No sound broke the frozen hush as I entered the lych-gate; not a figure of man or beast moved across that far-stretching savanna of new-fallen snow. You could have detected the passage of a fly. Dazzling light and gemclear coloured shadow played in hollow and ripple. I was treading a virgin wilderness, but one long since settled and densely colonized.
In surroundings like these – in any vast vacant quiet – the senses play uncommonly queer tricks with their possessor. The very air, cold and ethereal and soon to be darkened, seemed to be astir with sounds and shapes on the edge of complete revelation. Such are our fancies. A curious insecure felicity took possession of me. Yet on the face of it the welcome of a winter churchyard is cold enough; and the fare scanty!
The graves were old: many of them recorded only with what nefarious pertinacity time labours and the rain gnaws. Others befrosted growths had now patterned over, and their tale was done. But for the rest – some had texts: ‘I am a Worm, and no Man’; ‘In Rama was there a Voice heard: Lamentation and Weeping’; ‘He knoweth the Way that I take’. And a few still bore their bits of doggerel:
Stranger, a light I pray!
Not that I pine for day:
Only one beam of light —
To show me Night!
That struck me as a naïve appeal to a visitor not as yet in search of a roof ‘for when the slow dark hours begin’, and almost blinded for the time being by the dazzle of the sunlight striking down on these abodes around him!
I smiled to myself and went on. Dusk, as a matter of fact, is my mind’s natural illumination. How many of us, I wonder, ‘think’ in anything worthy of being called a noonday of consciousness? Not many: it’s all in a mirk, without arrangement or prescience. And as for dreaming – well, here were sleepers enough. I loafed on – cold and vacant.
A few paces further I came to a stand again, before a large oval stone, encircled with a blunt loop of marble myrtle leaves embellishing the words:
He shall give His angels charge over thee,
To keep thee in all thy ways.
This stone was clasped by two grotesque marble hands, as if he who held it knelt even now behind it in hiding. Facing north, its lower surface was thickly swathed with snow. I scraped it off with my hands:
I was afraid,
Death stilled my fears:
In sorrow I went,
Death dried my tears:
Solitary too,
Death came. And I
Shall no more want
For company.
So, so: the cold alone was nipping raw, and I confess its neighbour’s philosophy pleased me better: i.e., it’s better to be anything animate than a dead lion; even though that lion be a Corporal Pym:
This quiet mound beneath
Lies Corporal Pym.
He had no fear of death;
Nor Death of him.
Or even if the anything animate be nothing better than a Logge:
Here lies Thomas Logge – a Rascally Dogge;
A poor useless creature – by choice as by nature;
Who never served God – for kindness or Rod;
Who, for pleasure or penny, – never did any
Work in his life – but to marry a Wife,
And live aye in strife:
And all this he says – at the end of his days
Lest some fine canting pen
Should be at him again.
Canting pens had had small opportunity in this hillside acre: and the gentry of the surrounding parts, like those of most parts, had preferred to lie inside under cover – where no doubt Mr Jacob Todd had prepared for many of them a far faster and less starry lodging:
Mr Todd’s successor, it seemed, had entrusted him with a little protégée, who for a few years – not quite nine – had been known as Alice Cass:
My mother bore me:
My father rejoiced in me:
The good priest blest me:
All people loved me:
But Death coveted me:
And free’d this body
Of its youthful soul.
For youthful company she had another Alice. A much smaller parcel of bones this – though in sheer date upwards of eighty years her senior:
Here lyeth our infant, Alice Rodd;
She were so small,
Scarce aught at all,
But a mere breath of Sweetness sent from God.
Sore we did weepe; our heartes on sorrow set.
Till on our knees
God sent us ease:
And now we weepe no more than we forget.
