‘Because of this suicidé?’
‘One supposes so. But there are some who will believe anything.’
‘All the same these things make history.’
Marsac gave a shrug. ‘As I say, one can but die once. Perhaps it is well. And with Madame away I have the work of two to do. Monsieur will not let me make up the bed for him downstairs?’
‘I am very well where I am.’
‘I will ask the men about the chimney. It will then be possible to have a fire upstairs,’ and Marsac shuffled off to his own quarters. James Hopley filled his glass again.
One can but die! Now who had told the excellent Marsac that? And the legend of the smuggler who had come through the ceiling of his room! What tomfoolery would they be talking next? And as it was not a joke he could share with the first-comer he shared it with his cahier that night.
There is in fact one passage he wrote that had better be transcribed exactly as he wrote it, lest another pen should seem to have misinterpreted him. It is the first clear indication we have of the lengths to which this ingrowing mind of his was prepared to go. He writes, in cold ink:
Since that visit of mine to the top of the house this afternoon I am at least face to face with something real. But as for ‘A man can but die’, who except Marsac says so? If all who ever lived are completely dead what is all the talk about? Since the world began has no man ever been partially dead? Never? It seems to me a good deal to say. I am not thinking of Lazarus. Unless he was wholly dead there was no miracle. And I am leaving out Translation, for these ‘were not’ and death does not enter into it. But say that a few exist in this residual and partial state. On what level do these manifest, and to whom? Assuredly to somebody they meet on the same level. So take such a man as I am, neither one thing nor the other. I am, as you might say, either death warmed up or life cooled down. In that case there is only a margin of difference between him, scarcely dead, and me, scarcely alive. He is as much a man as I, I as much a ghost as he. For all I know I am in the direct line of succession. It is merely that in that case I should like to know. And by the way, a rather curious thing has occurred to me. A set of words has been running in my head for this last hour that I have not the faintest recollection of having heard before. Textually they are the same every time they come, and they do not strike one as an accidental jingle. They are: The Past was the Best, the Present is Worse, the Worst is to Come. Needless to say I haven’t invented them, and they seem to come from a very, very long way off. Where?
So here was a man, calmly arguing, and with a certain show of logic, the possibility of becoming a ghost himself. If (he seems to have asked) this Jean the Smuggler had been preceded by a spectre from the Terror, and that by an invisible shape from Arcques, and the Arcques phantom by a dim line of others, why should the Ghostage stop there? As for his quotation, that indeed is slightly puzzling. Very few fragments of this ancient Maya philosophy remain, and such as there are are not likely to have come James Hopley’s way. But somehow the words, coming like the phantoms out of abysses of time, add a credit to his other speculations.
But with all his logic he had forgotten one thing. This was that ghosts do not appoint themselves. It is still the consensus of human tongues that makes the ghost, and in the end all came back, not to James, but to the men and women of the neighbourhood.
As usually happens, it was pure accident that brought this to a head, on the Sunday after his arrival at the château. So far he had taken his walks within the limits of the château’s own lands, and he ought to have known that he was taking risks in venturing farther abroad on the day when the masons and carpenters rested from their work of the week. But it was a tempting day for a stroll, and he happened to find himself at a dilapidated postern with fields of wheat and half-cut lucerne beyond that rose up a small hill. There was nobody about, nor unless an unseen cock crowed, any sign of life to be seen, and passing out of the postern he began the ascent of the hill.
