The Lost Cavern

by H. F. Heard

  “‘Well, sir, I found that books could take me to the door but not over the threshold. So I went. Yes, I went to the oratory of Gallerius and those other shrines, hardly more than huts, out on the rock islets and those “By that lake whose gloomy shore, skylark never warbled o’er”—though Tommy Moore did it wrong. But at night these places are indeed austere. Such knowledge keeps its secrets well. But I found enough to know two things: first, that there lay my vocation, and, secondly, that I must find others to go with me. “Down to Gehenna or up to the throne he travels the fastest who travels alone”—that was written by one who had not actually trodden the upper road—it may be true of the lower.’”

  The Archdeacon paused and turned to me. “Am I giving you any impression of the man? I do want to, and so am trying to recall in detail that interview. You see, he had humor and a certain contemporaneity: One who knows about Buddhism in China, is not provincial; and one who quotes Kipling on the spiritual life is not a hidebound ecclesiastic.”

  I asked my friend to go on, said that it fascinated me. Indeed it did, for surely here was emerging a picture that might fit with my own experience.

  “Well,” Archdeacon Denson resumed, “I asked Dr. Tuohill to tell me a little more precisely what he took his vocation to be. He replied with some eagerness, ‘An active, an active.’ Perhaps I smiled. I know he smiled back.

  “‘Of course,’ he added, ‘I mean that I am not a pure contemplative,’ and then, with a sudden gravity, ‘I found, I found it in those little coigns of stones, that look like a fossilized giant beehive or an overturned petrified boat, those oratories that are some of them so small that only one person can be in them at a time and he must kneel—I found there in the long nights where my service lay.’ He stopped for a long while and then said one word—‘Intercession.’

  “Perhaps he sensed that I felt the need of asking some kind of further question but was—and this was true—at a loss how to frame my inquiry. Anyhow, while I was seeking about for some way to obtain further information, he began again.

  “‘It is a vast subject, just to map, just to know by what Job calls in that great final passage, “by the hearing of the ear”; and the patriarch may also be cited when one adds, however dimly, “And now my eye seeth and I abhor myself in dust and ashes.”’

  “His voice had taken on a tone of great depth, almost of sorrow, and he seemed for the time to forget me. But, pulling himself together with a sigh, he added, ‘I should have explained to you a few moments ago what I meant by that word inexperience. For I meant, in fact, two things, both of which might advise your judgment as to whether or not to grant my request. The first thing was a surface matter and one in which I hope and believe I have learned my lesson. There is an inexperience which leads to results which indeed do no more harm than giving the foolhardy something of a jolt. If I may put it in technical language just to save time—for, as I’ve said, that matter is closed and ended with my leaving Holy Ireland—when people are young in the life of prayer they find some things which vastly intrigue them—it is exciting, you know’—I bowed, but I hope it was more an act of contrite ignorance than knowing assent—‘Vastly exciting, oh, yes, if I may use the phrase, in quite a vulgar way. For the door which leads from the world of the five senses does not lead directly to the Presence Chamber of the Eternal—no, not even into the anteroom. Rather into a passage in which there are many doors, for “the Beyond which is within” is a veritable labyrinth, and we have now wandered out so far that our way home is marked—if I may slightly change my simile—by many strange byroads. Now, naturally, these are, to the beginner, all fascinating. But one alone is The Way. Nor is that all. While he is on the way he sees many attractive objects at the wayside. To drop similes, as it is put in Sanskrit, the Siddhi come before enlightenment, the appearance of powers dawns on the soul before it has true sight purged by the Light Eternal.’

