by Forrest Reid
“I don’t think you’d find that very enjoyable,” Mother replied; “and if you leave your door open you’ll get plenty of air. Think how nice it will be next month at the seashore.”
“Yes,” Tom sighed again, for next month seemed very far away.
“And it’s not nearly so hot as it was,” Mother went on. “At least, not so oppressive.” But she was still watching him doubtfully, and presently she said. “I hope you haven’t got a temperature!”
So did Tom, for temperatures were the bane of his existence. He was pretty sure he had one, too, or was going to have one. It was so stupid being like that! Anything in the least out of the ordinary upset him. Not that there had been anything out of the ordinary. A hot day—what was that! Nothing at all events to make you ill.
“If you like,” Mother said, “we’ll go out for a little walk in the garden—for half an hour. That is, if you’ll promise to go straight to bed without dawdling the moment we come in.”
Tom promised, and Mother put away her work. He followed her into the hall, where she wound a sort of scarf thing round her shoulders, so light that it couldn’t really make the least difference. Then they went into the garden.
The walk didn’t amount to much, for they merely sauntered along the paths and up and down the lawn, while Mother stopped every now and again to smell flowers. She was very fond of smelling flowers, and she could even smell things that to Tom were quite unsmellable, such as stones, and water, and the sun baking the bricks of the house.
A greenish translucent glow still lit up the sky, and against this a few small birds were wheeling in delicate noiseless curves and patterns, as they chased the moths. Tom’s first impression was of something extremely graceful and pleasing, till all at once it struck him as horrible. “They’re catching them!” he exclaimed in a shocked voice. “They’re eating them!” And he began to clap his hands to frighten the birds away.
“Insects are their natural food,” Mother observed calmly. “They’re not being cruel.”
“But it’s awful!” Tom cried in anguish. “They’re swallowing them alive!”
Mother put her hand on his shoulder and gave it a little squeeze. “You mustn’t think of things in that way,” she said. “You’re far too sensitive, and you must try to get over it. That isn’t the way to look at things. I don’t suppose the moths even know that it’s happening.”
“It’s our fault,” Tom went on, unconsoled by Mother’s philosophy. “We oughtn’t to put nets over the fruit. Then they wouldn’t want moths.”
Mother at this gave him a shake, almost as if she were trying to wake him up. Now you’re getting into one of your silly moods,” she declared.
But Tom refused to be shaken into comfort. “I’m not,” he said. “And it isn’t silly.”
“It’s silly if you allow it to worry you,” Mother told him. “Because you can’t alter it. It’s the way the world’s arranged, and if you don’t accept it you’ll never be happy. Besides, it’s necessary, or there’d be a plague of insects.”
“It isn’t necessary for us,” Tom argued gloomily. “We could live very well on vegetables and things.”
Not so well as you imagine,” Mother replied. “As a matter of fact it would be extremely troublesome—especially in winter, when there are very few vegetables.”
This might be true, yet it did not satisfy Tom. Nor merely because it was true did that seem to him to make it good, and he said so. “In the Garden of Eden,” he went on, “everybody must have lived on vegetables. I mean all the animals—even animals like lions and tigers.”
“Probably there weren’t: any lions and tigers,” Mother thought. “The savage creatures, I expect, lived outside the Garden.”
“The snakes didn’t,” Tom reminded her.
“Snakes were different then,” Mother said. “They must have been quite different, because we’re told that the serpent was more subtle than any beast of the field. So no doubt they were tame and gentle too, and only afterwards became what they are now.”
Tom thought this a prejudiced view—prejudiced in favour of humanity. “I don’t see that they’re any worse now than we are,” he said. “If it comes to killing things, I don’t expect they’re as bad.” But Mother’s words had called up a picture in his mind which temporarily distracted his thoughts from the callous terrestrial plan. “What happened to the Garden of Eden, do you think?” he asked.
“You know what happened,” Mother answered. “It’s all explained in the first chapters of Genesis.”
