would, if I can reach them.’
‘Oh, would you! And there you are again – “if!” But you shan’t – not while I’m here. That would be worse than stealing even, because this is a church, and that’s the altar. And that’s holy. This is not one of your mouldy old chapels.’ Once again he glanced about him. ‘I bet this, then. You wouldn’t go up into the gallery and scratch out the eye in that – not even if I lent you my knife to do it with. Why, you’d be scared even of falling off the chair!’
The ‘that’ he was referring to was an ancient painted lozenge-shaped hatchment, fastened by tenpenny nails in its clumsy black frame to the lime-washed western wall. It was blazoned with a coat of arms, and above the coat was a crest – the turbaned head of a Saracen in profile; and beneath the coat, in bold Gothic lettering, the one word, Resurgam.
Dick gazed motionlessly at its darkened green and vermilion and at the titled head. ‘Yes, I would,’ he muttered. ‘What does Resurgam mean?’
‘It’s Latin,’ replied Philip, as if he were a little mollified by the modesty of the inquiry. ‘And it means, I shall rise up again. But it might be the subjunctive. It’s what’s called a motto, and the head’s the crest, and the body’s down in the vault. I expect he was a crusader. Anyhow, anybody could do that; because you know very well it mightn’t be noticed for ages. Never, p’raps. Besides, what’s the use? … I’ll give you a last chance. I’ll tell you what you wouldn’t do, not if you stayed here for a month of Sundays, and not a single soul came into the church to see you!’
His cheek had crimsoned. He nodded his head violently. ‘You wouldn’t climb up that, and – and blow that trumpet.’
Dick wheeled about, lifting his dark squirrel-bright eyes as he did so towards the Angel, and looked. He continued to look: the angel at this moment of its nightly vigil, though already the hand that clasped the trumpet had lost its silver, seemed with an ineffable yearning as if about to leap into a cataract of moonlight, like a siren erecting her green-haired head and shoulders out of a rippleless sea to scan the shore.
‘You said, what would be the use?’ he protested at last in a small, scarcely audible voice, and without turning his head. ‘Even if I did, no one would hear … Why do you want me to?’
‘Who “wants” you to!’ came the mocking challenge. ‘You asked me to give you a dare. And now – what did I say! Shouldn’t I hear? I don’t believe you’ve ever even looked at it, not even seen it before!’
‘Oh, haven’t I!’ Dick faltered. ‘You say that only because on Sundays I don’t sit on your side. And what’s the use? Staring up gives you a crick in the neck. But it’s not because I am afraid … Besides, she’s only made of stone.’ In spite of this disparagement he continued to gaze at the angel.
‘Is she then! Stone! That’s all you know about it. She’s made of wood, silly. How could she be that colour if it were marble or even any stone? Anybody could see that! And even if she is only wood, there are people all over the world who worship idols and – and images. I don’t mean just savages either. If she’ – for an instant his eyes shut and revolved beneath their pale rounded lids – ‘if she or anybody else was to blow through that trumpet, it would be the Last Day. I say it, and I know. Even if your father has ever heard of angels, I bet he doesn’t believe in them. I’m sure he doesn’t. My father does believe in them, though. And if you had ever really listened to what he reads out about them in the Lessons you’d know too. I – have.’
He sat for a moment, torpid as a spider engaged in digesting or contemplating a visitor to its nets. Dick’s small, alert, yet guileless face was still turned away from him, upwards and sidelong. As one may put one’s ear to a minute device in clockwork and listen to the wheels within going round, the very thoughts in his cropped, compact head seemed audible. And then, as if after a sudden decision to dismiss the subject from his mind, Philip casually picked up his bull’s-eye lantern, idly twisted its penthouse top, and directed first a greenish, then a thin red beam of light towards the lustrous monument. But the moon made mock of this trivial rivalry.
‘What,’ was Dick’s husky inquiry at last, ‘what does the Bible say about angels? It must be a lovely place where they are, Philip.’
