Short Stories 1895-1926 (35 page)

But then, of course, one's condition of spirit and body must be taken into account. I was exhausted, and my mind like a vacant house with the door open – so vacant by now that I found I had read over and over the first two or three lines of Asrafel (or was it Israfel?) Holt's blackened inscription without understanding a single word; and then, suddenly, two dark eyes in a long cadaverous face pierced out at me as if from the very fabric of his stone:

‘… Departed this life May the First 1700'. Two long centuries dead, seraphic Israfel! Was time nothing to him either?

‘Now withered is the Garland on the …' the fragment of old rhyme chased its tail awhile in the back of my mind, and then was gone.

And I must be going. Winter twilight is brief. Frost was already glittering along the crisping surface of the snow. A crescent moon showed silvery in the sun's last red. I made her a distant obeisance. But the rather dismal sound of the money I rattled in my pocket served only to scare the day's last robin off.
She –
she paid me no heed.

Here was the same old unanswerable question confronting the traveller. ‘I have no Tongue,' cried one from his corner, ‘and Ye no Ears.' And this, even though nearby lay Isaac Meek, who in certain features seems easily to have made up for these deficiencies:

I turned to go – wearied a little even of the unwearying. Epitaphs in any case are only ‘marginal' reading. There is rarely anything unusual or original in such sentiments as theirs. Up to that moment (apart from the increasing cold) this episode – this experience – had been merely that of a visitor ordinarily curious, vulgarly intrusive, perhaps, and one accustomed to potter about among the antiquated and forgotten.

No: what followed came without premonition or warning. I had been stooping, for the last time, my body now dwarfed by the proximity of the dark stone tower. I had been reading all that there was to be read about yet another forgotten stranger; and so rapidly had the now north-east wind curdled the air that I had been compelled to scrape off the rime from the lettering with numb fingertips. I had stooped (I say) to read:

And with its last word a peculiar heat coursed through my body. Consciousness seemed suddenly to concentrate itself (like the tentacles of an anemone closing over a morsel of strange food), and I realized that I was no longer alone. But – and of this I am certain – there was no symptom of positive
fear
in the experience. Intense awareness, a peculiar physical, ominous absorption, possibly foreboding; but not actual fear.

I say this because what impressed me most in the figure that I now saw standing amid that sheet of whiteness – three or four grave-mounds distant on these sparse northern skirts of the churchyard – what struck me instantly was the conviction that to him I myself was truly such an object. Not exactly of fear; but of unconcealed horror. It is not, perhaps, a pleasing thing to have to record. My appearance there – dark clothes, dark hair, wearied eyes, ageing face, a skin maybe somewhat cadaverous at that moment with fasting and the cold – all this (just what my body and self looked like, I mean) cannot have been much more repellent than that of scores and scores of men of my class and means and kind.

I was merely, that is, like one of the ‘Elder Ladies or Children' who were bidden (by Mr Nash's Rules of the Pump Room in Bath in 1709) be contented ‘with a second bench … as being past, or not come to, Perfection'.

None the less, there was no doubt of it. The fixed open gaze answering mine suggested that of a child confronted with a fascinating but repulsive reptile. Yet so strangely and arrestingly beautiful was that face, beautiful with the strangeness I mean of the dreamlike, with its almost colourless eyes and honey-coloured skin, that unless the experience of it had been thus sharply impressed, no human being could have noticed the emotion depicted upon its features.

There was not the faintest faltering in the steady eyes – fixed, too, as if this crystal graveyard air were a dense medium for a sight unused to it. And so intent on them was I myself that, though I noticed the slight trembling of the hand that held what (on reflection) appeared to resemble the forked twig which ‘diviners' of water use in their mysteries, I can give no account of this stranger's dress except that it was richly yet dimly coloured.

As I say, my own dark shape was now standing under the frowning stonework of the tower. With an effort one of its gargoyles could have spilt heaven's dews upon my head, had not those dews been frozen. And the voice that fell on my ear – as if from within rather than from without – echoed cold and solemnly against its parti-coloured stone:

‘Which is the way?'