“There’s very little about it in the first chapters of Genesis,” Tom replied. “You’re told practically nothing, except that the Garden was there, and that, after Adam and Eve were driven out, it was guarded by angels. So unless something happened to it later, it must be there still.”
“The place where it was of course is there still,” Mother agreed, “but not the Garden itself: that disappeared long ago.”
“Why?” Tom demanded. “How do you know?” It may still be there—hidden by magic.”
But Mother did not find this a profitable subject to pursue; she thought more was to be gained by thinking and talking about the New Testament.
Tom wanted to talk about the Old. “It’s true, isn’t it?” he said, knowing that this would place her in a difficulty.
“Yes, Mother answered, “all the Bible is true.”
“Well then, I think the Old Testament is more interesting,” Tom declared.
But he could see that Mother didn’t approve of this opinion, though she didn’t actually say so. “The New Testament is more important,” she distinguished carefully. “I mean to people living at the present time, because it contains the actual words of Christ. The other is important too, but its importance is more or less only an historical importance. It describes things that happened a long time ago, and naturally such things haven’t a great deal to do with us.”
“All the same, they were interesting things,” Tom persisted. “The Flood, and Jacob’s ladder, and the Witch of Endor, and Lot’s wife, and Balaam’s ass, and Jonah in the whale, and Moses turning his rod into a serpent—they’re just like the Arabian Nights.”
“They’re not in the least like the Arabian Nights,” Mother contradicted, “and it’s very wrong to talk in that way.”
“Wrong!” exclaimed Tom in astonishment. “Do you mean wicked?”
“Yes,” Mother said. “You know the Arabian Nights stories are fairy tales, and that the Bible is God’s word.”
“But I only said it was like them,” Tom protested.
“And I say it isn’t like them,” Mother answered. “Nor is that the proper way to read the Bible—picking out bits here and there—especially the bits you seem to have picked out—just because they happen to contain marvels.”
“How ought I to read it?” Tom asked.
“The Bible was written to teach us how to live properly,” Mother continued, “and to reveal the truth. It isn’t like any other book.”
“But I didn’t really pick out those bits,” Tom said, after a brief pause. “They just happen to be the bits I remember.”
“Yes, and that shows they were the bits you liked. Otherwise you wouldn’t have said that the Garden of Eden might be hidden by magic. You said that because you wanted to think so. There is very little in the Bible about magic, and when it is mentioned at all, it is condemned as wicked. If the Garden of Eden had been hidden, it would have been hidden by God.”
“Yes, that’s what I meant,” Tom hastened to assure her.
“It isn’t what you said, then,” Mother told him. “God isn’t a magician.”
“N-o,” Tom hesitated. He couldn’t quite grasp the point, however, nor in what consisted the apparently so great difference between miracles and magic. But he was willing to leave this unchallenged, for his interest really was in the Garden itself. “You see,” he went on, reverting to his original thought, “the flood would only flood it: it would still be there when the water drained a
way. . . . Do you mind if I tell you what I think really may have happened?”
Mother for a moment looked as if she did mind, but suddenly she smiled and said, “No.”
“I’m not cross,” she added; “it’s only that these things aren’t the same as fairy tales: they’re true, and I want you to realize that.”
Tom was relieved, and told her that he did realize it. “I think,” he went on quickly, “that just before the flood came the Garden sank down into the earth, and then, after the rain had dried up, it rose again. You see, it would have been a pity to spoil a place like that. And I think all the animals who were in it—— No, I don’t—what I really think is that the flood wasn’t allowed to touch it at all. A magic wall—I mean a barrier suddenly rose up all round it, with watch-towers on which the guarding angels stood, waving their swords. . . . Square watch-towers,” he added, his eyes narrowing till they were nearly shut. “Then Noah, if he looked out from the Ark across the water at night, would see the moving lights of the swords, but he wouldn’t know what they were. It would be all dark, all black water, except for the red moving flames on the towers—the swords of the Cherubims. Even if a little bit of the Cherubims was lit up by the swords, they would still only be like shadows, standing with their faces hidden in the clouds.”
