by A. C. Benson
Father Maddox paused, took another pinch of snuff, looking round on us.
‘Is that all clear, so far?’ he asked.
There was a murmur of assent, and he went on:
‘Well, Mr Baxter was very late at breakfast. He did not come down till we had finished, and I thought he looked very tired. He was plainly rather excited, too, and as he helped himself at the sideboard he turned round.
‘“My dear Hudson,” he said, “what a house this is of yours! It has really inspired me. I sat up till nearly three, and I believe I have got a first-rate idea.”
‘Of course we asked what it was, and as he ate his porridge he told us.
‘He was going to bring in an apostate priest – a man, sincere enough in his faith, who gave way under torture. He was to be the son of a family who remained good Catholics, and he was to come home again to the very place where he had been caught, and where his mother was still living. It would be a good situation, thought Mr Baxter – the apostate son, believing all the time and his mother, who of course loved him, but who hated the thought of what he had done – and these two should live together in the house where they had said goodbye two months before, when the mother thought her son was going to his martyrdom. It seemed to me quite possible, and I said so; and that pleased Mr Baxter very much.
‘“Yes,” he said. “And, Hudson, would you mind if I took this house as the scene of it? It seems to me just made for it. That little turret-room, you know, would be the place from which the priest saw the constables surrounding the house; and the room underneath could be the chapel. And think what he would think when he saw them again! Do you mind?”
‘Mr Hudson, of course, said that he would be highly honoured, and all the rest; and so it was settled.
‘Presently Mr Baxter was off again.
‘“It is quite extraordinary,” he said, “how vivid the whole thing is to me – the character of the priest, his little ways, the weakness of his face, and all the rest; and the mother too, a fine silent old lady, intensely religious and intensely fond of her son, and knowing that he had only yielded through pain. He would limp a little, from the rack, and not be able to manage his knife very well.”
‘I asked him presently how he worked out his characters – and how far – before he began to write.
‘“Generally,” he said, “I leave a good deal to the time of writing. I first get the idea, and perhaps the general appearance of each person, and of course the plot; then I begin to write; and after about a chapter or two the people seem to come alive and to do it all themselves, and I only have to write it down as well as I can. I think most writers find it happens like that. But this time I must say it is rather different: I don’t think I have ever had anything so vivid before. I am beginning to think that my Catholics will have to be the principal people after all. At any rate, I shall begin with them.”
‘He talked like this a good deal at breakfast and seemed quite excited. It all seemed to me very odd, and particularly so when he said that when he was once in the middle of the book, his characters seemed almost more real than living people; it was a kind of trance, he said; the real world became shadowy, and the world of imagination the real one. Since then I have asked one or two other writers, and they have told me the same.
‘Well, when we met at lunch I began to understand how true it all was. He was actually in a kind of waking dream; he had been writing hard all the morning, and it seemed as if he could pay no attention to anything. He didn’t talk much – hardly a word, in fact – and finally Mr Hudson said something about it.
‘“My dear man,” said the other, “I really can’t attend. I am very sorry; but it’s a kind of obsession now. I tell you that this book is the only thing that matters to me in the least. They are all waiting for me now in the study – Mr Jennifer the apostate, his mother, and an old manservant of the house. I can’t possibly come out this afternoon; this chapter has got to get done.”
‘He really was quite pale with excitement, and he rushed out again as soon as he had finished.
‘Well, Mr Hudson and I went out together, and we got back about four, just as the evening was beginning to close in. We had tea alone; Mr Baxter had ordered it for himself, it seemed, when our host went in to see if he was coming.
‘“He is working like a madman,” he said, when he came back. “I have just given him the keys of the turret; he says he is going up there before it is quite dark to see how far away the priest could have seen the constables round the house.”
‘After tea I went upstairs to put on my cassock and change my shoes, and as I went into my room I heard the study door open and Mr Baxter come out. I watched him, from inside, go past, and heard him cross the landing to get to the turret-room and the stairs.
‘Now I must explain.’
Father Maddox paused; then he leaned forward, drew up the little table by his side, and began to arrange books in the shape of an L.
‘This is the first floor, you understand. This small book stands for the horizontal of the L. My room was here, in the angle, at the top of the stairs. Mr Baxter’s room was on the right, past mine, at the end of the horizontal. Just opposite his room was the one which he said was to be the chapel, and out of this room rose the turret-stairs. This part of the house is only two storeys high, but the turret itself is high enough to see over the roofs of the upright part of the L, as those rooms, although there are three storeys of them, are much lower than these others.
‘Very well, then … I heard Mr Baxter go across and go into the chapel-room. Then I heard his footsteps stop; he was looking, he told us afterwards, at the place where the altar would have stood, and so on.
‘When I had changed my things I thought I would go out and see how he was getting on. It was very nearly dark by now, so I took one of my candles and went across. The door of the chapel-room was open and I went in.’
