Short Stories 1895-1926 (33 page)

The stranger had raised his hand again, had turned with mouth ajar, as if to expostulate. ‘One moment, sir, if you please,' cried Mr Phelps. ‘Cheek by jowl with it, as you see, we have “O. A.” – no more than the initials, and the years, 1710–1762 – and this!

‘That's
another
way of looking at the riddle, and, I grant you, in our low moments there's a good deal to be said for the “Why”. But what I am bearing towards, if you follow me, is whether we are not already edging into the neighbourhood of the heathen, sir? And yet, mark you – light itself by comparison – here's another, clean contrary to both:

‘While here again, sir, beneath the very soles of our feet,' he tapped the stone with the capless toe of his shoe, ‘here we have Richard Halladay, and a very fine piece of lettering, I allow – though a few words, as you see, have been worn flat by the bell-ringers' treadings, sir.' He glossed the inscription as he read:

‘And last this, which, being human, we all can share. It was, sir, my poor dear mother's favourite of them all:

He had paused before attempting the last line. ‘But now, sir,' he went rapidly on, ‘to continue my argument. We all feel and realize
that
when the grief is on us. But what I am asking myself is what one of these Mohometans or suchlike, heretics as we call them, would think of so much of the contradictory, sir, in so little space! The fact is, when it comes to a question of truth – and, “What
is
Truth?” said Pontius Pilate – it's as if each and every one of us had his own private compass. From birth, sir. The needle pointing not due north, mark you, never that, but a few hairsbreadths or more short of it. As life goes on, now this way it veers, now that; and the most we can do as it seems to me, is to see that it doesn't jam.'

A little breathless, a fresh apprehension transfixing his pale face, he paused a moment – his own needle havering rather more widely than usual – as if to let this reflection sink in. Mr Phelps's stranger had at last found voice again.

‘You forget,' he was saying, ‘that every syllable inscribed on these walls was put there by the living. None
by,
but only
of
the dead. Better, a thousand times, I agree, a single word of pity and forgiveness than – nothing at all. As for any attempt to return, a mere child could have little occasion for it. But these others – do
they,
do you suppose, never come back?' The last few hollow, challenging, half-stifled words had rung out oddly in the silence of the church – and far more exclamatorily than Mr Phelps's pleasant tenoring.

Back, back,
back,
had quietly fainted away the echo – as if indeed the masons of the ancient building when fitting stone to stone had childishly so adapted its acoustics as to ensure a device of which the Elizabethan dramatists and the old poets never wearied. A long pause followed. But the set black eyes in the expressionless face were still apparently expecting an answer. The verger thrust his hand into his cassock pocket, drew out an immense handkerchief, and replaced it. He temporized.

‘I agree, sir,' he smiled inquiringly, ‘that the dead cannot compose their own epitaphs! They might make queer, ay, and moving reading if they did. The riddle to
me
is what sort of question you could put to such a one as Lazarus as you'd most wish to have answered, as would
assure
the point. But taking
your
question merely as it is put, I would not deny the possibility of such occurrences. God forbid. One may become aware of what is unusual, yet not know. You would be astonished, sir, how even the hopping of a bird, or the skirring of a withered leaf in the draught over the stones, will sound out in these walls when I'm alone here. And it's seldom so late. Nor would I deny that now and again I have fancied that other occupants …' His glance fixed on his visitor, a temporary confusion had spread over his mind, and he failed to complete his sentence. ‘But, there; the human eye, sir, can be a great deceiver!'

‘That indeed is so,' the low insistent voice rejoined, ‘but there may be those who prefer
not
to be seen?'

The verger disliked being cornered, but he had sat under many preachers.

‘The points as I take it, sir, are these. First,' he laid forefinger on forefinger, ‘the number of those gone as compared with ourselves who are still waiting. Next, there being no warrant that what is seen – if seen at all – is wraiths of the departed, and not from elsewhere. The very waterspouts outside are said to be demonstrations of that belief. Third and last, another question: What purpose could call so small a sprinkling of them back – a few grains of sand out of the wilderness, unless, it may be, some festering grievance; or hunger for the living, sir; or duty left undone? In which case, mark you, which of any of us is safe?'

His visitor lifted a heavy head and looked at him. ‘But the living themselves,' he said, ‘have instincts, hidden impulses, are driven, beaten, incited on to what may at last appear the unevadable. Then why not
they?
What proof is there … only “duty”? They might, no more than the living, be aware of any purpose, yet be compelled to pursue it. And assuredly,' he hesitated, ‘if, at the end, there had been extreme trouble and – horror.'

The harsh screaming of the swifts coursing in the twilight beyond the leaded windows before they retired into the heavens to sleep out the night upon the wing, was for the moment the only comment on these remarks.

‘Well, sir,' said Mr Phelps uneasily at last, ‘I confess you press me close. But we are still no nearer what you had in mind, and I must be locking up. Perhaps you would care to take a glance at a few of the stones in the churchyard, if there is light enough left? But, first,' he added, with a little bow of old-fashioned courtesy, ‘and I trust I haven't been detaining you, sir; would you very kindly put your name in our Visitors' Book?'

