The Dead of Night

by Oliver Onions

  Besides being a dungeon the place resembled a medieval torture-chamber too. Large-scale work requires room, but it had not been possible to add to the height of Cavani’s foundry. The depth was in the pit beneath that made the floor seem insecure to the feet and sounded hollow when John Brydon stumped across it on his two sticks. Not that there was much floor-space at the best, for coke had slipped from its loose mounds, wood rolled down from its stacking, iron moulds for ingots lay among cinders and slack, everywhere were solidified splashes of molten metal. You were careful what you touched on that floor, for you might put your foot or hand on something black that only a few minutes before had glowed dull red. Strange instruments of iron looked down from the walls, irons with rings and double handles, irons like the shackles of a bilboes, pokers, hooks, tongs, scrapers. Two great semicircular hearths of pale fire­brick seemed cachots for some choice and peculiar pain. And at one end of the suffocating place, left half uncovered by an iron ventilation-plate, was the firepit itself tinting the air and the walls about it with a jewel-like upward glow.

  John Brydon looked at his watch again and then spoke to Cavani.

  ‘How long can you give them yet?’

  ‘Only five, ten minutes, Mr Brydon,’ the Italian answered. ‘The flame is beginning to change. You cannot delay a fire that has been four days making itself.’

  ‘What the devil’s become of them?’ muttered John Brydon, and walked over to where his labour of months lay buried.

  For there was now nothing to be seen of it. A strong octagon of heavy timbers a yard high enclosed it, closely packed with sand, from which a pudding-shaped mound rose, with a ridiculous little twist of newspaper in its orifice. Hidden as the secret channels of the human body was the system of ducts and vents for the fiery vapours, the pins that kept core and case at their distance. The death was over, the obsequies were complete. By what a precarious thread the hope of the resurrection hung Cavani and John Brydon knew. Cavani had ceased to speak of it; who would add to the weight that that broken man on his two sticks carried already? Three days for the thing to cool, another day to chip off the mould, and he would know the best or the worst that could happen. And he could wait no longer. He made a sign with his finger and two assistants whose paper caps were a dust of bronze-filings advanced to the fire pit. One of them had a pair of tongs, the other a long iron scraper. There was a clanging of metal as the covering plate was dragged on one side.

  John Brydon too had advanced. He stood looking down into the beautiful horror in the heart of which, like a semi-transparent egg in an infernal nest, the crucible of bronze lay. For beauty it had in that last perfection of still heat. Over its surface blonde gases licked and played, as if diamond and amethyst and amber had rarefied them­selves together; sulphur yielded up its last and thinnest blue; but underneath the sevenfold fire slept like a top. Throw a cup of water into it and a gun would go off; pour in a bucketful and up would go the roof. The assistant had thrust in the tongs and seized the lip of the crucible. He tipped it forward for the other man to cream it of its surface of scum, and the beautiful beast opened an eye of baleful, flower-like periwinkle. But the attendant removed his implement again. Still a few minutes. He left the covering plate where it was as a cook leaves open the door of an oven, and at that moment John Brydon heard a sound outside. It was the stopping of a car. There was a knock at the door. Mara – both of them – had come.

  Cavani had to receive them, for John Brydon on his two sticks was little more than a living tripod. Neither was the floor about the firepit cool, and he had to stand first on this foot and then on that, nursing the supporting one with the other. He heard Cavani’s voice in the anteroom above. He was jesting with Mara, asking her whether she had met her handsome Italian yet. He waited for them to appear.

  Mara came first, and never had he seen his child’s face like that before. In her arms she carried her spaniel dog, and it was at once plain that she had taken the whole responsibility of the family on her young shoulders. It was only after a moment that her mother’s face appeared behind her; she might have been a nurse or a servant, ready to wait outside till she should be sent for. And now he knew why Tanner had spoken like that. They were pitiful, those eyes that neither looked at him nor away from him. And as she still hesitated Mara set the dog down. She felt behind her for her mother’s hand and came down the steps.

