The Dead of Night

by Oliver Onions

  ‘Gesù, the rush! It is all these nobodies from Catania and the clients of the other hotels! But quickly, before others hear of it – there is a little cabinet at the end empty. The signorina will excuse that it is perhaps not very tidy, but it is better to seize it quickly. Then two, three little minutes while I finish my present client – after that I myself will attend to the signorina – ’ and with a bright little nod she was off with her knaves and deuces fluttering about her calves.

  The little closet at the end was really no more than a storeroom where reserves of linen and other hotel accessories were kept. The young woman bustled in again, swathed Jennie in towels, but was again called and bustled out again. Jennie, in an uncomfortable chair, sat at a small kitchen table on which was an ordinary bed­room basin with a few bottles and brushes, a couple of hand-mirrors, and a borrowed hot-air machine joined up to the nearest plug. And as she waited again her thoughts began to rise as it were of themselves, a little way above her head. As a matter of fact her hair had been done for the Teatro yesterday. Should she hurry and have her bath and make shift with it? But no, that lout in the street had thrown the grimy confetti all over it; if only there had been a proper glass to look at herself in! Then she wondered whether the Mother Superior had begun the Pastorale on the harmonium yet and whether Sister Maddalena was listening with downdropped lids. Poor darling, what a life for her! Jennie half wished now she had come, if only for half an hour; she could have found her a cloak or something and put her in some dark corner where she couldn’t be seen. Anyway, tomorrow, when Jennie went to put a few lire into the convent box, she would find out exactly what had happened about that sketch, and why Sister Maddalena had skipped so swiftly and guiltily away when she had heard the sub-Prioress at the curtain, leaving Jennie feeling all worked-up and queer.

  And suddenly Jennie was conscious of light hands that moved about her head and shook out and loosened and caressed her hair. After a minute or two they began to brush, and the brushes on the cheap table had seemed quite ordinary ones, but never before had any brush stroked her hair like that. Such strokes, light as falling olive-leaves, took people’s headaches and troubles away, and Jennie closed her eyes, it was so exquisite to feel that one was being touched by somebody else exactly as one would have touched oneself. She wondered what the shampoo-perfume was that stole so drowsily about her. There seemed to be a little bit of this and a little bit of that in it, lovely, fragrant bits – stocks, violets, jasmine, cherry-pie –

  She came to with a start and a catch of her breath. Where was she? It took her some moments to realise; then she saw the bedroom basin, the bottles, the two handglasses. She picked up first one of these and then the other. How heavenly, to have one’s hair done like that while one slept! She sprang to her feet, throwing off the towels, and at that moment there appeared at the door of the cubicle a girl with a spotted cube of cardboard on her head and wavy playing-cards that descended half way to her dancing-shoes. Vivaciously she closed the door behind her.

  ‘See, this time I lock it – not a soul shall call me again – now I am ready for the signorina –’

  Jennie stared. ‘But if you mean my hair, it’s done!’

  ‘Done! By whom?’

  ‘I do not know. Find out the name of the girl. Send her to me in the morning. My room is 121.’

  ‘Assuredly I will find out. It will be Bice, or perhaps Fiammetta. But excuse’ – for Jennie was moving to the door – ‘the signorina is leaving something behind –’

  She held the something up. It was a finger-worn gold crucifix that dangled at the end of a thin broken chain.

  Jennie looked at it. When at last she spoke her voice was little more than a breath.

  ‘You found that – here?’

  ‘Si – in the towel –’

  ‘Tell me – yes, yes, I am perfectly well – do you know the convent of Santa Maria di Gesù?’

  ‘But who does not?’

  ‘Do you know – the out-Sister – who sells the lace there?’

  ‘The old Sister Lucia, with her sticks and her ear-trumpet?’

  ‘She sells the lace?’

  ‘Since before I was born, signorina.’

  ‘And Sister – Sister Maddalena?’

  ‘Sister Maddalena? Sister Maddalena? I do not know the name. But it would be easy to find out.’

  But Jennie had turned her back. ‘It doesn’t matter. Perhaps I have the name wrong. But send me the girl who did my hair. My room is 121.’

