by Earle Looker
‘But do not speak again of infidelity! There is nothing so terrifying to know the value of what you possess and, though only for an instant, really to fear its loss. I love you so much I can suggest what might seem cheapness to some other than yourself or an invitation to pretend your desires are more than you can stand – but I love you so greatly if ever that moment arrives with you I would come myself to you. I could do no more, and I could not do less. Now do you understand the strength of my passion and my faith? Do not speak again of infidelity! I must not ever doubt you. Vouz ne prouviez que trop que chercher a connaitre n’est souvent qu’ apprendre a doubter. If it sometimes seems we are both in a kind of a black deep pit waiting, remember how it is in such a place where if you look up the stars can be seen at midday and at night they are magnificent.’
It was late, David thought, for the ink of Celeste’s handwriting to make a grille as substantial as if beaten out of black iron between himself and temptation. Why, when the letter was fresher, had it not stood between Rose and himself? Perhaps it was because there can be few barriers between comrades in experience? He strove not to compare Rose and Celeste, though, now, would he not forever be making the comparison? Rose seemed to make Celeste clearer now. Rose had arrived at conclusions. Celeste was at beginnings, and what he wanted most now was a new beginning. Thinking of Celeste made Rose’s touch a moral matter, more than it had been. Even speech with her would be constrained. He felt his remorse growing in strength. Always with Celeste he would have to be watchful lest some poisonous word of his experience leak from his heart, always remembering and, so, more likely to distort his true meanings as a stammerer chooses the easier word? Would she not see the change and wonder and understand?
It all came down to realization he had responsibilities, now, toward both of them. While Rose’s future meant little to him in so far as he could not bring himself to deliberately slash himself free of her, suing truth as a weapon. She had been wounded enough. Yet living with her in Savatier’s house for the rest of his leave seemed more and more like a sort of marriage. He remembered some cynic had said marriage might result in love. Whatever he had felt of shame and disgust with himself was now vastly magnified.
David rose slowly, not without the necessity of concentrating upon balance and, with infinite caution lest he wake the two exquisitely naked slumbering girls, walked toward the door. He caught the jamb and turned himself into a narrow hall, saw another door and lurched toward it, amused for the moment because whatever his manner of progress it was still in the direction intended.
The air was cool against his face. There was still a crowd in the Street, but no one seemed to notice him standing in the doorway. The music was lively still, undiminished in volume. The drums seemed to be pounding away with as much determination as earlier in the evening. David swayed again, felt his elbow steadied and looked into dark eyes as commanding as any he had ever known. They were, he thought, Gaspard’s for scrutiny though they looked into his with more steadiness; they possessed the acuteness of those of a judge. The man’s astoundingly large head was round, grey and rumpled as if it had just come from a vigorous toweling. His bushy brows were frowning. His mouth was grimly determined. He wore the ample black woolen robe of a priest or a monk, with a clean white robe knotted about the middle.
“What have you done?” the priest asked in perfect English, both of pronunciation and intonation.
“What have I said? What have I done? I’ll tell you. Most interesting … thousands of actions tonight, and I’m the one responsible. Not a person – in this Street but hasn’t been … What do I mean to say? Whose direction hasn’t been changed by me? One man decides for the hell of it to give a party and hey, presto! It’s like a run of pool – click, click, click. Everybody changes position. Some drop into pocket, and I guess are forgotten …”
“Name?” the man said suddenly.
“Atwood.”
“Rank?”
“Major, Infantry,” David said, his mind suddenly clear again.
“What have you done?” the priest asked again with the assured tone of authority.
“Nothing wrong, if that’s what you mean,” David said.
“Those girls are under my protection.”
“Get away from me!” David cried furiously, shoving the priest aside and nearly falling into his arm as a result, then adding as he recovered his balance, “Go in yourself and find out. They’re all right.”
3
Mist banked low across the canal, blurring even the near lights from windows in walls rising out of the water. Above, in the semi-darkness, were wraiths of towers, fragments of gables stepping up into the sky, the dripping parapet of a bridge. Fog must have come in from the North Sea. David had welcomed its coolness. With the slow caution dictated by his unsteadiness, he had fumbled loose the knot mooring Savatier’s punt-like boat, placed the oars carefully along the gunwales and shoved off upon the black waters. He was sliding now along the rear of the houses that faced the Street. Their height seemed to cut off the sounds of the fête. The drums and music seemed further and further away as he drifted. He was finally alone – on the water.
He wondered, was it ever possible for him to be entirely alone? Even in this thickening darkness there seemed concealed movement along the empty canal, as if it were peopled. David looked back; nothing could follow across this water and yet his impression was definite. There was a further, more disquieting sense. His drinking seemed to have been greater than ever in his experience. Perhaps his mixed emotions – and wine mixed with absinthe – had increased its potency. One part of his mind seemed wholly sober, observing the other part gravely and being finally compelled to say, “No place for you, out here, when you’re drunk.”
