‘The time I’m telling you of was in the early winter – November. There was a dense sea-fog over the valley, I remember. It eddied through that opening there into the candle-light like flowing milk. I never light up now: and, if I may be forgiven the boast, sir, I seem to have almost forgotten how to be afraid. After all, in any walk of life a man can only do his best, and if there weren’t such opposition and hindrances in high places I should have nothing to complain of. What is anybody’s life, sir (come past the gaiety of youth), but marking time … Did you hear anything then, sir?’
His gentle monotonous mumbling ceased and we listened together. But every ancient edifice has voices and soundings of its own: there was nothing audible that I could put a name to, only what seemed to be a faint perpetual stir or whirr of grinding such as (to one’s over-stimulated senses) the stablest stones set one on top of the other with an ever slightly varying weight and stress might be likely to make perceptible in a world of matter. A world which, after all, they say, is itself in unimaginably rapid rotation, and under the tyranny of time.
‘No, I hear nothing,’ I answered: ‘but please don’t think I am doubting what you say. Far from it. You must remember I am a stranger, and that therefore the influence of the place cannot but be less apparent to me. And you have no help in this now?’
‘No, sir. Not now. But even at the best of times we had small company hereabouts, and no money. Not for any substantial outlay, I mean. And not even the boldest suggests making what’s called a public appeal. It’s a strange thing to me, sir, but whenever the newspapers get hold of anything, they turn it into a byword and a sham. Yet how can they help themselves? – with no beliefs to guide them and nothing to stay their mouths except about what for sheer human decency’s sake they daren’t talk about. But then, who am I to complain? And now, sir,’ he continued with a sigh of utter weariness, ‘if you are sufficiently rested, would you perhaps follow me on to the roof ? It is the last visit I make – though by rights perhaps I should take in what there is of the tower. But I’m too old now for that – clambering and climbing over naked beams; and the ladders are not so safe as they were.’
We had not far to go. The old man drew open a squat heavily-ironed door at the head of a flight of wooden steps. It was latched but not bolted, and admitted us at once to the leaden roof of the building and to the immense amphitheatre of evening. The last faint hues of sunset were fading in the west; and silver-bright Spica shared with the tilted crescent of the moon the serene lagoon-like expanse of sky above the sea. Even at this height, the air was audibly stirred with the low lullaby of the tide.
The staircase by which we had come out was surmounted by a flat penthouse roof about seven feet high. We edged softly along, then paused once more; to find ourselves now all but tête-à-tête with the gigantic figures that stood sentinel at the base of the buttresses to the unfinished tower.
The tower was so far unfinished, indeed, as to wear the appearance of the ruinous; besides which, what appeared to be scars and stains as if of fire were detectable on some of its stones, reminding me of the legend which years before I had chanced upon, that this stretch of coast had more than once been visited centuries ago by pillaging Norsemen.
The night was unfathomably clear and still. On our left rose the conical bluff of the headland crowned with the solitary grove of trees beneath which I had taken refuge from the blinding sunshine that very afternoon. Its grasses were now hoary with faintest moonlight. Far to the right stretched the flat cold plain of the Atlantic – that enormous darkened looking-glass of space; only a distant lightship ever and again stealthily signalling to us with a lean phosphoric finger from its outermost reaches.
The mere sense of that abysm of space – its waste powdered with the stars of the Milky Way; the mere presence of the stony leviathan on whose back we two humans now stood, dwarfed into insignificance beside these gesturing images of stone, were enough of themselves to excite the imagination. And – whether matter-of-fact or pure delusion – this old verger’s insinuations that the cathedral was now menaced by some inconceivable danger and assault had set my nerves on edge. My feet were numb as the lead they stood upon; while the tips of my fingers tingled as if a powerful electric discharge were coursing through my body.
