Mrs. Black saw Mr. Burnaby in the distance on the twelfth of April. He was walking along the shore with Marcus. She noticed that he looked much more vigorous than he had been during the last few years of his life. She was very much upset. Black was unable to convince her that it must be someone else, or alternatively that if it were Mr. Burnaby’s ghost, there was no need to be alarmed. During the next few weeks several people declared they had seen Mr. Burnaby, either with Marcus or alone. Mrs. Black saw him again in the distance on the first of May. By this time, of course, she had heard some at least of the rumours. She became hysterical and made Black drive her to Portmallagh where she caught the afternoon train to Belfast. She had a married sister in Belfast with whom she intended to stay till Black could join her.
Black returned to The Garrison. All that evening he hung about in the hope of seeing Marcus; but Marcus did not appear. Eventually Black went into his own house, which adjoined The Garrison, though it did not actually communicate with the main building. He decided to give his notice in writing. He wrote the letter in the morning and went into the house through the kitchen door which was never closed. Marcus was in the kitchen eating his breakfast. Black noticed that he had tea, a boiled egg, and bread and butter. The kitchen fire was lit. Mr. Burnaby was sitting at the table with Marcus. His appearance was exactly as it had been before his illness. Black was embarrassed. He felt it more difficult to give his notice to Mr. Burnaby, whom he had known for so long, than to Marcus.
“I’m sorry for coming in like this, Sir,” he said to Mr. Burnaby.
Mr. Burnaby did not speak but he smiled very pleasantly.
Marcus looked a little uncomfortable, almost ashamed, Black thought. “That’s all right,” he answered, though it was not really to him Black had spoken.
“I’m very sorry to have to give a week’s notice,” Black went on. “I’m sorry after all this time. It’s not that I’ve not been treated well, but it’s on account of the wife. I’ve no complaints.”
He held out his letter and Marcus took it. “I quite understand,” Marcus said. “It just can’t be helped.” He looked very sad—“Sort of hopeless,” is Black’s description.
Black withdrew. He worked faithfully up to the last. Before he went he arranged for provisions to be delivered regularly at The Garrison. The best he was able to do was to have them put at the gate for Marcus to collect. On his last day he brought down a large meat safe from the house and placed it just outside the gate. Milk and eggs were to be put in this every other day, groceries twice a week.
Most of the appearances of Mr. Burnaby may be explained away. The people who saw him, or imagined they saw him, were uneducated and many of them superstitious. Even if one is to admit that he did appear at all, some of the reports have to be dismissed as false. To this day any unidentified figure seen in the distance, or in the dusk, in the neighbourhood of The Garrison is described as “Owld Burnaby’s ghost”—and one or two people claim to have seen Marcus’s ghost also. It is generally believed that for years the two of them had been trafficking with the Devil.
As I have said however there is corroborative evidence, though it is only circumstantial. There are a considerable number of entries in Mr. Burnaby’s journal after Mr. Burnaby’s death. They extend from the date of Marcus’s return to The Garrison to within ten days or so of the presumed date of Marcus’s death.
Though the handwriting and style are Mr. Burnaby’s I have no doubt whatever that physically they were made by Marcus. At the same time I do not think they are forgeries. Marcus was not sufficiently clever to have forged them. I imagine that their only purpose was that the style and the handwriting should be noticed. They are concerned chiefly with Marcus. There is no description of any sort of other-worldly existence. I will give a few examples.
Sept. 10, 1935. Marcus of course is unhappy. He is divided, and he knows that neither of the courses before him can give him any feeling of contentment. He has a sense of futility in all that he does. He cannot have any illusion of acting under the direction of his own will. The gratification produced by personal achievement is impossible for him.
This afternoon he bathed—a very listless performance. The bathe, however, produced hunger and he enjoyed his tea. His youthfulness still emerges in moments of forgetfulness. Afterwards he was as morose as ever. Writing his book in the evening helped him a little.
Dec. 25, 1936. To all lonely people, to all except children and those surrounded by children or young people, this is the most melancholy day of the year. Marcus is counting the days till the summer. It is only the consciousness that he cannot go outside his pattern which prevents him from killing himself now;—that and his physical fear of violence.
No human being will ever spend Christmas in this house again, but it will have other inhabitants—first insects, crumbling the boards, then birds flying in and out through the windows; for boys, too terrified to enter, will have broken the glass with stones. Rain will get in, and damp will rot. Rust will eat into the hinges and the wind will break down the doors—and in fifty years there will be rabbit burrows in the hall.
April 2nd, 1937. Only Black is imperturbable. He is too unimaginative to be frightened: yet there is a great deal of value in him. What a pity that Marcus has not his strength of character. If he had, so much might have been accomplished. Both he and Mr. Burnaby have been failures. Yet they will have served their purpose in showing a little of what success will be almi patri De Laura Lee moter poter vobiscum.
The last seven words are in an unknown hand. I can’t explain them, except as the work of a mischievous spirit. There are several similar insertions in this post-mortem part of Mr. Burnaby’s journal.
May 12th, 1937. Poor Marcus. It is nearly over now. I shall be glad when it is finished.