Realizing more sharply with every tardy moment that this being, in human likeness, was not of my kind, nor of my reality; standing there in the cold and snow, winter nightfall now beginning to lour above the sterile landscape; I could merely shake a shivering head.

‘Which is yours?' sang the tranquil and high yet gentle voice.

‘There!' I cried, pointing with my finger to the pent-roofed gate which led out on to the human road. The astonishment and dread in the strange face seemed to deepen as I looked.

‘But I would gladly …' I began, turning an instant towards the gloomy snow clouds that were again gathering in the north – ‘I would gladly …' But the sentence remained unfinished, for when I once more brought my eyes back to this confronter, he was gone.

I agree I was very tired; and never have I seen a more sepulchral twilight than that which now overspread this desolate descent of hill. Yet, strange though it may appear, I knew then and know now that this confrontation was no illusion of the senses. There are hours in life, I suppose, when we are weaker than we know; when a kind of stagnancy spreads over the mind and heart that is merely a masking of what is gathering beneath the surface. Whether or not, as I stood looking back for an instant before pushing on through the old weathered lych-gate, an emotion of intense remorse, misery, terror – I know not – swept over me. My eyes seemed to lose for that moment their power to see aright. The whole scene was distorted, awry.

Mr Kempe

Mr Kempe
1

It was a mild, clammy evening; and the swing-door of the tap-room stood wide open. The brass oil-lamp suspended from the rafter had not yet been lit; a small misty drizzle was drifting between the lime-washed walls and the over-arching trees on the further side of the lane; and from my stool at the counter I could commune, as often as I felt inclined, with the wild white eye of the Blue Boar which fleered in at the window from the hanging sign.

Autumnal scents, failing day, rain so gentle and persistent – such phenomena as these have a slightly soporific effect on the human consciousness. It is as though its busy foreground first becomes blurred, then blotted out; and then – the slow steady sweep of the panorama of dream that never ceases its strange motioning. The experience is brief, I agree. The footlights, headlights, skylights brighten again: the panorama retires!

Excluding the landlady, who occasionally waddled in from her dusky retreat behind the bar, there were only three of us in the tap-room – three chance customers now met together for the first time: myself; a smallish man with an unusually high crown to his head, and something engagingly monkey-like in his face; and a barrel-shaped person who sat humped up on a stool between us in an old shooting-jacket and leather leggings, his small eyes set close together on either side a red nose.

I had been the last to put in an appearance, but had not, it seemed, damped anything in the nature of a conversation. Such weather does not conduce to it. But three may be some sort of company where two is none; and what, at last, set us more or less at our ease was an ‘automatic machine' that stood in the corner of the tap-room under a coloured lithograph of Shotover, the winner of the Derby in 1882. It was a machine of an unusual kind since it gave its patronizers nothing tangible for their penny – not even their ladylove on a slip of cardboard, or a clinging jet of perfume.

It reminds me now of the old Miracle Plays or Moralities. Behind its glass it showed a sort of grotto, like a whited sepulchre, with two compartments, over which descended the tresses of a weeping willow. You slipped a penny into the slot, and presently a hump-backed mommet in a rusty-black cowl jerked into view from the cell on the left. He stood there a moment in the midst – fixedly looking at you: then decamped into the gloom again.

But this was if your luck was out – or so I assumed. If it was in, then a nymph attired in skirts of pink muslin wheeled out of the flowery bower on the eastern side; and danced a brief but impassioned
pas seul
.

My three pennies had brought me one fandango from the latter and two prolonged scrutinies from the former – a proportion decided on, no doubt, by the worldly-wise manufacturer of the machine. But this was not all. In intention at least he must have been a practical optimist. For if the
nymph
responded to your penny, you were invited to slip yet another coin into another slot – but before you could count ten. This galvanized the young lady into a giddy pursuit of the numbskull in the black hood – a pursuit, however, which ended merely in the retirement of them both behind the scenes.

The man in leggings had watched my experiments with eyes almost as motionless as plums in a pudding. It was my third penny that had wooed out the nymph. But the ‘grandfather's clock' in the corner had ticked loudly at least five times before I managed to insert a fourth. It was a moment of rapt – of an aching – excitement. What teeming passion showed itself in that wild horseplay behind the glass! And then, alas, the machinery ceased to whirr; the clock ticked on; the faint rustle of the drifting rain sounded once more at the open door; I returned to my stool; and the landlady retired into her den.