Father Maddox paused once more. I could see that a climax was coming, and I must confess that I felt oddly excited. He seemed such a common-sense man, too.
‘Now, those of you who have ever shot over dogs know what happens when a dog points; how he stiffens all over and is all strung up tight. Well, that is what Mr Baxter was doing. He was standing, rather crouching, with his hands out on either side, palms down, staring sideways up the little staircase that led to the turret. This staircase, I must tell you, ran diagonally up across the further end of the room, like a loft staircase. There were no open bannisters; it was masked by panelling, and was generally closed by a door in the panelling; but this was open now, and, as I said, he had twisted his head sideways so that his eyes looked up it – up to the right.
‘Well, at first I thought he was calculating something, but he did not move as I came in; he was like a statue. I said something, but he paid no attention. I went right up to him.
‘“Mr Baxter,” I said, “I have come to see—”
‘Then a sort of horrid moan came from him, and he suddenly jumped back and seized me by the arm so that the candle dropped and we were almost in the dark; but I caught a sight of his face.
‘“He is coming down, he is coming down, Father,” he whispered. “Oh! for God’s sake!” Then he gave a great wrench at my arm, still moaning; and somehow we were out of the room, across the landing and half tumbling downstairs together. Mr Hudson ran out at the noise, and somehow we got Mr Baxter into the study and in a deep chair, and he went off into a swoon.’
The old man paused, and looked round with rather a tremulous smile; and, I must confess, the silence in the room was very much marked.
‘Well, half-an-hour later Mr Baxter seemed himself again. He was able to tell us what had happened. It seemed that he had gone into the room, and, as I had thought, had stopped a moment or two there, trying to imagine the old arrangements that he had invented – invented, Reverend Fathers; remember that: there was no tradition about the house at all. Neither then nor afterwards. Then he had gone to the staircase to go up to the turret.
&nbs
p; ‘Now, this is what he said he saw – he told us all this gradually, of course. He saw a man in a cassock and cap standing on the top step of the little stairs, looking out through the tiny window that is in the wall opposite. At first he thought it was I. It was very dark; there was only a little dim light from the turret-room behind the figure, and his face, as I said, was pressed against the darkening window, exactly as if he were watching for somebody. He had called out, and the figure had turned, and he had seen it to be a young man, under thirty, with very large dark eyes, thin lips, and a little round chin. He had seen that absolutely plainly in the light from the window. He also saw, as he looked, that the face was exactly that of the priest whom he had imagined in his story, and who, as he had told us at lunch, was completely vivid to his brain. Well, he had simply stared and stared. He said that fear was not the word at all: it was a kind of paralysis. He could not move or take his eyes away; and what was odd too was that this other man seemed paralysed too. He said that the lips moved, and that the eyes were wide and dilated, but that he said nothing. Mr Baxter had heard me come in, and at the sound the figure at the top of the stairs had winced and clasped its hands, and that then, with some sort of hopeless gesture, it had begun to come down. Then I had spoken, and Mr Baxter had turned and seized my arm.
‘Well, there was no doing anything with Mr Baxter. He lay still, starting at every sound, telling us this little by little. Then he asked that his things might be packed. He must go away at once, he said.
‘We told him what nonsense it all was, and how he had been worked up; and Mr Hudson talked about the artistic temperament and all the rest. But it was no good; he must go; and Mr Hudson rang the bell to give the order. As Mr Baxter stood up at last, still all white and trembling, he saw his manuscript on the table, and before I could say a word, he had seized it and tossed it into the fire: there would be thirty or forty pages, I should think.
‘We went to the door to see him off – he had entirely refused to go upstairs again; even his boots were brought down – and he hardly said anything more after he had told us his story; he said he would write in a day or two. Then we went back to the parlour and talked it all over.
‘Of course, we said what we thought. It seemed to us plain enough that he had worked himself up to a most frightful pitch of nerves; and – well, all the rest of it. The whole thing, we said, was sheer imagination; you see, it was not that there was any story about the house.
‘Just as Mr Hudson was going to dress, the butler came in.’
Father Maddox stopped again.
‘Now, Reverend Fathers, this is the point of the story, and you may draw your own conclusions. The butler came in, looking rather puzzled, and asked how many there would be for dinner. Mr Hudson told him two: Mr Baxter was not coming back.
‘“I beg your pardon, sir,” said the man; “but what of the other gentleman?”
‘“Why, here he is,” said my friend. “One and one makes two, Manthorpe.”
‘“But the gentleman upstairs, sir, and his servant?”
‘“You may imagine we jumped rather at that; and he told us then.
‘“One of the maids going across the landing ten minutes before had seen two persons – one of them a young gentleman, she said, in a long cloak, and the other an old man, his servant, she thought, for he was carrying a great bag – come out of Mr Baxter’s room and go into the turret-room. The young gentleman was limping, she said. She had particularly noticed that.”’
Father Maddox stopped, and there was a sudden chorus of questions.