“Well,” said Mother, abandoning theological discussion and pressing her cool hand against his cheek, “it’s time we were going in and time you were going to bed.”
But Tom didn’t want this at all: he wanted to talk; and the hour and the place were somehow just right, if only Mother would be right too. “Don’t let’s go in yet,” he pleaded. “It’s far nicer out here and I feel better already. Besides, there’s the moon.”
“What has the moon got to do with it?” Mother asked. “You’re a little humbug. And anyhow I must go in, because I’m being eaten alive by midges.”
She did not insist on his accompanying her, however, and he sat down on a bench outside the study window. The midges did not trouble him, and a light wind had sprung up and was whispering its plaintive sighings in his ears. Daddy, who was always too busy to sit in the dark, or even in the twilight, had turned on the light in the study, and it streamed out through the uncurtained windows. It had a quite different effect, Tom noticed, from daylight. The shrubs in its immediate radius were vividly and metallically green, but they suggested the brightness of a painted scene in a theatre, and behind this the trees assumed dark listening shapes, and the bushes were like crouching Sphinxes and Chimeras. Where the light fell, it created a superficial illusion, a glittering enchantment; but beyond was the great world of nature—profound, real, and living.
Then, in the study, Mother drew the curtains, and the enchantment vanished. The trees drew closer, while the great white moon, like a pale floating water-lily, rose higher above them. Tom had an impression of drifting up to meet it, of drifting above the tree-tops. And looking downward thence he could see the shadowy garden and the house, and a small human figure with a white face sitting on a bench. Higher still, so that now he could see the silent coils of the river and the foaming whiteness where it rushed over the weir, and the dark tangle of woodland on the farther bank. The sense of actual levitation was much more real, much less dreamlike, than it had been that morning when he had sat half asleep in school. Now he could see the grey fields, intersected by dark lines that were the hawthorn hedges. It was the country Pascoe had mapped, but soon Tom left it behind him. On and on he voyaged, over hills and lighted towns and open country until at last below him he saw a wide dark stretch of water and knew that he had reached the sea. A white line marked the breaking of the waves against black cliffs; and where it curved in a long slender bow he knew there was a beach.
Miles and miles away he was, and yet a step on the gravel, and Daddy’s voice, reached him across all that distance, and brought him at terrific speed back into the waiting empty body on the bench. “You’re to come in, young man,” Daddy announced. “Your supper is ready; and after that, bed.”
Tom got up at once, for the moment Daddy spoke he realized that his feet and lower limbs were cold. His body was not much warmer, yet his head felt very hot. He did not mention these symptoms, though they struck him as remarkable and most likely dangerous. For if his blood was circulating properly, how could there be all these different temperatures? Meanwhile Daddy’s hand, placed beneath Tom’s armpit, impelled him firmly towards the house.
CHAPTER NINE
TOM OPENED his eyes with a feeling that somebody had called his name. It was uncommonly dark, and without raising his head from the pillow he could see two tiny green lamps outside the window. The lamps appeared to be suspended in mid-air some eight inches above the sill, and shone with a bright steady glow. It was quite half a minute before he understood what they were: then he knew that Henry was watching him. . . .
Why? Henry must have clambered up somehow by the creeper, yet evidently not with the intention of coming in, for both windows were open. He must have climbed up for some other purpose, though what that might be Tom could not imagine, and he softly called: “Puss—puss!” Instantly the green lights disappeared, and he heard a rustle of leaves, followed by silence. . . .
Tom was perplexed. Not that he objected to Henry being on the window-sill; it was only his secretiveness that seemed strange. He all b didn’t believe Henry had had any purpose at all beyond that of making himself mysterious, and with this he dismissed him from his thoughts and tried to go to sleep again.