  ‘Sammie is on his lead, father,’ she said, while her mother stumbled a little, as if she was just up after a month in bed.

  ‘Look where you walk, and don’t touch anything,’ said John Brydon. ‘We couldn’t have waited any longer. Better pick Sammie up and stand over here. Now, Cavani, as soon as you like.’

  There was no time for further greetings, for a third assistant had come in and Cavani had taken charge. Brydon found a place for them on one side. One of the long torture-bars had been laid in position on the floor, its two-handled end towards Cavani, for when you are handling metal so changed by heat that it seems almost an impiety that man should have dared to meddle with it so, you cannot have two minds in control. They were getting down more irons from the wall.

  ‘Not too near,’ said John Brydon. ‘Down there, that’s the bronze,’ and Mara peered cautiously down into the pit where the crucible lay like a rosy petal. ‘They’ll pour it into that little hole over there, where the bit of newspaper’s sticking up.’

  ‘Has the wax all gone now?’

  ‘Nobody’ll see that wax any more. Nobody wants to see any of us any more when we’ve done our work. Keep close to mother, and you’d better come over here now. I must see this,’ and he slipped something into his mouth.

  With the tongs they were preparing to lift the crucible from the pit. Suddenly, as if the stillness of the fire protested against being disturbed, the pit became a bursting sunspot. Half way up its walls the vapours leapt, and the throat shut itself tightly against the blast of coke. Up the crucible came, a plucked out heart, to pulse for only a few moments before it was quenched in the tomb of the mould. ‘There’s still a little more crust to come off – keep back in case of a splash,’ muttered John Brydon over his shoulder.

  They were already flaking it off, a splash at a time, casting it behind them, showing the unsullied metal beneath. John Brydon was holding his breath. The colour, the timing, the implements, the cunning of men – down the centuries nothing had altered, all was as in the days of Benvenuto, as in the days of Michael Angelo himself. One more splash that went a little further this time – Winifred stepped back. Mara with the spaniel still clasped to her breast, had moved closer to her father.

  ‘Now watch,’ he whispered in her ear.

  Cavani had lifted the double handle, and the other man the single end of the iron. The half-transparent crucible sat in the ring midway between them. A hand twitched the bit of paper from the orifice of the mould, and steadily the vessel and its ardent contents were raised. One last pollution of scum – that too must be skimmed off – the man put out the rod to do it.

  Not an eye saw the thing in the moment of its happening, not an ear heard a cry. But eyes saw and ears heard the terrible sequel that followed hardly a moment later, and in that den of heat every heart turned to ice. A blaze and a roaring rushed up from the pit. A heedless step sideways to see better, a fragment of something too hot for a woman’s thin sole, a whiff of coke, an instant’s giddiness, something else of which Tanner knew the reason – but almost better to have been there than to read about it at ease in an armchair. It was not as if mortal man could have done anything. A minute or little more sufficed, and then the foundry seemed to grow suddenly inky dark. Winifred was not there.

  John Brydon on his sticks was the first to move. He could not move far nor easily, for his daughter had cast her arms about him and buried her face against his body. Only the spaniel whimpered and looked piteously up at him. And when certain drugs have their way with a man who shall say how many
lives he is living simultaneously, how many emotions crowd themselves on him in one moment of time? Dragging the child and the dog with him he had taken a step forward. The man who still held the iron was looking at him with a face that few who knew him would have known for his. Over the pit John Brydon’s lips were shaping words, a name.

  ‘Winifred – my loved Win – Win –’

  But the words, seemed to run straight into other words, that came he knew not whence. They came from his childhood perhaps, some story heard at his mother’s knee, of a certain faithful three whose names were Shadrach and Meshach and Abednego. Even in their coats and hosen and their hats they had been cast in, but the smell of it had not passed upon them, neither had the fire had any power over them. And had not an angel, peering down into the pit, seen a Fourth walking among them, and did not an angel stand by John Brydon’s side now? Suddenly, thrusting the child aside, he stood up at his full height. Swiftly in the thick air his finger made the Sign of the Cross. The next words came in a rapid gabble.