‘No,’ he said, ‘there was no explanation at all. The maid had not been at all frightened; she had supposed it was another visitor come by the same train as that by which Mr Baxter had come the night before. She had not followed them; she had just gone and told Manthorpe, and asked where the gentleman was to sleep. We went everywhere – into the turret-room, up the stairs – everywhere. There was nothing; there never was anything; none at all.
‘Now you see the difficulty, Reverend Fathers,’ ended the old man, smiling again. ‘The question is, did Mr Baxter’s imagination in a kind of way create those things so strongly that not only he saw them, but the maid as well – a kind of violent thought transference? Or was it that there was some truth in the story – that something of the sort happened in the house, and that this was the reason why, firstly, the idea had come so vividly to Mr Baxter’s mind, and secondly that he and the maid had actually seen – well, what they did see?’
He took out his snuff-box.
THE WATCHER
R.H. Benson
[In an earlier story from The Light Invisible, the old priest tells Benson of a vision of nature he once saw, where the green of the fields and the blue of the sky form God’s robe. ‘The Watcher’ follows straight on from that story. HL]
‘Il faut d’abord rendre l’organe de la vision analogue et semblable à l’objet qu’il doit contempler.’
Maeterlinck
The next morning, the priest and I went out soon after breakfast and walked up and down a grass path between two yew hedges; the dew was not yet off the grass that lay in shadow; and thin patches of gossamer still hung like torn cambric on the yew shoots on either side. As we passed for the second time up the path, the old man suddenly stooped and pushing aside a dock-leaf at the foot of the hedge lifted a dead mouse, and looked at it as it lay stiffly on the palm of his hand. I saw that his eyes filled slowly with the ready tears of old age.
‘He has chosen his own resting-place,’ he said. ‘Let him lie there. Why did I disturb him?’ – and he laid him gently down again; and then gathering a fragment of wet earth he sprinkled it over the mouse. ‘Earth to earth, ashes to ashes,’ he said, ‘in sure and certain hope’ – and then he stopped; and straightening himself with difficulty walked on, and I followed him.
‘You seemed interested,’ he said, ‘in my story yesterday. Shall I tell you how I saw a very different sight when I was a little older?
‘I was eighteen years old at the time, that terrible age when the soul seems to have dwindled to a spark overlaid by a mountain of ashes – when blood and fire and death and loud noises seem the only things of interest, and all tender things shrink back and hide from the dreadful noonday of manhood. Some one gave me one of those shot-pistols that you may have seen, and I loved the sense of power that it gave me, for I had never had a gun. For a week or two in the summer holidays I was content with shooting at a mark, or at the level surface of water, and delighted to see the cardboard shattered, or the quiet pool torn to shreds along its mirror where the sky and green lay sleeping. Then that ceased to interest me, and I longed to see a living thing suddenly stop living at my will. Now,’ and he held up a deprecating hand, ‘I think sport is necessary for some natures. After all, the killing of creatures is necessary for man’s food, and sport as you will tell me is a survival of man’s delight in obtaining food, and it requires certain noble qualities of endurance and skill. I know all that, and I know further that for some natures it is a relief – an escape for humours that will otherwise find an evil vent. But I do know this – that for me it was not necessary.
‘However, there was every excuse, and I went out in good faith one summer evening intending to shoot some rabbit as he ran to cover from the open field. I walked along the inside of a fence with a wood above me and on my left, and the green meadow on my right. Well, owing probably to my own lack of skill, though I could hear the patter and rush of the rabbits all round me, and could see them in the distance sitting up listening with cocked ears, as I stole along the fence, I could not get close enough to fire at them with any hope of what I fancied was success; and by the time that I had arrived at the end of the wood I was in an impatient mood.
‘I stood for a moment or two leaning on the fence looking out of that pleasant coolness into the open meadow beyond; the sun had at that moment dipped behind the hill before me and all was in shadow except where there hung a glory about the topmost leaves of a beech that
still caught the sun. The birds were beginning to come in from the fields, and were settling one by one in the wood behind me, staying here and there to sing one last line of melody. I could hear the quiet rush and then the sudden clap of a pigeon’s wings as he came home, and as I listened I heard pealing out above all other sounds the long liquid song of a thrush somewhere above me. I looked up idly and tried to see the bird, and after a moment or two caught sight of him as the leaves of the beech parted in the breeze, his head lifted and his whole body vibrating with the joy of life and music. As some one has said, his body was one beating heart. The last radiance of the sun over the hill reached him and bathed him in golden warmth. Then the leaves closed again as the breeze dropped, but still his song rang out.
‘Then there came on me a blinding desire to kill him. All the other creatures had mocked me and run home. Here at least was a victim, and I would pour out the sullen anger that I had been gathering during my walk, and at least demand this one life as a substitute. Side by side with this I remembered clearly that I had come out to kill for food: that was my one justification. Side by side I saw both these things, and I had no excuse – no excuse.