by H. F. Heard
But when it came to acting up to my promise I expect you realize I didn’t find it easy. A whole afternoon to amuse oneself! And by now the weather was more fickle and the afternoons shorter, of course. Why didn’t I spend the time in the sanctuary I had found? Well, because my free day was Sunday. Don’t you see? The place was an escape, a reaction spot for me. I wanted it not for itself but as contrast—not for anything it might be or have been in its own right but just because it wasn’t office, war, comradeship—just as when we’ve been working under too hard a light and we shut our eyes or go out and stand in the dark, that doesn’t mean we want to be blind. And, mind you, blind is what I assumed all that the chapel stood for, had been, and must be. It was a “blind turning,” away into fantasy from fact, from order to wandering, from reason to romance. I had had a good training in economics, and my job had kept my knowledge whetted. I knew the economic confusion of the Middle Ages and felt sure that in spite of little setbacks such as the two world wars, we were going to put man’s economy in order. Of course, then he would be right. Do you know, it had never occurred to me that if you could tidy up the outer world, if you were efficient economically, you wouldn’t be as advanced psychologically! Yes, I’d gone on to the further fatuous assumption that anyone who was economically advanced must be psychologically progressive and that anyone who was economically backward must be psychologically ignorant. Could provincial conceit go further? But certainly such was mine. It was no more and no less than that of the entire species of civil servant I represented.
So I wouldn’t go to my cubbyhole on Sundays because on Sundays I was sure it wouldn’t be my hole but someone else’s nest. I was like that small owl which, needing a hide-out during the day, takes to a rabbit hole, as the rabbit is out most of the day and generally wants the burrow only at night when the owl is out on business. But one day, as autumn had fully come, I was driven a step further. I’d taken a fine walk and the weather had been perfect. I had struck inland and followed the rising country through high pasture and gorse common. When I’d gone so far that, if I were to get back in time for even a late dinner, I knew I must not go farther, I found a perfect spot. It faced south; the soil was sandy, warm, and dry; a real zareba of gorse, thick and high, swept round in a half-circle that screened this small bay of earth from any draft. The gorse still had on it quite a deal of its yellow blossom, vivid against the sky and its fragrance drawn out by the sun. I threw myself on the earth, and it was springy and warm as a sofa. I let all the tense air I held rise out of me in a huge sigh of content.
Do you know that queer little exercise—if it can be called by that rather over-earnest word? Well, I don’t think I ought to call it an exercise, anyhow, for I fell into it. But after I learned that some people do it deliberately and say it is of benefit. You lie on your back in a completely lonely place, right straight down on the earth, full length on your back. You look straight up at the sky, right into the vacant blue, and you stretch out your arms full either side. After a little while I noticed—and I’m told this is what usually happens—I had a curious sense of the earth behind and beneath me bearing me up, as though it rose gently like a vast billow, on the smooth unbreaking crest of which I rode, and was being carried up and up, while the vast curve of the sky, corresponding with the vast sweep of the earth below me, drew earth and me toward it. There was nothing but this great breast bearing me up and this vast span bending over me. It was tremendously restful and refreshing. And when you scramble yourself together, how odd you feel, how scrappy, giddy even, what an odd little fragment, what a tattered and displaced and creased and crumpled piece of leaf, withered leaf, which before was firmly on the vast tree of life and spread by it in the sun.