‘Bang goes fourpence,' I remarked a little sheepishly. ‘Still, mine was about the right average, I suppose.'

The man in the leather leggings – as if the problem were not for
his
solution – at once turned his little eyes towards our companion in the corner, whose face was still wreathed with the friendliest of grimaces at my efforts.

‘Well, now,' he took me up, ‘I'm not so sure. In my view, that minx there sidles out too often. Most young men and more old ones would be content with once in six. I would myself. It's our credulity. We live on hopes, however long they may be deferred. We
live,
as you might say; but how many of us learn? How many of us want to make sure?' He paused for an answer: his small eyes fixed in his face. ‘Not one in a million,' he decided.

I stole another look into the narrow darkness of the Young Lady's Bower.

‘Oh,' he interrupted, ‘I wasn't thinking merely of the “eternal feminine”, as they call it. That's only one of the problems; though even an answer to that might be interesting. There's Free Will, for example; there's Moral Responsibility; and such little riddles as where we all come from and where we are going to. Why, we don't even know what we are – in ourselves, I mean. And how many of us have tried to find out?'

The man in leggings withdrew his stare and groped out a hand towards his pint-pot. ‘Have you?' he enquired.

The dark-eyed, wizened face lit up once more with its curiously engaging smile. ‘Well, you see, I was once a schoolmaster, and from an official point of view, I suppose, it is part of the job. To find answers, I mean. But, as you'll agree, we temporize; we compromise. On the other hand, I once met quite by chance, as we call it, a man who had spent I should guess a good many years on that last problem. All by himself, too. You might almost describe it as a kind of pilgrimage – though I'm not anxious to repeat it. It was my turn for a lesson.'

‘And what was
his
solution?' I enquired.

‘Have you ever been to Porlock – the Weir?' the little man enquired.

I shook my head.

‘I mention Porlock,' he went on, ‘because if you had ever been there, the place I'm thinking of might perhaps call it to mind. Though mine was on a different scale – a decidedly different scale. I doubt, for example, if it will ever become one of those genial spots frequented by week-end tourists and
chars-a-banc.
In the days I'm speaking of – twenty years or more ago – there wasn't even the rudiments of an inn in the place. Only a beershop about half the size of this tap-room, with a population to match – just a huddle of fishermen's cottages tucked in under the cliff.

‘I was walking at the time, covering unfamiliar ground, and had managed to misread my map. My aim had been to strike into a cliff-path that runs more or less parallel with the coast; but I had taken the wrong turn at the cross-roads. Once astray, it seemed better manners to keep on. How can you tell what chance may have secreted in her sleeve, even when you don't put pennies in slots?

‘I persuaded an old lady to give me tea at one of the cottages, and asked my way. Visitors were rare events, it seemed. At first she advised me to turn back; I couldn't do better than that. But after further questioning, she told me at last of a lower cliff track or path, some miles apparently this side of the one I had in view. She marked it out for me with her rheumaticky old forefinger on the table-cloth. Follow this path far enough, I gathered, it would lead me into my right road at last.

‘Not that she suggested my making the attempt. By no means. It was a matter of seven miles or more. And neither the natives of the village nor even chance visitors, it seemed, were tempted to make much use of this particular route.'

‘Why not?' enquired the man in leggings, and immediately coughed, as if he had thought better of it.

‘That's what I am coming to,' replied the schoolmaster – as though he had been lying in wait for the question. ‘You see my old lady had volunteered her last piece of information with a queerish look in her eyes – like some shy animal slipping into cover. She was telling me the truth, but not, I fancied, the whole truth.

‘Naturally I asked what was wrong with the path; and was there anything of interest on the way or at the end of it – worth such a journey? Once more she took a long slow look at me, as if my catechism were rather more pressing than the occasion warranted. There
was
a something marked on the map, she had been given to understand – “just an old, ancient building, like”.

