The Recognitions (Dalkey Archive edition) (76 page)

—Who has been away a very long time.

—The prodigal son.

—But he has no brothers.

—Yes, the poor boy.

—Poor Camilla.

—May was really a mother to him.

—Poor May.

—It was a severe trial for everyone.

—He wasn’t a strong boy.

—But then Camilla . . .

—Poor Camilla . . .

—Poor Camilla never was strong.

—Taken and left in foreign lands. Left to lie among Roman Catholics.

—I trust the Reverend Gilbert Sullivan is not a Roman Catholic priest? The name . . .

—The name . . .

—Me? Good God, no. I mean . . .

—The name suggests Irish extraction. Perhaps his forebears are
north
of Ireland?

—Perhaps we may ask Reverend Gilbert Sullivan to attend our Christmas supper tonight?

—Of course we may.

—Of course he may.

Hurraaaph! . . . —Look out, or by God I’ll split your skull. Shake the snow off before you come inside. Oh, good day, ladies. I didn’t see you, ladies. Don’t mind us, the dog and me. We’ve been outdoors, as you can see. We’ve been working, both very tired. Up the stairs, now! Up the stairs!

—Working, indeed.

—Indeed!

—Indeed!

—Why I could smell him across the room.

—He wanted to sing at the supper tonight. One of his songs from the saloon.

—It is a disgrace to have him our sexton.

—It is a disgrace to have him living right here under the roof of the parsonage.

—But Reverend Gwyon . . .

—Reverend Gwyon . . .

—Reverend Gwyon always smells so
fresh
.

—Even his charity is stretched too far.

—Indeed it is. But I’ve been thinking . . .

—I’ve been thinking, don’t misunderstand me, the very same thing. After all, the sexton is getting older.

—The Lord will deliver him.

—The Lord will release him.

—The Lord will have pity on the poor man.

—Why, Reverend Gwyon.

—Reverend Gwyon . . .

—We’ve come to ask you about our supper, the Christmas supper in the church tonight.

—Mrs. Dorman is going to sing. My sister is going to play the piano.

—And we’ve arranged for a visiting lecturer.

—A former Y.M.C.A. official. He is going to give a humorous talk.

—Nothing flighty. Nothing frivolous.

—Oh dear no, his talk will have some meat in it.

—I understand he has been in Africa. Not just traveling, wasting time. He was fully occupied with the Lord’s work.

—And your guest will come.

—Yes, he is coming. We shall see both of you there tonight.

—Reverend Gwyon might like to hear our poem.

—Reverend Gilbert might like to hear our poem.

—Both of them might like to hear the poem we’ve written for the Christmas supper tonight.

—The last two verses. The rest will have to be a surprise!

So as members of the Use-Me

So as members of the Use-Me

So as members of the Use-Me

We hope to conquer all

We hope to conquer all

We hope to conquer all

Offering the fellowship of Jesus

Offering the fellowship of Jesus

Offering the fellowship of Jesus

To those who need him most of all

To those who need him most of all

To those who need him most of all

For when we get to heaven

For when we get to heaven

For when we get to heaven

A reward there will be in store

A reward there will be in store

A reward there will be in store

For those whose daily living

For those whose daily living

For those whose daily living

Has been “Use-Me evermore.”

Has been “Use-Me evermore.”

Has been “Use-Me evermore.”

When they looked round, they were alone in the room. When they left, seeking their footprints, those were gone under the snow; and the prints of departure so quickly obliterated as to leave no witness that their visit had ever been made at all.

Though Reverend Gwyon, alone again in his study, found time to mutter, —There was a woman’s grade in the Mysteries. Porphyry mentions it . . . hummn . . . He turned up open books on his desk. —Hyena. That was it. Hyena.

His gaze fell upon the Bible. —Near Christmas! Christmas! he said almost viciously, as his eye followed lines on the open page. —Then the moon shall be confounded and the sun ashamed . . . His hand flung over the pages of Isaiah. —The sun shall be no more thy light by day; neither for brightness shall the moon give light unto thee: but the Lord shall be unto thee an everlasting light, and thy God thy glory. Thy sun shall no more go down; neither shall the moon withdraw itself: for the Lord shall be . . .