And a man may commune with a rope about the vileness of man and the things he does on earth but he cannot see the wheat waving over its poppies and cornflowers, nor the humble thyme and bedstraw and rest-harrow that make a world of dowdy beauty of the stubble, and remain altogether unmoved in heart. Acute noises of busy insects sounded in James Hopley’s ears, the quick eyes of a bird looked into his for a moment, and close to his foot a clod stirred that was a hedgehog. And for all he knew he might be looking at it for the last time. Something came into his throat. This was all of life he would really miss. There had indeed been a time . . . but what was time to all this untramelled homeliness? The speck of an insect settling on his hand: its momentary agony were he to destroy it would be as long as any agony James Hopley had endured, but its joy in the glowing minutes of the sun was as long. It was endless as those kisses women gave to all men but to him, seeming to keep them alive for ever during the unmeasured minute their eyelids dropped and quivered. O, if a man could but have had the floweriness and the love and put all the fiendishness away. And in that very moment he found himself at the top of the hill, looking down the other slope of it. The slender spire of the church rose against the next hillside, and past it the road straggled among the compact farms. But there was also something else going on. In a small field just this side of the church the people of the village seemed to have been spilt together in a little hollow as if out of a scoop. Marsac had said nothing to James Hopley about a fête, but there it was, in full progress. Half a dozen canvas booths had been set up, with tiny flags and gay banners of bunting. Rustic games were in full swing, and the short crack of airguns where the boys shot for tinsel prizes, and he could distinguish the curé, short and black in his soutane, moving among the mothers and marshalling the children for their short races. A hedge surrounded the field. It was pure hunger of heart that made James long to draw a little nearer. If he liked to use the slight shoulder of the hill as cover he might be able to do so unseen. Cautiously he descended, and presently, standing in a dry ditch with foxgloves and cow-parsley up to his knees, was peering through a gap.
Almost the first thing he saw seemed to have been put there specially for him. On a fluttering strip of homely unsized calico, the home-made letters all blurred, he read: ‘Anciens Combattants de la Guerre’. There with their half-legs and sticks and empty sleeves and war-medals they moved about, and God knows they could have had James’s English one-pound note had anybody told him of the occasion. But these were decent mutilations, mutilations that made a man hold his head up and brought him honour among his friends and the awed regard of their children. James, putting the tangle of convolvulus aside with his hand, could only stand there out of sight, looking on.
He never knew whose eyes had been the first to see him. By ill-luck it was a child who suddenly screamed. And though an instant later James Hopley was no longer there a mother was already at the child’s side. Other mothers, too, had come up and were gently shaking the child, demanding what it had seen to terrify it. But the child could only sob and gulp and cling to its mother. By that time James, no longer thinking of concealment, was walking with downhung head and hands before his face up the hill again. Once he turned. Down in the field he saw them as they watched him, hands that pointed him out. One urchin had lifted a toy gun to his shoulder and James heard the minute crack. Where the stooks began he dropped behind them out of sight. Below him he saw the broken postern he had come out by. Better if he had remained on the other side of it.
For men might understand and grant that after all war was like that, and women always had their men behind them, but let James Hopley come unawares upon a child and its father and mother alike turned on him eyes that blazed. Had this accursed mutilé then not the decency to stay within doors? Must he stare even at children so that his dreadful visage haunted them at night? Who was he, this corpse that Madame had sent here to die? He who prowled about the cháteau after dark, so that even good Mathilde Marsa
c would not stay a day longer in the place? Where was Mathilde? Run and get her! She was the one to question the child; poor little Leonie, she could not tell her own mother, but she would tell Mathilde, who had come over just the same way herself. ‘Francis! Charles! You saw the foreigner, the English gueule cassée; tell us what kind he is, this animal who frightens children!’