We moved gently on – the spare shape of the old man a few steps ahead, peering cautiously to right and left of him as we advanced. Once with a hasty gesture, he drew me back and fixed his eyes for a full minute on a figure – at two removes – which was silhouetted at that moment against the starry emptiness: a forbidding thing enough, viewed in this vague luminosity, which seemed in spite of the unmoving stare that I fixed on it to be perceptibly stirring on its windworn pedestal.
But no; ‘All’s well!’ the old man had mutely signalled to me, and we pushed on. Slowly and cautiously; indeed I had time to notice in passing that this particular figure held stretched in its right hand a bent bow, and was crowned with a high weather-worn stone coronet. One and all were frigid company. At last we completed our circuit of the tower, had come back to the place we had set out from, and stood eyeing one another like two conspirators in the clear dusk. Maybe there was a tinge of incredulity on my face.
‘No, sir,’ murmured the old man, ‘I expected no other. The night is uncommonly quiet. I’ve noticed that before. They seem to leave us at peace on nights of quiet. We must turn in again and be getting home.’
Until that moment I had thought no more of where I was to sleep or to get food, nor had even realized how famished with hunger I was. Nevertheless, the notion of fumbling down again out of the open air into the narrow inward blackness of the walls from which we had just issued was singularly uninviting. Across these wide, flat stretches of roof there was at least space for flight, and there were recesses for concealment. To gain a moment’s respite, I inquired if I should have much difficulty in getting a bed in the village. And as I had hoped, the old man himself offered me hospitality.
I thanked him; but still hesitated to follow, for at that moment I was trying to discover what peculiar effect of dusk and darkness a moment before had deceived me into the belief that some small animal – a dog, a spaniel I should have guessed – had suddenly and surreptitiously taken cover behind the stone buttress nearby. But that apparently had been a mere illusion. The creature, whatever it might be, was no barker at any rate. Nothing stirred now; and my companion seemed to have noticed nothing amiss.
‘You were saying’, I pressed him, ‘that when repairs – restorations – of the building were in contemplation, even the experts were perplexed by what they discovered? What did they actually say?’
‘Say, sir!’ Our voices sounded as small and meaningless up here as those of grasshoppers in a noonday meadow. ‘Examine that balustrade which you are leaning against at this minute. Look at that gnawing and fretting – that furrowing above the lead. All that is honest wear and tear – constant weathering of the mere elements, sir – rain and wind and snow and frost. That’s honest nature-work, sir. But now compare it, if you please, with this St Mark here; and remember, sir, these images were intended to be part and parcel of the fabric as you might say, sentries on a castle – symbols, you understand.’
I stooped close under the huge grey creature of stone until my eyes were scarcely more than six inches from its pedestal. And, unless the moon deceived me, I confess I could find not the slightest trace of fret or friction. Far from it. The stone had been grotesquely decorated in low relief with a gaping crocodile – a two-headed crocodile; and the angles, knubs and undulations of the creature were cut as sharp as with a knife in cheese. I drew back.
‘Now cast your glance upwards, sir. Is that what you would call a saintly shape and gesture?’
What appeared to represent an eagle was perched on the image’s lifted wrist – an eagle resembling a vulture. The head beneath it was poised at an angle of defiance – its ears abnormally erected on the skull; the lean right forearm extended with pointing forefinger as if in d
erision. Its stony gaze was fixed upon the stars; its whole aspect was hostile, sinister and intimidating. I drew aside. The faintest puff of milk-warm air from over the sea stirred on my cheek. ‘Ay, sir, and so with one or two of the rest of them,’ the old man commented, as he watched me, ‘there are other wills than the Almighty’s.’
At this, the pent-up excitement within me broke bounds. This nebulous insinuatory talk! – I all but lost my temper. ‘I can’t, for the life of me, understand what you are saying,’ I exclaimed in a voice that astonished me with its shrill volume of sound in that intense lofty quiet. ‘One doesn’t repair in order to destroy.’