Philip ignored the sentimental comment. ‘Oh, heaps of things. I couldn’t tell you; not half of them, not a quarter.’ A mild, absent-minded, almost hypnotic expression now veiled his pale cold features. He began again as though he were repeating a lesson, in tones low yet so confident that the whole church could easily play eavesdropper to his every word. Nevertheless the sentences followed one another tardily and piecemeal, as if, like a writer of books, he could not wholly trust his faculties, as though words and ideas were stubborn things to set in order and be made even so much as to hint at what was pent up in his mind.
‘Well, first there was St Paul; he went to a man’s house who had seen an angel. Then there was the angel who came to tell his mother about Samuel, when she was sitting alone sewing in her bedroom … And there was the angel that spoke to a man called Lot before he came out of a place called Sodom that was burned in the desert and his wife was turned into a pillar of salt. Because she turned back. Oh, heaps! You seem to suppose that because people can’t see them now, there never were angels. What about the sea-serpent, then; and what about witches? And what about the stars millions and billions of miles out in space, and mites and germs and all that, so teeny-tiny nobody ever saw them until microscopes and telescopes were invented? I’ve looked through a microscope, so I know.’
Dick nodded vacantly. ‘If people can see them,’ he admitted, ‘there must be sea-serpents. And I have seen a witch. There’s one lives in Colney Bottom, and everybody says she’s a witch. She’s humpty-backed, with straggly grey hair all over her shoulders. I crept in through the trees once and she was in her garden digging potatoes. At least I think it was potatoes. She was talking; but there was nobody there and it wasn’t to me. But you were telling me about the angels, Philip. Won’t you go on?’
‘“Go on”!’ echoed Philip in derision, and began again fumbling with his lantern. ‘Good heavens, you don’t expect me to tell you half the Bible, do you? Why don’t you listen? I don’t believe you’ve any more brains than a parrot. “Go on”! Why, everybody has heard of the angel that when Moses was with his sheep called to him out of the middle of the burning bramble bush on the mountains. Its leaves and branches were all crackling with flames. That’s another. And when Elijah was once lying asleep in the desert under a juniper tree an angel came in the morning and touched him to wake him because he had brought him some cake, and some fresh water to drink. That,’ he pondered a moment or two, ‘that was before the ravens. And I suppose you’ve never even heard of Joshua either? He was a captain of Israel. And when he was standing dressed in his armour on the sand, with his naked sword in his hand, and looking at the enormous walls of Jericho, he saw an angel there beside him, in armour too, just as you might see a man in a wood at night. They stood there together looking at the enormous walls of Jericho. But you couldn’t see them very plainly because it was getting dark, and there weren’t any lamps or lights in the houses. So nobody inside knew that they were there, not even the woman who had talked to the two spies who had stolen the bunches of grapes.’
Philip, unperceived, had quickly and suddenly glanced at his friend, who, his face wholly at peace, had meanwhile been emptily watching the coloured lights succeeding one another in the round, glass, owl-like eye of the toy lantern.
‘I should like to see an angel,’ he said.
‘Oh, would you? Then that’s all you know about it. There are thousands upon thousands of them, most of them miles taller than any giant there ever was and others no bigger than – than ordinary. Not all of them have only two wings either; some of them
have six – here, and here, and here; with two they fly and with two they cover their faces when they are asleep. And they have names too; else God wouldn’t be able to call them. But don’t you go and think they are like us; because they aren’t. They are more like demons or ghosts – real ghosts, I mean, not the kind you were talking about. And I don’t believe either that just because anything is made of wood or stone, it hasn’t any life at all – not at all. Even savages couldn’t be as stupid as all that. You only think you could touch angels. But you couldn’t. And some angels, though I don’t know even myself if they are most like women or men’ – his voice ebbed away almost into a whisper, like that of a child murmuring in its sleep, as if he were not only nearing the end of his resources, but was losing himself in the rapture of some ineffable vision in his mind – ‘some angels are far far more beautiful to look at than any woman, even the most beautiful woman there ever was. And even than – that!’
Yet again Dick lifted his intense small eyes towards the image. It had, it seemed, as if in an instant, returned to an appearance of mute immobility; but only in the nick of time, to elude his silent questioning.
