by Dion Fortune
We entered a broad lobby that ran the length of the façade and was partitioned off from the main hall by panelling of yellow varnished pitch-pine. We went on through double doors, and I found myself in a typical chapel interior, save that at the east end there was a sanctuary, complete with saints in niches and a lofty stained glass window representing a most horrible scene from the Last Judgment. At the other end was a rose-window over the gallery which appeared to consist of two concentric circles of devils. Whatever sect had owned this tabernacle must have held some pretty lurid views.
Whoever had built that place had evidently employed a good architect, for the proportions were lovely. It looked, however, as if it had been abandoned before it was quite finished, for there were no pews or pulpit, and no marks on the stone-flagged floor to indicate that there ever had been any.
I walked slowly across its broad expanse and mounted the three steps into what appeared to be an Anglican chancel intended for ritualistic uses, for it was large in proportion to the nave, and if that was what one should call it in an obvious conventicle, and discovered to my amazement that what I had taken for an out-size in altars was actually a small stone tank like a miniature swimming bath.
“What in the world is this?” I asked the caretaker.
“That's the font,” he answered, surveying it with obvious pride, grimy and unprepossessing as it was.
“Was this a Baptist chapel?” I enquired thinking that its ornate architecture was not quite the usual style of that austere set.
“Well, it was, and it wasn't. ‘E baptised ‘em, but ‘e also ‘ad a service. ‘E was ‘alf way, you might say, between the Baptists and the Cath’lics.”
This horrible hybrid left me dumb. How could it conceivably work? One would imagine that the two halves of his soul, whoever “he” might be, would spend all their time cursing and excommunicating each other.
“What religion did he belong to?” I asked when I had recovered my poise.
“E didn't belong to no religion, lidy, ‘e run ‘is own. Called ‘emselves the Resurrectionists, they did.”
Remembering the other connotation of the word, I could not repress a smile, which he saw and answered.
“No, mum, not body-snatchers. They reckoned they'd rise again, all on ‘em, just as they was, so they dressed accordingly, and ‘e give ‘em baptism all over every Sunday—ducked ‘em right under, so's they'd rise nice an’ clean.”
“Did he have many followers?” I asked, thinking of all the Sundays in Trinity, and wondering how many could be found to put up with such drastic salvation, for there appeared to be no way of heating the tank.
“A tidy few,” said he.
“And what was the end of it all? I enquired.
“Well, yer see, mum, ‘e believed in total ‘mershun, like the Baptists; but then ‘e also believed in infant baptism, like the Catholics, and ‘e ‘mershed an infant and it died and ‘e up and ‘anged ‘isself. Never even stopped to tike up the collection, ‘e didn't, and so the plice was never paid for, and the builders went bust an’ the agents collared it, and there it is, just as it allus was, these forty years.”
“There must be a curse on it,” I said.
“Oh, I dunno, it's suited me very nicely,” said he with a wink. “If you was to take it, mum, would you be wantin’ a caretaker?”
“No,” I said, “I should not, but I could find plenty of work for a handy man, and might be able to give your wife some cleaning.”
“My wife was took orf to the ‘sylum this mornin’, lidy, but I could do anythink you wanted in the way of cleanin’. I'm real ‘andy, I am. Yer see, of recent years she got that religious she wouldn't do a ‘and'sturn, and I ‘ad to do everythink. Cookin’. Cleanin’. Make the beds. I'm reel ‘andy, lidy.”
“I'm very sorry to hear that,” I said, hoping he would know I was referring to his wife, not to his cooking.
“Well lidy, perhaps it's orl for the best. I could do fer ye fine, mum, if you'd give a chanst.”
“I don't know that I'm coming here yet,” I said. “Everyone connected with the place seems to go either bankrupt or mad.”
“Not me, lidy, I ain't bust an’ I ain't bats.”
“But your wife?”
“Bats but not bust, lidy. She'd a nice bit o’ cleanin’ if she'd only ‘a done it. But she got that religious, yer see, she couldn't put ‘er mind to it. They said to ‘er: “Mrs Meatyard, you'll ‘ave to go if you can't do better'n this.”
