Unknown (13 page)

A shiver of excitement ran through the worn-out frame of John Crow,

“I was done in, dead beat, at . . . the end * .. of my ... of my tether,” gasped John when he found himself safely inside the little car. And then, as they moved on very slowly, what must this impulsive man do but confess to this stranger how he had just prayed in the middle of the road to the spirit of his mother and how he too was bound for Glastonbury. “There is another explanation, my good friend,” said the motorist gravely. “My mind was at the moment absorbed in thoughts of Glastonbury—yours was also—what more natural than that I should ask you to let me take you there?”

John now became aware that although a few faint stars were visible the departing day was still dominant. “It will not be dark for half an hour yet,” he thought. “I shall see Stonehenge before night.” They were now reaching a little upward slope of the road. The wide Plain stretched around them, cold and mute, and it was as if the daylight had ceased to perish out of the sky, even while the surface of the earth grew dark. The identity of that great space of downland was indrawn upon itself, neither listening nor seeking articulation, lost in an interior world so much vaster and so much more important than the encounters of man with man, whether evoked by prayer or by chance, that such meetings were like the meetings of ants and beetles upon a twilit terrace that had thoughts and memories of its own altogether outside such infinitesimal lives.

To John's surprise, the stranger put on his brake and stopped his car. “Can you see that thorn?” asked the man.

John peered forward through the twilight- Yes, he did clearly see the object indicated. It looked to him like a dead tree. “Is it a dead tree?” he enquired.

But the man went on, “From the foot of that thorn there's a path across the grass leading straight to Stonehenge. You can see Stonehenge from the foot of that thorn.”

"Can anyone go there, at this hour? Someone told me in France that it was guarded after sunset by soldiers.1'

“Are you able to come with me or would you like best to stay here till I come back?” said the man, totally disregarding this remark.

“I must come! Of course I must come with you!” insisted John Crow.

They got out of the little car together. The stranger gave John his arm; and although John would have liked to lean on it a great deal more heavily than he did, it was some support. He hobbled along as best he could, leaning the bulk of his real weight upon his own root-handled hazel-stick, and staring forward at the dead thorn tree with dazed curiosity. Deep in his mind he was thinking to himself, “1*11 always pray to her for everything from now on. I'll pray to her that Mary and I can live together in Norfolk!”

When they reached the thorn tree John stopped and drew a deep breath. He pressed heavily now on his companion's wrist and stared across the dark strip of downland turf before him, staggered and thunderstruck. Stonehenge! He had never expected anything like this. He had expected the imposing, but this was the overpowering. “This is England,” he thought in his heart. “This is my England. This is still alive. This is no dead Ruin like Glastonbury. I am glad I've come to this before I died!” “Will you excuse me, Sir,” he said, in a loud, rather rasping voice, the voice he had always assumed when, in the presence of French officials, he wished to assert himself, “will you excuse me if I sit down for a minute?”

“Do you feel queer? Are you ill?”

“I want to look at it from where we are.” They sat down on the ground beside the thorn tree; and even as he did so John observed that from one or two dark twigs upon a twisted branch a few leaves were budding. “It's not quite dead,” he remarked.

The stranger naturally thought he was speaking of the dark pile in front of them. “You mean its power's not left it?” He paused and then went on in a low voice. “About four thousand years it's been here; but, after all, what's that to some of the antiquities there are in the world? But you're right—it's not quite dead.”

“It's very English,” said John,

The man turned and gave him a strange, indignant glance. “Is it English then to hide your great secret?” he cried excitedly. “Is it English to keep your secret to the very end?”

“I expect you know much more about it, Sir, than I do,” said John humbly, “but I don't feel that those stones have anything hidden. They look to me just what they are, neither more nor less. They look simply like stones, enormous stones, lifted up to be worshipped.”

His companion swung round and hugged his shins, resting his chin on the top of his knees and balancing himself on the extreme tips of his haunch-bones. He gave his head an angry toss so that his black bowler fell to the ground and rolled a few inches before lying still.

“Could you worship a stone?”

“I ... I think ... I think so. . . .” stammered John, a little disconcerted by the man's intensity. “He must be a nonconformist preacher,” he thought.

“Simply because it's a stone?” cried the other, and he hugged his ankles so tightly and tilted himself forward so far that John was reminded of a certain goblinish gargoyle that he knew very well, on an out-of-the-way portion of Notre Dame.

“Certainly. Simply because it's a stone!”

“And you call that English?” the stranger almost groaned.

“I could worship that nearest one,” John said, “the one that stands by itself over there.”

