Rudyard Kipling's Tales of Horror and Fantasy (101 page)

‘Yes, thank you,' said Helen, and hurried out before the woman on the bed should begin to lament again.

Tea in a crowded mauve and blue striped wooden structure, with a false front, carried her still further into the nightmare. She paid her bill beside a stolid, plain-featured Englishwoman, who, hearing her inquire about the train to Hagenzeele, volunteered to come with her.

‘I'm going to Hagenzeele myself,' she explained, ‘Not to Hagenzeele Third; mine is Sugar Factory, but they call it La Rosière now, It's just south of Hagenzeele Three. Have you got your room at the hotel there?'

‘Oh yes, thank you. I've wired.'

‘That's better. Sometimes the place is quite full, and at others there's hardly a soul. But they've put bathrooms into the old Lion d'Or – that's the hotel on the west side of Sugar Factory – and it draws off a lot of people, luckily.'

‘It's all new to me. This is the first time I've been over.'

‘Indeed! This is my ninth time since the Armistice. Not on my own account.
I
haven't lost any one, thank God – but, like every one else, I've a lot of friends at home who have. Coming over as often as I do, I find it helps them to have some one just look at the – the place and tell them about it afterwards. And one can take photos for them, too. I get quite a list of commissions to execute.' She laughed nervously and tapped her slung Kodak. ‘There are two or three to see at Sugar Factory this time, and plenty of others in the cemeteries all about. My system is to save them up, and arrange them, you know. And when I've got enough commissions for one area to make it worth while, I pop over and execute them. It
does
comfort people.'

‘I suppose so,' Helen answered, shivering as they entered the little train.

‘Of course it does. (Isn't it lucky we've got window-seats?) It must do or they wouldn't ask one to do it, would they? I've a list of quite twelve or fifteen commissions here' – she tapped the Kodak again – ‘I must sort them out tonight. Oh, I forgot to ask you. What's yours?'

‘My nephew,' said Helen. ‘But I was very fond of him.'

‘Ah yes! I sometimes wonder whether
they
know after death? What do you think?'

‘Oh, I don't – I haven't dared to think much about that sort of thing,' said Helen, almost lifting her hands to keep her off.

‘Perhaps that's better,' the woman answered. ‘The sense of loss must be enough, I expect. Well, I won't worry you any more.'

Helen was grateful, but when they reached the hotel Mrs Scarsworth (they had exchanged names) insisted on dining at the same table with her, and after the meal, in the little, hideous salon full of low-voiced relatives, took Helen through her ‘commissions' with biographies of the dead, where she happened to know them, and sketches of their next of kin. Helen endured till nearly half-past nine, ere she fled to her room.

Almost at once there was a knock at her door and Mrs Scarsworth entered; her hands, holding the dreadful list, clasped before her.

‘Yes – yes –
I
know,' she began. ‘You're sick of me, but I want to tell you something. You – you aren't married, are you? Then perhaps you won't… But it doesn't matter. I've
got
to tell some one. I can't go on any longer like this.'

‘But please—' Mrs Scarsworth had backed against the shut door, and her mouth worked dryly.

‘In a minute,' she said. ‘You – you know about these graves of mine I was telling you about downstairs, just now? They really
are
commissions. At least several of them are.' Her eye wandered round the room. ‘What extraordinary wall-papers they have in Belgium, don't you think? … Yes. I swear they are commissions. But there's
one
,d'you see, and – and he was more to me than anything else in the world. Do you understand?'

Helen nodded.

‘More than any one else. And, of course, he oughtn't to have been. He ought to have been nothing to me. But he
was.
He
is.
That's why I do the commissions, you see. That's all.'

‘But why do you tell me?' Helen asked desperately.

‘Because I'm
so
tired of lying. Tired of lying – always lying – year in and year out. When I don't tell lies I've got to act 'em and I've got to think 'em, always.
You
don't know what that means. He was everything to me that he oughtn't to have been – the one real thing – the only thing that ever happened to me in all my life; and I've had to pretend he wasn't. I've had to watch every word I said, and think out what lie I'd tell next for years and years!'

‘How many years?'Helen asked.

