Mr. Greenstream wandered up the nave but felt a reluctance, for which he could not quite account, to mount the chancel steps; in any case there was little of note there and the east window was evidently modern. Straying back along the north aisle wall he read the monumental inscriptions, black lettering on white marble or white lettering on black marble. Then he came face to face with the stove, an impressive cylinder from which issued a faint crackling. His tour seemed to be over; but he was aware of a feeling of expectancy, as if the church were waiting for him to do something.
‘After all, why not?’ he thought, sinking to his knees. But he could not pray at once—he had lost the habit, he did not know how to begin. Moreover he felt ashamed of coming to claim the benefits of religion when for many years he had ignored its obligations. Such a prayer would be worse than useless; it was an insult; it would put God against him. Then the Thought came with its needle-jab and he waited no longer but prayed vehemently and incoherently for deliverance. But a morbid fear assailed him that it was not enough to think the words, for some of them, perhaps the most operative, might be left out, telescoped or elided by the uncontrollable hurry of his mind, so he repeated his petition out loud. Until he had ceased to speak he did not notice how strange his voice sounded in the empty church, almost as if it did not belong to him. Rising shakily to his feet he blinked, dazzled by the daylight, and stumbled out of the church without a backward look.
Not once on the homeward journey to his narrow house in Midgate was Mr. Greenstream troubled by the Thought. His relief and gratitude were inexpressible; but it was not till the next day that he realized that the visit to Aston Highchurch had been a turning point in his life. Doctors had told him that his great enemy was his morbid sense of guilt. Now, so long as St. Cuthbert’s, Aston Highchurch, stood, he need not fear it.
Fearful yet eager he began to peer down a future in which, thanks to the efficacy of prayer, the desires of his heart would meet with no lasting opposition from the voice of his conscience. He could indulge them to the full. Whatever they were, however bad they were, he need not be afraid that they would haunt him afterwards. The Power whose presence he had felt in church would see to that.
It was a summer evening and the youth of Aston Highchurch would normally have been playing cricket on the village green, but the game fell through because a handful of the regulars had failed to turn up. There was murmuring among the disappointed remnant, and inquiry as to what superior attraction had lured away the defaulters.
‘I know,’ said a snub-nosed urchin, ‘because I heard them talking about it.’
‘Well, tell us, Tom Wignall.’
‘They said I wasn’t to.’
‘Come on, you tell us or . . .’
According to their code a small but appreciable amount of physical torture released the sufferer from further loyalty to his plighted word. After a brief but strident martyrdom the lad, nothing loth, yielded to the importunity of his fellows.
‘It’s about that praying chap.’
‘What, old Greenpants?’
‘Yes. They’ve gone to watch him at it.’
‘Where?’
‘In the tower gallery. Fred Buckland pinched the key when the old man wasn’t looking.’
‘Coo, they’ll cop it if they’re caught.’
‘Why, they aren’t doing no harm. You can’t trespass in a church.’
‘That’s all you know. They haven’t gone there just to watch, neither.’
‘Why, what are they going to do?’
‘Well,’ said Tom Wignall importantly, ‘they’re going to give him a fright. Do you know what he does?’
‘He prays, doesn’t he?’
‘Yes, but he don’t pray to himself. He prays out loud, and he shouts sometimes, and rocks himself about. And he doesn’t pray for his father and mother——’
‘He hasn’t got any, so I’ve heard,’ said an older boy, who, to judge from his caustic tone, seemed to be listening with some impatience to Tom Wignall’s revelations. ‘He’s an orphan.’
‘Anyhow,’ the speaker resumed unabashed, ‘he doesn’t pray for his king or his country, or to be made good or anything like that. He confesses his sins.’
‘Do you mean he’s done a murder?’
‘Fred Buckland couldn’t hear what it was, but it must have been something bad or he wouldn’t have come all this way to confess it.’
This reasoning impressed the audience.
‘Must have been murder,’ they assured each other, ‘or forgery anyhow.’
‘But that isn’t all,’ continued the speaker, intoxicated by the attention he was receiving. ‘He prays for what he didn’t ought.’
