Short Stories 1895-1926 (34 page)

‘Ah!' ejaculated the verger in unfeigned dismay … ‘And the date, sir, perhaps?'

‘1882.'

‘Well, in that case,' was the hesitant reply, ‘we
are
on the right side.' The syllables he had heard, though they had been uttered in so low and lifeless a voice, were now being called, whispered, echoed in every chamber of the old man's memory. Where, where, had he seen, heard, that name before? ‘You see,' he was explaining, ‘at that time, and perhaps even now, his remains would not so much as have entered the church; not
felo de se,
sir. The whole service, a special one, would be at the grave's side. There was one, I recollect, many years ago, the rain pouring in torrents, and a heavy sea running. But,' he added, as if in apology, ‘not
fifty
years ago!'

By this time he was thoroughly wearied of his task. He had been ill-advised to linger so long – this craving for
any
listener. His one desire was to get back to his cottage and to the cold supper that was awaiting him. Nevertheless he was still reluctant to leave such a visitor at large and to his own devices in the precincts of the church. Only two grave-stones, however, now remained between him and freedom; he would at any rate wait them out. They leaned slightly askew under a much-lopped but still hardy old yew tree, one of them encrusted from summit to base with a thin, pale mantling of grey and green.

Mr Phelps was observing his visitor with some anxiety. He looked like a man upon the verge of a trance, a cataleptic, a somnambulist. ‘I have never
myself,
' he told him, ‘been aware of any “danger” here. And, as you yourself pointed out but a few minutes since, though I confess the thought had never occurred to me, not in that shape, sir – it is the
living
who are speaking to us from these stones – not the dead. Or at least, those who were living at that time. And last,' he went on, since no response had been vouchsafed to him, ‘there's this.' He emphasized the word, in a tone of finality, pointing with his finger. ‘But it's “N. F.” – as you see, sir; and so the initials don't suit with the names you mentioned. A very tragic case, too – for more than one; as I remember hearing when a boy:

The stranger (having as it appeared digested these words also), with a peculiar motion of the head, again glanced gently around him, then lifted his colourless face towards the dimly gilded hands of the clock in the church tower. Whereupon, the bells within, as if in response to a silent invitation, chimed out the hour – that of compline. Perplexed, even vexed at this taciturnity and poor fellowship, Mr Phelps remarked a little coldly that ‘this' was ‘the nearest way out'. But again to unlistening ears, for his visitor with no more than a last furtive and empty yet concentrated glance at him, had turned aside, and was already making his way under the dark trees towards a stile which gave egress to a plank bridge over a brook, and so to the hills beyond.

Mr Phelps watched him until he had vanished – not merely from sight, but as if the dense motionless foliage had swallowed him up. There was not a sigh of wind to stir the flowering grasses. The waters of the brook in their narrow ravine were singing a quiet tune; a corncrake was calling in the meadows beyond the low stone wall. All was as it had ever been. The verger turned about at length and paced slowly back to the south porch. Should he or should he not re-enter the church? Should he postpone what he had in mind until the morning? He was aware of a distaste to linger any more. And yet …

He adjusted the key, stepped across the threshold into the darkened building, paused, drew to the heavy door behind him, paused again, then deliberately locked it. Having lit a stub of candle, which in its brass dish-shaped holder he took from a cupboard in the vestry, he unlocked a small iron safe and laid the burial book on the table. The gilt of its title –
Register
of Burials, Church of St Edmund; Langridge –
had nearly faded from out of its covers. Having adjusted his eyeglasses on the extremity of his long stooping nose, he stood there in the stony silence, the radiance of the candle striking up into his long face, etching in with black shadow the lines upon it, chiefly of kindliness, long service and curiosity. Then with a wetted finger he slowly turned over the leaves until he came to January 1, 1882.

After that he drew his finger steadily down each of the following few pages in turn until he came to November 4. Memory had not deluded him; at least not wholly.
‘November 4. Ambrose Manning,'
he read. Nothing more than that, and even this had proved to be erroneous. A thin line in red ink had been drawn through both names, and in another hand there followed a scrawled – ‘Nothing known. Not buried here.'

Mr Phelps – his eyebrows mounted high on his conical bare forehead – continued for a few moments to scrutinize the entry: he could recall no other example of the kind. How many years had it been since he had chanced on it? ‘H'm, not buried here,' he muttered to himself. ‘Strange … Why not, then … ? And where?'

‘Where?' an excessively faint voice from nowhere had muttered as if in reply. Scrupulous servant of habit that he was, though a little jarred, he put back the book into the iron chest, locked it, and, cupping the lighted candle with his bony fingers, made his way out of the vestry. The Visitors' Book lay open, as he had left it, on its narrow table, the pen beside it, now dry. Mr Phelps glanced down at the scribbled page. The latest entry on it was the signature of Helen Jane Wilkinson (Mrs) of 1a Portsea Terrace, High Wycombe. His last visitor then, taking advantage of his own courtesy, had merely pretended to write his name. There was no reason to suppose that he could have forgotten it!