‘Six years and four months before, and two and three-quarters after. I've gone to him eight times since. To-morrow'll make the ninth, and – and I can't – I
can't
go to him again with nobody in the world knowing. I want to be honest with some one before I go. Do you understand? It doesn't matter about
me.
I was never truthful, even as a girl. But it isn't worthy of
him.
So – so I – I had to tell you. I can't keep it up any longer. Oh, I can't!'

She lifted her joined hands almost to the level of her mouth, and brought them down sharply, still joined, to full arms' length below her waist. Helen reached forward, caught them, bowed her head over them, and murmured: ‘Oh, my dear! My dear!' Mrs Scarsworth stepped back, her face all mottled.

‘My God!' said she. ‘Is
that
how you take it?'

Helen could not speak, and the woman went out; but it was a long while before Helen was able to sleep.

Next morning Mrs Scarsworth left early on her round of commissions, and Helen walked alone to Hagenzeele Third. The place was still in the making, and stood some five or six feet above the metalled road, which it flanked for hundreds of yards. Culverts across a deep ditch served for entrances through the unfinished boundary wall. She climbed a few wooden-faced earthen steps and then met the entire crowded level of the thing in one held breath. She did not know that Hagenzeele Third counted twenty-one thousand dead already. All she saw was a merciless sea of black crosses, bearing little strips of stamped tin at all angles cross their faces. She could distinguish no order or arrangement in their mass; nothing but a waist-high wilderness as of weeds stricken dead, rushing ather. She went forward, moved to the left and the right hopelessly wondering by what guidance she should ever come to her own. A great distance away there was a line of whiteness. It proved to be a block of some two or three hundred graves whose headstones had already been set, whose flowers were planted out, and whose new-sown grass showed green. Here she could see clear-cut letters at the ends of the rows, and, referring to her slip, realised that it was not here she must look.

A man knelt behind a line of headstones – evidently a gardener, for he was firming a young plant in the soft earth. She went towards him, her paper in her hand. He rose at her approach and without prelude or salutation asked: ‘Who are you looking for?'

‘Lieutenant Michael Turrell – my nephew,' said Helen slowly and word for word, as she had many thousands of times in her life.

The man lifted his eyes and looked at her with infinite compassion before he turned from the fresh-sown grass toward the naked black crosses.

‘Come with me,' he said, ‘and I will show you where your son lies.'

When Helen left the Cemetery she turned for a last look. In the distance she saw the man bending over his young plants; and she went away, supposing him to be the gardener.

THE EYE OF ALLAH

The Cantor of St Illod's being far too enthusiastic a musician to concern himself with its Library, the Sub-Cantor, who idolised every detail of the work, was tidying up, after two hours' writing and dictation in the Scriptorium. The copying-monks handed him in their sheets – it was a plain Four Gospels ordered by an Abbot at Evesham – and filed out to vespers. John Otho, better known as John of Burgos, took no heed. He was burnishing a tiny boss of gold in his miniature of the Annunciation for his Gospel of St Luke, which it was hoped that Cardinal Falcodi, the Papal Legate, might later be pleased to accept.

‘Break off, John,' said the Sub-Cantor in an undertone.

‘Eh? Gone, have they? I never heard. Hold a minute, Clement.'

‘The Sub-Cantor waited patiently. He had known John more than a dozen years, coming and going at St Illod's, to which monastery John, when abroad, always said he belonged. The claim was gladly allowed for, more even than other Fitz Otho's, he seemed to carry all the Arts under his hand, and most of their practical receipts under his hood.

The Sub-Cantor looked over his shoulder at the pinned-down sheet where the first words of the Magnificat were built up in gold washed with red-lac for a background to the Virgin's hardly yet fired halo. She was shown, hands joined in wonder, at a lattice of infinitely intricate arabesque, round the edges of which sprays of orange-bloom seemed to load the blue hot air that carried back over the minute parched landscape in the middle distance.

‘You've made her all Jewess,' said the Sub-Cantor, studyingtheolive-flushedcheekandtheeyeschargedwith foreknowledge.