‘Why, you can pray for anything you like,’ opined one of the listeners.
‘That you can’t. There’s heaps of things you mustn’t pray for. You mustn’t pray to get rich, for one thing, and (he lowered his voice) you mustn’t pray for anyone to die.’
‘Did he do that?’
‘Fred Buckland said that’s what it sounded like.’
There was a pause.
‘I think the poor chap’s balmy if you ask me,’ said the older boy. ‘I bet his prayers don’t do no one any harm nor him any good either.’
‘That’s where you make a mistake,’ said the spokesman of the party. ‘That’s where you’re wrong. Fred Buckland says he’s got much, much richer these last six months. Why, he’s got a car and a chauffeur and all. Fred Buckland says he wouldn’t be surprised if he’s a millionaire.’
‘You bet he is,’ scoffed the older boy. ‘You bet that when he prayed somebody dropped down dead and left him a million. Sounds likely, doesn’t it?’
The circle of listeners stirred. All the faces broadened with scepticism and one boy took up his bat and played an imaginary forward stroke. Tom Wignall felt that he was losing ground. He was like a bridge-player who has held up his ace too long.
‘Anyhow,’ he said defiantly, ‘Fred Buckland says that church is no place for the likes of him who’ve got rich by praying in a way they ought to be ashamed of. And I tell you, he’s going to give old Greenpants a fright. He’s going to holler down at him from the tower in a terrible deep voice, and Greenpants’ll think it’s God answering him from Heaven, or perhaps the Devil, and he’ll get such a fright he’ll never set foot in Aston again. And good riddance, I say.’
Tom’s own voice rose as he forced into it all the dramatic intensity he could muster. But he had missed his moment. One or two of his companions looked serious and nodded, but the rest, with the unerring instinct of boys for a change of leadership, a shifting of moral ascendancy, threw doubtful glances towards their senior. They were wavering. They would take their cue from him.
‘Lousy young bastards,’ he said, ‘leaving us all standing about like fools on a fine evening like this. I should like to tan their hides.’
There was a murmur of sympathetic indignation, and he added, ‘What makes them think the chap’s coming to-day to pray, anyhow?’
Tom Wignall answered sullenly: ‘He comes most days now. . . . And if you want to know, Jim Chantry passed him on his motor-bike the other side of Friar’s Bridge. He didn’t half jump when Jim honked in his ear,’ Tom concluded with unrepentant relish. ‘He’ll be here any time now.’
‘Well,’ said the older boy stretching himself luxuriously, ‘you chaps can go and blank yourselves. There’s nothing else for you to do. I’m off.’ He sauntered away, grandly, alone, towards the main road. Those silly mutts need a lesson. I’ll spoil their little game for them, he thought.
The tower gallery at St. Cuthbert’s, Aston Highchurch, was a feature most unusual in parish churches. But the tower was rather unusual too. Its lower storey, which rose fifty or more feet to the belfry floor, was open to the main body of the building; only an arch divided it from the nave. The gallery, a stone passage running along the tower wall just above the west window, was considerably higher than the apex of the arch. It was only visible from the western end
of the church, and itself commanded a correspondingly restricted view—a view that was further impeded by the lightly swaying bell-ropes. But Fred Buckland and his four conspirators could see, through the flattened arc of the arch, a portion of the last six rows of chairs. The sunlight coming through the window below them fell on the chairs, picking them out in gold and making a bright patch like the stage of a theatre.
‘He ought to be here by now, didn’t he?’ one urchin whispered.
‘Shut up!’ hissed the ringleader. ‘It’ll spoil everything if he hears us.’
They waited, three of them with their backs pressed against the wall, their faces turned this way and that as in a frieze, looking very innocent and naughty. Fred, who had more than once sung carols from this lofty perch, embraced a baluster and let his feet dangle over the edge.
Five minutes passed, ten, a quarter of an hour. The sinking sun no longer lay so brightly on the foreground; shadows began to creep in from the sides. The boys even began to see each other less plainly.
‘I’m frightened,’ whispered a voice. ‘I wish we hadn’t come. I want to go home.’