Leaving out the gibberish passages, which I believe are unimportant, what strikes me about these entries is a quality in the personality of Mr. Burnaby. Sometimes he is just Mr. Burnaby; sometimes he is someone more, someone who is Burnaby and yet contains him and looks at him from the outside.
It may be wondered that during this period of almost two years from his last departure from home, Mr. and Mrs. Brownlow never came to see Marcus. They ought to have done so and ever since they have regretted not having intervened. All the same anyone who has read Marcus’s letters to his mother will understand why they did not come. They are cold, unkind, and hostile. Yet with an after-knowledge of the facts they are pardonable and rather tragic. With one part of him Marcus would have liked them to come: at the same time he was afraid of them—and he knew they were not going to come. The letters he wrote seem in a way to have been dictated to him. Three times he invited them—for Christmas 1935, for September 1936 and again for Christmas 1936. He had never any intention of allowing these visits to take place. They were always put off by a telegram at the last moment, announcing that Marcus had been called away, once to London, once to Dublin and the third time, by a flight of fancy, to Paris. Of course he didn’t go away at all. Mr. and Mrs. Brownlow were hurt. They could not help feeling that Marcus had become a very unpleasant person. Yet they both had a strong sense of duty. They were uneasy and they decided that they must see him.
Mr. Brownlow was in serious trouble with his business. He was getting old and he had come out of the slump badly. Otherwise no doubt he would have acted earlier and more vigorously. In February 1937 he and Mrs. Brownlow fixed a definite date for an unannounced visit. It was to be on the second Saturday of the month. On the Friday they received a letter from Marcus. “I am off again,” he wrote. “I don’t know how long I shall be away, but I want you to come and stay at the end of May. I shall be back then and this time I promise there will be no putting off.”
So of course they didn’t go. They looked forward to May hopefully, but not very confidently. They didn’t expect to enjoy their visit, but surely he wouldn’t pu
t them off again. He didn’t, but this letter written with a complete foreknowledge of the facts was surely the most cruel.
Black had left with the intention of getting in touch with the Brownlows as soon as he arrived in Belfast. For all his stolidity he had worried about Marcus. Unfortunately when he arrived at the Great Northern terminus he was met by his sister-in-law with the news that his wife was seriously ill. For the next ten days he was too occupied with his own troubles to think about Marcus. On the eighteenth of May he read in a newspaper that Marcus had disappeared and was believed to have been drowned. Two months later Marcus’s body was found on a lonely little beach near the point. How long it had been there nobody could say for certain.
[1] Queen’s University, Belfast.
CHAPTER XXXV
I DO not know if it can be said that Marcus drowned himself. I think it is certain that he foresaw his death and the manner of it and that he met it deliberately. Why he had to die is perhaps not quite clear. All I can offer are the conjectures I have made from the evidence available.
In the first place I think Marcus knew, before Mr. Burnaby died, the rough outline of the rest of his own life. I don’t suppose he knew every detail; he may have seen every detail in advance, but probably he only remembered certain incidents and in particular the incident of his own death. I don’t know why he went home or why he returned to The Garrison when he did. Probably it was one of the things which he knew he would do: it was part of the plan, which he could not alter in any way.
I accept the theory that we are all parts of a whole, that this whole has a consciousness of the whole of itself. I believe too that when we die our own individual consciousness may not be immediately absorbed into the total consciousness. In the case of Mr. Burnaby this absorption was very slow. He remained, though in touch with the whole, sufficiently himself to direct Marcus, to govern him. Indeed he inserted himself into Marcus, not ousting Marcus’s own individuality completely, but leaving him a resentful junior partner in himself. Sometimes he was no more than an unwanted companion, visibly present, not only to Marcus, but to others: sometimes when it suited his purpose better he entered into Marcus and took complete control. It was then that he made the entries in Marcus’s journal: then that he was seen by Kate, by Mrs. Mullan, and by Black, when he encountered what was half Marcus, half Mr. Burnaby on the drive.
While Mr. Burnaby was alive there had always been times when Marcus could escape from him into his own individuality. If my assumptions are to be accepted, there can have been no such escapes after Mr. Burnaby died. If Marcus were to live on it could only be as a continuation of Mr. Burnaby. He had no hope of ever again being entirely himself.
Marcus’s interest in the work he did with Mr. Burnaby had been partly curious, partly a reflection of Mr. Burnaby’s own interest. By the time Mr. Burnaby died his curiosity was satisfied. He knew all he could ever know; and he had not Mr. Burnaby’s sense of Mission. He was haunted and oppressed, and would be so, wherever he went, whatever he did, for as long as he remained alive. By dying he must have hoped to merge himself completely in the whole. Perhaps however this may not have been so easy. Perhaps he lingered on, an unwilling ghost on that barren, haunted shore.
I think we have to assume that the whole is God. That the whole is God, is to say that everything, every one of us, every beast, every bird, every flower, every stone, is God too. We might go further and suppose that there is a purpose in all that is done. That purpose may be to make every part conscious of its identity with the whole, to make every part share continually in the consciousness of God and of being God.
The fulfillment of such a purpose must seem so remote as to be almost without interest. It seemed so to Marcus. He had neither the will nor the desire to increase the importance of his contribution to its accomplishment. Death was before him in any case: for him death must be better than life. So he died—not sooner or later, but when he knew he had to die.
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