Tudor roses had been carved around the edge of her stone – vigorously and delicately too, for a rustic mason. Every petal held its frozen store. I wandered on, restlessly enough, now that my journey was almost at an end, stooping to read at random; here an old broken wooden cross leaning crookedly over its one legible word ‘Beloved’; here the great, flat, seventeenth-century vault of Abraham Devoyage, ‘who was of France, and now, please God, is of Paradise’; and not far distant from him some Spanish exile, though what had brought such a wayfarer to these outlandish parts, heaven alone could tell:
Laid in this English ground
A Spaniard slumbers sound.
Well might the tender weep
To think how he doth sleep —
Strangers on either hand —
So far from his own land.
O! when the last Trump blow,
May Christ ordain that so
This friendless one arise
Under his native skies.
How bleak to wake, how dread a doom,
To cry his sins so far from home!
And then Ann Poverty’s stone a pace or two beyond him:
Stranger, here lies
Ann Poverty;
Such was her name
And such was she.
May Jesu pity
Poverty.
A meagre memorial, and a rather shrill appeal somehow in that vacancy. Indeed I must confess that this snowy waste, these magpie stones, the zebra-like effect of the thin snow-stripings on the dark tower beneath a leaden winter sky suggested an influence curiously pagan in effect. Church sentiments were far more alien in this scene of nature than beneath a roof. And after all, Nature herself instils into us mortals, I suppose, little but endurance, patience, resignation; despair – or fear. That she can be entrancing proves nothing.
On the contrary, the rarer kinds of natural loveliness – enormous forests of flowering chestnuts, their league-long broken chasms sonorous with cataracts and foaming with wild flowers; precipitous green steeps – quartz, samphire, cormorant – plunging a thousand fathoms into dark gulfs of emerald ocean – such memories hint far rather at the inhuman divinities. This place, too, was scarcely one that happy souls would choose to haunt. And yet, here was I … in a Christian burial ground.
But then, of course, one’s condition of spirit and body must be taken into account. I was exhausted, and my mind like a vacant house with the door open – so vacant by now that I found I had read over and over the first two or three lines of Asrafel (or was it Israfel?) Holt’s blackened inscription without understanding a single word; and then, suddenly, two dark eyes in a long cadaverous face pierced out at me as if from the very fabric of his stone:
Here is buried a Miser:
Had he been wiser,
He would not have gone bare
Where Heaven’s garmented are.
He’d have spent him a penny
To buy a Wax Taper;
And of Water a sprinkle
To quiet a poor Sleeper.
He’d have cried on his soul,
‘O my Soul, moth & rust! —
What treasure shall profit thee
When thou art dust?’
‘Mene, Tekel, Upharsin!’
God grant, in those Scales,
His Mercy avail us
When all Earth’s else fails!
‘… Departed this life May the First 1700’. Two long centuries dead, sera
phic Israfel! Was time nothing to him either?
‘Now withered is the Garland on the …’ the fragment of old rhyme chased its tail awhile in the back of my mind, and then was gone.
And I must be going. Winter twilight is brief. Frost was already glittering along the crisping surface of the snow. A crescent moon showed silvery in the sun’s last red. I made her a distant obeisance. But the rather dismal sound of the money I rattled in my pocket served only to scare the day’s last robin off. She – she paid me no heed.
Here was the same old unanswerable question confronting the traveller. ‘I have no Tongue,’ cried one from his corner, ‘and Ye no Ears.’ And this, even though nearby lay Isaac Meek, who in certain features seems easily to have made up for these deficiencies:
Hook-nosed was I; loose-lipped. Greed fixed its gaze
In my young eyes ere they knew brass from gold.
Doomed to the blazing market-place my days,
A sweating chafferer of the bought, and sold.
Frowned on and spat at, flattered and decried,
One only thing man asked of me – my price.
I lived, detested; and forsaken, died,
Scorned by the Virtuous and the jest of Vice.
And now behold, you Christians, my true worth!
Step close: I have inherited the Earth.
