Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated) (781 page)

‘And what has happened to them?’ Satan pursued.

The Archangel of the English glanced towards Azrael, who replied: ‘Both filed.’

‘‘Sorry for that — ’sorry for that,’ the Archangel chirped briskly. ‘But of course I was only concerned to get the best work out of them which their limitations permitted. And I think, without unduly vaunting my methods, I have succeeded. By the way, I have just drafted a little bit of propaganda on the Interdependence of True Happiness and Vital Effort. It won’t take ten minutes to — ’

But once again it appeared that his hearers had business elsewhere. And indeed they met, soon after, on the Edge of the Abyss.

‘If I had nerves,’ said Satan, ‘my young friend would arride them, as he’d say. What was he telling you when we left?’

‘Oh,’ said Azrael, ‘our Interdepartmental Commission hadn’t come up to his expectations. We couldn’t agree on a form of words for a modus moriendi.’

‘And then,’ Gabriel added, ‘he said Azrael hadn’t the judicial mind.’

‘How can! have?’ said Azrael simply. ‘I’m strictly executive. My instructions are to dismiss to the Mercy. Apropos — what has happened to that couple you were talking over with him, just now?’

‘I’ll show you in a minute.’ Satan looked about him. The light from his halo was answered by a throb of increased productivity through all the Hells. He shaped some wordless questions across Space, and nodded. ‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘She’s been in one of our shops, on test for Breaking Strain. He’s due for final test too. We’ — Satan parodied the manner of the Archangel of the English — ’took the liberty of thinking that there was a little more work to be got out of him in the Paviour line, after our young friend above had dropped him. So we made him do it — rather as job did — on an annuity bought by his friends, in what they call a Rowton lodginghouse, with an incurable disease on him. In our humble judgment, his last five years’ realisation-output was worth all his constructive efforts.’

‘Does — did he know it?’ Gabriel asked.

‘Hardly. He was down and out, as the English say. I’ll show them both to you in a little. They met first at — -Terminus; didn’t they?... Good!...Follow me till you see me check! — So I...And here we are!’

‘But this is the Terminus! Line for line and’ — Gabriel pointed to the newspaper posters — ’letter for letter!’

‘Of course it is. We don’t babble about Progress. We keep up with it.’

‘Then why’ — Gabriel coughed as a locomotive belched smoke to the roof — ’why don’t you electrify your system? I never smelt such fuel.’

‘I have,’ said Azrael, expert in operations. ‘It’s ether — ’he sniffed again — ’it’s nitrous oxide — it’s — it’s every sort of anaesthetic.’

‘It is. Smells wake memory,’ said Satan.

‘But what’s the idea?’ Gabriel demanded.

‘Quite simple. A large number of persons in Time have weaknesses for making engagements — on oath, I regret to say — to meet other persons for all Eternity. Most of these appointments are forgotten or overlaid by later activities which have first claim on our attention. But the residue — say two per cent — comes here. Naturally, it represents a high level of character, passion, and tenacity which, ipso facto, reacts generously to our treatments. At first we used to put ‘em into pillories and chaff ‘em. When coaches came in, we accommodated them in replicas of roadside inns. With the advance of transportation, we duplicated all the leading London stations. (You ought to see some of ‘em on a Saturday night!) But that’s a detail. The essence of our idea is that every soul here is waiting for a train, which may or may not bring the person with whom they have contracted to spend Eternity. And, as the English say, they don’t half have to wait either.’

Satan smiled on Hell’s own — -Terminus as that would appear to men and women at the end of a hot, stale, sticky, petrol-scented summer afternoon under summer-time — twenty past six o’clock standing for twenty past seven.

A train came in. Porters cried the number of its platform; many of the crowd grouped by the barriers, but some stood fast under the Clock, men straightening their ties and women tweaking their hats. An elderly female with a string-bag observed to a stranger: ‘I always think it’s best to stay where you promised you would. ‘Less chance o’ missing ‘im that way.’ ‘Oh, quite,’ the other answered. ‘That’s what I always do’; and then both moved towards the barrier as though drawn by cords.