“Oh, says she, the Lord's comin’.”
“Well. ‘E ain't ‘ere yet. Won't yer get on with your work while you're waitin’?’ they sez to ‘er.”
“But she wouldn't. It weren't no use. Couldn't give ‘er mind to it, yer see. Then she took off ‘er clothes an’ tried to baptise ‘erself in the kitchen copper an’ they sent ‘er ‘ome.”
“Good heavens!” I said. “Was the kitchen copper alight when she did it?”
“Oh no, mum. Their ole prophet didn't believe in no comforts. I ‘ad ‘er ‘ome for a bit, but it weren't no use. She kep’ yellin’ the Lord was after ‘er. Seemed to get ‘im mixed up with the Devil towards the end an’ couldn't tell ‘em apart, so I ‘ad to ‘ave ‘er fetched away, and now she's gorn. An’ if yer want to know the truth, lidy, I was ‘avin’ one with meself to cheer meself up when I ‘eard you knockin’.”
“You must be feeling very lonely,” I said, though he looked exceedingly cheerful.
“So-so. It's lonely, but it's peaceful. There weren't no peace for nobody while she was savin’ ‘er soul. I tell yer straight, lidy, I wouldn't ‘ave saved it if it ‘ad been mine. I'd ‘ave chucked it away if I couldn't ‘ave give it away. It wasn't worth savin’, it was such a worry to ‘er.”
I thought I had better stop this flood of psychology.
“Are the agents near here?” I asked.
“Yus, lidy, just round the bend. But if you'll wait till ter-morrer before you see ‘em, I'll chuck a few buckets of water abart the floor and tell ‘em the roof's leakin’ an’ then they'll let it go cheap. I'd like yer to ‘ave it, fer I think you an’ me ‘ud suit each other fine, though I won't deceive yer mum as to me ‘avin’ bin in quod.”
In the face of such frankness, what could I do save tell him that if I took the place the job was his? As a matter of fact, he would probably suit me much better than a woman, for he would be less likely to take fright at my doings.
Well, I bought the place, though not without many qualms, for I am sensitive to atmospheres, and I wondered what sort of atmosphere would be left behind by the homicidal prophet and his suicidal congregation. I could picture so clearly the kind of crack-brained fanatic it must have been who had gathered together the “tidy few” followers for his crazy views and produced the architectural hybrid I proposed to inhabit. Then there were the religious opinions of this nonconformist with a liking for ritual. The Baptist and the Catholic sides of his nature would both hate me equally, but as they would hate me for different reasons, it was possible they might cancel each other out. The moment I had obtained possession I did a thorough exorcism with the Banishing Ritual of the Greater Pentagram. I wondered what Meatyard would think when he smelt the incense, but all he said was:
“You needn't worry about the drines, lidy, for there ain't none,’ and this I found to be true, which explained the price at which I got the place. It was just as well that this was low, for I was put to a pretty penny of expense before I was through with it. There is an old saying that whatever is wanted for magical purposes must be bought without haggling, but there is a limit to that sort of thing—I did not haggle over the bathroom however. It was of a very pale pink quartz-like marble as to the walls, and the floor was black marble, warm to the foot because the heating was under it. My bath was black and looked like a tomb, but inside it was of the same pale fawnish pink as the walls. It was square, too, and had to be specially made for me, which was an extravagance, but baths are one of my weaknesses. I got the idea from the prophets dreadful fon
t, though I would never admit it; but Mr Meatyard guessed as much, and said to me with a wink:
“I see you believes in total ‘mershun, mum.”
“I believe in having what I like,” I said.
“Most folk does that, if ye comes ter think of it, only when they gets it, they finds they doesn't like it.