  ‘ “I am the Resurrection and the Life – ” ’

  Then his voice cracked as thunder cracks when it is flung back from a low cloud.

  ‘You there! What’s your name! Cavani! What are you doing?’ His stick beat the air in an agony of impatience. ‘It’s cooling in the crucible! There’s a crust on it already! Quick – what are you waiting for? Run it in I tell you – run it in –’

  And Cavani, his face a mask behind which there was no looking, nodded to the man at the other end of the iron. By a miracle that bronze might come out, but nothing less than an angel would have looked after John Brydon if it did. From the lip of the crucible the metal began to pour in a steady, ponderous flow.

  The Woman in the Way

  Note – There lived in England, in the middle of the Seventeenth Century, a man called Ruddle, a parson by calling, who wrote down on paper that he saw, with his own eyes, the things here described, and did not add that he considered it high time he prepared to take his leave of the world. All I know of this Reverend Mr Ruddle is to be found in the History of the Princes, Lords Marcher, etc. of Powys Fadog, by Mr Hughes of Clochfaen (London, Richards, 1881), vol.1, pp.246 et seq. The passages here printed in italics are precisely as Mr Ruddle wrote them. The rest is my own. Mr Ruddle begins.

  1

  In the beginning of the year 1665 a disease happened in this town of Launceston and some of my scholars died of it. Among others who fell under its malignity was John Elliott, the eldest son of Edward Elliott, of Treberse, Esq., a stripling of about sixteen years of age, but of uncommon parts and ingenuity. At his own particular request I preached at the funeral, which happened on the 20th day of June. In my discourse I spoke some words in commendation of the young gentleman, such as might endear his memory to those who knew him, and withal tend to preserve his example to those who went to school with him and were to continue after him. An ancient gentleman who was then in the church was much affected with the discourse, and often heard to repeat one expression I then used out of Virgil: ‘Et puer ipse fuit cantari dignus.’

  Mr Ruddle then goes on to tell us that no sooner was the service over than he was accosted at the church-door by the ancient gentle­man just mentioned (on whom he had never before set eyes in his life), who, with unusual importunity, begged the minister to come with him to his house and stay the night. The request could hardly be granted, as the parson considered himself to be bound to the bereaved parents for the remainder of the day. Accordingly he ‘rescued himself’ from the old gentleman’s kindness – for the invitation had been courteously expressed.

  But the would-be host persisted; and this is the first of a series of pictures Mr Ruddle gives us that need but a touch to make them glow – the group of the Elliotts and their friends at the church-door, the dead boy’s fellow-students, the ring of less-directly interested spectators, and, in the middle of it, the parson, button-holed by an importunate stranger almost before the bell had ceased to toll. We can imagine the parson as saying, as he extricated himself, that this was no moment for intrusion. Nor would he even promise to go on the following day.

  ‘Then at least, sir, give me your promise that you will come on the day after,’ the old gentleman urged, in some such words.

  Whereupon the parson asked the nature of this business that could brook so little delay.

  But even this was evaded. The other only begged him over and over again to come, while none was more puzzled than the parson himself ‘to know whence this sudden flush of friendship should arise’.

  But in the end he gave way. He promised to pay his visit on the next day but one, and the old gentleman, with profuse thanks, bowed and departed.

  But this was only a beginning. Apparently Mr Ruddle stayed in the Elliotts’ house that night, for it was there, on the very next day, that a messenger from the same old gentleman sought him out and begged him to come forthwith. The distance that the messenger had travelled could have been no very great one, for, on Mr Ruddle’s bluntly refusing, he was back again, if you will believe it, in the afternoon. It was surely pardonable in the parson that by this time he showed a flash of temper.