The passengers filed out — they and the waiting crowd devouring each other with their eyes. Some, misled by a likeness or a half-heard voice, hurried forward crying a name or even stretching out their arms. To cover their error, they would pretend they had made no sign and bury themselves among their uninterested neighbours. As the last passenger came away, a little moan rose from the assembly.

A fat Jew suddenly turned and butted his way back to the ticket- collector, who was leaving for another platform.

‘Every living soul’s out, sir,’ the man began, ‘but — thank ye, sir — you can make sure if you like.’

The Jew was already searching beneath each seat and opening each shut door, till, at last, he pulled up in tears at the emptied luggage-van. He was followed on the same errand by a looseknit person in golfing- kit, seeking, he said, a bag of clubs, who swore bitterly when a featureless woman behind him asked: ‘Was you looking for a sweetheart, ducky?’

Another train was called. The crowd moved over — some hopeful in step and bearing; others upheld only by desperate will. Several ostentatiously absorbed themselves in newspapers and magazines round the bookstalls; but their attention would not hold and when people brushed against them they jumped.

‘They are all under moderately high tension,’ Satan said. ‘Come into the Hotel — it’s less public there — in case any of them come unstuck.’

The Archangels moved slowly till they were blocked by a seedy-looking person button-holing the Stationmaster between two barrows of unlabelled luggage. He talked thickly. The official disengaged himself with practised skill. ‘That’s all right, Sir. I understand,’ he said. ‘Now, if I was you I’d slip over to the Hotel and sit down and wait a bit. You can be quite sure, Sir, that the instant your friend arrives I’ll slip over and advise you.’

The man, muttering and staring, drifted on.

‘That’s him,’ said Satan. ‘“And behold he was in My hand “ — with a vengeance. Did you hear him giving his titles to impress the Stationmaster?’

‘What will happen to him?’ said Gabriel.

‘One can’t be certain. My Departmental Heads are independent in their own spheres. They arrange all sorts of effects. There’s one, yonder, for instance, that ‘ud never be allowed in the other station up above.’

A woman with a concertina and a tin cup took her stand on the kerb of the road by Number One platform, where a crowd was awaiting a train. After a pitiful flourish she began to sing: —

‘The Sun stands still in Heaven — Dusk and the stars delay. There is no order given To cut the throat of the day. My Glory is gone with my Power. Only my torments remain. Hear me! Oh, hear me! All things wait on the hour That sets me my doom again.’

But the song seemed unpopular, and few coins fell into the cup.

‘They used to pay anything you please to hear her — once,’ Satan said, and gave her name. ‘She’s saving up her pennies now to escape.’

‘Do they ever?’ Gabriel asked.

‘Oh, yes — often. They get clear away till — the very last. Then they’re brought back again. It’s an old Inquisition effect, but they never fail to react to it. You’ll see them in the Reading-Rooms making their plans and looking up Continental Bradshaws. By the way, we’ve taken some liberties with the decorations of the Hotel itself. I hope you’ll approve.’

He ushered them into an enormously enlarged Terminus Hotel with passages and suites of public rooms, giving on to a further confusion of corridors and saloons. Through this maze men and women wandered and whispered, opening doors into hushed halls whence polite attendants reconducted them to continue their cycle of hopeless search elsewhere. Others, at little writing-tables in the suites of overheated rooms, made notes for honeymoons, as Satan had said, from the Bradshaws and steamer-folders, or wrote long letters which they posted furtively. Often, one of them would hurry out into the yard, with some idea of stopping a taxi which seemed to be carrying away a known face. And there were women who fished frayed correspondence out of their vanity- bags and read it with moist eyes close up to the windows.

‘Everything is provided for — ”according to their own imaginations,”‘ said Satan with some pride. ‘Now I wonder what sort of test our man will — ’

The seedy-looking person was writing busily when a page handed him a telegram. He turned, his face transfigured with joy, read, stared deeply at the messenger, and collapsed in a fit. Satan picked up the paper which ran: — ’Reconsidered. Forgive. Forget.’

