The Dead of Night

by Oliver Onions

  But some richness of light had passed away from the golden maples, a tarnish had come over the silver of the shedding weed. One could hardly have imagined a greater stillness than before, and yet the pause and hush seemed intensified, John said, as he suddenly remem­bered a pause and hush in his life before. Here again he admits to a certain amount of confusion. He was no longer in a church, but in his own office or study, where he kept his guns and account-books and received his rent from his tenants, regaling them in the cleared barn afterwards with beef and beer. He had taken off his boots, quite unnecessarily, since his walking about could not possibly have been heard, and sometimes his brown hands were clasped before him and sometimes they touched grain-samples or farm-plans, or his magni­fying-glass, or a strap, or some other of the objects that littered the room. He was waiting with tense nerves for news from upstairs, news of Emily.

  It was brought to him, less by the doctor’s words than by his cheerful face. The child was a boy, and all was well. John Gladwin pulled his boots on again and put his hand to the little porcelain bell-knob by the side of the mantelpiece. Wine and glasses were brought – and then, without warning he says, he was back in the church again. He was standing by the font, and when the priest said ‘Name this child’ John Gladwin answered ‘George’, and by that name he was baptized in the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost.

  And a year and a half later it happened again, and the name this time was William.

  John Gladwin says quite frankly that he is by no means certain as to what came next. As the light had died out of the maples so the pictures had become a little less distinct, a little more run together. Perhaps that was because on the whole his life had been a peaceful and eventless one. He had brought up his two sons in the fear of the Lord. On Sundays, in the square pew, and while they were yet quite small, he had had to tell them to hush, because they were in a church, and as they grew older, and those things began to happen about the price of corn, and the lads shot up to the height of their mother’s waist, and then to her breast, churchgoing lads they remained, as was right in the successors of that Henry Gladwin whose tablet in white marble looked down on the pew from the fissure where the butterflies were no longer at play.

  John had not noticed the departure of the butterflies; butterflies go everywhere; and neither had he noticed the further sombring of the maples nor the change of light that turned the pink of the willow-herb silver to a whitey-brown. He was still, he supposed, half in the church two hundred miles away, and the Sabbaths ran together as the snowy Christmases had run together and the hot summers and the daisied fields and the birthdays of the boys. He was troubled about the boys, he says. The price of corn was becoming less and less what it should have been. The marble Henry Gladwin, gazing stead­fastly from the wall into the square pew, might presently find one of the boys missing. Probably it would be George, the elder one. He spoke of Canada and South Africa. And it might be a good thing, for it was not right that John Gladwin’s labourers only should bear the brunt of a period of agricultural depression. John talked with Emily about it.

  ‘But you have an offer for the shooting, John.’

  ‘Which I shall take, but it is only delaying matters for another year. It is no remedy.’

  ‘George only wants to go because he thinks it may ease matters.’

  ‘George is not the only one who is going.’

  ‘And then I suppose William will want to go after him.’ John Gladwin vows that he heard all this again, in the broken church in Old Harkness Bottom.

  ‘We must do what we can. And if you’re going to read let me get you your glasses.’

  But as things chanced it was neither Canada nor South Africa that took George and William. If John Gladwin is to be believed, that vanished bell against the now unnaturally-hued sky spoke loudly once again. And, knowing now what was happening, he did not jump a foot into the air this time. Quietly he sank to his knees among the nettles.

  ‘Let them go,’ he said with bowed head. ‘I will go too. We shall all be needed.’

  ‘John!’ he says her voice rang sharply out. ‘They cannot take them! They did not bear them! They are mine!’

  ‘They will go laughing. You will not be able to keep them.’

  ‘But I shall be alone!’

  ‘There is nursing. There is cooking. I will find you something to do.’

  And again, says John Gladwin, the bell rang warningly out, as if to summon the women as well as the men.

  But in the end neither did he find anything for her to do nor yet anything for himself. They wanted captains of twenty-five, not forty-five, they said, and he must wait his turn. Youngest and best first, and go George and William did. Shortly after, John Gladwin, seizing an occasion, sold his land two hundred miles away and brought his wife south and settled her in a small house not far from Harkness, and himself became a special constable since that was all they seemed able to find him to do.

  And now, though he was on his knees, he was not in a place that at all resembled a church, but in some dim twilight of mud and flashes and roaring and death, that naturally he could not see clearly because he had never been there. An occasional ‘Pretty hectic’ was all he got out of the letters of his sons, varied once in a while with a jest about its healthiness. The light through the brambles and the mountain-ash became of a more sullen green. The wall-tablet of Henry Glad­win, John says, dissolved away and another slid relentlessly into its place. This one was of oak, with names upon it in gold, and there was one exactly like it in New Harkness Church as well as where John Gladwin knelt. Even the names were the same:

  GEORGE GLADWIN

  WILLIAM GLADWIN

  They were the first two of the seven. The names only survived. What had become of the rest of them neither John Gladwin nor anybody else knew.