  ‘Tell your master,’ he charged the servant, ‘that it does not suit my convenience, and if that does not content him, and he will still give no reason why I should visit him, then I will not come at all.’

  However, he finally went, as originally arranged and in view of all this urgency he must have been more than a little astonished to find himself received, not by his host, nor by any member of his family, but by a second clergyman, who had very little the air of being there by accident. Parson Ruddle does not hide his im­pression that the stage had been carefully set, and it was, in fact, from this brother of the coat that he had the first inkling of why he had been summoned.

  First [says Mr Ruddle] he began to inform me of the infelicity of the family in general, and then gave instance of the youngest son. He related what a hopeful sprightly lad he lately was, and how melancholick and sottish he was now grown. Saith he, ‘The poor boy believes himself to be haunted with ghosts, and is confident that he meets with an evil spirit in a certain field about half a mile from this place, as often as he goes that way to school.’

  At which point, and ‘as observing their cue most exactly’, up at last came the old gentleman and his lady, and made haste to confirm all that had been said.

  But apparently they did not do this to Mr Ruddle’s entire satis­faction, if we are right in reading a certain reserve into his next words.

  It was the main drift of all these three to persuade me that either the boy was lazy, and glad of an excuse to keep from the school, or that he had a fetch upon his father to get money and new clothes, that he might range to London after a brother he had there.

  And this strikes one as a sensible view. The parents will have none of this ghost-seeing, and neither will we. In fact we should have expected Mr Ruddle, who so far has seemed a level-headed man and skilled in the ways of boys withal, to be of the same opinion.

  But not so. He found the thing ‘strange but not incredible’, and for a moment we wonder whether we have not been mistaken in him after all.

  However, the obvious thing to do in the circumstances was to see the boy himself. As part of the invitation these people had forced on him Mr Ruddle was staying the night in the house. Perhaps he was a little tired, perhaps he had found a little more than met the eye in the peculiar manner of his reception. However it was, he proposed to put off seeing the boy until the following morning.

  But here he ‘perceived another spring that their courtesy had laid for him.’ The ‘spring’ must have been more in the manner than the words, for it was surely not unnatural that the mother should want no more delay. The three men, two of them parsons and the third the old gentleman, had been talking a little apart. Suddenly the mother stepped forward to them, with the request that the boy
should be seen there and then.

  So, drawing off the company to an orchard hard by, she went herself and brought him to me, and left him with me.

  We are given the actual date of this interview. It was the twenty-second day of June, in the late afternoon or early evening. And it gives us a curious sense of the nearness of all these events that we have even authority for the weather – the extraordinary heat and dryness of the day that was closing, the sultry stillness of the air, so that chimney-smoke rose straight up, the low flashes of summer lightning, the mutterings of thunder. The fruit would be forming in that Cornish orchard, and the last of the browning petals would sprinkle the grass underfoot. As these were evidently people of some substance, it is no far flight of fancy to add a fruit-wall or so, gardens with walks between the parched flowers, and the sun either behind the gables of the house or flashing on their windows like gold. In spite of the two-and-a-half centuries that lie like a dark glass in between, these things still show faint but true through Parson Ruddle’s tale.

  And so, walking up and down that orchard, he and the boy had what nowadays would be called their psychoanalytic talk together.

  He instantly discovered that it ‘needed no policy to screw himself into the youth’s heart.’ Quite the other way.

  He most openly, and with all obliging candour, did aver that he loved his books and desired nothing more than to be bred a scholar: that he had not the least respect for any of womankind, as his mother gave out: and that the only request he would make to his parents was that they would but believe his constant assertions concerning the woman he was disturbed with in the field called the Higher Broom Quartils. He told me, with all naked freedom and a flood of tears, that if any man (making a bow to me) would but go with him to the place, he might be convinced that the thing was real.