He thought again of Louisa Agnew; of her words in the church porch; of Emilia’s parting counsel. Yet it was unthinkable to inflict his shame on her. Hers was a maiden spirit, untouched by the vileness in the world. Even the astonishing candour with which she had first discountenanced him so long before was an earnest of guileless simplicity. He could not sully it.
Until that moment his reveries over women had been rank with the impersonalities of sense. Only in form were they human; otherwise he had diminished them to provocative and recumbent flesh, skin over appetite, no more. Yet even as he revelled in it, that lack of human tenderness disgusted him. His dreams had indeed been an expense of spirit in a waste of shame, and now, in thoughts of Louisa Agnew, he saw how little such excesses answered to his deeper need.
There was that in the quality of her presence which distinguished the need of his heart from those of the flesh. Lovely in form as she was, the spirit within spoke of rarer delights, and when he thought of her now, he saw – he had always somewhere seen – that she was a special presence in the world, apart but not aloof, distinctively herself. He saw her smiling up at him in the shelter of the porch – the eyes bright and enquiring, yet warm also with the tact of her compassion. Wistfully he watched her turn and walk away. She was a baronet’s daughter, carrying in her very air a patrician grace of which her cavalier forebears would have approved, but what a parson’s wife she might have made! She loved this place, this parish; she shared its delights and felt its woes. Far from shocked at Amy Larner’s frailty, she had discerned the generous heart within; for what in others might have appeared mere nonchalance was, in Miss Agnew, ever warmed by care. You could see it in her lively dealings with her servants, who were closer far to friends. You could see it in her affection for her feckless dog, and in the tender diligence she brought to her father’s needs. And there was humour there, an inspiriting, sometimes breathtaking vivacity. How wrong he had been a moment before to think her simple, for there was also the extraordinary fact of her intellectual endeavours. Yes, in both his private and his public life what a fine companion she would have been! How well they might have worked together here, and then, alone by the fireside at night, what conversation they might share! With Plato and Plotinus for their friends, he would urge her on in the adventure of the intellect, while she perhaps might encourage him to pick up his pen once more and try for verse. Why, in such domestic serenity, he would need no encouragement.
Frere sighed. Pleasant as they were, such reveries were disgraceful too. Always, whether dwelling on the flesh or on the more tender yearnings of his heart, his thoughts approached adultery. What else should be the case when he abandoned duty to his wife and pondered endlessly on selfish need?
He must try to think beyond himself, to look outwards, into the world. He tried to fix his interest on his parishioners. He thought of the other men in Munding, they who were not wedded to the church, the free men. They who had a purchase on the world. In their secret hearts, he wondered, were they too desolated by the knowledge that life as meeting always eluded their grasp? Was such despair the common lot? He could not conceive of Mr Bostock and Mr Wharton agonizing out their nights in dread.
Was it possible then that he had been elected to live out, in stricter suffering, what was common to all yet evaded by most? Perhaps that was it? Perhaps this was a cross he carried that others might be spared what he endured? For a moment he saw it meaning so. His distress was suddenly suffused with pride. There need be no shame in his suffering if that were so. It was a special destiny.
And there the ironic demon grinned again. From lust to shame to pride – a vicious circling deeper into sin. Always, at the heart of it, this sensual obsession with the self. His reflections were only ever precisely that – as though the darkness into which he peered was no more than a mirror figuring back his inward emptiness. And yet he must reflect, for what other guarantee remained of his continued spiritual existence? Not the bewildered smiles on the faces of his parishioners as he passed them, distracted, in the lanes. It was merely the animated black of his vestments that they saw, and the oddly white flesh of his hands and face. No, only this capacity for desperate thought was a serviceable spirit here – even if the twists of its mazes were where his demons dwelt.
In an agony of apprehension he saw how closely Easter loomed on the calendar before him.
Dimly at first, then with mounting alarm, he saw that in rejecting the vision of himself as paschal lamb suffering on behalf of others, a catastrophic doubt had entered his mind.