  A low muttering filled the air. It was the first rumble of the storm. There was a pale flash like the flash of a shell in daylight, and if John Gladwin wanted to get home before it came he had best put his hood up and begone. But he remained where he was, so still that the very field mice might have approached him. Then the muttering was no longer a muttering. Suddenly the heavens cracked and pealed harshly above his head. A chill gust filled the air with fleece, and a bright flash showed every leaf and berry of the ash. But between it and the crash that followed John Gladwin says he heard another voice, the voice of the white-haired New Harkness vicar, who had put the names of John Gladwin’s sons in gold on the wall.

  ‘We bring nothing into this world, and it is certain that we can carry nothing out . . . The Lord gave and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord . . . We therefore commit her body to the ground . . . Not to be sorry, as men without hope . . . ’

  Three days before the words had been spoken, and John Gladwin says he heard their very vibrations still.

  ‘Amen,’ he said with bowed head, and rose as the first great drop struck his bare crown like a falling pebble.

  He was hardly out of the church when the rain crashed down. Every broken tombstone was hidden in a mist and spray of it. The maples were not to be seen, the craven silver of the weed seemed to cower under its thrashing. Rivers coursed between the old graves, and at the gap where the wedding-carriage had stood, with favours on the horses and flowers in the lamps – it was only John Gladwin’s car that stood there, twanging like a drum and spouting out valances of water.

  Soaked to his spine, John Gladwin bent over the starting-handle. The engine broke into a rattle. He climbed into the sodden seat and sat for a moment wondering whether he should turn round or go forward. He decided to go forward. A gate might close the old track at its other end, but he would risk it. The other would be miles round to where he wanted to be – standing before a gold-lettered name­board, standing before a mound of earth three days old.

  And John Gladwin says, and stands to it,
that it was to the tolling of the bell of Old Harkness Church heard above the shout of the rain that he swayed and splashed in the car round the churchyard and skirted the beaten-down silver of the weeds.

  First, he says, he found roofless buildings, then a solitary inhabited farm, and then a straggle of cottages along a cart-track, but ever getting nearer to the known world. Then, almost suddenly because of the rain, he saw the tree-line of the tarred main road. At the crest the shower ceased as suddenly as if an invisible hand had turned it off at the main. Swiftly the clouds packed themselves away behind him and ahead there flashed on his eyes a dazzle of gold. It glittered on the still-showering branches, it made prisms in the air, and as John Gladwin swung out of the lane into the tarred road he saw nothing but a glow of molten light. He says it was like looking into the middle of the Sun Himself.

  And the manner of his going out of Old Harkness Bottom was as the manner of his entering it. I think myself that Death did not ride on a Pale Horse that afternoon, but took a trip in a Golden Car. John Gladwin was driving slowly; at his time of life he never did anything else. He never saw what rushed towards him (he says), but only the effulgent road. And this time it was too late to swerve. It was just where the red and yellow petrol-pumps stood, backed by their sheet-iron advertisements. New Harkness Church with its shrine and lych-gate was a bare hundred yards away. John Gladwin thinks, and says, that it was the same car as before. The noise of the smash was heard by a Bentley more than a mile away.

  The Bentley came up and drew to a standstill. It had come from that direction, but it had met no other car. And it was the Bentley that took John Gladwin to the cottage hospital, with a broken back.

  I myself have never been to Old Harkness Bottom, and have only John Gladwin’s word for it that there is a church there at all. We go to see him where he lies. He lies on a white bedstead, with a white-uniformed nurse to make things easy for the remaining time, which we, like himself, hope won’t be too long. And he tells us these things with the dreadful candour of a man about to die.

  But sometimes, with the screen at his feet and the chart over his head, without regard to where he is, in a red-roofed cottage hospital with white woodwork and a privet hedge round it, he breaks off with a gesture. His fingers go to his lips and his eyes steal round. He is in Old Harkness Bottom again, and for all I know his boys are being naughty once more.

  ‘Hush!’ he reproaches them in a whisper. ‘We are in a church!’

  Hic Jacet

  A Tale of Artistic Conscience

  Introduction

  As I lighted my guests down the stairs of my Chelsea lodgings, turned up the hall gas that they might see the steps at the front door, and shook hands with them, I bade them good night the more heartily that I was glad to see their backs. Lest this should seem but an inhospitable confession, let me state, first, that they had invited themselves, dropping in in ones and twos until seven or eight of them had assembled in my garret, and, secondly, that I was rather extraordinarily curious to know why, at close on midnight, the one I knew least well of all had seen fit to remain after the others had taken their departure. To these two considerations I must add a third, namely, that I had become tardily conscious that, if Andria­ovsky had not lingered of himself, I should certainly have asked him to do so.

