Short Stories 1895-1926 (31 page)

Silence, dense as the milky mist that wreathed the neighbouring water-meadows, now enwrapt us. Cold and cheerless, we sat down once more to await the coming of the dawn. And it was the sun's first clear beams, putting to shame all remembrance of night, that, slanting in palest gold, lit up for us a little odd stone at our feet, almost hidden in brambles:

Words have strange capricious effects.
Now,
it was as if I could actually recall in memory itself the infant face in its white frilled cap – icily still, stonelike.

And then I raised my eyes and looked into the face of the living one beside me. Hers were fixed as if absently on the broken inscription, the curved lids fitting them as closely as its calyx the rose. The face was cold and listless; her hands idle in her lap. It was as though the beauty of her face were lying (like a mask) dead and forgotten, the self within was so far away.

A thrush broke into song, as if from another world. Conscious at last of my silence perhaps, she slowly lifted her head into the gilding sunshine. And as if with a shrug of her slender shoulders, ‘Now for the rest of our lives,' she said.

Strangers and Pilgrims

Strangers and Pilgrims
1

It was later even than Mr Phelps had supposed. But now his day was nearly over. Not an arduous, and perhaps a rather vacant day, spent as it had been like thousands of its forerunners between his three-roomed cottage – resembling at this season a mound of flowers more than a house – and the great church. Lank and ascetic, in his old many-buttoned cassock, ponderous key in hand and the heavy door yawning behind him, he had paused as was his habit in the southern porch to lift his eyes towards the smooth, low, bright-green hills that rose beyond it. Dotted with dwarfed and scattered thorn-trees and bushes of juniper in their mounded hollows, they lay there – mantled with light and colour. They were his constant companions, unchanging and serene.

Shadows in the oblique sunshine were now encroaching upon them. High in the vault of the blue air a few gulls were circling; the plaintive sweet call of a peewit fell faintly on his ear. And behold, one solitary human figure was descending the rough cart-track towards the church. Mr Phelps had at once fixed his eyes on this unlikely fellow-creature.

Head bowed down, he came slowly, steadily, ploddingly on; now treading the grass between the wheel-ruts, and now stumbling into the ruts themselves, though he raised no dust into the gilding evening light. Like all ancient buildings, the old church attracted an odd assortment of visitors; but few – at least so late in the day– came from this direction: that of the sea. Mr Phelps kept his quarry closely in view. For a moment, but only for a moment, his cautious but discerning soul had uncharitably debated whether or not he could be perfectly sober.

It was as yet no more than on the fringe of the holiday season, and little opportunity had recently been offered him for descanting on the glories of the edifice in his charge – a privilege of which he never wearied. This individual, however, had no trace of the holiday-maker in his aspect. From head to foot he was in black. And yet, the verger, long practised in these little matters, had at once decided that he was not in holy orders. He was the better pleased to think so. Laymen make the more docile listeners. And you might be excessively odd, yet orthodox. At this moment there could be no question of the odd. ‘In the name of God,' the old man heard himself muttering, ‘and who can this be?'

Unwilling to be caught resembling a spider in wait for a fly, he withdrew a few paces into the church, and in this seclusion kept an ear cocked beyond it. At length the iron latch of the lych-gate had clicked. Peering out, he still kept watch. The stranger had paused before a vast palisaded vault, but rather as if to make certain that he was alone than to read what was inscribed on its panels. Indeed, as he came on, his face had oddly contracted at the discovery that the heavily-hinged door within the porch was a few inches ajar. He hesitated again – like an animal wary of a trap. It was Mr Phelps's opportunity.

‘Good evening, sir,' he said, sallying out pleasantly. ‘And a very beautiful evening it is!'

The stranger became completely motionless, as motionless as some animal or insect ‘shamming dead'. The deep-set inward eyes under his black hat-brim seemed to be slightly asquint, so fixed was his scrutiny. A prolonged murmuration had ebbed away into silence in the sunlit calm of the evening – the placid breaking of a seventh wave along the low beach beyond the hill – a sigh as of time itself in the quiet.

‘Is this St Stephen's, Langridge?' came at length the inquiry – but in tones so mumbled and muffled that Mr Phelps had detected no motion in the questioner's mouth.

He smiled urbanely; but, he
knows
it is Langridge, was the conviction that had swiftly flitted through his mind. ‘Indeed, yes, sir; this is Langridge. The village you'll find is only a few minutes' distance, beyond the trees round the bend of the road; and
this
is St Edmund's, King and Martyr.' With but a lift of a forefinger he had indicated the great beautiful stone church behind him.

‘You may perhaps, sir, have already noticed in the niche above our heads the crossed arrows and the crowned head – with open mouth – between the fore-paws of the wolf. And as you may be aware, the body of the saintly King was not discovered and reattached to the head until some fifty years afterwards – after he was martyred, sir. A pitiless affair. There is a scrap of old glass too in the vestry showing him one among a happy group of the halt and the lame – and all of them
carrying
their crutches!'

The loose creaseless trousers were powdered with dust; the dark hands hung squat and swollen from their cuffs. Owing in part to his having spent so many years within walls and in part to a bilious constitution, the verger's lean ecclesiastical countenance was somewhat tallowy in hue. His visitor's might have been modelled out of wax. The lips had lost their red, his eyes resembled little flat agates beneath their heavy lids – the eyelids, one might conjecture, of one so wearied out with this world's travailings that they could never be surfeited enough with sleep. It was a face burdened with a profound secretiveness. Only an extreme solitude surely could have produced the appearance of so dark a lethargy. And yet, no countryman, Mr Phelps had concluded; possibly a lay-reader, though he hardly thought so.