‘Shut up, can’t you?’
More minutes passed and the church grew darker.
‘I say, Fred,’ a second voice whispered, ‘what time does your old man come to shut the church up?’
‘Seven o’clock these evenings. It still wants a quarter to.’
They waited; then one whispered in a tense voice, ‘I believe that’s him.’
‘Who?’
‘Old Greenpants, of course.’
‘Did you hear anything?’
‘No, but I thought I saw something move.’
‘You’re balmy. That’s the shadow of the bell-rope.’
They strained their eyes.
‘I don’t think it was, Fred. It moves when the bell-rope doesn’t.’
‘Funny if somebody else should be spying on old Greenpants.’
‘Maybe it’s him who’s spying on us.’
‘What, old Greenpants?’
‘Of course. Who else could it be?’
‘I wish I could see what that was moving,’ the boy said again. ‘There, close by the stove.’
‘I suppose it couldn’t get up to us?’
‘Not unless it came by the bell-rope,’ said Fred decisively. ‘I’ve locked the door of the stairs and the only other key my dad has. You’re in a funk, that’s your trouble. Only the Devil could shin up one of them ropes.’
‘They wouldn’t let him come into church, would they?’
‘He might slip in if the north door was open.’
Almost as he spoke a puff of wind blew up in their faces and the six bell-ropes swayed in all directions lashing each other and casting fantastic shadows.
‘That’s him,’ Fred hissed. ‘Don’t you hear his footsteps? I bet that’s him. Just wait till he gets settled down. Now, all together: “God is going to punish thee, Henry Greenstream, thou wicked man”.’
In creditable unison, their voices quavered through the church. What result they expected they hardly knew themselves, nor did they have time to find out; for the sacristan, appearing with a clatter of boots at the gallery door, had them all like rats in a trap. Fear of committing sacrilege by blasphemy for a moment took away his powers of speech; then he burst out, ‘Come on, you little blackguards! Get down out of here! Oh, you’ll be sore before I’ve finished with you!’
A spectator, had there been one, would have noticed that the sounds of snivelling and scuffling were momentarily stilled as the staircase swallowed them up. A minute later they broke out again, with louder clamour; for though Fred got most of the blows the others quickly lost their morale, seeing how completely their leader had lost his.
‘I’ll take a strap to you when I get you home,’ thundered the sacristan, ‘trying to disturb a poor gentleman at his devotions.’
‘But, Dad, he wasn’t in the church!’ protested Fred between his sobs.
‘It wasn’t your fault if he wasn’t,’ returned his father grimly.
For some months after being warned Henry Greenstream came no more to St. Cuthbert’s, Aston Highchurch. Perhaps he found another sanctuary, for certainly there was no lack of them in the district. Perhaps, since he had a motor, he found it more convenient to drive out into the country where (supposing he needed them) were churches in sparsely populated areas, untenanted by rude little boys. He had never been a man to advertise his movements, and latterly his face had worn a closed look, as if he had been concealing them from himself. But he had to tell the chauffeur where to go, and the man was immensely surprised when, one December afternoon, he received an order to drive to Aston Highchurch. ‘We hadn’t taken that road for an age,’ he afterwards explained.
‘Stop when I tap the window,’ Mr. Greenstream said, ‘and then I shall want you to do something for me.’
At the point where the footpath leads across the fields Mr. Greenstream tapped and got out of the car.
‘I’m going on to the church now,’ he said, ‘but I want you to call at the Rectory, and ask the Reverend Mr. Ripley if he would step across to the church and . . . and hear my confession. Say it’s rather urgent. I don’t know how long I shall be gone.’
The chauffeur, for various reasons, had not found Mr. Greenstream’s service congenial; he had in fact handed his notice in that morning. But something in his employer’s tremulous manner touched him, and surprising himself, he said:
‘You wouldn’t like me to go with you as far as the church, sir?’
‘Oh, no, thank you, Williams, I think I can get that far.’
‘I only thought you didn’t look very fit, sir.’