Yes, the sun was quite low, its heat even more diminished, and I looked at my watch. It would need some hurry to get back. I passed into a mood of contrasting vexation which the fading memory of the queer hypnotic calm as it cleared away only made worse. I hurried along, yes, stumbled along, and the varied going which on my way out had seemed such pleasant change from streets now only added to my sense of frustration. In consequence, by the time I reached the combe next to the one in which lay our lodging house, I realized I was in no mood to meet colleagues. I don’t think I am a pleasant character, but growing old does make one wiser, and I have learned to avoid people when one is not certain if one can stand their company—I suppose that might be taken as an example of Mandeville’s famous or infamous paradox, private vices are public benefits. But what should I do? I was quite tired. The evening was quite cool now. Of course, I was being driven a step further into the hole which I had used for my private comfort but which I knew had quite probably its own and indeed public purposes. Well, I must risk it. If I went in and found five desolate landladies, their scrannel voices woven on the worsted threads of a wheezy harmonium, their cantor a nasal-voiced curate chanting Tallis canon in unison or wailing “Abide with me,” I could flee, though the place would echo for weeks with that worse-than-witches’ sabbath. As I approached the final pull up the down-side and came in sight of the small building, I glanced at my watch. Alas, I was right on time. That rite rather pathetically called by Anglicanism—I was brought up in a vicarage—evensong would be due to occur. But another glance at the sanctuary gave me a faint hope. There was no sign of anyone approaching. After all, why should they? The town was amply supplied, I knew, with what are frankly—but to me how forbiddingly—called bright churches with bright services. No one could fancy that this Norman oratory, dark, crabbed, dank, could be a place of attractive worship. I had become used to finding the door unhasped. But that need not mean, at least I had considerable weekday evidence, I should find company had gone in before me, or would follow. That the bell cote was silent told nothing; after dusk the jangling of bells was discouraged by Air Precautions. I hesitated, looked again at my watch. It was past that six-thirty, which is the deadline for the outbreak of most Anglican evensongs. I listened. No, not a hint of either nasal intonation or drawling response came to me—and the air was as quiet as at my first visit.
I moved the door, which was only ajar, not set with any evident welcome. I moved it so slowly and gently that even its rusty temper didn’t protest. I was able even to draw it to behind me, and still there was no arthritic complaint from its hinges. That queer familiar smell of old undisturbed churches met me with a kind of welcome—that best of welcomes to the shy: the assurance that you will be disregarded. With gentle contact my hand and shin simultaneously made their findings of the pew, and I think I slid into it and curled up without a sound; that kind of timber had given up creaking and such sappy tricks four centuries ago. I felt a great and growing relief, almost irrational in its depth and force. I felt I was back home and had found home undisturbed.
I felt free of this queer little kingdom. Perhaps, after all, by some strange freak of what is really one of the strangest of all religious bodies, the Anglican Church, this church was on its own and had no parochial or any other duties—perhaps it was just a museum piece at large. Such a thing wouldn’t be too improbable in a church so full of exceptions that you can hardly ever find the rules. I smiled in the dark to myself as I recalled that there were actually places and offices in this Church of England which were called “peculiars.” Well, perhaps this was a peculiar, a particular peculiar all for me. And then in a moment that little play of fancy, with which I was hugging myself, took on what perhaps you might call a minor key. You know when you are playing with words they turn into what psychologists call word-association tests and will suddenly fish up from the depth of your mind associations you didn’t suspect, yes, and didn’t want! That word “peculiar” began to change key and, from being an archaeological amusement, began to take on just a hint of the other senses it may have; for example, the uncanny. I was now quite certain I had escaped evensong. The dreadful banality of a dreary modernized rite was not to spoil my retreat for me. No, I realized, this place was abandoned. Why, I didn’t ask for the moment. But th
en the question did form itself—why? And then another question followed: abandoned to what? Those questions, those inquiries were quite as irrational, quite as independent of me, as were those first investigations which I had let the child- or dog-side of my mind make when I first had found the place and curled up in it. But this time there was a change. They both had this in common, that I was not controlling them. But otherwise they were utterly different. The first inquiries had been pleasantly detached—the idlest and easiest of curiosities. These new questions were completely the reverse; they had about them an irrational concern, an urgency. For one moment—and I think this gives some gauge of their force—I felt a sudden pang of regret that I had not found landladies, curate, harmonium, and all, set at full out-of-key blast at evensong. Then that thought was swept away by the immediate concern. Again my discovery, if it was one, was certainly not enough to account for my swift swoop of mood. I was certain of only one thing—and I couldn’t give proof of it—that I was not alone. Someone was in the place. Well, why shouldn’t this be? Was I the only person who might like to sit at dusk in an old church? Yes, but I was certain of more than that. Like a seeping tide that was cutting me off, these certainties grew quietly, vaguely, and encirclingly. There was someone here, and it was not—most emphatically it was not, any more than this was a bevy of conventional landladies about to sing “Abide with me”—someone like myself just resting and relaxing.