Suddenly Gwyon’s hand swept the Bible to the floor. He stood there quivering the length of his frame. Then he crumpled the newspaper clipping from
Osservatore Romano;
and after it, one by one, the books went to the floor, Tertullian’s
De Prœscriptione Hœreticorum
, Arnobius’
Adversus Nationes, De Errore Profanarum Religionum
of Firmicus Maternus . . . He did not stop until he
came to Saint John of the Cross, which he opened, removed the contents, and dropped the hollow
Dark Night of the Soul
after the rest of them. Then he straightened the gold bull figure to its feet on his desk, and stood with his hands on its horns looking out at the darkening sky.

—Cannot they see, it is exhausted? he whispered. Thunder sounded, beyond Mount Lamentation, and it sounded again.

Then he broke out,

—Herakles star-adorned, king of fire, ruler of the universe, thou sun, who with thy far-flung rays art the guardian of mortal life, with thy gleaming car revolving the wide circuit of thy course . . . Belus thou art named on the Euphrates, Ammon in Libya, Apis of the Nile art thou by birth, Arabian Kronos, Assyrian Zeus . . . but whether thou art Serapis, or the cloudless Zeus of Egypt, or Kronos, or Phaëthon, many-titled Mithra, Sun of Babylon, or in Greece Apollo of Delphi, or Wedlock, whom Love begat in the shadowy land of dreams . . . whether thou art known as Paieon, healer of pain, or Æther with its varied garb, or star-bespangled Night—for the starry robes of night illuminate the heaven—lend a propitious ear to my prayer. He paused, then went on more loudly,

—O king, greatest of the gods, thou sun, the lord of heaven and earth, god of gods, thy breath is potent, if it seem good to thee, forward me on my way to the supreme deity who begat thee and formed thee, for I am the man Gwyon.

—I invoke thee, O Zeus the Sun-god Mithra Serapis, invincible, giver of mead, Melikertes, lord of the mead, abraalbabachaebechi . . .

He stood, his hand on the bull’s horns, and the expression on his face of a man waiting for something which has happened long before.

Each time Janet’s eyes reached the foot of the page, she returned them to the top, to verse eight of chapter twenty-four of the Gospel according to Saint Matthew, —All these are the beginning of sorrows, and read the column down again. She stood and bore this repetition silent for some time, until at last, after hanging for a moment on verse twenty-four, her gaze shortened to her bare hands clasped before her, and under the care of her eyes they opened, sustaining the shock of her pupils in two dark scars on the palms. The palms were clean, but the rest of her hands as she turned them, from the nails down along the ridges and jointures of the fingers, were not. Suddenly her left hand closed, and she dug the firm flesh on the back of it with her forefinger.

Through the window the snow fell fast and heavily, the leisured
dignity of perfect flakes lost in bitter water-soaked streaks to earth, each moment passing in more frantic declivity until the artifice of its identity had entirely disappeared, and it was rain.

The sound of thunder drew her to the glass. She stood looking out. Then she raised her hands and tried to rub away the two blots on the windowpanes she had left earlier, but she could not, and her hands moved more and more slowly until they stopped, and left her staring down at the carriage barn, barely discernible below. As she looked, a hand came back to her face and commenced moving over it, not in caress along its surface, nor excitedly, but deliberately resting on her features in one position after another; until that hand stopped, the thumb along the ridge of her nose and the palm over her mouth, and she drew her left hand back to grasp the empty folds at her breast.

A minute later and she’d pulled the frame of type from the flatbed hand press in the corner, unlocked it and spilled the letters all over the floor, banged the Bible closed, hesitated a moment over it and then pushed it off into the pile of metal spellingless letters and come out her door. Her steps creaked in the hallway, but the Town Carpenter’s voice came on from behind his door as she passed, evenly absorbed in reading aloud to the dog, —“While we go now to bring the Wanderer up, it should not be forgotten that the house, completely furnished, is awaiting him, and he has only to knock at the door, enter, and be at home” . . . (They were in volume I of Lew Wallace’s
The Prince of India, or, Why Constantinople Fell
.)