My bedroom I had of the curious blue-green of shagreen, which is also the green of the sea on a rocky coast. It held no furniture save my bed and my dressing-table and a cabinet beside my bed; all else was fitments. Such of the wall as was not mirrors was worked in bas-relief in the semblance of breaking waves. It faced east, as a bedroom should, though I nearly had to tear the place to pieces to get it so, for the non-ecclesiastical accommodation was exiguous. It was only the fact that the prophet had been obliged to provide dressing accommodation for his drowned rats after baptism, that had made the place a practical proposition for me. His vestry was my kitchen, and the places where he separated the sheep from the goats were respectively my bedroom and bathroom. He must have expected mass conversions, for they were of by no means inconsiderable dimensions. For the rest, I lived and moved and had my being in the great hall.
This, as I re-planned it, began to take on a strange and unique beauty. The pitch-pine panelling was replaced with old oak, and dark parquetry covered the cold grey flags. I made no attempt to clean the stonework, which rose in groins to a central boss, the plaster in between, mellowed to the colour of old parchment, still bearing the tarnished shadows of golden stars. All this I left as I found it; but I smashed those dreadful stained-glass windows to pieces and out of their multi-coloured fragments had them re-made into a bewildering mosaic like a Rococo jewel. Into the pointed arches of the chancel I put leaded windows of clear glass through which I could see out into what had been a dingy and cathaunted dungeon but was now like a corner of an Italian courtyard. I think the architect must have had some Italian church in his mind, for the place responded instantly to figs in great earthenware jars and a vine trained over a trellis.
In the summer I intended to focus my existence in the chancel where the sun came through the leaves of a great plane tree, graceful as a willow because it had never known the pruning-saw; and in the winter I would retire to the panelled ingle-nook surrounding the vast fireplace I had built.
Resisting all blandishments of the builder to buy a ready-made one, I had stood over the masons while they laid a hearth bigger than most folks’ dining tables and sloped the back to my liking; and this, with a great copper canopy, was all the grate I had. On it, three-foot logs and a bank of peat blazed in the winter and smouldered in the summer, for the great hall was cool even in the hottest weather. There were deep divans, and great chairs, and low tabourets and poufs, and cabinets to hold my beautiful things and display them; and I had as many cushions as Gabriele d'Annunzio. In the gallery, where the casual visitor could not get at them, were my books.
Not that I had many casual visitors, however, for I had work to do and no time to waste on them, being there for a purpose. Callers were not encouraged, and Mr Meatyard's way of discouraging callers was devastating. Such people as I saw, I saw for a reason, and they knew it.
Mr. Meatyard himself was wonderful, once the problem of his hat was solved. He was bald as the proverbial egg, and explained, most reasonably, that draughts blew on his pate in the winter and the flies walked about on it in summer and he had to have some sort of shelter; so we compromised on a black velvet skull-cap that made him look like a gnome, with his bat-ears and pug-nose, and the effect was very fine indeed, seen against a background of old oak; he was, in fact, the ideal retainer for such a person as myself, with a reputation for vampiricism to maintain, and no one could tell from the looks of him that he had been a cab-driver. He also developed, under my tuition, into a most admirable cook.
It was a strange ménage. There was I, with my cab-driver and my cooking, tucked away in an abandoned chapel in a Surrey-side alley, yet even priestesses of strange cults have to live while they are in incarnation, and there are stranger cults than mine.
My establishment sounds simple, and so it was in its fastidious way; but it took time to equip, for I would not go to the big stores and order this and that, but picked up my things as I found them from queer small shops in side-streets of mean parts, for there one finds strange and beautiful things if one knows where and how to look, and what to look for. Heavy Victorian mahogany covered with knobs and curly-cues is one thing, and the same piece, denuded of its trimmings and lacquered and dusted with gold, is another. Little by little I got my new home together, while living in my old one, but it was late summer before I moved in.
That moving-in was something of an ordeal. I am, as I have already said, very sensitive to atmospheres. I had performed an efficacious banishing and the place was inoffensive, but it was as devoid of personality as outer space. I had had many picnic meals in it while the workmen were still in possession, but that is not the same as entering in and living there, as I was very soon to learn.
Mr Meatyard remained in his cottage, so I had the whole building to myself, and it was like being sealed up in a vacuum jar. I have never known anything so strange. I think one would feel like that when flying a single-seater plane across the Atlantic—I must have done a very effectual banishing. Luckily for me, it was a lovely day of sun and breeze when I left my hayloft for the last time and drove my new car, a smart black coupé, across the bridge to take up my transpontine existence. If it had been wet and cold I do not think I could have borne it.
