The Lost Cavern

by H. F. Heard

  He stopped for some time. It would be untrue to say that I saw there was no use in lying. All that was as obviously out of the question as for a consumptive to deny he has T.B. when the X-ray lung-skiagraphs are in the hand of the specialist who confronts him. The doctor knows more about the patient’s deadly pass than does the patient himself. Still, something made me want to gain time, for what could I do? I must think, though, of course, my mind wouldn’t work. As I wavered he said, “I will give you final and third proof of the truth of what I have said. Come across here.” We moved to that small box over there. “Now kneel down. Make your confession. Tell me all you can and I will tell you on each important point where either you are lying or your memory is playing you false.” I did and he did. But that was not all. As I tried to rise from my knees, I found I couldn’t. I was weaker than a man who has just recovered consciousness after his lungs have been emptied from being full of foul water. I felt exorcised, it is true. But I felt, too, that I might at any moment die: I was so utterly drained, empty. All that I had built on, that I had swelled up and swaggered on, had been just a tumor of pus. And, that swept out and cleansed away, I had collapsed, like the thin skin that is all that remains when an outsize abscess has been discharged and its whole area of infection cleansed. That question—and it was real enough to me to put any other out of my head for the moment—he answered for me, though, of course, I had not put it into words. “No, you are not going to leave the body yet. The woman had to start again a completely other life. She had spent all the wonderful resources, torn out all the amazing apparatus of reaction and psycho-physical equipment with which the temple of the Holy Ghost is fitted—that supreme treasure of the spirit, its essential instrument, the sacred human body. Your mind and spirit have been treacherous and foul. But they have yet to ruin that holy place itself. You are, by God’s grace, still young. You must live, and He will give you your purgatory here and now.”

  I know that may not sound a reassuring sentence. But somehow at the moment it sounded so to me. I had no stomach for the Void or for anything but the thickest possible insulation I could find between me and that abyss. Later I was to find that what he said about purgatory here was true enough. But for the time being I felt something that might almost be called relief.

  “You must start a life, in some ways as new as hers, certainly as big a contrast. This is the new birth for you; the second delivery.”

  I could only say, “How?”

  His reply, “I’ll take you,” did not tell my mind anything definite but it settled my will. I knew that I’d let him and that he would arrange. He didn’t keep me waiting, either, before telling me his plans. He seemed to have made them as quickly as he made his survey of my entire past. Perhaps the Future and the Past were equally clear to him at those moments of awful lucidity. For when this surface frame of Space goes, so does that web of this warp: the other sequence which we call Time. So what will be is as clear as what has been.

  “I shall send you,” he spoke with perfect command, “to a small seminary not far from here, run by a fellow student of mine. He will prepare you to work here with me. I have long been looking for and asking God for a colleague. After a year, the Bishop’s chaplain will pass you for ordination as a deacon, and a year after that you will be priested. The rest I can teach you here.”

  So I found myself settled here. I, the rolling stone, black and grimy as a piece of rotten coal, was now set as one of the minute stones next this great scrying crystal of a man. And he was right; he always was on such matters, at least I can say that as far as I was concerned. It was a queer life in this queer dull little village, but that of course was only the camouflaged surface, just as that cup there, before you knew, seemed nothing but an archaeological piece strayed from a museum. Underneath, what struggles went on here. Yes, yes, purgatory now, that was right enough. “And the Devil departed from him for a season.” My old master used often to point out to me that passage when I used to say that I just couldn’t stick it, I must go, I was only a disgrace to him and he an exasperation to me. For I need not say that his suddenly taking a young American and making him into the curate didn’t please the village in the least. I don’t think they could have disliked it more—all save one person—had they known the whole truth. My Midwest accent—and I’d given up trying to finick with it—seemed, and I believe was, more offensive to them than if I had given them the whole catalogue of my more legal sins. My master used to say, “If the Ever-active Spirit of Denial and Deprivation could not leave our Master alone for long, even after such a crushing first defeat, even after knowing in a way that the game must be up, why should he leave us, about whom he can surely entertain somewhat higher hopes?” And then I would remember that, though, of course, I knew nothing of Heaven, and didn’t deserve to, I did know something, and more than most, of Hell and the way to it. I could travel still by the kick it had given me, if I could not often feel that any hand was drawing me.

  The housekeeper was on the whole my most effective outer and inner trial. For one thing I always had the uneasy feeling that she suspected it was I who had come disguised that night to lead her little old fool, as she sometimes would call him, astray and into some sort of peril. For another, she loved to run him down to me, and that I found very hard to bear. I think it was a kind of jealousy in her very queer nature. For she loved him in a sort of bitter way that resented his failure to recognize her superlative virtue, as well as her incomparable gifts as a conversationalist and her profound insight into the motives, morals, and souls of his parishioners. I have a feeling that he thought her to be perhaps at about the same level as Mrs. Martin had been shortly before her final seizure. Of course, one was violent; but I suspect that in the cold self-righteousness of the other he saw that in the end there might be found the more serious disease, all the more for not being at all spectacular, so all the harder to bring to a crisis and to cure.