  But she knew that no Bice or Fiammetta would come to her room in the morning. Neither would it be any good to ask at the convent kiosk for the Sister Maddalena who sold the lace. Now that she came to think of it, had she actually been to sketch the door in the convent court that afternoon, or had she only intended to go?

  But as she slowly made her way to the bathroom the bit of thin chain was twisted round one of her fingers, and the worn old crucifix lay hidden in the palm of her hand.

  ‘John Gladwin Says . . . ’

  If we are to believe John Gladwin, the oncoming car made no attempt to avoid him, but held straight on. It held on at top speed, he says, for the first he saw of it was the sudden blinding gold of the afternoon sun on its screen, almost on top of him. He was not woolgathering or thinking of anything else at the time, and he had been for years a teetotaller. As for there not being any other car there at all, he naturally scouts the idea, for if there had been no other car why should he have made that violent and instinctive swerve? He did swerve; something hurtled past him; into the hedge and through it he and his car plunged; and where a moment before the white secondary road had run straight as a ruler for miles, he found himself on soft green, still at the wheel, his screen unbroken, his engine still running.

  He says that his first thought was this – people ought not to drive like that. All was quiet on the road behind him, but the fellow could hardly be out of sight yet. John Gladwin came to life. He climbed as quickly as he was able out of the car and pushed through the hole he had made in the hedge.

  Properly speaking he had not come through the hedge at all. He had broken through a thin part of it, a gap, thinly tangled over, and his car had come to rest on an old grass-grown track beyond. He looked first down the long white road. There was no sign of any other car, and no other roads ran into it. Then he looked at his own wheel-marks in the dust, and they rather scared him. Heavens! What a mercy he had been crawling along! It would be just as well to report a lunatic who drove like that.

  But what was there to report, except that golden flash, gone in a moment, the empty road, and his own tracks in the dust? He scrambled back through the broken hedge and climbed into the car again. At any rate he was alive.

  Something had happened to the car none the less. The lever would not go into reverse. Again and again he tried; it went with ease into the other speeds, but not into the one that would take him out backwards again into the road he had left. He got out and set his shoulder to the car, but that was a younger man’s job, and the car remained immovable. Then he looked ahead, and thought he saw the best thing to do.

  Old Harkness Bottom he knew the region to be called, and from the pocket of the car he fetched out the map. It was an old map, mounted on linen, in tatters with much use, but it told him what he wanted to know. Harkness itself – New Harkness the older people still called it – lay away over the hill and out of sight, and New Harkness was almost a bustling sort of place. A tarred main road ran through it, with traffic at all hours, and it had red and yellow petrol-pumps, and a church already old as new churches go, with its shrine and flowers at the lych-gate and its tablet with the names of seven Harkness lads inside. But nobody ever went near Old Harkness. Something had happened about the price of corn, and its very stones had been carted away to make the new village.

  But there was probably a way through and out again beyond, and John G
ladwin, unable to go back, decided to go forward.

  On the left of the green lane along which he bumped rose a rough slope covered with ragwort and thistles, and on his right he brushed another hedge so closely that clusters of berries, vivid and rank, scarlet and bright green and glossy black all on the same bunch, broke off and fell into the car, with strippings of deadly-nightshade and fat-fruited bryony. Swish, snap, rip; it was far from being a new car, and a loose mudguard rattled and the headlamps vibrated with the jolting. For half a mile or so he drove, winding now to the left and now to the right. And then suddenly he came upon a whole world of palest pinkish-silver.

  It rose steeply round three sides of a deep dell, the seeding willow-herb, deadly-soft, wreathed, billowing, with here and there a maple of a gold so vibrant that the eye was almost sensible of a twang. A week or two before it must have been a dyer’s vat of the flagrant purple; now the very air was thickened with the fleece of its pro­creation. And down in the bottom, in the only patch the weed had not invaded, stood a church.