He shut his eyes, but it was no use. His pillow was hot and uncomfortable, and he also was hot and uncomfortable, though only a sheet and a counterpane covered him. There were peculiar little noises, too, going on all round him, and they were very like voices. They came from everywhere—from under the bed, from the ceiling, from the windows, from the pictures, from the wardrobe, from the washstand—and they grew every moment more eager and confused, as if a discussion were being carried on and everybody were talking at once. In such a babel how could he go to sleep? Yet the voices didn’t really say anything, were only sounds, little cries and chirps and squeaks, not human at all.
And with that, quite distinctly, he heard three words: “Follow the light.”
Queerer still, he was neither startled nor particularly surprised, though he sat up and listened. It had been a very small voice certainly, and the moment he sat up it stopped speaking, in fact there was a general silence. Tom could be quiet too, however, and presently, as if reassured by his stillness, the same small voice spoke again, evidently from somewhere behind the washstand. “Follow the light,” it said; and this time there could be no mistake; for a ray of light, not much thicker than a whipcord, actually darted across the room about three feet above the carpet, so that the end of it passed straight through the keyhole.
Tom did not hesitate an instant, but sprang out of bed and opened his door. He was just in time to see the ray of light gliding forward like a thread of elastic pulled by an invisible hand: next moment it had stretched round the corner at the end of the passage, and he hurried after it, passing the open door of Daddy’s and Mother’s room and reaching the wide landing above the staircase. Down into the hall the thread of light went, and down into the hall Tom pursued it. Then, just as he reached the last stair, the grandfather’s clock began to clear its throat, and the sound brought him up abruptly.
For it was not the same sound as the clock ordinarily made, or else Tom’s sense of hearing was not the same. It seemed to him now that the wheezing noise was trying to make words, trying to tell him something, trying to attract his attention. He stood still and “Don’t go! Don’t go!” the old clock choked and gasped, but the words were indistinct and he could not be sure that he had heard them aright. If the warning had been repeated, or if he had been quite certain that it had been a warning, he might have heeded it, but there was a sudden break in the sound, and a brief silence, followed immediately by two slow clear notes striking the hour. The deep mellow chime floated out and died a
way, and with this the clock’s power of speech died too. It appeared to Tom that for just a few seconds the tall wooden figure quivered slightly, but when he touched it, half expecting to find in it some lingering vibration of life, it had stiffened once more into immobility, and its round placid old face was sunk in its customary repose.
But the silver thread remained, and it passed through the keyhole of the hall-door, showing that the track it marked led outside the house. The door was a heavy mahogany one, locked and chained, nevertheless Tom had no difficulty in unchaining it and in turning the big iron key. He slipped back the latch and swung the door wide; and maybe the door too tried to warn him, but its voice had been drowned in oil, and it could make no sound, only turn on its hinges and let him out into the night. Tom followed the guiding thread. It led him through the soft darkness, and the cool air was pleasant, though his feet were naked and his pyjamas thin. The flowers were shut in sleep, but the garden was filled with sweetness strengthened by a heavy dew that lay on everything, deep as a shower of rain. And the night already was more a veil than a curtain; not really night, but only a shadow which would be lifted in another hour.
The light passed round the house, and Tom, turning the corner after it, saw at once whither it was leading him. Merely to his play-loft, and he crossed the yard on the cobblestones, while out of the shadow a black shape emerged, purring and rubbing dew-soaked fur against his legs. The thread of light ran up the wall like a silver vein of mushroom spawn: it passed through the window of the loft, but more than that Tom could not see.
The ladder was still there, however, propped up against the wall, and he put a bare foot on the lowest rung. And then once more something checked him, this time something within himself, a faint and vague premonition of danger. Yet he climbed up—mounting more and more slowly and now he saw that there was a dim light in the loft, pale and phosphorescent, hardly so powerful as the light of a candle. And in fact no candle was burning, the light had no visible source—unless it issued from that fantastic figure seated in a chair beside the table.