The old man met me without flinching. ‘No, sir? Say you so? And why not? Are there not two kinds of change in this world? – a building-up and a breaking-down? To give strength and endurance for evil or misguided purposes, would that be power wasted, if such was your aim? Why, sir, isn’t that true even of the human mind and heart? We here are on the outskirts, I grant, but where would you expect the enemy to show himself unless in the outer defences? An institution may be beyond saving, sir: it may be being restored for a worse destruction. And a hundred trumpeting voices would make no difference when the faith and life within is tottering to its fall.’
Somehow, this muddle of metaphors reassured me. Obviously the old man’s wits had worn a little thin: he was the victim of an intelligible but monstrous hallucination.
‘And yet you are taking it for granted,’ I expostulated, ‘that, if what you say is true, a stranger could be of the slightest help. A visitor – mind you – who hasn’t been inside the doors of a church, except in search of what is old and obsolete, for years.’
The old man laid a trembling hand upon my sleeve. The folly of it – with my shoes hanging like ludicrous millstones round my neck!
‘If you please, sir,’ he pleaded, ‘have a little patience with me. I’m preaching at nobody. I’m not even hinting that them outside the fold circumstantially speaking aren’t of the flock. All in good time, sir; the Almighty’s time. Maybe – with all due respect – it’s from them within we have most to fear. And indeed, sir, believe an old man: I could never express the gratitude I feel. You have given me the occasion to unbosom myself, to make a clean breast, as they say. All Hallows is my earthly home, and – well, there, let us say no more. You couldn’t help me – except only by your presence here. God alone knows who can!’
At that instant, a dull enormous rumble reverberated from within the building – as if a huge boulder or block of stone had been shifted or dislodged in the fabric; a peculiar grinding nerve-wracking sound. And for the fraction of a second the flags on which we stood seemed to tremble beneath our feet.
The fingers tightened on my arm. ‘Come, sir; keep close; we must be gone at once’ the quavering old voice whispered; ‘we have stayed too long.’
But we emerged into the night at last without mishap. The little western door, above which the grinning head had welcomed me on my arrival, admitted us to terra firma again, and we made our way up a deep sandy track, bordered by clumps of hemp agrimony and fennel and hemlock, with viper’s bugloss and sea-poppy blooming in the gentle dusk of night at our feet. We turned when we reached the summit of this sandy incline and looked back. All Hallows, vague and enormous, lay beneath us in its hollow, resembling some natural prehistoric outcrop of that sea-worn rockbound coast; but strangely human and saturnine.
The air was mild as milk – a pool of faintest sweetnesses – gorse, bracken, heather; and not a rumour disturbed its calm, except only the furtive and stertorous sighings of the tide. But far out to sea and beneath the horizon summer lightnings were now in idle play – flickering into the sky like the unfolding of a signal, planet to planet – then gone. That alone, and perhaps too this feeble moonlight glinting on the ancient glass, may have accounted for the faint vitreous glare that seemed ever and again to glitter across the windows of the northern transept far beneath us. And yet how easily deceived is the imagination. This old man’s talk still echoing in my ear, I could have vowed this was no reflection but the glow of some light shining fitfully from within outwards.
We paused together beside a flowering bush of fuchsia at the wicket-gate leading into his small square of country garden. ‘You’ll forgive me, sir, for mentioning it; but I make it a rule as far as possible to leave all my troubles and misgivings outside when I come home. My daughter is a widow, and not long in that sad condition, so I keep as happy a face as I can on things. And yet: well, sir, I wonder at times if – if a personal sacrifice isn’t incumbent on them that have their object most at heart. I’d go out myself very willingly, sir, I can assure you, if there was any certainty in my mind that it would serve the cause. It would be little to me if —’ He made no attempt to complete the sentence.
On my way to bed, that night, the old man led me in on tiptoe to show me his grandson. His daughter watched me intently as I stooped over the child’s cot – with that bird-like solicitude which all mothers show in the presence of a stranger.