  John Gladwin would hardly have known it was a church, he says, if it had not been for the tombstones. There were perhaps a score of these, lying and leaning at all angles, and some of them were not stones at all, but nameboards of ancient wood with finials sticking up at the ends like prick-ears, John Gladwin says. As for the church – well, there it was, what remained of it, that wrecked and ivied hum­mock in the middle of the field. The gap into the field had no gate. John Gladwin imagines he must have stopped his engine, for this pink and silver bowl in the hills was filled with an immense quiet. He got out of the car. Picking his way among the tombstones he pushed through coarse grass to the ruin.

  The stone-movers had been there too, John Gladwin says, for half of the broken buttress over which he clambered had gone; but that ragged ‘V’ against the sky where the belfry had been had probably fallen down of itself. He could only just force his way in for brambles and tangled rose, and a mountain-ash filled the chancel, its berries already turning red. The whole church was not more than fifteen strides long. A greenish semi-darkness filled it, says John Gladwin. And all over brooded that stillness, not of peace (he says), but of the desolation of things lost to the world. He started when, with a harsh beating of wings, a thrush flew out of the chancel where the mountain-ash was. But he jumped nearly a foot into the air when, loud and immediately above his head, there clanged out the single stroke of a bell.

  Of course he knew there was no bell. The nearest bell was the thin-noted bell of New Harkness Church, away over the hill, and anyway its sound would have passed unheard overhead. Nevertheless John Gladwin looked up. And naturally he saw only the ragged ‘V’ where once a bell had been. And then the note came again, urgent and earnest, as if it summoned somebody to make haste. John Gladwin, suddenly remembering that he was in a church, took off his hat.

  The bell that wasn’t there rang a third time, and he bent his knee and crossed himself. As he did so he heard his name spoken behind him.

  Now the most astounding statement of a number that John Glad­win makes is that of a sudden all this seemed reasonable and natural and right. Indubitably there had been a bell in that crumbling ‘V’ above his head. It had had its own voice, earnest and urgent and compelling. But in another moment he had forgotten all about the bell, he says. What was a bell by the side of the voice that had called him by his name? It was a young voice, of a lingering sweetness, that finished each syllable exquisitely, and had always moved John Glad­win past telling. It took him back more than thirty years – and already John Gladwin was fifty-eight years old when he says all this happened. And then the voice spoke his name again.

  ‘John!’

  This time he did not turn round, as a minute or two before he had looked up at that startling ringing of the bell. What, he asks, is the good of turning round to see something that is as much you as your heart itself? Instead he replied to the voice, and his own tones shook with a still passion of tenderness.

  ‘Emily!’

  ‘So you were able to come?’

  ‘I was not able to stay away.’

  ‘You rode over on Grey Boy?’

  ‘Yes, most loved.’

  ‘I have his piece of sugar. It is in my muff.’

  ‘How beautiful you are!’

  ‘Am I?’

  ‘Have you no kiss for me?’

  And the voice said, ‘Hush – we are in a church.’

  She had always been like that, John says, sweet and circumspect, decorous and right, so that those other moments, when there had been no need of circumspection, had been by contrast unutterably full. And when a love like that has been it still is, and dies only with the heart it has visited. So in that sense I should say that every word John Gladwin says is to be believed. He was in a church with her once more, with Grey Boy contentedly cropping in the adjoining pasture. Not the leprous silver of the willow-herb disgraced the hill outside, but the corn whispering in the sun, with the horseless reaper left where it was until Monday morning. He was less aware of the hymn book they shared than of her hand so near to his own; and he wore a cravat, and she an adorable little bonnet with ribbands, and a flounced skirt with a waterfall behind. And John Gladwin says it didn’t seem to be any particular Sunday. The Sundays seemed to run together, he says, as snowy Christ­mases run together in our memories, and sunny summers, and indistinguish­able daisy-fields, that somehow seem the same daisies year after year.

  But there came suddenly a Sunday that did stand out from the rest. As plainly as he had heard the bell he heard the parson’s voice again, pronouncing his name with hers who sat there in the square pew so consciously glowing by his side.