The verger's grey eyes wandered vacantly over the scribbled page. He felt a trifle cold, empty, anxious and oppressed. And as he stood pondering, momentarily severed and estranged as it seemed for the first time in all these years from the beloved, familiar building in his charge, a faint sound arrested his attention. A sound that was no more than a whisper, as of a minute clot of plaster falling from the roof onto the flags beneath. He jerked his head sidelong towards the door that he had but a few minutes before locked behind him.

He held his breath to listen again; then, puffing out his candle-end, crept to the cranny of the door, remaining there as motionless for a while as a cat at a mouse's hole. Slowly and stealthily at length he pushed the key into the lock, turned it in the oiled wards, and drew open the door. But no. The sound he had heard can have been no more than a mere fancy. The ancient porch stood empty; the southern sky now framed beyond it was studded with a few brightening stars. He was unutterably relieved; and yet not wholly so. A hitherto unheeded misgiving was gnawing in his mind. Poor creature – he was debating within himself; this man had come to him hungry, famished, it seemed, for help, and had gone away unsatisfied. He realized now that he had swallowed an extreme distaste for his visitor only in order to indulge his own love of talking. Yet, even at the worst there had been nothing of active evil in that mask of a human face, only an animal-like patience and obstinacy, clay-cold, impassive. No signal of hope either, or of comradeship; only the sediment of an unspeakable obsession. He might have been searching for years. But why?

Nor had it occurred to the verger, he ruminated mutely, to offer his belated visitor even so much as a glass of cold water. A few words of comfort, of reassurance –
they
would not necessarily have been cold. And – least commendable perhaps of all motives – you never can tell when you may not be needing them yourself.

Winter

Winter
1

Any event in this world – any human being for that matter – that seems to wear even the faintest cast or warp of strangeness, is apt to leave a disproportionately sharp impression on one's senses. So at least it appears to me. The experience lives on secretly in the memory, and you can never tell what trivial reminder may not at some pregnant moment bring it back – bring it back as fresh and living and green as ever. That, at any rate, is my experience.

Life's mere ordinary day-by-day – its thoughts, talk, doings – wither and die away out of the mind like leaves from a tree. Year after year a similar crop recurs: and that goes too. It is mere debris; it perishes. But these other anomalies survive, even through the cold of age – forsaken nests, everlasting clumps of mistletoe.

Not that they either are necessarily of any use. For all we know they may be no less alien and parasitic than those flat and spotted fungi that rise in a night on time-soiled birch trees. But such is their power to haunt us. Why else, indeed, should the recollection of that few moments' confrontation with one who, I suppose, must have been some sort of a ‘fellow-creature' remain so sharp and vivid?

There was nothing much unusual in the circumstances. I must have so met, faced, passed by thousands of human beings: many of them in almost as unfrequented places. Without effort I can recall not one. But this one! At the first unexpected premonitory gloom of winter; at sight of any desolate stretch of snow; at sound at dusk of the pebble-like tattling of a robin; at call, too, of a certain kind of dream I have – any such reminder instantly catches me up, transports me back. The old peculiar disquietude possesses me. I am once more an unhappy refugee. It is a distasteful experience.

But such things are difficult to describe – to share. Date, year are, at any rate, of no account; if only for the reason that what impresses us most in life is independent of time. One can in memory indeed live over again events in one's life even twenty years or more gone by, with the same fever of shame, anxiety, unrest. Mere time is nothing.

Nor is now the actual motive of my journey of any consequence. At the moment I was in no particular trouble. No burden lay on my mind – nothing, I mean, heavier than that of being the kind of self one is – a fret common enough in these late days. And though my immediate surroundings were unfamiliar, they were not unusual or unwelcome, since, like others who would not profess to be morbid, I can never pass unvisited either a church of any age or its yard.

Even if I have but a few minutes to spare I cannot resist hastening in to ponder awhile on its old glass and brasses, its stones, shrines, and monuments. Sir Tompkins This, Lord Mount Everest That – one reads with a curious amusement the ingenuous bygones of their blood and state. I have sometimes laughed out. And queer the echo sounds in a barrel roof. And perhaps an old skimpy verger looks at you, round a pillar. Like a bat.

In sober fact this human pomposity of ours shows a little more amiably against any protracted background of time – even a mere two centuries of it. There is an almost saturnine vanity in the sepulchral – ‘scutcheons, pedigrees, polished alabaster cherubim and what not. You see it there – like a scarcely legible scribbling on the wall. – well, on this occasion it was not any such sacred interior I was exploring, but a mere half-acre of gravestones huddling under their tower, in the bare glare of a winter's day.

It was an afternoon in January. For hours I had been trudging against a bitter winter wind awhirl with snow. Fatigue had set in – that leaden fatigue when the body seems to have shrunken; while yet the bones keep up a kind of galvanic action like the limbs of a machine. Thought itself – that capricious deposit – had ceased for the time being. I was like the half-dried mummy of a man, pressing on with bent head along an all but obliterated track.