The well-worn volume stood on a table by itself. He set it open at the current page, and himself dipped the pen into the inkpot. His visitor accepted the pen, paused, and, without again raising his heavy eyes, stooped over the book.

Mr Phelps politely retired, drew open the great door, and his visitor, rather reluctantly, it seemed, and still as far as space permitted keeping his distance, presently edged out and preceded him into the churchyard. From their haunts in the green hills came yet again the sweet and sorrowful cry of the peewits. The air in the porch, after the stony chill within, struck warm on the cheek, and mild as new milk, laden faintly with the earth-sweet fragrance of the hills and the remote freshness of the sea. The evening star in the tarnished gold of the west shone liquid and solitary. The verger feasted his eyes a moment on this quiet scene.

It was as if he had half-forgotten but had now retrieved it, after some dark passage of the mind. An unusual sense of fatigue, mind and body, had stolen over him, and he was relieved that his catechism was over. Few visitors volunteered many questions. If they did, they were questions expected, easy to answer – concerning dates, styles, uses, rituals and so forth. He regretted now, but only because he was unwontedly tired, that he had not a moment ago seized his opportunity to bid this stranger Godspeed. He was none the less astonished to discover on issuing from the porch that he had already vanished. Since he was nowhere within sight, he cannot but have made his way round the east end of the church. Had this, he mused a little forlornly, been merely with the notion of evading the customary tip?

He could recall many such hints of human nature – pious and prosperous pilgrims absent-mindedly debating if perhaps sixpence would be enough. To describe as sardonic any smile on so mild, horse-resembling and pensive a face as the verger's would be absurd. In his own small way he was an artist. Tips were not his sole incentive. Besides, his comfortable little balance in the Savings Bank needed no refreshing, not at this late day. He could, then, easily afford this faint grin of amusement. The horseleach hath two daughters, crying Give, give!'

No, it was the
gaucherie,
the unfriendliness that piqued the old man. And not merely that, something else, less easy to describe. Should he let him go, or be after him? This was not his first visit to the church – of that he was convinced. Then why pretend it? Had the stranger hoped to find himself alone there? For what purpose? Now that Mr Phelps was no longer listening to his own voice – perhaps his favourite occupation – hitherto unheeded impressions had begun to coagulate in his mind.

Clothes, manner, gait, speech – never in his long experience had any specimen of a human being embodied so many peculiarities. And there was yet another, pervading all the rest, but more elusive. The verger was a confirmed dreamer. His office, perhaps, and his daily surroundings accounted for a more active night-life. In this he was apt to have strange experiences – to find himself surveying vast shelves of sloping rocks, the sea, enormous buildings, their bells ringing, but not to summon humanity within their walls. At this very moment – wideawake though he had supposed himself to be – he might have issued from such a dream. The body sometimes seems as precarious as if it had but just been put on. And now, quite another suspicion had struck across his mind. Was this man – was he – quite
sane
? That taciturnity, the vigilance, the dark, fixed, lightless eye, the galvanic gestures, the evasiveness. No; to put it crudely, it would be as well to see him safely off the premises.

He hastened away, the hem of his iron-black cassock rustling over the grass as, in spite of his sixty-odd years, he stepped nimbly across the intervening mounds. And though he was half prepared to find no trace of his visitor, there was nothing unexpected in that visitor's appearance when, on skirting the outer walls of the Lady Chapel, he set eyes on him again. He was standing in engrossed contemplation of yet another tombstone, and evidently unaware that he was observed.

Solitary thus in this dusky green on the colder north side of the high old ecclesiastical mansion, and motionless as an image in a waxwork show, he looked, if not exactly more real, at least more conspicuously actual than anything around him. It was almost as though he had dressed up to simulate a certain part on the stage of life, and had overdone it. But perhaps Mr Phelps himself was now overdoing it a little! He was at any rate taking liberties, and had no intention of playing the spy. He coughed discreetly. But his visitor had either not heard this announcement, or had taken no notice of it. He had remained unmoved, peering, as if shortsightedly, at the defaced inscription at his feet, one which Mr Phelps could easily have repeated to him, word-perfect:

With no more than a slow unsteady movement of his head, he presently turned aside to the stone of Susanna Harbert, ‘Spinster of this Parish':

But if any bush had ever been planted there, it was gone. Instead, a delicate forest of summer grasses and a few wild flowers concealed the flattened mound.

‘You will pardon me breaking in, sir,' interposed the verger, but drawing no nearer, ‘there are very few inscriptions in this part of the churchyard; it is seldom visited. If you would give me even so much as a name to go by, it
might
be, sir, within my recollection. I have been here for many years. But the stone itself will almost certainly be on the south side.'

The stranger, looking, as Mr Phelps afterwards put it to himself, more like a copy of a human being than ever, continued for some moments merely to gaze at him; but not as if there were any activity of speculation behind his fixed eyes. ‘The name?' he repeated at last, as if he had drawn the word cold and dripping out of some unfathomable well of memory. ‘The name was Ambrose Manning … It was said he had made away with himself. It was said …' But nothing further came.