‘What else was Our Lady?' John slipped out the pins. ‘Listen, Clement. If I do not come back, this goes into my Great Luke, whoever finishes it.' He slid the drawing between its guard-papers.

‘Then you're for Burgos again – as I heard?'

‘In two days. The new Cathedral yonder – but they're slower than the Wrath of God, those masons – is good for the soul.'

‘
Thy
soul?' The Sub-Cantor seemed doubtful.

‘Even mine, by your permission. And down south – on the edge of the Conquered Countries – Granada way – there's some Moorish diaper-work that's wholesome. It allays vain thought and draws it toward the picture – as you felt, just now, in my Annunciation.'

‘She – it was very beautiful. No wonder you go. But you'll not forget your absolution, John?'

‘Surely.' This was a precaution John no more omitted on the eve of his travels than he did the recutting of the tonsure which he had provided himself with in his youth, somewhere near Ghent. The mark gave him privilege of clergy at a pinch, and a certain consideration on the road always.

‘You'll not forget, either, what we need in the Scriptorium. There's no more true ultramarine in this world now. They mix it with that German blue. And as for vermilion—'

‘I'll do my best always.'

‘And Brother Thomas' (this was the Infirmarian in charge of the monastery hospital) ‘he needs—'

‘He'll do his own asking. I'll go over his side now, and get me re-tonsured.'

John went down the stairs to the lane that divides the hospital and cook-house from the back-cloisters. While he was being barbered, Brother Thomas (St Mod's meek but deadly persistent Infirmarian) gave him a list of drugs that he was to bring back from Spain by hook, crook, or lawful purchase. Here they were surprised by the lame, dark Abbot Stephen, in his fur-lined night-boots. Not that Stephen deSautré was any spy; but as a young man he had shared an unlucky Crusade, which had ended, after a battle at Mansura, in two years' captivity among the Saracens at Cairo where men learn to walk softly. A fair huntsman and hawker, a reasonable disciplinarian, but a man of science above all, and a Doctor of Medicine under one Ranulphus, Canon of St Paul's, his heart was more in the monastery's hospital work than its religious. He checked their list interestedly, adding items of his own. After the Infirmarian had withdrawn, he gave John generous absolution, to cover lapses by the way; for he did not hold with chance-bought Indulgences.

‘And what seek you
this
journey?' he demanded, sitting on the bench beside the mortar and scales in the little warm cell for stored drugs.

‘Devils, mostly,'said John, grinning.

‘In Spain? Are not Abana and Pharphar—?'

John, to whom men were but matter for drawings, and wellborn to boot (since he was a de Sanford on his mother's side), looked the Abbot full in the face and – ‘Did
you
find it so?' said he.

‘No. They were in Cairo too. But what's your special need of'em?'

‘For my Great Luke. He's the masterhand of all Four when it comes to devils.'

‘No wonder. He was a physician. You're not.'

‘Heaven forbid! But I'm weary of our Church-pattern devils. They're only apes and goats and poultry conjoined. ‘Good enough for plain red-and-black Hells and Judgment Days – but not for me.'

‘What makes you so choice in them?'

‘Because it stands to reason and Art that there are all musters of devils in Hell's dealings. Those Seven, for example, that were haled out of the Magdalene. They'd be she-devils – no kin at all to the beaked and horned and bearded devils-general.'

The Abbot laughed.

‘And see again! The devil that came out of the dumb man.What use is snout or bill to
him
?He'd be faceless as a leper. Above all – God send I live to do it! – the devils that entered the Gadarene swine. They'd be – they'd be – I know not yet what they'd be, but they'd be surpassing devils. I'd have 'em diverse as the Saints themselves. But now, they're all one pattern, for wall, window, or picture-work.'

‘Go on, John. You're deeper in this mystery than I.'

‘Heaven forbid! But I say there's respect due to devils, damned tho' they be.'

‘Dangerous doctrine.'

‘My meaning is that if the shape of anything be worth man's thought to picture to man, it's worth his best thought.'

‘That's safer. But I'm glad I've given you Absolution.'

‘There's less risk for a craftsman who deals with the outside shapes of things – for Mother Church's glory.'