No, whoever was here was here with a business, with a process in hand. And with that word business there ran into my mind that strangely unpleasant line from the Vulgate version of the Psalms, the line about the unknown terrors of the dark—Negotium perambulans in nocte—the peculiar concern that goes about its business in the dark. Yes, I felt a shudder as those words repeated themselves in my mind, for they seemed like a caption written beside an otherwise enigmatic and sinister picture. Of course, I could see nothing. Nor could I hear anything, either. I tried to sense that current I had diagnosed as flowing past where I sat—yes, I could just be aware of that. Next, to quieten myself, I tried to see if I could sound out for that other current, the other side of the margin on which I sat. But that only added to my disquiet. It was quite clear that it was out there that the trouble lay. Then in a moment I came to a conclusion: The farther-away force, the force I described after my first visits as having a tension about it, a high voltage, it was that which was now disturbing me. Before, you remember, it was at the very limit of my apprehension. Well, now it had come much nearer; it was not only right up against the other side of the margin on which I sat, cresting against it, but somehow I was much more in key with it, it could get much nearer to me through my natural human insulation. I was much more exposed. I drew myself back. My curl-up became a true crouch. I was gathered with knees, arms, shoulders, hands, and head in a bundle so that I must have been little above the book-rest of the pew. I don’t think I wished I hadn’t come, now. I was somehow fixed in the moment, and my attention, willy-nilly, was with what was ahead of me, both in space and time. I peered just over the bookrest and tried to pierce the darkness. Do you know, it was quite a relief when at last I was quite certain that someone had moved? Yes, there was someone there, and this—I knew that quite as clearly—was the cause of the atmosphere, of the tenseness, of the uncanny business that was going forward—so it was a relief to know that a presence was actually physically there. When you have a force placed, to some extent you have it defined. When you have decided it is at least largely physical, you can begin to think about it rationally. My sense of sound also stood me in good stead. I could place my—what shall I call it—my protagonist. I knew where it must lie. It was—and I felt the relief such a discovery gave—as far away from me as it could be in that place—it was right up at the other end of this little cove. That, of course, wasn’t much, but it was something, and it was immensely reinforced by another discovery—another kind of sounding, something that, though it sounds irrational, was certainly as clearly apprehended as the bearings of this strange, powerful, uncanny object. And that was that its force, what it was sending out with such really awful stress, was not only not aimed at me but—how shall I put it—not in my direction. Just to know that was such a relief that it permitted my interest, which had frozen as a hare freezes when the hound is right on it, to stir a little. What could be going on? I could be sure of one thing only: that a drive of force was being sent out with a dreadful vigor, with agonizing effort against some frightful opposition. Then, when I began to feel that something must burst if this silent tension were sustained a moment longer, it stopped.
But the cessation of that drive only switched my dismay onto another circuit. True, the pressure had been cut off, but the stoppage was caused by a physical break. A new kind of shock of surprise hit me. For what broke the surcharged silence, though not loud, was all the more alarming. It was a groan of such agony that I hope I won’t hear it again—at least till I can stand it. Oh, yes, I’ve heard and watched a good many people in extremis. And one thing I’m certain of: this was an agony deeper than that which can be wrung from the spirit of man by any physical distress. It was all the more ghastly then, when, after that groan, in which the very oak of the bench I sat on seemed to join—as though anything which had ever had life had to respond to such intense capacity to feel—after a short silence there came a sob. Again there was nothing of relief in that very human sound; indeed, I might say there was nothing that was human. No more than that groan was it the reaction of a creature expressing, with early loss of self-control, its self-pity and protest at its pain. It showed a sorrow so deep, as the groan expressed a pain so piercing, that one’s own feeble reaction could only be a wave of the most horrible despair: if in the world or anywhere there were pain and sorrow of this quality, what was the use of life, to what end courage and love and sacrifice—for they were simply so many drops of warm water falling into the sub-zero void, onto that awful core of ice which Dante believed he saw locking the central depth of Hell.