  “Perhaps he saw I was certainly more than a bit mystified. He smiled and went on, ‘I’ve said, that’s all over. The hotter-headed of the people who were with me in Ireland were soon (and that happens often) discouraged after their first excitements. I can see now it was all to the good. The Lord is merciful to beginners and sends them back to the common safe ways with a gentle blow of his staff, for fear they would fall headlong over the cliff into the voids. The blow is, of course, outer attacks. The people we would help accused us of witchcraft and sorcery and, of course, our own Church gave us no support. It taught me, too, my great ignorance. Who was I to be attempting this task of helping the living by prayer while I knew so very little about the rules of the vast unseen universe in which we live? And had I stayed at that level I might have become some simple sort of healer, not knowing his powers, a risk to those he would help, yes, and a peril to himself. No, I was to be taught, Laus Deo! It was then, and not till then, that I began to plumb my own ignorance; it was then that at last I received my first hint of what initiation actually may mean. To quote the great Paul, “I hold not myself to have comprehended but I have apprehended.” Yes, I now know where my service, which is also my education, lies. Later on there may be work more obvious to be done. Meanwhile there is this basic service to be yielded and this basic training in the ordeals of prayer to be completed. I will only add and conclude that I venture to think true intercession is always, to some degree, vicarious sacrifice.’

  “He paused and then very gently said, ‘Perhaps, again to quote Job, I have only succeeded in darkening counsel with words. All I was trying to say is that I have been taught a certain amount about this vast subject of intercession, I feel its supreme importance, and I am asking that I may, in what I believe to be this most crucial, I almost said, most favored, spot, carry on the work to which my work in Ireland was my first step.’

  “We were silent for some time and then he said quite cheerfully, ‘I do hope the Bishop will be able to concede my request. I would wish to say all the appointed offices in the small church above here, celebrate the sacraments, and offer my services to any who might wish to avail themselves, and not,’ he smiled, ‘prove a nuisance to my fellow clergy.’

  “I pointed out that not even the house he was in would be in his cure of souls, that the chapel was technically a chapel of ease, it was meant to serve purposes the parishes could not serve. He could hope for no congregation, for the purposes for which the place was built had long ceased to be operative—and, I added, ‘Thank God.’ But I didn’t say more.”

  The Archdeacon stopped, got up, and then, looking down at me, said, “I wonder if you understand, perhaps you do, but I felt the first sense of what is rightly called the uncanny—that is, what the canny man can’t ken—when Dr. Tuohill remarked almost casually, almost to himself, ‘That was what drew me to the place. There is a need there.’”

  As the Archdeacon used that word uncanny—I know it sounds strange but hope actually stirred in my mind, as a man left in a dungeon may hear with deep relief the steps of his rescuers stumbling down the shaft that leads to where he is lying. But I was too nervous to call out yet, for fear I’d frighten help away.

  Anyhow, he had begun speaking again: “Let me, before ending, as I promised, with this place, finish with its incumbent, for he did become so. I have to own he had left me in doubt, because, as I was rising to go, he said, ‘My particular concern, sir, is with the mind, the spirit. Do not think I would despise those who have the vocation to tend man’s body and estate—his threefold need calling for a threefold service. I have corresponded with a member of a religious order in this country, in the north. He is now with God, but toward the end of his life of prayer and preaching he found that through his prayer he had been let have access to minds and hearts long closed to all words however eloquent. He found he had a vocation to the hopelessly insane, to homicidal lunatics and such strayed souls. He could go into the asylum and stay with such in the padded cell and bring them forth healed. Of course, he had spiritual discernment. Naturally, therefore, he did not heal right and left. As I hav
e said, no one who has the vision equal to the power does that. Are we not told, ‘There were many lepers in Israel at the time of Elisha the Prophet and none were healed save Naaman the Syrian’?

  “‘Do you mean,’ I asked, ‘that you are interested in psychotherapy?’

  “Dr. Tuohill paused, then said, ‘Yes, in the deepest sense of the word and with the strongest wish that my spiritual discernment may be equal, indeed may exceed, any power to aid that may be vouchsafed me.’

  “Well, we parted at that. As I’ve said, I was puzzled by that ending. I reported to our Bishop. Not long before that, one of his colleagues had done a very brave thing. In his diocese he had a tumbled-down church on the fringe of one of the large towns. A clergyman asked that he might have it to start there a ministry of healing. After consulting with some able and openminded doctors, that bishop decided to let this work be ventured, under constant supervision. It was of some considerable use for a number of years. Our Bishop felt that he should not be less courageous—there was nothing against the man, much to be said for him. The chapel did need someone to take care of it, and, after all, we were not sure that Dr. Tuohill would attract a single visitor to hear him, let alone submit to his direction. At the worst it would mean that its upkeep costs would be met and that the services would be said to empty air, though I would add that I myself greatly doubt if a service devoutly said is ever said to vacancy.