  For that was my third problem and a large part of my misery: How, if my teacher was as good and wise as at moments I had proof he was, how was it that she couldn’t see it at all and why couldn’t he do anything about it, about her? Why did he let her shrew and scold and boss him, and me, and watch her grow more peevish, exacting, acid, impossible? Why let her live almost like a vampire on sucking away the reputations of others? When we were left alone, one of her favorite themes, when she had no “freshly-killed” reputation to gnaw in front of me, was to go back to that night I’ve told you of. With a never-failing relish she would go over the incidents, telling me how a young unknown—“And I know most around here, you may be sure”—had called with some cock-and-bull story to get the old man out. And how he had gone, as he would, of course, against her and the doctor’s advice, and only brought on a seizure and of course nearly got himself killed into the bargain. And there was the woman dead who might have lived for years in a nice mental home with a nice operation or opiation or something of that sort keeping her quiet as Doctor had always said. And how Parson had come home with me, and of course I’d excuse her, but she must say that I looked almost a tramp myself and more than half out of my wits. And, after that, Parson himself was if anything “queerer.” That, I gathered, was meant to refer to his suddenly befriending a ne’er-do-well American and having him ordained into the English Church and, clinching, final proof of feeble-mindedness and disregard of decent people’s feelings and judgments, bringing him into the village as curate.

  I must own also, further, and for my own humiliation, that though the dear old man was spiritually a real master, that did not mean that he was master of anything in this world and its affairs. The whole village, not merely his housekeeper, really rather despised him. He could wander about in sermons that were in part reveries, in part recondite metaphysics; part scholarship of far too fine a brand for his people and part what seemed to them—and also, I want to own, to me—sheer sentimentality. Of course I wanted him to be a success all around, a man of power and recognized as such, a Savonarola, and a polis
hed scholar, someone to whom the mean, snobbish, crook side of my mind—and it was still all too strong—might not feel it was quite so humiliating to make surrender. The congregation were agreed that they were very tolerant about him. Once when he had been roused and had preached, in spite of all his word tangles, with real power, I overheard the two churchwardens while they were entering up the service collection. They thought I had already left the inner vestry and gone back this way into the house.

  “Well,” one said grimly, “the poor old fellow was like a volcano today.”

  “Yes,” the other agreed with that abstracted voice we use when counting money and someone speaks to us of something of no importance, “but I must say I prefer when he rambles to when he rants; it’s bad for the village, that kind of Methodist stuff, and, besides, when he rambles, one can sleep.”

  They chuckled and I sighed. How I wished, and bitterly, that the light, instead of being on him now and then, as it chose, would stay and illumine him! And, of course, I meant by that that it would tidy him up, make him, if not famous, respectable and perhaps formidable, and throw a little reflected glory on me! For, need I tell you, he wasn’t even neat. He was far too abstract even to have exact table manners. And, dirty little crook that I was, I remained so mean that for long his messiness and general incompetence used to vex me, the scum, sorely. Yes, it was part of my training. God meant me to understand that He sends His message by bellhops from whom, if we look at them and not at the writing, our vanity will make us refuse to receive the deed of our release from Hell. We insist that we be treated with respect. Well, of course, I would behave like that. But remember he was the only companion I had, I had to be with him all the time, and he was far from good company, caring only for prayer and his own spiritual studies—and I still abominably callow at best, and fresh in the worst sense of the word, and wickedly smug, to boot. For I was driven back on him for my good. As I’ve said, only one person in the village would be even commonly polite, and I saw him, to speak to, hardly more than once.

  Who was the one person who did not disapprove? Why, the chief butler, of all people!

  And that allows me to finish this story and to tell you, as an epilogue, what became of that rather embarrassing object, that rather respectable copy of the Tiepolo, that copy which had been made to sleep away its days in the Abbey until, at the death of HIS Grace the valuers for probate announced (or perhaps did not pronounce) that it was a patent fraud, or that here was a Tiepolo “of a sort,” done, of course, all but the outline, by one of his hack pupils, and so the English “Milord” of two centuries ago was defrauded, and not the revenue of that future day.

  I was hurrying through the village street one day, for I knew the dislike with which I was viewed and knew, of course, better than any of them, the real grounds the inhabitants could have for their otherwise rather unreasonable contempt. I stopped as a large voice said “Good morning.” My mentor of the fish-streams was towering above me. He seemed glad to take the opportunity—for no doubt he knew the village’s feelings—to show that he was so great that he could disregard them. That was indeed probably the reason for quite a high percentage of his quality of friendliness. The other factors came out fairly quickly in the conversation. First he congratulated me on “Entering the Establishment.” I felt he thought I was being raised to some kind of parallel rank with his own—the corps d’élite guards that defend the doting ruler and, as Mayors of the Palace, have all the power and nearly all the appearance of it.