Was it possible for anyone to suffer on behalf of others?
Easter was coming and he must profess it so. Yet the empty tomb on which his thoughts were fixed was not that of the risen Christ. It was a further reflection of his own hollowness. Intellectually he knew that he should take comfort from the Easter story. What he could not accomplish for himself had been done for him already through the passion, death and resurrection of the Lord. Here was the very heart of the Christian mystery. It was the miraculous fact which had invested almost two thousand years with meaning. It had made the crucial intersection between time and eternity. Since Adam’s fall, man had been born in sin, yet Christ had redeemed that sinfulness. All was washed clean, hell harrowed, the gate of heaven opened. It was his duty to assure the congregation of this truth. Yet did he really believe it?
From a long time before he remembered the voice of Henry Agnew at the Hall: All that could be done for the world he did. Yet it remains a sorry place, sir, and man a sorry creature within it.
Frere shied away from the implications of his thoughts. He tried to imagine himself in the garden of the holy sepulchre. He tried to imagine himself standing there outside the tomb and marvelling at the impossibly rolled stone. He found himself staring into empty rock – a dark cave, cold and empty.
He tried again to pray and prayer proved futile. Christ – that pure and sexless radiance – had no answer to the empty cave which was his own heart. He was ashamed even to come into that presence. He himself was absence, and in absence was it possible to believe in anything?
Only his demons came to keep him company. In them he could believe.
On whose authority did they come to torment him so? What principle of life had he so abjured that they should come now – as once before in India – to exact such vengeance? What lay behind all this agony? Where were its roots? How to lay hold of them and tear them from his soul?
The answer came as nightmare. He woke, sweating and shouting in his chair. He had been walking round and round his church only to find that it had no door. All the walls were sealed with flints. He had walked widdershins, faster and faster in mounting panic, until he came upon an entrance. It was a cave. The cave of the holy sepulchre. He was flooded with immense relief, put his hands together in prayer, and entered. And then the cave had closed round him. He was shut in, walled up in stone, and it was not a cave – it was the womb of the hideous idol on his church. She had swooped down over him and engulfed him there.
He sat up, trembling. He was still half-crazed with the fear of it, and with the terrible awareness borne in on him. He had asked and she had answered. It was she who lay at the back of all this torment. She, the goddess who squatted naked across his church. Eostre, Cybele, Beltis, Ashtaroth, Kali, Gypsy May – the goddess of a thousand names. It was she who was his mortal enemy.
Therefore Sheol hath enlarged herself and opened her mouth without measure.
And Sheol, she of the hollow place, the underworld, was hell. Was that what he had meant when he told himself he was in hell – that she had swallowed him alive? Was it she who punished him so? And was it before her that he must grovel for mercy now?
Frere was not the only man in Munding experiencing crisis.
All that afternoon Henry Agnew prowled his parkland glowering at the premonitions of spring. The library had become unbearable – all those damned books unforgivably complete, their places securely taken on the shelves of time, while his own on
ce more groaned like a wagon in the mire.
For a time his verse had taken wing. Ground had been covered with mercurial speed and, yes, he had been aware of flaws, but surely it was wiser to make sail while the wind was at his back rather than lie close-hauled, tinkering over detail? Page after page of couplets mounted on the desk beside him. He was so infatuated with his progress that he found no time to miss his daughter, was glad rather to remain undistracted. Then the wind dropped. He found himself yawing, finally gravelled. He had tried to be philosophical, had seen no choice but to go back over what had been achieved and fettle it, and he had been appalled by what he found.
How could he have allowed so many false quantities to pass muster? How could he ever have taken for other than the grossest botches those clumsy inversions by which rhyme after rhyme was clinched? And the diction on which he had prided himself – inflated, sententious, dull. Shock made him perhaps a severer critic than the work deserved, but what grimaced back at him from those quick-scrawled pages seemed disaster. As contemporary witness to the Hermetic Mystery, the lines might be unique; as verse they would be mocked out of court. Only an innately conservative temperament saved the papers from immediate destruction.