‘I shouldn’t mind any angel,’ he said, ‘if it were only like that. Not mind, I mean. If she looked at me, perhaps I might. She’s like Rebecca, the girl that lives up at the farm. My mother taught me a hymn once to say when I am in bed. I can’t remember the beginning now, but some of it I can:
Four corners to my bed;
Four angels round my head:
One to bless, and one to pray,
And one to bear my soul away…
If you are not afraid, she says, not anywhere, ever, nothing can do anything against you.’
‘Oh, they can’t, can’t they! That just shows all you know about it. Besides, what you’ve been saying is only a rhyme for children. It’s only a rhyme. My nurse told me that ages ago. Those angels are only one kind. Why, there are angels so enormously strong that if one of them no more than touched even the roof of this church with the tip of his finger it would crumble away into dust. Like that’ – he firmly placed his own small forefinger on the dried-up corpse of a tiny money-spider that had long since expired in the corner of the pew – ‘absolutely into dust. And their voices are as loud as thunder, so that when one speaks to another, the sound of their shouting sweeps clean across the sky. And some fly up out of the sea, out of the East, when the sun rises; and some come up out of a huge frightful pit. And some come up out of the water, deep dangerous lakes and great rivers, and they stand on the water, and can fly – straight across, as if it was lightning, from one edge of the world to the other – like tremendous birds. I should jolly well like to see what a pilot of an aeroplane would do at the edge of the night if he met one. They can’ – he bent forward a little, his pale face now faintly greened with his own lantern – ‘they can see without looking; and they stay still, like great carved stones, in a light – why, this moon wouldn’t be even a candle to it!
‘And some day they will pour awful things out of vials down on the earth and reap with gigantic sickles not just ordinary corn, but men and women. Men and women. And besides the sea,’ his rather colourless eyes had brightened, his cheeks had taken on a gentle flush, his nervous fingers were clasping and unclasping themselves over the warm metal of his lantern, ‘and besides the sea, they can stand and live exulting in the sun. But on earth here they are invisible, at least now, except when they come in dreams. Besides, everybody has two angels; though they never get married, and so there are never any children angels. They are called cherubs. And I know this too – you can tell they are there even when you cannot see them. You can hear them listening. If they have charge of you, nothing can hurt you, not the rocks – nor the ice – not even of the highest mountains. And that was why the angel spoke to Balaam’s donkey when they were on the mountain pass, because he wished not to frighten him; and the donkey answered. But if you were cursed by one for wickedness, then you would wither up and die like a gnat, or have awful pains, and everything inside of you would melt away like water. And don’t forget either that the devil has crowds of angels under his command who were thrown out of heaven millions of years ago, long before Adam and Eve. They are as proud as he is, and they live in hell … They are awful.’
It was doubtful if Dick had been really attending to this prolonged, halting, almost monotoned harangue; his face at any rate suggested that his thoughts had journeyed off on a remote and marvelling errand of their own.
‘Well,’ he ventured at last, with a profound half-stifled sigh, ‘I would climb it anyway. And not because you dared me to, either. Even you couldn’t say what I might not see up there.’
He tiptoed a pace or two nearer the shallow altar steps and again fixed his eyes on his quarry. ‘What about the trumpet?’ he suddenly inquired, with a ring of triumph in his voice, as if he had at last managed to corner his learned friend. ‘The trumpet? You didn’t say a single word about the trumpet.’
‘Well, what if I didn’t?’ was the flat acrimonious answer. ‘I can’t say two things at once, can I? You don’t know anything. And that is simply because you never pay any attention. You’re just like a fly buzzing about among the plates seeing what you can pick up. I don’t suppose, if I asked you even now, you could tell me a single word of all that I’ve been saying!’
Dick turned, glancing a little sadly and wistfully at his friend. ‘I could, Philip. At least, I think I could. Besides flies do settle sometimes; I suppose then they are asleep.’