I turned to go – wearied a little even of the unwearying. Epitaphs in any case are only ‘marginal’ reading. There is rarely anything unusual or original in such sentiments as theirs. Up to that moment (apart from the increasing cold) this episode – this experience – had been merely that of a visitor ordinarily curious, vulgarly intrusive, perhaps, and one accustomed to potter about among the antiquated and forgotten.
No: what followed came without premonition or warning. I had been stooping, for the last time, my body now dwarfed by the proximity of the dark stone tower. I had been reading all that there was to be read about yet another forgotten stranger; and so rapidly had the now north-east wind curdled the air that I had been compelled to scrape off the rime from the lettering with numb fingertips. I had stooped (I say) to read:
O passer-by, beware!
Is the day fair? —
Yet unto evening shall the day spin on
And soon thy sun be gone;
Then darkness come,
And this, a narrow home.
Not that I bid thee fear:
Only, when thou at last lie here,
Bethink thee, there shall surely be
Thy Self for company.
And with its last word a peculiar heat coursed through my body. Consciousness seemed suddenly to concentrate itself (like the tentacles of an anemone closing over a morsel of strange food), and I realized that I was no longer alone. But – and of this I am certain – there was no symptom of positive fear in the experience. Intense awareness, a peculiar physical, ominous absorption, possibly foreboding; but not actual fear.
I say this because what impressed me most in the figure that I now saw standing amid that sheet of whiteness – three or four grave-mounds distant on these sparse northern skirts of the churchyard – what struck me instantly was the conviction that to him I myself was truly such an object. Not exactly of fear; but of unconcealed horror. It is not, perhaps, a pleasing thing to have to record. My appearance there – dark clothes, dark hair, wearied eyes, ageing face, a skin maybe somewhat cadaverous at that moment with fasting and the cold – all this (just what my body and self looked like, I mean) cannot have been much more repellent than that of scores and scores of men of my class and means and kind.
I was merely, that is, like one of the ‘Elder Ladies or Children’ who were bidden (by Mr Nash’s Rules of the Pump Room in Bath in 1709) be contented ‘with a second bench … as being past, or not come to, Perfection’.
None the less, there was no doubt of it. The fixed open gaze answering mine suggested that of a child confronted with a fascinating but repulsive reptile. Yet so strangely and arrestingly beautiful was that face, beautiful with the strangeness I mean of the dreamlike, with its almost colourless eyes and honey-coloured skin, that unless the experience of it had been thus sharply impressed, no human being could have noticed the emotion depicted upon its features.
There was not the faintest faltering in the steady eyes – fixed, too, as if this crystal graveyard air were a dense medium for a sight unused to it. And so intent on them was I myself that, though I noticed the slight trembling of the hand that held what (on reflection) appeared to resemble the forked twig which ‘diviners’ of water use in their mysteries, I can give no account of this stranger’s dress except that it was richly yet dimly coloured.
As I say, my own dark shape was now standing under the frowning stonework of the tower. With an effort one of its gargoyles could have spilt heaven’s dews upon my head, had not those dews been frozen. And the voice that fell on my ear – as if from within rather than from without – echoed cold and solemnly against its parti-coloured stone:
‘Which is the way?’
Realizing more sharply with every tardy moment that this being, in human likeness, was not of my kind, nor of my reality; standing there in the cold and snow, winter nightfall now beginning to lour above the sterile landscape; I could merely shake a shivering head.
‘Which is yours?’ sang the tranquil and high yet gentle voice.
‘There!’ I cried, pointing with my finger to the pent-roofed gate which led out on to the human road. The astonishment and dread in the strange face seemed to deepen as I looked.
‘But I would gladly …’ I began, turning an instant towards the gloomy snow clouds that were again gathering in the north – ‘I would gladly …’ But the sentence remained unfinished, for when I once more brought my eyes back to this confronter, he was gone.