With Louisa still in exile at the Decoy Lodge, there had been nowhere to turn other than to the works of Nature. Perhaps by immersing himself in her creative power he might find the strength to begin anew? His heart a dense lump at his side – itself a fragment of fool’s gold now – he strode out into the park.
And soon found himself breathless and afraid.
He was an old man and he had failed. That was the cruel truth of it. Staring into the flawless light as though into a narrow tunnel, he saw that his epic would never reach completion now. None of the joy that Helvetius must have felt to see his projected gold successfully abide the assayer’s test would ever be his. His own work was no gold, common or otherwise. Apply the aqua fortis of objectivity to it, or a septuple of critical antimony, and it crumbled. His work was dross.
He looked up and saw that with no conscious intention on his part his steps were taking him towards the Decoy Lodge. There, in that dreadful place, Louisa worked in patience, committed to her task and utterly innocent of his failure. It might be some consolation to come there, to hang his head in his hands, and make a full confession of his wretchedness. Louisa would understand. She would know what must be done.
But even as he quickened his pace through the beechwood glades, he felt revulsion rise. Why had she insisted on making use of that infernal place? It was the place to which he had been dragged by his father once, when he was still a mere boy, unready for and undesirous of that barbaric initiation into the appetites of the adult male. The ordeal had been terror and humiliation. Its cruelty appalled his heart. He could still hear his own boyish voice tearfully beseeching release, the hideous laughter round him and his father’s rage. Even now, more than half a century later, the memory was insupportable. He could not go there.
Then a new thought crushed his spirit like a blow. Even were he to overcome these phantoms from his youth and go to her, what must happen then? To confess his wretchedness would be to confess his failure. To confess his failure would be to render futile all her own laborious weeks of solitude, for her work had meaning only as a prologue to his own. Without his epic, her treatise would be an overture divested of the operatic drama. It would invite the world to a chymical wedding where there would be no marriage feast. It would be mere mockery. She would see it instantly, and she would be desolated.
He could not do it. Sooner have murdered her in her cradle than mortify her days like this. Yes, she loved him dearly enough not to chide him with her useless sacrifice. Her own loss would count as nothing over against her grief for him. But he would know it. Each gesture of her sympathy would be intolerable reproach. He doubted he could long survive such bitter knowledge. For both their sakes it must not come to pass.
Yet how to prevent it now?
There was only one answer to his ills and that was work. Work, work and yet more work. Had not all the adepts averred no less across the centuries? They had lost fortunes in their endeavours. They had suffered imprisonment, scorn and torment. Year after year they had wasted following new and fruitless lines of enquiry. They too had grown haggard and distraught on the labyrinthine quest. Only those who had endured to the end had seized the golden prize – and, even then, not all. Had not Norton himself died in poverty and despair? Agnew was spared the pauper’s shame at least, and if his spirit expired of hopelessness then his daughter must never know.
He would return to his desk. He would smother all doubts, all fear, in work. He would outstare the empty page, and if nothing of value ever appeared there, he would not admit it to the world. It would be his secret.
The little silver clock on her desk stood at twenty minutes to ten, and it was very dark outside, a moonless night, when Louisa heard someone moving in the yard at the rear of the Decoy Lodge. Alarmed, she put down her pen and listened. Pedro lay sprawled asleep before the fire. He had not stirred. Perhaps it had been no more than a figment of her own weary mind. It was, in any case, time that she stopped work. She put her papers aside. The first draft and the almost complete revision of her script lay in two neat piles. She was about to rise from her chair, when she froze once more to hear someone stumble over a bucket in the darkness. And this time Pedro woke. Startled, he lifted his head, one velvet ear cocked, then stretched to his feet. He did not bark but every hair on his back seemed alert. They were no longer alone at the Lodge, and this visitor was real, material.