‘Oh, well, anyhow,’ replied Philip coldly, ‘I don’t think I want to. But I could if I had the time.’ He sighed. ‘You don’t even seem to understand there are so many kinds of trumpets. You don’t seem ever to have heard even of Gideon’s trumpets. Some are made of brass and some are silver and some are great shells and some are made out of sheep’s horns, rams.’ And in the old days, ages ago, war-horses loved the sound of trumpets – I don’t mean just men going hunting. It made them laugh and prance, with all their teeth showing. “Ha-ha!” – like that. Simply maddened to go into battle. And besides, clergymen, priests they were called in those days, used to have trumpets, but that was ages before Henry VIII. And they used to blow them, like that one, up there, when there was a new moon; and when,’ he glanced sidelong, his eyelids drooping a little furtively over his full eyes, and his voice fell to a mumble, ‘and when there was a full moon too. And at the end there will be incense, and dreadful hail, and fire, and scorpions with claws like huge poisonous spiders. And there’s a Star called Wormwood; and there will be thousands and thousands of men riding on horses with heads like lions …’ He fell silent and sat fumbling for a few moments. ‘But I wasn’t really going to talk about all that. It’s only because I have listened. And it’s just what I’ve said already, and I know the very words too.’ He nodded slowly as if he were bent on imparting a deathless and invaluable secret: ‘“The trumpet shall sound and the dead shall be raised.” Those are the very words. And I see what they mean.’
Dick had meanwhile become perfectly still, as if some inward self were lost in a strange land. He appeared to be profoundly pondering these matters. ‘And supposing,’ he muttered at length, as though like the prophet he had swallowed Philip’s little book and it were sweet as honey, ‘supposing nothing happens, Philip? If I do? Perhaps that trumpet is only solid wood all through. Then it wouldn’t make any sound. Then you would only burst your cheeks, trying. Wouldn’t it be funny – if I burst my cheeks, trying!’
‘That,’ replied Philip, disdaining the suggestion, ‘that would only mean that it isn’t really a trumpet. But you wouldn’t even be thinking of that if you weren’t too frightened to try. You’re only talking.’
‘You wouldn’t.’
‘I like that!’ cried Philip, as if in a brief ecstasy. ‘Oh, I like that! Who thought of the angel, may I ask? Who asked to be dared? Besides, as I have said again and again, this is my father’s church; and chapel people don’t believe in angels. They don’t b
elieve in anything that really matters.’
‘You can say what you like about chapel people,’ said Dick stubbornly, his eyes shining like some dangerous little animal’s that has been caught in a snare. ‘But I’m not afeard even if you won’t go yourself.’
‘Oh, well’ – a cold and unforeseen fit of anxiety had stolen into Philip’s mind as he sat staring at his friend. ‘I don’t care. Come on, let’s clear out of this, I say. You can try if you want to, but I’m not going to watch. So don’t get blaming anything on to me. It’s nothing to do with me. That’s just what you always do. You’re a silly little weathercock. First, yes; then, no.’
Cramped and spiritless, he had got down from his pew and, as if absent-mindedly, had pushed his magic dumb-bell flint into his great-coat pocket and shut off the light of his lantern. The moonlight, which a few moments before, from pavement to arching roof, had suffused the small church through and through, had begun to thin away into a delicate dusk again; and at the withdrawal even of the tiny coloured lights of the lantern, its pallor on the zigzag-fretted walls and squat thick stone shafts of the piers had become colder. Moreover the quietude around them had at once immeasurably deepened again now that the two boys’ idle chirruping voices were stilled.
Philip took up the lantern, and looked at his friend. A curious, crooked, scornful alarm showed on his own delicate features. But it was the scorn in it that his ardent, undersized and peeping devotee had detected most clearly. His intensely dark eyes were searching Philip’s face with an astonishing rapidity.
‘You said, “blaming”,’ he half entreated. ‘And did I ever? I – I … Haven’t I always shown that we – I …! It’s only because I didn’t think anything might happen. But I’m not afeard, whatever you may think. Besides, you asked me, Philip. And anything – anything you asked me … So it couldn’t be only a dare.’
Short Stories 1927-1956 Page 53