  ‘I publish the Banns of Marriage –’

  There was a rustle in the mountain-ash that filled the chancel; the thrush had returned. Through a fissure where the ivy had forced the stones apart two butterflies could be seen at play. Morsels of fleece settled on John Gladwin’s new black arm-band, and some­thing stirred among the thigh-deep nettles. But to John Gladwin it was her voice again. Thrice the Banns had been proclaimed, and none had known of any let or impediment.

  ‘So now you can hardly run away!’ the voice laughed.

  ‘Away! Where, away from you, when you are everywhere?’

  ‘So that’s what you mean when you say I’m the world to you!’

  ‘You are both worlds, the bread I eat and the prayers I say.’

  ‘Listen to him, Grey Boy! Did ever you hear such a man?’

  ‘We are not in a church now, love. Have you no kiss for me?’

  And the remembered kiss was as fresh to John Gladwin as on the day it had been given.

  At this point John Gladwin admits to a certain confusion as to what was really happening. His actual surroundings, he says, stood out clearly enough before his eyes. Looking up he saw the gap where the bell had been. Looking out of the breach by which he had entered he saw the spilth of silver seed, the raw gold of the maples, his car not a hundred yards away. But in some other way he cannot explain the things he saw were doubled with other things, just as by mechanical ingenuity pictures are imposed on pictures and made to come and go. It was, he says, as if one looked at a half-obliterated sketch and saw brightly through it, drawing nearer and nearer, a golden-hued irradiation behind.

  Unfortunately, to question him too closely is to confuse him and make him give different answers. He acknowledges, for example, that he is not a Harkness man and that his Banns were never called in Old Harkness Church. It was in a church two hundred miles away that they were published. But Holy Church, he says, is one no matter where the location of its fabric, and wedding-bells are the same whether they be a merry peal or a single blithe note.

  For it was his marriage, he says, that that vanished bell next gave tongue to. Not nettles and brambles, but guests filled the church, the friends of the bride on the one
side, those of the groom on the other. The gilded pipes of the little organ reared themselves among the berries of the mountain-ash. The fissure where the butterflies played healed itself; and there floated into its place the placid white marble tablet of Henry Gladwin, Justice of the Peace, benefactor of the church, and owner of acres long before things had happened about the price of corn. The altar was raised again, a roof of oak shut out the September sky, John Gladwin says. And she came in on her father’s arm and was brought to where he waited for her. She wore her great-grandmother’s lace, and never, the village declared, had bride looked lovelier.

  And John Gladwin thinks that as he stood there, as one might say in two churches at once, he saw something no man has seen before – two faces also at once, not as one sees them in some old album, with the gradations of the years coming, coming calmly and imperceptibly in between, but vividly and violently contrasted, the unwrinkled face side by side with the wrinkled one, the veined hand by the flower-smooth one, and nothing to account for the fading and change. And one face was shrouded in lavendered lace, and the other had lain now for a week in another shroud. The two faces looked together at him, different yet the same, as his love had been different yet the same. She had neither utterly died nor utterly grown old. Something as inalienable as her name had persisted throughout – Emily.

  So she said ‘I will’ that day, and there was a hush, because they were in a church.

  John Gladwin says that he saw himself too. He saw himself in a pouting grey cravat and beautiful tubular trousers, and he was straight-backed then and strong-limbed, and could if need be walk his thirty miles in a day instead of being glad of a coughing old two-seater to trundle him about. But he did not see himself twice over, side by side, as he had seen her, for what was there to look at in the John Gladwin who stood that afternoon among the brambles that choked Old Harkness Church, friendless, alone and very tired? Life was a thing to look back on, not forward to, and now, in this curious experience of his, he had nothing but thanks for that mad driver who, dashing past him with a flash of gold, had pushed him through the hedge and into the old lane. He heard the organ in the mountain-ash again and the words joined in of themselves – ‘The voice that breathed o’er Eden that earliest wedding day’. He saw the throng at the sunny church-door, saw the waiting carriages and the coloured favours of the horses, the showers of rice, an old shoe. He says he turned himself about in Old Harkness Church and actually saw these things, and not merely his own old two-seater waiting for him beyond the overturned tombstones. If they were not there, he says, he saw them none the less.