And Francis the mason was able to say that he had looked through a window-piercing into the corridor, and it was well the ladder had been secured at the top or he and the ladder must have come down together, such a glaring face had this stranger turned on him. And Charles could tell them more than that, for he had seen him in his room, dressing himself, putting his face on, for that, bien sur, was not the face he slept in, but another, that he took off and put on the bedside commode before he hid himself under the sheets. But a third had presently left that far behind. This Englishman, this horror, he said, had a glass eye, which God knows does sometimes happen to a copain in a war without anybody thinking the worse of him, but he does not get a malevolent soul in the war too. Not only had he a glass eye, ce cadavre, but he played devil’s tricks with it. Let them ask Jacques Martin when he returned! Jacques would tell them how he had met this misérable three days ago down by the river, at a certain spot they knew of . . . yes, the selfsame spot. He had been under the alders, just as he had hidden under the hedge to frighten the child. And Jacques himself had seen him take out the glass eye and polish it with a handkerchief and put it back into its socket again, and then he had screwed up the other eye, pretending to take that out and polish it too, and had glared at Jacques with them both. What did Jacques do? You may well ask! He looked round for the nearest billet of wood. But before he could find one he had gone, this English miscreant . . . gone and not to be found, though Jacques had shaken every bush round about for half an hour. As for him, who spoke, he wished that somebody would write a letter to Madame in Paris, telling her she must remove her revenant or get somebody else to wheel her barrows. When Madame bought people’s labour she did not buy their nerves too. Mon Dieu, he wanted a cognac now, the turn Jacques Martin’s story had given him . . .
So the workmen retired to the inn, there to discuss their relations with Madame Blanche; but James Hopley sat among his tapestries and porcelain vases, his spirit broken. What was the world but a place where little girls had fits at the sight of him and youngsters of ten pointed their toy guns at him? Anciens Combattants de la Guerre! It was time to make room. He saw by Marsac’s face when he came in that what had happened had already got round to him. And Marsac now had not even the excuse that he had his wife to look after, but he merely brought in James’s supper, saw to it that he had a good fire, and left him again. Drawing near to the fire-dogs and stretching out his hands as if they had been cold and stiff already, James Hopley did not even write in his book.
6
Whenever James Hopley looked back on those days of 1916 he looked back on a world of men each with a face and name and rank and regimental number and a separate history of his own. And that had been a good time to know a man in, for you had learned more about him in half an hour than in all the years since the Armistice. But in this harmonic repetition of it all every one of these trifling, all-important things was missing. He had now spent four nights in that Hôtel Drouot room upstairs, knowing with a certainty that had increased every night what this roomfellow of his was, but without getting an inch nearer to knowing who. He sat long that night over the fire. The flames seemed to make the stiff figures of the tapestries start softly forward and retire again, they gave a dim life and motion to the battlepiece that was big enough for a wall at Versailles, but no friendly face started forth out of the fire to look at James himself. Curse the fellow! James had done his utmost to make himself known to him; why couldn’t he have done the same? If James had been through that storm of khaki and flame and gas and mud and chloride-of-lime once he could go through it again, but he would not do so alone. He would have a pal with him the next time. Well there was another chance tonight. Perhaps his pal would have changed his mind. Sluggishly he rose.
His pal had changed his mind. Throughout that night the second bed remained unvisited. In the room itself nothing whatever happened. James lay awake till the first streaks of daylight. Then, exhausted, he fell into a doze.
But he was roused by a rude enough shock an hour or so later. There was a shattering of glass. Something rolled across the floor and came to rest. Turning his head on his pillow James saw that it was a stone. They were going to stone him out of the château now.
And what was he going to do about that? There had been a time when he wouldn’t have had to ask himself. The whole village could have gone to the devil before he would have budged. There were plenty of ways in which he could have retaliated. But what was the good? It wasn’t the hostility of the village that mattered. It was this utter, heartbreaking failure of the night. Yet where in this shadowy business had he miscalculated? He went over it all again, but could not find that anywhere he had made a mistake. Was then some presumption being punished in him? Some sin? He asks himself, searching his heart.
I cannot see what great wrong I have ever done in my life. Looking back on it I have a thousand meannesses and petty acts to beg forgiveness for, but it hasn’t been an important enough life for a big sin. Not even important enough for big suffering either, for this is not true suffering. There is a gallantry in defying anguish, but this is only wincing under the blow when it comes and waiting for the next. I had hoped for something a little braver. I would have stood up to it, gone out to meet it. Next Wednesday was to have been the crux. And I have one more night. If nothing happens I shall feel like . . .