I agree I was very tired; and never have I seen a more sepulchral twilight than that which now overspread this desolate descent of hill. Yet, strange though it may appear, I knew then and know now that this confrontation was no illusion of the senses. There are hours in life, I suppose, when we are weaker than we know; when a kind of stagnancy spreads over the mind and heart that is merely a masking of what is gathering beneath the surface. Whether or not, as I stood looking back for an instant before pushing on through the old weathered lych-gate, an emotion of intense remorse, misery, terror – I know not – swept over me. My eyes seemed to lose for that moment their power to see aright. The whole scene was distorted, awry.
1 See also ‘De Mortuis’, Uncollected Stories, p.444, which has epitaphs in common.
THE CONNOISSEUR AND OTHER STORIES (1926)
Mr Kempe1
It was a mild, clammy evening; and the swing-door of the tap-room stood wide open. The brass oil-lamp suspended from the rafter had not yet been lit; a small misty drizzle was drifting between the lime-washed walls and the over-arching trees on the further side of the lane; and from my stool at the counter I could commune, as often as I felt inclined, with the wild white eye of the Blue Boar which fleered in at the window from the hanging sign.
Autumnal scents, failing day, rain so gentle and persistent – such phenomena as these have a slightly soporific effect on the human consciousness. It is as though its busy foreground first becomes blurred, then blotted out; and then – the slow steady sweep of the panorama of dream that never ceases its strange motioning. The experience is brief, I agree. The footlights, headlights, skylights brighten again: the panorama retires!
Excluding the landlady, who occasionally waddled in from her dusky retreat behind the bar, there were only three of us in the tap-room – three chance customers now met together for the first time: myself; a smallish man with an unusually high crown to his head, and something engagingly monkey-like in his face; and a barrel-shaped person who sat humped up on a stool between us in an old shooting-jacket and leather leggings, his small eyes set close together on either side a red nose.
I had been the last to put in an appearance, but had not, it seemed, damped anythin
g in the nature of a conversation. Such weather does not conduce to it. But three may be some sort of company where two is none; and what, at last, set us more or less at our ease was an ‘automatic machine’ that stood in the corner of the tap-room under a coloured lithograph of Shotover, the winner of the Derby in 1882. It was a machine of an unusual kind since it gave its patronizers nothing tangible for their penny – not even their ladylove on a slip of cardboard, or a clinging jet of perfume.
It reminds me now of the old Miracle Plays or Moralities. Behind its glass it showed a sort of grotto, like a whited sepulchre, with two compartments, over which descended the tresses of a weeping willow. You slipped a penny into the slot, and presently a hump-backed mommet in a rusty-black cowl jerked into view from the cell on the left. He stood there a moment in the midst – fixedly looking at you: then decamped into the gloom again.
But this was if your luck was out – or so I assumed. If it was in, then a nymph attired in skirts of pink muslin wheeled out of the flowery bower on the eastern side; and danced a brief but impassioned pas seul.
My three pennies had brought me one fandango from the latter and two prolonged scrutinies from the former – a proportion decided on, no doubt, by the worldly-wise manufacturer of the machine. But this was not all. In intention at least he must have been a practical optimist. For if the nymph responded to your penny, you were invited to slip yet another coin into another slot – but before you could count ten. This galvanized the young lady into a giddy pursuit of the numbskull in the black hood – a pursuit, however, which ended merely in the retirement of them both behind the scenes.
The man in leggings had watched my experiments with eyes almost as motionless as plums in a pudding. It was my third penny that had wooed out the nymph. But the ‘grandfather’s clock’ in the corner had ticked loudly at least five times before I managed to insert a fourth. It was a moment of rapt – of an aching – excitement. What teeming passion showed itself in that wild horseplay behind the glass! And then, alas, the machinery ceased to whirr; the clock ticked on; the faint rustle of the drifting rain sounded once more at the open door; I returned to my stool; and the landlady retired into her den.
Short Stories 1895-1926 Page 31