‘I was just about to lock up, sir. The key, as you see, is in my hand. But if you had anything in particular in view? …'

The stranger withdrew his glance from the time-pocked dismembered stone head that graced the porch and slowly eyed him. He drew in his lips. ‘As a matter of fact,' he said, and as if he were repeating a lesson, ‘I am – and have been for some time – in search of … of an inscription. But I agree; yes, it is growing late. And you must be gone?' He raised his head as though to measure the advance of darkness with his eyes, but stealthily, one by one, surveyed instead the grinning row of gargoyles that jutted out above the weathered groining of the windows, then glanced back at the track he had recently descended.

‘Why, yes, sir, but that's of no account,' Mr Phelps assured him.' “At length it ringeth to evensong,” as the old rhyme says, but I should be very glad to give you any assistance in my power. We are not, as you can see,
short
of inscriptions – inside or out! In fact our population here must now far exceed what is left in the village yonder. In these days, sir, we cannot even make good our losses. All sheep, and few lambs. There will presently, I sometimes say, be nobody and nothing left but me and the church! If you would give me the name, or even as much as the year and place, there might be no difficulty. In late summer we have visitors from all parts of the world, most merely from hearsay, but a good sprinkling of them hunting up ancestors, coats of arms, pedigrees and so forth. Anything for deep-laid English roots, sir; and no wonder. There was a party from the United States of America, a very talkative lady, sir, who I myself tracked down only a few weeks ago to 1616 – the year of the lamented death, you will remember, of the poet William Shakespeare. And highly gratified she was.'

The stranger appeared to have listened, but made no comment. You would hardly associate him just now, mused the verger, with the heraldic. There are individuals who in spite of copious hints at a private history suggest neither roots nor pedigree. This one, indeed, to judge from his appearance, might himself be one of his more recent ancestors – the slack ill-fitting black clothes, the elastic-sided boots, the shield-shaped cravat decked with a garnet pin, the shapeless black-banded hat. They reminded Mr Phelps of an enlarged and tinted photograph of his own father which graced the chimney-piece of his crowded little sitting-room. He had been posed by the genial photographer of the county town standing in his Sunday best beside a canvas depicting a large urn – a rather funereal effect.

In this case the funereal seemed to have been carried to an extreme. The verger – dust in hand – had helped to officiate at many ‘interments' in his day, but never before had he encountered a human being so eloquent of mourning. His black was almost dazzling in its intensity – as dazzling as the dark outer blue of the Atlantic. On glancing away for an instant a faintly green after-image was left within the eye. Only guilty sorrow has a blackness as much bereft of light; and despair one as dense. And the more repeatedly Mr Phelps examined the stranger before him the less he could make of him, except that he resembled a receptacle which however much you might pour into it in the way of information, you could never hope to brim. Still, any listener was better than none; he must craftily play his catch, and hope for the best.

With a mild sacerdotal gesture he invited his visitor to follow him in. ‘Perhaps,' he explained ingenuously, ‘we might first take a glance at the interior. As you see, sir, we have some uncommonly fine Norman work – early Norman, some of it, too. Before the Conqueror, they say; though there seems to be no end to their disputings. And that, sir, is a unique angel roof in the chapel yonder. There are only three, I am told, to match it in these islands. The rood-screen has been carefully restored but not re-coloured; and we are proud of our pews; the poppyheads are very little damaged. Them old high pews may have had their abuses, sir – sleeping, snoring, and children monkeying – but rush chairs with Norman I never could away with. Our brasses, too. Mostly in Latin of course; but you will find the English in the pamphlet. If, that is,' he added gallantly, ‘you should require it. In fact, as I often repeat, we are packed from crypt to belfry with the Past. Yes, sir; and with all due respect, I might say that this church has become a second home to me. Indeed, believe it or not, I can detect the presence of a stranger in it even before I've either seen or heard him.'

This particular stranger's eyes had meanwhile settled vacantly on a slab of grey marble which had been inset in the stone of the wall opposite to him. It was surmounted by the flat square head of a cherub, but the words beneath it must at this distance have been completely indecipherable.

‘The “Past”,' he repeated dully, as if the meaning of the word were no longer worth even the effort of speech. ‘Yes. And yet … The truth is, there
is
no past. There is only what is here now. For all that,' he added, his flat husky tones sinking almost into inaudibility, ‘I must, even recently, have read over hundreds – I say, hundreds of inscriptions.'

‘Indeed, sir?' said the verger tactfully. ‘And I see you have already detected one which attracts practically every visitor that comes along; especially our female visitors.'

He rapidly sidled his way between the pews, and in a tenoring voice, a little throaty but not unpleasing, intoned aloud:

‘Not even the daybreak lark,' he repeated, and paused to look back. ‘Why, sir, in the spring, as you might well guess, there's scarcely a minute of the day without its circling skylark over these quiet hills; and no doubt it has always been so.' His visitor was continuing to listen. ‘But “youthful” notwithstanding, sir, if this little lad had lived up to now, he would be
one-
hundred-and-twenty-four
years of age! And that is a fact, seeing him so young in the mind's eye, that never fails to strike me as pathetic. I agree it's nothing to the point,' he added, after yet another glance at his listener, ‘since it is the age that we die at we remain – at least in memory. Tidings sad enough, sir, for the old and infirm. Still, you cannot put an old man back into his youth again, however much he may covet it.'

‘It's the human way,' Mr Phelps's visitor had huskily interposed, as if he were unaccustomed to the sound of his own voice. ‘But what is age? No more than a mask; even if what is done is done for ever. The cocoon may perish, but not the deathless worm. You said “the Past”; but it's the same thing. Its all is all
we
have.'