“I still know what I’m doing,” the first part said. “Look! I can row a stroke. Fine.”
His second part advised: “Steady! You’re in a boat, in fog, in darkness, over deep strong currents. Slow with that oar, or you’ll go in. Full of liquor. Idiot.”
“Drunks and Providence!”
He looked into the black, still shadows, realizing he was almost under the cathedral tower. “The nearer the church,” he remembered, “the further from God.” Nobody in that church and nothing in it, he thought. Just a big tomb. Just a pile of brick and stone built by misguided fools, an everlasting monument to superstition and fear of the unknown, a place for all generations to come pray, and to what? Or perhaps, despite all reason, was there a God in it after all? The Cathedral of St. Sauveur! Where was he? Down in the crypt?
“Hey you! You and your angels and your archangels! Your whole outfit! Outside! Join the party!” He listened. There was no answer but the faintly ringing echoes of his own voice. ‘Is this blasphemy?’ he wondered. If it were, perhaps the punishment would be worth it to prove it. Try again. “Outside! One of your … sparrows is out here! Outside! Outside! Am I in hell? Do I need religion? No!”
“You’d shout too, if you could, but you can’t. You’ll never shout again. You’re just a whiff of cordite. You’re just a bullet in the back of the head! You’re just a letter to your next-of-kin. You’re dead!”
“Born again?”
“That’s what I tried to tell Celeste. But she didn’t believe it either. Nobody would. Look here; get away from me! Just because I saved you once, you can’t be hanging around me. Or was that the reason you thought you were welcome, billeting yourself with me all these months when you might have gone to live in anybody’s mind? Damn you, Alan, why couldn’t you have gone on leave somewhere else, instead of coming here with me? You here? Where are you? Come out! You hear me?”
David wondered, ‘Are there two of us here or one?’ His anger rose when he realized it was just an echoed burlesque of a drunken question. Or could this other voice have been his own inner mind? Could this have been what he had heard before under greater strain and excitement? Had not the shock of the crashing silence o
f armistice, to which had been added the full impact of his realization of Alan’s death, caused him to write that letter in his mind to Anne? Anne! He softly sobbed.
Had not the lull of inaction, followed by the swift movement of the affair with the Oberst, jolted him to remember that quotation in the Forest of Argonne? Was it not after the sudden new emotions of finding Celeste in his arms that he had written the armistice article? Was it not after the blow of Anne’s death that it had seemed Alan and Anne had met in himself and Celeste? Had not Alan’s death been Anne’s death? Had Celeste’s comment upon death been merely the impression of death all about them, as suggested by those many dead-letters to relatives? Had it not simply been his Division Commander’s insistence on selecting a place for furlough, at once and out of hand, that had brought any place, and so Bruges, to mind? Had not these last hours combined to make his inner mind speak again tonight?
Yet someone, David felt, was close and watching. “Are there not those who watch over us?”
“Liquor turns the mind out nicely, doesn’t it?” David heard himself say aloud when he had intended absolute silence. He found himself waiting for affirmation from the darkness. “Releases ideas, doesn’t it? Hence all the drunken philosophers. I can make myself as good as any one of them. As good as any – remember, you fool – from A to – from Aristotle to B, C, D, E, F – Fechner. Fechner; I’d think of a Bosch! Fechner with his ‘Weltansicht.’ Pass friends, into the lines of the enemy with a word like that. Fechner with his –ah! – listen to me quote now: ‘As body is in body, and all ultimately in the world body, so soul is in soul and all ultimately in the world soul.’ Hear that! I could make my own new religion out of that if I chose.
“Religion again – damn religion. Am I in so much trouble that I need religion? Can’t I get out of this without a miracle? Why do I think of it at all? Because of Celeste – yes. Isn’t her religion really her hope twisted to fit by the convent and that Saint? Isn’t that the way religions are made?
“‘Answer that,’ I’d say, ‘if you can.’ Listen to this: ‘As body is in body’ – and that’s certainly true. Am I not made of all my line who came before me? Can’t you see them, like two great divisions in review? ‘As body is in body and all ultimately in the world body’ – doesn’t it all go back to dust? ‘As soul is in soul’ – part of my mother’s soul in me and my father’s; can you deny that? Must be. That’s what you say all the time – must be! Call that intellectual intuition if you like. You’ve got your holy mysteries, haven’t you? ‘As body is in body, and all ultimately in the world body, so soul is in soul and all ultimately in the world soul’. How else could it be? There’s hope and if you hope enough, faith too.”
He waited again for an outside response. His reasoning, he thought, had never been so logical or his explanation as clear. Perhaps it was after effects from too much absinthe. He had stated facts so great they demanded exclamation. Someone was absorbing it all; he felt it reach the other mind. His exasperation mounted. This silence continued because whoever was so close in the darkness disagreed?