  “I might,” he remarked, “almost venture to give you my blessing, were I one of the ‘cloth.’” And certainly, as our Archbishop of that date was usually referred to by the rich as “God’s butler,” I felt that the two might have been switched one night and neither have found the other’s office much unlike the one he had filled. “As it is, I will give you my hearty congratulations. And now,”—and this was delivered like the ascription at the end of a cathedral sermon—“And now, I am going to give myself the pleasure of asking for yours.”

  I looked up in some sheepish confusion, but he was well set in the stride of his periods and needed no comments.

  “Mrs. Dappleshade—of course till now the ‘Mrs.’ was honorary as becomes, and is by tradition, always accorded to a head housekeeper in any titled household—Mrs. Dappleshade, as I will now call her rightly as far as her title is concerned, was lately offered my hand and she has accepted.” He did not add “the honor,” but he and I knew the word was there unsounded. “We are about to be married by special license. ‘Calling of banns’ would be most unsuitable to either of our situations. But I cling to small and lowly things, and so I am having the marriage here in your little church. I am now coming from my interview with your senior. He has already received the special license and has observed my wish that no one should know about the coming celebration. HIS Grace has seen the sense of the proposal that the smaller dower house should be properly occupied. Since the larger was built, this one has been without tenant for, though of modest scale, it is too large for people not used to the ampler conveniences of living. The house has its proportions and therefore rightly makes its demands. There is, for instance, in our dining room a fine, but till now blank, panel extending above the well-proportioned fireplace. I am wondering whether you recall that copy you made of the Tiepolo?”

  I did not need a further hint but on the spot made my wedding present with more relief than the recipient could have suspected. But he beamed and, under the feeling that his point had been not only conceded but welcomed, he unbent further than ever I had seen that great presence condescend.

  “I am peculiarly pleased; it is particularly happy, I think. For I shall often look at it and reflect that whereas I have only the copy—of course, a very good one—I can gain more from it than HIS Grace ever can from the original.” He paused and his smile became even more bland. It spread and wreathed till it might almost be called intimate, perhaps arch. “This,” he said, “is a secret, of course, between us two, and, what is more, I would wager it is a thought which never entered your head. For I saw at the first that you had true modesty and knew your power’s extent. But, do you know, I believe that if I swapped my fine copy for the original, HIS Grace would be quite content; he’d never know. We all sometimes go beyond ourselves and do something quite beyond our gifts. I don’t believe that even you know what a fine piece of—” he chuckled and brought out the word quite roguishly, “forgery you had made and now have given to me. There, that’s our little secret joke, isn’t it!”

  And my astonished shoulder felt the accolade of his fat hand patting it with approval. “Being High Butler he prophesied that year—” the misformed quotation floated through my dazed mind. Prophecy may be the wrong word in its modern sense of seeing the future, but all that it really means is insight into the hidden meaning of things and the secret motives of men. And am I wrong then in seeing something providential in this disposal of events and something unconsciously vatic in the man who was the unknowing agent in them? Here was the neatest possible disposal of the embarrasing evidence of a stillborn crime. I would have had to get hold of it and burn it otherwise. It would certainly never have done for the church here, even if I could have been sure—an impossible hope—that it would never have come to HIS Grace’s ear that his discourteous lack of generosity to artists had been circumvented. I must say, I thought there was something rather sublime in the matter: perhaps the choicest of those many quiet revenges that this Mayor of the Palace could take on the coroneted oaf who thought he employed him, that the chief butler should choose this to be his choicest piece of house decoration, knowing that if the Duke saw it, he would realize that one of the few proofs he was able to give himself of his power had been violated.

  One thing, however, I would wager, and I must say I am glad to be sure of that, for if that happened then in a way my crime would be carried out: He will never live up to his joke and trouble to switch the pictures. My copy was, I’ve told you, only the best thing I�
��ve ever done, and that’s saying quite a little. Nevertheless, I dare to say that I am equally sure that it seems to the butler quite as good as the original. His joking threat was only to try and impress me still further with his all-round superiority to the automaton that called itself his master—and, of course, also to me.

  There, that’s my story of that cup, of the part that it played in my life and destiny. You can see what a remarkable object it is, remarkable as it meets the eye but so much more wonderful for the unseen potential that it holds. As I said when we began this long-night chat, surely we may presume that in its huge history this is not an exceptional episode. It would, wouldn’t it, be wonderful to know that history in full? It would make a sort of cheerful counter-saga to that of the wandering Jew. But, better than that, surely we can suppose that that history is not finished? Anyhow, you will agree that it would not be wise to carry it off on the spot, not until one had turned over this tale. You are turning it over—and have decided to let the cup alone? Yes, I’m glad; and you can see I’m not shamming when I say I’m glad for your sake. I wonder, though, whether the cup is going to leave you alone, whether it’s leaving you alone now? After all, yours has been a pretty lonely life, hasn’t it? Mine was, I know, before I made this coupling—if you’ll forgive my ending with a pun.