But what he would feel like in that case is heavily scored out. Again he quotes his bit of Maya about the Best and the Worst, and within a couple of hours is writing:
And now Marsac is leaving me. He has just told me so. I told him he couldn’t just step out like that but would at least have to find me somebody else, but he shook his head. Nobody else would come. But he has consented to stay another week. Then in my place he would go too, he says. In my place! . . . Am suddenly interrupted. Here comes the curé along the terrace.
But this time he was not the amiable curé who had come to ask after Madame Blanche in Paris and to invite James to come and stay with him at the vicarage. He had his most unyielding clerical face on, so much so that not ten minutes had passed before he was asking James whether he would not like to pray.
‘To pray? Why?’ James asked.
The curé looked him resolutely in the face. ‘Have you no enemies?’
With that James answered the curé in his own tone. – ‘None who have not made themselves so.’
‘Is it likely the whole village is wrong?’
‘Must I pray for the man who threw a stone through my window this morning?’
The curé frowned as he turned his little silver cross in his fingers. The throwing of the stone was evidently news to him, for he dropped a little of his austerity.
‘It is as I said. This air is not suitable for you. It is best to speak plainly as to the terrible thing that has happened to you. For your physical hurt, so much worse (believe me) in this short time, there is, alas, no doctor. If they have done all they can for you in Paris it is the will of God. But if your soul is sick there is always prayer. Will you kneel with me?’
‘So the village says my soul is sick too?’
‘I must close my ears if you boast of your own righteousness.’
‘If then my soul is sick should we be praying the same prayer, to the same God?’
‘My prayer and my God will prevail.’
‘Enough. I will not kneel with you.’
The curé became austere again. – ‘Monsieur, you come here and in less than a week you are troubling my flock. Already it is said of you that if the earth swallowed you it was as it closed upon
Dathan and Abiram, who went down quick into the pit. But the incense of God, whose priest I am, rose between the dead and the living. Again I ask you to pray.’
‘I live my life alone. I will pray for what is left of it alone.’
‘Surely our own Anciens Combattants should sympathise and understand?’
‘What do they say?’
‘That where already a fear was you make it visible. I, I have the protection of my Cross,’ he turned it in his fingers again, ‘but if others think you are the Devil I cannot be the shepherd of my flock without entering into their thoughts.’
Suddenly, too exhausted for further disputation, James dropped heavily into a chair. It was precisely as he had thought. This curé had his middle course between two worlds to steer. Well, let them have it their own way. He closed his eyes.
‘I am sure you meant kindly in coming, monsieur.’
‘It was my duty. Your case shall be pleaded with them too. At least no more stones shall be thrown. Since you will not pray with me I will pray for you alone.’
But he spoke to the air. James was asleep. When he opened his eyes again the curé had gone.
But during that short interval of forgetfulness James had had a curious dream. He had dreamed that he was upstairs in his room, packing his bags to return to Paris. With the manifestations cut abruptly off, what was there left to stay for? Marsac had advised him to go. The curé told him plainly that he was looked on as the Devil and a fear made visible. So he was packing up to leave it all.
But as in his dream he moved about his bedroom he suddenly found himself looking for his water-bottle. Somehow his familiar civilian attire had changed itself into articles of wartime equipment. There they lay spread out on the second bed, his greatcoat, his haversack, his intrenching-tool, his tin hat, his gas-mask. Looking down at himself he saw the puttees on his legs, his stained knees, the skirts of his frayed tunic. His revolver was in the holster at his waist, the breach of his rifle was oiled, the piece of rag was tied over its muzzle. His ten-days’ leave was up. Waterloo, the night train and the escorted crossing. Where the devil was that water-bottle? There was something stronger than water in it. Ah, there it was, on the alabaster-topped washstand; fool that he was, it wasn’t his water-bottle but his gas-mask that he had lost. It had been on the second bed there only a moment ago. Curse things for getting lost like this, and him in a hurry with the boat-train to catch.
The Dead of Night Page 63