It was the sense of that despair that filled me with a new kind of panic. I don’t know how long I sat. Breath and heartbeat seemed shrinking under that weight. I can’t say, then, whether it was relief or only another kind of fear shot across the desolation which was sucking me down, when I heard quite clearly again with my physical ears, as clearly as the groan and the sob, an ordinary movement. I call it ordinary because there was no furtiveness about it, no hint that whoever made it was wishing to conceal the fact or, indeed, was aware of anyone being near. But it was not ordinary in another way. In out-of-the-way parts of the world, where street lighting is uncommon and bad accidents not so, and you can often be called on for quite advanced first aid in the middle of the night, you spontaneously get to make your first diagnosis by sound, by the way the man who is coming to you for help is moving:—That’s a pretty bad smash, you guess, straight away, from a kind of fumbling walk:—That one’s near the end of his tether, he’s been trying to get back from where he was hit and will hardly make this porch:—And so on. Well, the same guessing, quick and sure as a shot, went off in my mind. Heavens! I thought, whoever moves like that, what exhaustion! And then: Only a will of iron could move a body that drags like that.
The drawing, dragging sound began also to awake another distress in my mind. There could be no doubt of it—it was coming toward me. True, the current of force, which I so much dreaded might strike in my direction, that was temporarily cut off. But now I was to face another ordeal. I was to be brought up against whatever it was that could send out such a piercing thrust—yes, and in that effort experience such an anguish and such almost overwhelming opposition. Well, I couldn’t get away. I felt I mustn’t betray that I was here; and there was a cowering little reassurance in the thought that the creature of such force and such labor-pain was totally unaware of me. And, just as I’d concluded there was nothing for it but to wait, the oncomer paused, too. Indeed, the sound of movement had not approached very near to me—or, rather, because the place was s
o small, I suppose I ought to say, it hadn’t moved very far from the spot, the extreme other end off the little nave, where I had first sensed it.
I was hunched and gaping with my effort to hear. At last I was quite sure. It had come to pause, I dare not say to rest, about halfway down the nave. I could make sure of something further. It was now situated somewhere at the base of the north wall and so in a kind of diagonal from my corner position on the southwest angle. Nothing happened for a little time; and if not reassurance, at least a kind of mood akin to resignation began to seep into my mind. I felt I could at least stick it out.
The next change was as gradual as the change of lighting which takes place at the very beginning of an eclipse: that queer hint of lividness which comes into the strong brightness of the sun and seems to come not so much from the sun’s losing light as from the world’s seeming to be able to soak up and exhaust the light that’s falling on it. Some activity, alien, utterly uncanny, was starting up again. I don’t know how I knew the next thing, but almost at the same time I could distinguish that this new thing was in some way different from the last storm I had felt rushing ahead of me. Again I can only say it was nearer to my level, and this awoke a personal fear once more.
The utter distress I had felt at those first sounds, and the torment that gave them rise, was, I suppose, somehow selfless—or, at least, collective. I was being put into circuit with, and being in danger of being overwhelmed by, the sheer misery of existence—the Weltschmerz, as that tragic people the Germans call it. But now I had the humiliating and mean sense of personal fear, fright for myself. For, as I’ve said, when that drive first caught my attention, I had had a kind of relief that it wasn’t hitting at me, was disregarding me—yes, was even unaware of me and of all my sort and kind. But now the direction, and the aim, and the kind of force being used, all these had changed, and they had all changed for the worse, as far as I personally was concerned. What I mean—for I know how difficult it is to give you any real sense of it—is that the presence was now pointing in my direction. Further, it was deliberately aiming its attention in my quarter. And, finally, it was using, or about to use, a medium which might permit it to strike directly at me.