‘Get something better if you can! Even with all its questions. What’s the difference between soul and mind? I don’t know. What’s the relation between new souls and old? I don’t know. But what do you know? How about punishment and reward – karma? But is any of this more perplexing than your religion, slurring inconsistencies over with faith?’
David listened again, suddenly more than sure there must have been a response beside him, some comment, even an argument he must have heard, heeded, answered. “Before this slides away from me,” he said, “you have your miracles? Then give my ideas a break. I remember now. Fechner felt that God was the soul of the world. But that’s not a big enough command for God, is it? Look here, I’m really on the edge of something – a world soul that’s part of the universal soul, perhaps the universal mind. Hey, I could almost believe that’s God.”
Out of the darkness a sharp cry floated, not human and yet hardly else, almost without a beginning or an end, for it rose slowly out of silence, came to a full-throated demon’s scream and died down so gradually it seemed never to actually cease, only to diminish in distance. David froze – listened – there was no further sound but the gentle lapping of water against the punt. ‘Wires crossed in my head,’ David thought. Then suddenly he cried “Good God!”
An appalling shape had risen out of the mist directly from the black water beside the boat. David thought of a medieval devil, then of a black angel. It seemed to have wings. “You’re Death!” he yelled at the apparition.
The thing became immense and terrible. Black pinions rose against his face. Instinctively he braced his knees in the boat and struck back, but into the empty air, nearly overbalancing. He cowered in the bottom of the boat while it rocked.
He was struck in the face. A physical blow, he realized. Slowly he began to understand it was real. Death was real enough but delivered no blows like this. “I’m alive!” he cried as so long ago. “By God! I’m alive!” Whatever this was, it was tangible and therefore could be fought.
Now he understood. He was being attacked. He was being attacked by something which floated upon the canal. It was – one of the black swans! He remembered, they had been protected here for centuries. By law. Now they knew their overlordship upon the canals, and they resented any intrusion. He knew his danger would have been extreme even had his faculties been at their best. He knew a swan could be as quick as a man, almost as strong and as savage. He unshipped one of the oars.
The bird struck at him again savagely. He feared most for his eyes, that cruel stabbing beak. Its neck coiled over the thwart and against him as if to find an opening. He struck the head away from him, raised the oar and brought it down with all his strength. He stared at the oar in his hands. He was holding, now, only the bloodied, splintered end. The long neck was over again, like a spring releasing unbelievable strength, flinging him down against the lock, the weight bearing the boat down until water poured in. He held to the bird, now, to keep from capsizing. They went over together down into the deep, icy, black water.
Instantly, David was chilled to the bone and soul, seemed to be paralyzed. His head went under again; taste was bilge. Then his boots caught upon the slimy underwater surface of masonry. They thrashed it out. A fiery stab shot into the back of his neck. Immediately there was a widening spot of warmth. He knew he had been wounded by the demon. Almost at once he felt himself sliding from the slippery foothold with the water dragging at his clothes and boots, pulling him down further. They went under again. They were sinking deeper. He could not hold his breath much longer. He could not fight his way clear of the thing. Its wings seemed to have the convulsive grip of strong arms. He caught its neck and tried to twist it. They rose again to the surface, he sucked in a deep breath. The neck seemed to be trying to cry out to David to prevent its demise as if he had caught a squirming hose through which sound, as palpable as water under pressure, was being forced. Even in the midst of this, he thought it might be trying desperately to utter its fabled song, supposedly its lament upon its own dead – or his. The alarming cries he had heard must have been real. Had the thing seen its fate approach before it attacked?
He suddenly knew from the very beginning he had been right about Alan watching over him, trying to influence and guide. Alan was near now and coming closer, shouting. The strap of David’s belt had been caught at the back in Alan’s familiar jerk David had forgotten. It was physically impossible Alan’s hand could be under his armpit giving support, buoyancy, added strength. Perhaps, David thought, with a stab in the brain from that beak, he had already passed over the line and into Alan’s sector where Alan could thus help? In any event, Alan was beside him and assuring him he would stay. Here was proof you cannot finish a man by killing him. Bury him deep, cover him over, but if he is a comrade and loves you, he will come to you. Blow taps over him, but it is really reveille. David plunged down again, s
obbing out air and sucking in water.
CHAPTER 15
Priest of the Street
“We are all in the gutter,
but some of us are looking at the stars.”
~ Oscar Wilde
Bruges by Louis Dewis (1872–1946)
Books, shelf upon shelf of them, down from the ceiling with a cornice warm with soft yellow lamplight. A comfortable room where he lay upon a bed under blankets. Soft, dim light, and the twitterings of birds at daybreak cascaded in through the open window. He started to struggle up, then groggily remembered the canal – and that black swan! That demon bird! “Did I kill it?” he said aloud.
“Easy there, lad!” a calming English voice said.
David looked up into the blur of a large face above him, the features slowly taking form. It was the Priest of the Street, the man of the great rumpled head, the black robe.
“Out of – the canal?” David said.
“Yes, and it’s nearly morning now, nearly dawn rather.”