Had she remembered to bar the door?
She got up, walked quietly across the room and out into the back hall. The door was unlocked. The bolt was rusty and could not be shifted without a noise, yet it must be done. Pedro was with her now and, at some sound too quiet for her to hear herself, or at some strange scent perhaps, began to bark. The loudness of the noise intensified her alarm, as if the barking alone betrayed her presence when already her light must have been visible across the yard. She reached for the bolt and struggled to budge it. It shot home with a force that hurt her finger.
She stood, breathing quickly.
Pedro had his paws up at the door, still barking. Under her breath she hissed him to silence, then heard the sound of footsteps moving away through the darkness outside.
No violence had been intended then. Suddenly she was ashamed at her own needless fear: it must be someone who knew her, knew that she was here.
“Who’s there?” she cried.
There was a long silence, into which she called again, then heard the sound of footsteps on the cobbles once more.
“Miss Agnew, it is I, the Reverend Frere.”
A great wave of relief passed over her. Without pause for doubt or question, as though a moment long expected had at last arrived, and with it reprieve from a long and tiresome solitude, she struggled to free the bolt again, opened the door, and admitted her lamplight into the darkness of the yard.
Edwin Frere squinted in the sudden brilliance. She saw how bedraggled his appearance was. She saw how anxious his gaze among the shadows cast across his features by the lamp. Pedro bounded out to greet him and was called, with difficulty, to heel. The man looked up in bewilderment from the excited setter to the woman at the threshold.
“You have come,” she said.
He frowned, perplexed. This was not the response for which he had steeled himself. It seemed almost as if she had been waiting for him while he approached the Lodge through the darkness in such uncertainty.
“I have been out walking,” he improvised. “I lost my bearings in the darkness… and then I saw your lamp…”
“Walking? At this late hour?” There was no reprimand, only wonder in her voice. She realized that she was whispering, a little breathlessly, and that he might be discouraged by her answer. She added, “It was a very great relief to hear the voice of a friend.”
“I must have greatly alarmed you.”
“A friend is no cause for alarm.”
“You are alone?”
“Pedro is with me.” Which had, of course, been apparent from the dog’s first commotion, and was therefore an otiose reply. She must collect herself, but she hesitated, divining his thought, then seized the moment before confusion could increase. “Will you come in, Mr Frere?”
He shook his head, demurring, then looked up, and the appeal in his eyes belied the words he found. “But if you are alone here… It might be thought…”
“There is no one here to think but myself,” she answered.
His eyes scouted the darkness as though testing the truth of her claim. He remembered that he had omitted to remove his hat and did so now, holding it by the brim at his chest, his glance downcast. He might have stood in mourning at a grave. Then, startlingly, beyond the gloomy outbuildings a barn owl cried. He looked up, alarmed. Her mild eyes held his for a moment, and her heart faltered to see the desolation in his face.
“Miss Agnew,” he said, “I am in great fear for my mind.”
Her first sense of joyful expectation quickly expired. She had thought she knew precisely how she would manage this encounter when it came – for come it must, she had long known that. She had known it even as Emilia unfolded her secret thoughts; she had known it before that even, for something in Frere’s very presence had always commanded the attention of her soul. Of course she had resisted it – he was a married and virtuous man, the Rector of the parish, beyond reproach. Except as friend and pastor he was inaccessible, and so it must be resisted, whatever way she might. She had tried to make him a figure of fun with his awkward, ear-tugging ways, his earnest diffidence. Certainly she had tried to outgrow her own juvenile fantasies, for they had been a disgrace to one who was, after all, Louisa Anne Agnew, kinswoman to Hypatia and Diotima, faithful handmaid of the Hermetic Mystery. She was no lovesick chit of a girl to fritter her life, like her cousin Laetitia, in daydreams over the opposite sex. No, her concern was only with the sacred marriage of spirit and matter, the chymical wedding of the androgynous human soul.
The Chymical Wedding Page 43