As it was, although Mr Meatyard made me a marvelous meal such as only a man accustomed to cooking on a shovel over a bucket of coke could have prepared, and although, despite the warmth of the day, peat and cedar were softly flickering on my hearth, I fled forth from that place as dusk drew on as if pursued by furies, and took refuge on the wharf to watch the the last of the sunset.
The sun was already below the roofs of Pimlico across the river, for here the bend of the stream took it north and south and there was a sky-line against the sunset that reminded me of the Andes. The river to mid-stream already lay in the shadow of the dusk, indigo-blue; but under the Surrey bank it flamed in every shade of orange and the ripples caught the light like tumbled jewels. A barge coming down with the tide, black against the gold, contrived, with its high deck cargo, to look like a gigantic gondola. I sat down on a great balk of timber, the water lapping beneath my feet under the rotten planking, and watched the glory fade and the night come on.
In that deceptive light the sordidness was gone from the mean streets of Pimlico; their irregular roofs and twisted chimneys stood out against the paling sky in jagged silhouette, modernist, startling; then, with the waning of the light and the coming of the mist, they slowly blurred till their serrated skyline became soft folded uplands fading into hills. The lamps in Grosvenor Road grew brighter as the dusk came on, and threw long glittering lines of light across the darkening water; but they never grew very bright, for their part of the world was neither busily commercial nor smartly fashionable. The houses facing the river were old and high, and the light of the street did not reach above their first floors; but presently the dark irregular line of their cliff-like façade began to be picked out here and there with squares of yellow light as rooms were lit up, their occupants not troubling to curtain the windows that looked river-wards.
Then I noticed that across one pair of windows on a top floor, that had been among the last to light up, something moved as regularly as a pendulum. I wondered what manner of manufacture was being pursued up there at that hour, but suddenly the rhythm was broken as the square of one window was blocked, and I saw the outline of a man's head and shoulders against the light, and I guessed that an individual who had been pacing his room was now leaning his elbows on the window-sill and contemplating the river. That it was a man, I was certain, for no woman paces a room like that, and I wondered whether it was my red-headed, tempestuous friend, whom I had so nearly run over. It was
about the situation of his house and that restless pacing was just the sort of thing he would do.
My mind went back to the man as I had seen him. His image was very clearly printed on my memory, as it is apt to be in such circumstances, for it had been a near thing, very near indeed, and only the fact that he was as active as a cat in spite of his thickset build had prevented it from being a very nasty accident, and I was not surprised that he had lost his temper with me, for I must have scared him very thoroughly.
He was a middle-aged man, with the pallid face of an indoor worker; the red hair on his bull-dog head was greying slightly and receding at the temples; his face was much lined, with the two upright lines between the eyebrows that indicate nervous tension, and the deeply-scored lines from the angle of the nostril to the corner of the jaw that indicate irritability, yet his deep-set eyes, startled wide open under their heavy brows, were candid and bright as a child's, and he did not look an illnatured man. He impressed me rather as an over-strained, embittered man than a bad-tempered one, though I have no doubt he would be none the pleasanter to live with on that account. His clothes were good, but old and carelessly worn, and though he carried the brown leather despatch case of a professional man, his double-breasted blue reefer suit did not point to the professions, nor did his slouch hat. Yet when he lifted it there appeared a forehead as broad and high as most folks’ top hats, and the hand with which he grasped my door to recover his balance was a most beautiful and beautifully tended hand, broad and square, even as he was, yet with a sensitive suppleness in its muscularity that one sees in the hands of great pianists, which, contrary to popular belief are never slender and long-fingered.
That angry, bull-dog face with its marvellous brow was vaguely familiar to me, and I should not be surprised if I had seen it, and should see it again, in the illustrated papers, for a man with a head and hands like that could not be a nonentity and might quite well be a somebody for all his careless dress and unfashionable abode.