‘Is that why you decided to leave me?’ asked Mr. Greenstream, and the man bit his lip and was silent.
Mr. Greenstream walked slowly towards the church, absently and unsuccessfully trying to avoid the many puddles left by last night’s storm. It had been a violent storm, and now though the wind was gone, the sky, still burning streakily as with the embers of its own ill-temper, had a wild, sullen look.
Mr. Greenstream reached the porch but didn’t go in. Instead he walked round the church, stumbling among the graves, for some were unmarked by headstones; and on the north side, where no one ever went, the ground was untended and uneven.
It took him some minutes to make the circuit, but when he had completed it he started again. It was on his second tour that he discovered—literally stumbled against—the gargoyle, which, of course, has been replaced now. The storm had split it but the odd thing was that the two halves, instead of being splintered and separated by their fall, lay intact on the sodden grass within a few inches of each other. Mr. Greenstream could not have believed the grinning mask was so big. It had split where the spout passed through it: one half retained the chin, the other was mostly eye and cheek and ear. Mr. Greenstream could see the naked spout hanging out far above him, long and bent and shining like a black snake. The comfortless sight may have added to the burden of his thoughts, for he walked on more slowly. This time, however, he did not turn aside at the porch, but went straight in, carefully shutting the inner and outer doors behind him.
It was past four o’clock and the church was nearly dark, the windows being only visible as patches of semi-opaque brightness. But there was a light which shone with a dull red glow, a burning circle hanging in the air a foot or two from the ground. It looked like a drum that had caught fire within, but it was not truly luminous; it seemed to attract the darkness rather than repel it. For a moment Mr. Greenstream could not make out what the strange light was. But when he took a step or two towards it and felt the heat on his face and hands he knew at once. It was the stove. The zealous sacristan, mindful of the chilly day, had stoked it up until it was red hot.
Mr. Greenstream was grateful for the warmth, for his hands were cold and his teeth chattering. He would have liked to approach the stove and bend over it. But the heat was too fierce for that, it beat him back. So he withdrew to the outer r
adius of its influence. Soon he was kneeling, and soon—the effect of the warmth on a tired mind and a tired body, asleep.
It must have been the cold that woke him, cold, piercing cold, that seemed solid, like a slab of ice pressing against his back. The stove still glared red in front of him, but it had no more power to warm him physically than has a friendly look or a smiling face. Whence did it come, this deadly chill? Ah! He looked over his left shoulder and saw that the doors, which he remembered shutting, were now open to the sky and the north wind. To shut them again was the work of a moment. But why were they open? he wondered, turning back into the church. Why, of course, of course, the clergyman had opened them, the Rector of Aston Highchurch, who was coming at his request to hear his confession. But where was he, and why did he not speak? And what was the reddish outline that moved towards him in the darkness? For a moment his fancy confused it with the stove, or it might be the stove’s reflection, thrown on one of the pillars. But on it came, bearing before it that icy breath he now knew had nothing to do with the north wind.
‘Mr. Ripley, Mr. Ripley,’ he murmured, falling back into the warmth of the stove, feeling upon his neck its fierce assault. Then he heard a voice like no voice he had ever heard, as if the darkness spoke with the volume of a thousand tongues.
‘I am your confessor. What have you to say?’
‘My death must be my answer,’ he replied, the consciousness of annihilation on him.
When Mr. Greenstream’s chauffeur learned that the Rector was not at home he left a message and then returned to the car, for he knew from experience that his master’s unaccountable church-going often kept him a long time. But when an hour had gone by he felt vaguely anxious and decided to see if anything was the matter. To his surprise he found the church door open, and noticed a smell coming from it which he had never associated with a church. Moving gingerly in the dark, he advanced towards where a sound of hissing made itself heard. Then he struck a match, and what he saw caused him to turn and run in terror for the door. On the threshold he almost collided with Mr. Ripley, hastening from the Rectory on his errand of mercy. Together they overcame the repugnance which either of them would have felt singly, lifted Mr. Greenstream’s body from the stove across which it hung and laid it reverently on the pavement.
The Complete Short Stories of L.P. Hartley Page 23