At the other end of the hall Janet reached the empty sewing room and went straight in among the roses upside-down, the green-capped pink-faced dogs faded on the west wall behind the chaise longue where she suddenly saw him sitting rigidly erect, his drawn fist plunged into his neck so that his arm stood out like a wing, and his brows noticeable for being contracted so forcefully that they seemed to have seized the face and held it in this stifling grasp. Apparently he was asleep. Janet bent close, studying the thin face, the slightly crooked nose, the rough chin and bare throat. The left hand lay in his lap as rigid as the rest of him, the fingers doubled in upon themselves and the veins standing out around the clotted blood, where Janet reached and prodded the torn place with her forefinger. Not a muscle moved in his face, nor anywhere else about him; and Janet turned and ran out, down the hall, and the stairs, and out of the house, leaving him there in the darkening room, where he slept in this same tense numb position until the roses had faded to stripes, and the walls themselves had lost their boundaries.

He waked staring straight ahead to that full consciousness which only sheer horror attains: his blood stopped. For a prolonged instant everything stopped and the blood, without motion, was cast as a solid of unbearable weight and impenetrable density.

—
No one knows who I am
.

It was a full minute before he moved; and when he did he burst to his feet, as though to shatter this irregular surface of space enclosed by merciless solids. —No one in this house knows me, he brought out; but his mouth was so dry that the words came to pieces before he got them out where his own ear could resolve them, and he stood sucking the inside of his mouth in upon itself, plying the barren, abruptly unfamiliar hollow with his insensible tongue until its features dissolved, and he could repeat, —None of them knows who I am.

But even before these words were out, something else had assailed him. He began looking wildly round the room, where shapes refused to identify themselves, and endured only in terms of the others, each a presence made possible only by what everything else was not, each suffering the space it filled to bear it only as a part of a whole which, with a part standing forth to identify itself, would perish.

—Who was here? he whispered. Already the inside of his mouth was afloat with saliva, so that he swallowed, raised the pool on his tongue and exhausted its surface on the roof of his mouth and swallowed again. —She was here, he said, gripping his chin in his hand.

Starting again, the blood on its course had set every interior surface of his body stingingly aflame with the thrill of its own existence; and he stamped his feet, and shook his hands in the air. —This . . . this . . . he whispered hoarsely. Then he grabbed one hand with the other and gripped it tight as he could, until the balance of that was out and he exchanged them, gripping the second with the first, and finally got out of the room with his hands interlocked before him, the fingertips of each one straining in upon the bones of the other.

There had been a good deal of noise in this last hour or so, books thrown and dropped, the type-metal words smashed into their meaningless components, doors banging, and all these fragments were recapitulated now in the thunder, as he broke out into the hall and down the stairs repeating, —Don’t you know me? Don’t you know who I am? You know who I am. Don’t you know who I am? . . . , words which broke the surface, and followed one another as discordant articulations of his heavy breathing.

Reverend Gwyon had gone out a minute before, hatless, across the bare boards of the porch so heavily that they seemed not yet to have recovered silence, when he reached them and made out Gwyon’s great figure striding down the slope toward the carriage barn. He followed precipitously, sliding and slipping on the soaked pores of the snow as though it were the headlong incline of twenty-five years past; and before he’d reached the bottom he did fall, headlong, so that the crust of the snow gashed his cheekbone and, for the moment he lay there, smothered his rehearsal, —You know who I am. Don’t you know who I am? Don’t you know me? . . .

The rain was coming down the more heavily for the saturated surface which awaited it; and he was drenched when he gained his feet. Just then there was a crash of thunder.

Gwyon had already made the carriage barn and thrown the door open. There was electricity there, and Gwyon stood just inside, his great hand on the switch and his thumb jamming it back and forth, back and forth, with no consequence but a
snap
. —Damnation, Gwyon muttered; and then, aware of someone behind him, said, —The bull. I came down to make sure of the bull . . . But Gwyon had hardly got the words out of his mouth before his upraised arm was grasped in the dark so heavily that it almost pulled him over; and the lightning followed so fast on the words that followed, that both were gone, and the transformation was complete, when Gwyon heard,