  It was to nothing more than a glance, swift and momentary, directed by Andriaovsky to myself while the others had talked, that I traced this desire to see more of the little Polish painter; but a glance derives its import from the circumstance under which it is given. That rapid turning of his eyes in my direction an hour before had held a hundred questions, implications, criticisms, in­cred­ul­ities, condemnations. It had been one of those uncovenanted gestures that hold the promise of the treasures of an eternal friend­ship. I wondered as I turned down the gas again and remounted the stairs what personal message and reproach in it had lumped me in with the others; and by the time I had reached my own door again a phrase had fitted itself in my mind to that quick, ironical turning of Andriaovsky’s eyes: ‘Et tu, Brute! . . . ’

  He was standing where I had left him, his small shabby figure in the attitude of a diminutive colossus on my hearthrug. About him were the recently vacated chairs, solemnly and ridiculously suggest­ive of still continuing the high and choice conversation that had lately finished. The same fancy had evidently taken Andriaovsky, for he was turning from chair to chair, his head a little on one side, mischievously and aggravatingly smiling. As one of them, the deep wicker chair that Jamison had occupied, suddenly gave a little creak of itself, as wicker will when released from a strain, his smile broad­ened to a grin. I had been on the point of sitting down in that chair, but I changed my mind and took another.

  ‘That’s right,’ said Andriaovsky, in that wonderful English which he had picked up in less than three years, ‘don’t sit in the wisdom-seat; you might profane it.’

  I knew what he meant. I felt for my pipe and slowly filled it, not replying. Then, slowly wagging his head from side to side, with his eyes humorously and banteringly on mine, he uttered the very words I had mentally associated with that glance of his.

  ‘Et tu, Brute!’ he said, wagging away, so that with each wag the lenses of his spectacles caught the light of the lamp on the table.

  I too smiled as I felt for a match.

  ‘It was rather much, wasn’t it?’ I said.

  But he suddenly stopped his wagging, and held up a not very clean forefinger. His whole face was altogether too confoundedly intelligent.

  ‘Oh no, you don’t!’ he said peremptorily. ‘No getting out of it like that the moment they’ve turned their backs! No running – what is it? – no running with the hare and hunting with the hounds! You helped, you know!’

  I confess I fidgeted a little.

  ‘But hang it all, what could I do? They were in my place,’ I broke out.

  He chuckled, enjoying my discomfiture. Then his eyes fell on those absurd and solemn chairs again.

  ‘Look at ’em – the Art Shades in conference!’ he chuckled. ‘That rush-seated one, it was talking half an hour ago about “Scherzos in Silver and Grey”! . . . Nice, fresh green stuff!’

  To shut him up I told him that he would find cigarettes and tobacco on the table.

  ‘ “Scherzos in Silver and Grey”!’ he chuckled again as he took a cigarette . . .

  All this, perhaps, needs some explanation. It had been the usual thing, usual in those days, twenty years ago – smarming about Art and the Arts and so forth. They – ‘we’, as apparently Andriaovsky had lingered behind for the purpose of reminding me – had perhaps talked a little more soaringly than the ordinary, that was all. There had been Jamison in the wicker chair, full to the lips and running over with the Colour Suggestions of the late Edward Calvert; Gibbs, in a pulpy state of adoration of the less legitimate side of the paint-ing of Watts; and Magnani, who had advanced that an Essential Oneness underlies all the Arts, and had triumphantly proved his thesis by analogy with the Law of the Co-relation of Forces. A book called Music and Morals had appeared about that time, and on it they – we – had risen to regions of kite-high lunacy about Colour Sym­phonies, orgies of formless colour thrown on a magic-lantern screen – vieux jeu enough at this time of day. A young newspaper man, too, had made mental notes of our adjectives, for use in his weekly (I nearly spelt it ‘weakly’) half-column of Art Criticism; and – and here was Andriaovsky, grinning at the chairs, and mimicking it all with diabolical glee.

  ‘ “Scherzos in Silver and Grey” – “Word Pastels” – “Lyrics in Stone”!’ he chuckled. ‘And what was it the fat fellow said? “A Siren Song in Marble”! Phew! . . . Well, I’ll get along. I shall just be in time to get a pint of bitter to wash it all down if I’m quick . . . Bah!’ he broke out suddenly. ‘Good men build up Form and Forms – keep the Arts each after its kind – raise up the dikes so that we shan’t all be s
wept away by night and nothingness – and these rats come nosing and burrowing and undermining it all! . . . Et tu, Brute!’

  ‘Well, when you’ve finished rubbing it in – ’ I grunted.

  ‘As if you didn’t know better! . . . Is that your way of getting back on ’em, now that you’ve chucked drawing and gone in for writing books? Phew! . . . Well, I’ll go and get my pint of beer –’

  But he didn’t go for his pint of beer. Instead, he began to prowl about my room, pryingly, nosingly, touching things here and there. I watched him as he passed from one thing to another. He was very little, and very, very shabby. His trousers were frayed, and the sole of one of his boots flapped distressingly. His old bowler hat – he had not thought it necessary to wait until he got outside before thrusting it on the back of his head – was so limp in substance that I verily believed that had he run incautiously downstairs he would have found when he got to the bottom that its crown had sunk in of its own weight. In spite of his remark about the pint of beer, I doubt if he had the price of one in his pocket.