Her small son was of that fairness which almost suggests the unreal. He had flung back his bedclothes – as if innocence in this world needed no covering or defence – and lay at ease, the dews of sleep on lip, cheek, and forehead. He was breathing so quietly that not the least movement of shoulder or narrow breast was perceptible.
‘The lovely thing!’ I muttered, staring at him. ‘Where is he now, I wonder?’ His mother lifted her face and smiled at me with a drowsy ecstatic happiness, then sighed.
And from out of the distance, there came the first prolonged whisper of a wind from over the sea. It was eleven by my watch, the storm after the long heat of the day seemed to be drifting inland; but All Hallows, apparently, had forgotten to wind its clock.
1 As printed in BS (1942), but also including manuscript alterations made by de la Mare in his copy of C (1926).
The Wharf1
She gave a critical pat or two to the handsome cherry bow, turning her head this way then that, as she did so; pulled balloonishly out its dainty loops; then once more twisted round the small figure with its dark little face and dancing burning eyes, and scanned the home-made party frock from in front.
‘What does it look like, Mother?’ the small creature cried in the voice of a mermaid: then tucked in her chin like a preening swan to see herself closer. The firelight danced from the kitchen range. There was an inch of snow on the sill of the window, and the evergreen leaves of the bushes of euonymus beyond bore each its saucerful of woolly whiteness.
‘Please, Mother. What do I look like?’ the chiming voice repeated; ‘my frock?’
With that wearer within it, it looked for all the world like the white petals of a flower; its flashing crimson fruit just peeping out from beneath. It looked like spindle-tree blossom and spindle berries both together. And the creature inside danced up and down with the motion of a bird on its claws, at sight, first, of the grave intentness and ardour and love in its mother’s eyes; and next, in expectation of the wonderful party, which was now floating there in the offing like a ship in full sail upon the enormous ocean.
‘Then I look nice, Mother, nice, nice, nice?’ she cried. And her mother smiled with half-closed eyes, just as if she were drinking up a little glass of some strange far-fetched wine.
‘You do my precious one,’ she said, still gazing at her. ‘And you will be very good? And eat just a little at a time, and not get over-excited?’
‘Oh dear, oh dear,’ cried the mite, her dark face turning aside in dismay like a tiny cloud from the sunrise; ‘they won’t never, never be done dressing.’
‘There, now, be still, my dear,’ her mother pleaded. ‘You mustn’t excite yourself. Why, there they are, you see, coming down the stairs.’
And when the three – the two elder fair ones and this – were safely off, she returned to the fire, knelt down to poke it into a blaze, and then reclining softly back upon her heels, remained there a while, quite still – brooding on a distant day indeed.
Something had reminded her of a scene – a queer little scene when you came to think of it, but one she would never forget, though she seldom had even the time to brood over it. And now there was one whole long hour of peace and solitude before her. She was with herself. It was a scene, even in this distant retrospect entangled, drenched, in a darkness which, thank Heaven, she could only just vaguely recall. To return back even in thought into that would be like going down into a coal-mine. Worse; for ‘nerves’ have other things to frighten one with than merely impenetrable darkness. The little scene itself, of course, quite small now because so far away, had come afterwards. It shone uncommonly like a star on a black winter night. And yet not exactly winter; for cold wakens the body before puttting it to sleep. And that time was like the throes of a nightmare in a hot, still, huge country – a country like Africa; enormous and sinister and black.
And so, piece by piece, as it had never returned to her before, she explored the whole beginning of that strange experience. She remembered kneeling as she was now, half sitting on her heels, and looking into a fire. A kitchen fire, then, as now; though not this kitchen. And not winter, but early May. And behind her the two elder children were playing, in their blue overalls, the fair hair gently shimmering in the napes of their necks as they stooped over their toys. It was, of course, before this house, before tiny Nell had come – dark and different from her two quiet sisters. And yet – good gracious me, how strange things are!
Short Stories 1895-1926 Page 53