‘Tck!’ said Satan. ‘That isn’t quite cricket. But we’ll see how he takes it.’

Well-trained attendants bore the snorting, inert body out, into a little side-room, and laid it on a couch. When Satan and the others entered they found a competent-looking doctor in charge.

‘“He that sinneth — let him fall into the hands of the Physician,”‘ said Satan. ‘I wonder what choice he’ll make?’

‘Has he any?’ said Gabriel.

‘Always. This is his last test. I can’t say I exactly approve of the means, but if one interferes with one’s subordinates it weakens initiative.’

‘Do you mean to say, then, that that telegram was forged?’ cried Gabriel hotly.

‘“There are lying spirits also, was the smooth answer.” Wait and see.’

The man had been brought to with brandy and salvolatile. As he recovered consciousness he groaned.

‘I remember now,’ said he.

‘You needn’t;’ the doctor spoke slowly. ‘We can take away your memory — ’

‘If — if,’ said Satan, as one prompting a discourteous child.

‘If you please,’ the doctor went on, looking Satan full in the face, and adding under his breath: — ’Am I in charge here or are You? “Who knoweth — ”‘

‘If I please?’ the man stammered.

‘Yes. If you authorise me,’ the doctor went on.

‘Then what becomes of me?’

‘You’ll be free from that pain at any rate. Do you authorise me?’

‘I do not. I’ll see you damned first.’

The doctor’s face lit, but his answer was not cheering.

‘Then you’d better go.’

‘Go? Where in Hell to?’

‘That’s not my business. This room’s needed for other patients.’

‘Well, if that’s the case, I suppose I’d better.’ He rebuttoned his loosed flannel shirt all awry, rolled off the couch, and fumbled towards the door, where he turned and said thickly: — ’Look here — I’ve got something to say — I think...’I — I charge you at the Judgment — make it plain. Make it plain, y’know...I charge you — ’

But whatever the charge may have been, it ended in indistinct mutterings as he went out, and the doctor followed him with the bottle of spirits that had clogged his tongue.

‘There!’ said Satan. ‘You’ve seen a full test for Ultimate Breaking Strain.’

‘But now?’ Gabriel demanded.

‘Why do you ask?’

‘Because it was written: “Even Evil itself shall pity.”‘

‘I told you long ago it would all be laid on me at last,’ said Satan bitterly.

Here Azrael interposed, icy and resplendent. ‘My orders,’ said he, ‘are to dismiss to the Mercy. Where is it?’

Satan put out his hand, but did not speak.

The Three waited in that casualty room, with its porcelain washstand beneath the glass shelf of bottles, its oxygen cylinders tucked under the leatherette couch, and its heart-lowering smell of spent anaesthetics — waited till the agony of waiting that shuffled and mumbled outside crept in and laid hold; dimming, first, the lustre of their pinions; bowing, next, their shoulders as the motes in the never-shifted sunbeam filtered through it and settled on them, masking, finally, the radiance of Robe, Sword, and very Halo, till only their eyes had light.

The groan broke first from Azrael’s lips. ‘How long?’ he muttered. ‘How long?’ But Satan sat dumb and hooded under cover of his wings.

There was a flurry of hysterics at the opening door. An uniformed nurse half supported, half led a woman to the couch.

‘But I can’t! I mustn’t!’ the woman protested, striving to push away the hands. ‘I — I’ve got an appointment. I’ve got to meet the 7.12. I have really. It’s rather — you don’t know how important it is. Won’t you let me go? Please, let me go I If you’ll let me go, I’ll give you all my diamonds.’

‘Just a little lay-down and a nice cup o’ tea. I’ll fetch it in a minute,’ the nurse cooed.

‘Tea? How do I know it won’t be poisoned. It will be poisoned — I know it will. Let me go I I’ll tell the police if you don’t let me go! I’ll tell — I’ll tell! Oh God! — who can I tell?...Dick! Dick! They’re trying to drug me! Come and help me! Oh, help me! It’s me, Dickie!’