‘Sure enough there was: though unfortunately long wear of the one I carried had not only left indecipherable more than an Old English letter or two of any record of it, but had rubbed off a square half-mile or so of the country round about it.

‘It was proving a little irksome to draw Truth out of her well, and when innocently enough I asked if there was any one in charge of the place, the old lady was obviously disconcerted. She didn't seem to think it needed being taken charge of; though she confessed at last that a house “not nearly so old, sir, you will understand”, stood nearby, in which lived a gentleman of the name of Kempe.

‘It was easier sailing now that we had come to Mr Kempe. The land, it appeared, including the foreshore – but apart from the chapel – had been in his family since the beginning of time. Mr Kempe himself had formerly been in the church – Conformist or otherwise – and had been something of a traveller, but had returned home with an invalid wife many years before.

‘Mrs Kempe was dead now; and there had been no children, “none, at least, as you would say grew up to what might be called living”. And Mr Kempe himself had not only been ailing for some little time, but might, for all my informant knew apparently, be dead himself. Nevertheless, there was still a secretive look in the faded eyes – almost as if she believed Mr Kempe had discovered little methods of his own against the onsets of mortality! Anyhow, she couldn't tell; nobody ever went that way now, so far as she was aware. There was the new road up above. What's more, tidings of Mr Kempe's end, I gathered, however solitary, would not exactly put the village into mourning.

‘It was already latish afternoon; and in that windless summer weather walking had been a rather arduous form of amusement. I was tired. A snowy low-pitched upper-room overlooking the sea was at my disposal if I wanted it for a night or two. And yet, even while I was following this good soul up her narrow staircase, I had already decided to push on in the direction of Mr Kempe. If need be, I would come back that evening. Country people are apt to be discreet with strangers – however open in appearance. Those shrewd old eyes – when at least they showed themselves – had hinted that even with an inch to the mile a map-maker cannot exhaust a countryside. The contours, I had noticed, were unusual. Besides, Mr Kempe was not less likely to be interesting company because he was a recluse!

‘I put down five shillings on account for my room, and the kindly old creature laid them aside in an ornament on her mantelpiece. There they lie still. for all I know. I have never reclaimed them.'

The man in leggings once more turned his large, shapeless face towards the schoolmaster, but this time he made no audible comment.

‘And did you find Mr Kempe?' I enquired.

The schoolmaster smiled, looking more like a philanthropic monkey than ever. ‘I set out at once: watched by the old lady from her porch, until, with a wave of my hand for adieu, I turned out of the village street, and she was hidden from sight. There was no mistaking the path – even though it led off over a stile into a patch of stinging-nettles, and then past a boggy goose-pond.

‘After a few hundred yards it began to dip towards the shore, keeping more or less level with the sea for a mile or so until it entered a narrow and sandy cove – the refuge even in summer of all sorts of flotsam and searubbish; and a positive maelstrom, I should imagine, when the winter gales sweep in. Towards the neck of this cove the wheel-marks in the thin turf faded out, and the path meandered on for a while beside a brook and under some fine ash trees, then turned abruptly to the right, and almost due north. The bleached bows of a tarred derelict boat set up on end and full of stones –
The Orion –
was my last touch with civilization.

‘It was a quiet evening; the leaves and grasses shone green and motionless, the flowers standing erect on their stalks under the blue sky, as if carved out of wax. The air was uncommonly sweet, with its tang of the sea. Taking things easy like this, it was well worth while to be alive. I sat down and rested, chewing a grass-stalk and watching the friendly lapping sea. Then up and on.

‘After about an hour's steady walking, the path began once more to ascend. It had by now led shorewards again, though I was softly plodding on out of sight and all but out of sound of the tide. Dense neglected woods rose on either side of me, and though wherever the sun could pierce in there were coverts in plenty, hardly a cry of insect or bird stirred the air. To all intents I might have been exploring virgin country. Now and again indeed the fallen bole of a tree or matted clumps of bramble, briony, and traveller's joy compelled me to make a widish detour. But I was still steadily ascending, and the view tended at length to become more and more open; with here and there a patch of bright green turf and a few scrub bushes of juniper or sprouting tamarisk.