  “Well, I inquired, when I used to be in the town, how Dr. Tuohill was getting on; I seldom had time to get up to his house, but the rural dean whose church is near the station knew about him and had been hospitable. He had asked the Doctor to read a paper to their Deanery society. He smiled as he told me that, though they had all liked the reader, the subject had been well above their practical heads. It had been on—the oddness of the title stuck in his mind—‘A Consideration of the Stages of the “Marred” and the “Perished” Soul as set out in the Thirteenth-Century Flemish Tractate entitled The Mirror of Simple Souls.’ The souls may have been simple, but they seem to have been conjoined with very subtle minds. ‘So,’ concluded my rural dean, ‘we have not ventured to ask Dr. Tuohill to address us again, and he seems quite content to be a lookout man leaving us in the hold of the ship.’

  “Once, however, I did get up—not long ago, and I own on that occasion I was a little disquieted. I thought Dr. Tuohill looked very worn. But, to be quite frank, that was not the real source of my sense of misgiving. That arose from something he said which I do think was strange. To my inquiry as to whether people were attending the services, he replied that there were a few on summer evenings and then added, ‘May I request of them that they never sit anywhere but in the last pew of the church?’ That surely was a queer request.”

  The Archdeacon had been walking up and down in front of me as he spoke and now turned and looked down at me. I felt myself start, but hope I did not show it, and, a moment after, he went on, “Dr. Tuohill added that, as only one or two persons came, the back pew held them well enough. But the request was odd, and it was put with a certain urgency that was oddly disturbing. I think I got out of it by saying that if there was room in the pew for all who dropped in, right and good. That he then added, ‘I wouldn’t ask it if it were not important, if it were not to their interests,’ puzzled me more. But, as you know, it is not wise to speak when you are puzzled. I was rushed for time anyhow—the vice of all administrators—and had to go. And that was the last time that I saw him alive.”

  The Archdeacon stopped his slow walk to and fro in front of me, and, putting out his hand to pull me to my feet, said, “Now come and see the place. It repays study and perhaps tells us something about the man who served it.”

  He led me around to the east end and so we came to the little door on the north side. I told him I had admired the tympanum but had been puzzled by the carving in the cushion capitals of the pillars.

  “It gives the original use of the place, though,” he replied, and then pointed out the figure which, on the left capital, stood under the figure throned in what he said was cloud and with a small object in its hand. This lower figure had, as I had noticed, something like lines of spaghetti trailing up around it.

  “Those,” he said, “are the Romanesque carvers’ convention for flames. And now look at the corresponding figure on this right-hand capital.”

  I said I thought this figure had specks or spots drilled on it.

  “That,” he added, “is the convention of the time for something as bad as burning, leprosy. This chapel, I’ve said, was a chapel of ease—that is, it was to give ease to the comfortable people down below in the little town and to keep at more than arm’s length that ghastly population that wandered in desolate places seeking rest and finding none. For this place, we know, was built in that awful epidemic of the twelfth century when leprosy, or some frightful eroding skin disease, became almost a plague. The panic was terrible. First the poor creatures were driven out, stripped of home, family, estate. A hideous travesty of a service was held, and the victim was thrown a rough robe, a clapper, and a bowl; told that the curse had come on him for his sins, and expelled from mankind. Then men revolted against such cruelty, and, first, chapels such as this were built and, next, lazar houses. The scene you see on these post heads is, of course, the story in stone, taken from St. Luke, of Dives and Lazarus. It was carved here, I suppose, to strengthen the brave priest—one of those unnumbered Damiens of the past—every time he went in to his hideous duties among that hellish congregation. He could steel his heart, knowing that if he succored these living corpses and ran the risk of becoming one himself he was making it less likely that after death he would be eaten by the undying flame and see Lazarus in Heaven—not a very high way of putting the call to a high service but perhaps better than nothing.”

  I was now listening with a growing tension of interest.