Then, as if at a signal, I looked up; to find that the snow had ceased to fall: that only a few last, and as if forgotten, flakes were still floating earthwards to their rest in the pallid light of the declining sun.

With this breaking of the clouds a profounder silence had fallen upon the dome-shaped summit of the hill on which I stood. And at its point of vantage I came to a standstill awhile, surveying beneath me under the blueing vacancy of the sky, amidst the white-sheeted fields, a squat church tower, its gargoyles stooping open-mouthed – scarcely less open-mouthed than the frosted bells within. The low mounded wall that encircled the place was but just perceptible, humped with its snow. Its yews stood like gigantic umbrellas clotted with swansdown; its cypresses like torches, fringed, crested, and tufted with ash.

No sound broke the frozen hush as I entered the lych-gate; not a figure of man or beast moved across that far-stretching savanna of new-fallen snow. You could have detected the passage of a fly. Dazzling light and gemclear coloured shadow played in hollow and ripple. I was treading a virgin wilderness, but one long since settled and densely colonized.

In surroundings like these – in any vast vacant quiet – the senses play uncommonly queer tricks with their possessor. The very air, cold and ethereal and soon to be darkened, seemed to be astir with sounds and shapes on the edge of complete revelation. Such are our fancies. A curious insecure felicity took possession of me. Yet on the face of it the welcome of a winter churchyard is cold enough; and the fare scanty!

The graves were old: many of them recorded only with what nefarious pertinacity time labours and the rain gnaws. Others befrosted growths had now patterned over, and their tale was done. But for the rest – some had texts: ‘I am a Worm, and no Man'; ‘In Rama was there a Voice heard: Lamentation and Weeping'; ‘He knoweth the Way that I take'. And a few still bore their bits of doggerel:

That struck me as a naïve appeal to a visitor not as yet in search of a roof ‘for when the slow dark hours begin', and almost blinded for the time being by the dazzle of the sunlight striking down on these abodes around him!

I smiled to myself and went on. Dusk, as a matter of fact, is
my
mind's natural illumination. How many of us, I wonder, ‘think' in anything worthy of being called a noonday of consciousness? Not many: it's all in a mirk, without arrangement or prescience. And as for dreaming – well, here were sleepers enough. I loafed on – cold and vacant.

A few paces further I came to a stand again, before a large oval stone, encircled with a blunt loop of marble myrtle leaves embellishing the words:

This stone was clasped by two grotesque marble hands, as if he who held it knelt even now behind it in hiding. Facing north, its lower surface was thickly swathed with snow. I scraped it off with my hands:

So, so: the cold alone was nipping raw, and I confess its neighbour's philosophy pleased me better: i.e., it's better to be anything animate than a dead lion; even though that lion be a Corporal Pym:

Or even if the anything animate be nothing better than a Logge:

Canting pens had had small opportunity in this hillside acre: and the gentry of the surrounding parts, like those of most parts, had preferred to lie inside under cover – where no doubt Mr Jacob Todd had prepared for many of them a far faster and less starry lodging:

Mr Todd's successor, it seemed, had entrusted him with a little protégée, who for a few years – not quite nine – had been known as Alice Cass:

For youthful company she had another Alice. A much smaller parcel of bones this – though in sheer date upwards of eighty years her senior:

Tudor roses had been carved around the edge of her stone – vigorously and delicately too, for a rustic mason. Every petal held its frozen store. I wandered on, restlessly enough, now that my journey was almost at an end, stooping to read at random; here an old broken wooden cross leaning crookedly over its one legible word ‘Beloved'; here the great, flat, seventeenth-century vault of Abraham Devoyage, ‘who was of France, and now, please God, is of Paradise'; and not far distant from him some Spanish exile, though what had brought such a wayfarer to these outlandish parts, heaven alone could tell:

And then Ann Poverty's stone a pace or two beyond him:

A meagre memorial, and a rather shrill appeal somehow in that vacancy. Indeed I must confess that this snowy waste, these magpie stones, the zebra-like effect of the thin snow-stripings on the dark tower beneath a leaden winter sky suggested an influence curiously pagan in effect. Church sentiments were far more alien in this scene of nature than beneath a roof. And after all, Nature herself instils into us mortals, I suppose, little but endurance, patience, resignation; despair – or fear. That she can be entrancing proves nothing.

On the contrary, the rarer kinds of natural loveliness – enormous forests of flowering chestnuts, their league-long broken chasms sonorous with cataracts and foaming with wild flowers; precipitous green steeps – quartz, samphire, cormorant – plunging a thousand fathoms into dark gulfs of emerald ocean – such memories hint far rather at the inhuman divinities. This place, too, was scarcely one that happy souls would choose to haunt. And yet, here was I … in a Christian burial ground.