  “Well,” he went on, “the epidemic died down, and gradually that leprosy, as far as we know, disappeared. But apparently the chapel found another use as an ease to men’s consciences. For from late medieval times right down to the repeal of those harsh penal laws that hanged a man for stealing five shillings’ worth of goods, the medieval gibbet stood just up there—on the mistaken assumption that if you saw the corpse of a man who had been killed for his crime you wouldn’t commit it. Statistics leave no doubt as to the inaccuracy of that deduction. But men are stubborn about cruel mistakes. And the regular little batches of men going on their way to be, in their phrase, ‘turned off,’ were let turn in here for their last prayers, and afterward their poor bodies, after they had served the needs of advertisement, were given their rest under these walls. So you see criminals and lepers have enriched this soil. And the spiritual climate of this spot must surely have been infected with their despair.

  “Nor was that all. Another grotesque custom—springing, as did the others, from man’s worse counselor and cruelest companion, fear—added its last quota of pain and frustration to this spot. People dreaded a suicide as much as a leper or a thief. He couldn’t be buried in the good churchyard. No, he had to be hauled up to a lonely crossroad and there pegged down with an oak stake through his poor body to hold him from walking as a ghost and upsetting the comfortable who found the life of the flesh good. You see, the two tracks meet here, and here these corpses were certainly taken. The archaeologists who repaired this church, and then handed it over to my office to keep in order, actually dug, I have been told, and found these poor bones with the stake still stuck through the middle of them. The soil is good and dry here and bone and oak last well in it.

  “Now,” he said, “there’s only one more item in this rather grim archaeological catalogue, and it’s a little lighter, I think. Come inside the church for a moment.”

  I followed him inside, entering under the image of Michael in his victory and with the judgment of Dives on either hand of us. This door, I noticed, too, was not locked. Well, the late incumbent certainly might not have stood in awe of thieves, considering the
forces that I felt were given play in that place. And when we came inside, and for the first time I saw the spot which had been so terrible for me, I saw there was as little reason for locking up the inside of this as for padlocking the outside. Indeed, the inside was even barer, for at least on the door through which we had come was some carving—here not a scratch.

  “The restorers’ money fortunately did not run to glass,” my companion remarked in a whisper as we stopped a moment to look around. “No doubt the walls,” he added, “must have had those ocher outline drawings on them, but they were erased by time or Protestant protest.”

  The place had been now left with the freestone bare. The sunlight palely shone down from the high windows. The impression was one of curious vacancy. The old words came into my mind, “Empty, swept, and garnished.” Yes, it was garnished in a way: there was a stone altar with its steps, stone candlesticks, and cross, a small pulpit-reading desk against the north wall about a third of the way down, and the pews. My mind for a moment couldn’t remember whence that quotation about the house being left empty actually came. Then I recalled. Yes, it was apt—for in the short parable in which that line comes, you remember, the house is left like that while that which had occupied it has been driven to leave and is “wandering in dry places seeking rest and finding none.” Even in the quiet daylight, even with the sense that the place was now empty, even with this sane, informed, kindly man, a sudden shudder took me, like those spastic rigors that shake a patient after a seizure. I don’t know whether he noticed it, but I heard him saying, “The spot I wanted to show you is down the other end.” He led me to the west along the narrow lane between the pews till we reached the last of these.

  “That little square of worn stone there,” he said, pointing to a block that rose just above the floor at the northwest corner and was given space by the north end of the last pew not being continued over on that side of the church, “that stone, or, rather, those stones, interested the later archaeologists more than the building itself. They are quite sure that that is part of a Keltic Church that stood on part of this site. Small as this is, that was considerably smaller, they judge by the footings. But the really interesting thing about it is that they discovered what I think they were right in calling its actual baptistry. In fact, the whole little church was no more than a baptistry; perhaps an oratory-baptistry would be the best term. For under that stone is a small vault, and at the bottom of it is still a tiny spring. Those to be baptized—as was, of course, the ancient rite—went down into that well. The water flows out from there, and the builders of that first church made a runnel for its course so that it ran the whole length of their little shrine under the floor. I am told that was a common practice in the Keltic churches, and I rather suspect”—he paused—“that Dr. Tuohill knew of that fact. The Keltic missionaries did not break the old customs or try to erase the lines of the old forces; instead, down what had been a nature current—for no doubt this was a pagan holy well—they ran the fresh currents of the new grace.”