The man jumped to his feet and, picking up his bowler hat, clamped it upon his head. He was a tall man and he looked pre-ternaturally tall as he stood between John and the stone which John had said he could worship. His profile was like a caricature of a Roman Emperor.

“Do you know what that stone's called?” he cried, “Do you know what it's called?” In his excitement he bent down and shook John by his shoulders. John thought to himself, “I wish my stick had a heavier handle. This man is evidently a mad dissenting minister.”

“Have all these stones got names?” asked John eagerly, making two desperate attempts to rise to his feet.

The man gave him his hand and John stood up. He surreptitiously substituted the handle of his hazel-stick for its ferrule end and grasped it tightly. “If he becomes dangerous,” he thought, "I'll step backward and hit him on the head with all my force.1' He laughed to himself as he swung his stick in the darkness.

The Great Stone Circle had stirred up in him an excitement the like of which he had never felt in all his life before. The pain of his blistered heel became nothing. R** 'urched forward, pushed the man aside, and stumbled .owards the huge, solitary, unhewn monolith which had attracted his attention. The other strode by his side murmuring indignantly, “It's more than that, it's more than that.” When they reached the stone John embraced its rough bulk with his arms, his stick still clutched by the wrong end in his fingers. Three times he pressed his face against it and in his heart he said, “Stone of England, guard Mary Crow and make her happy.”

The stranger continued his surly protest. “This stone,” he said, “is called the Hele Stone. It's this stone which stands exactly between the sunrise on a certain day and the Altar Stone inside the Circle—Hele—you can see what that is, can't you? It's Helios, the Sun! You've been playing your little game, Sir, with the Sun Stone.”

But John, in that fading twilight, with Stonehenge looming up in front of him, was not to be overawed. He felt too far drunken with the magnetism emanating from these prehistoric monoliths and trilithons. He felt no longer afraid of blaspheming against any God, even against the great Sun Himself!

The two men confronted each other. It was not yet too dark for them to see each other's faces. John leaned on his stick in a normal manner now—the sight of the look of his companion's aquiline nose, combined with his last remark, had reassured him. No religious maniac would have referred to Helios. John continued their disputation, “I believe this stone,” he said dogmatically, “is far older than the rest. I believe Stonehenge was built here because of this stone. I think stone-worship is the oldest of all religions and easier to sympathise with than any other religion.”

The stranger made no reply and looked round him with the air of one who listens intently.

“Come!” he said peremptorily, taking hold of John by the upper part of his arm. “Let's enter the Circle.”

They moved on for a short distance and came upon a large stone lying fiat at their feet. The man's fingers clutched John's flesh now with a convulsive clutch.

“You know what that is, I suppose?” he said.

John's answer to this was to tear himself loose, go down on his knees, fumble at the stone with his hands, scoop up some seven-days' old rain-water that he came upon in a hollow concavity there and lap it up noisily with his lips. The stranger's tall figure hovered over him like a great, agitated dusky bird. He was wearing a long, old-fashioned overcoat, thin at the waist and very baggy round the legs, and the tails of it kept flapping against his ankles as he went circling about John's crouching figure, gasping forth bewildered protests.

“What are you doing? Tve been hero more times than TCan remember, and I've never dared do that! That water's stagnant. It's worse than stagnant. They've killed thousands and thousands of their enemies here. It's the Slaughtering Stone, I tell you!”

John Crow rose from his feet and drew the back of his hand across his mouth. This childish gesture, visible enough in the twilight, seemed to confound his companion.

"Have you no reverence at all?*' he groaned, while the deep-sunken eyes above his Roman nose flashed a disconcerting gleam of anger. John Crow gave vent to a queer animal sound, that was something between a fox-bark and a pig's grunt. Some ancient vein of old Danish profanity seemed to have been aroused in him.

“I've got what I've got, Mister,” he said, “but I want to kneel by that Altar Stone in there before it gets too dark.” He was already limping forward when the man pulled him back with a jerk.

“How did you know there was an Altar Stone in there?” The words were uttered in such an awed whisper that John gave vent to a gross Isle-of-Ely chuckle.

“Know it? Hee! Hee! Who doesn't know it?” Saying this he led the way between two of the perpendicular cyclopean uprights which bore aloft a third, a horizontal one. Vast, shadowTy, terrific, this third stone now took the place of the twilight sky. John leaned his back against the left-hand monolith, digging his stick into the ground, and his companion imitated him, standing erect against the right-hand one. Above their heads, concealing the grey mass of the zenith, hung that monolithic roof-tree. The faint stars, as they gazed up at them, past the monstrous obstacle, seemed less obscure than they had been before. To the northward, by the way they had entered, they could dimly see the form of the Hele Stone. It emerged out of the obscurity like a gigantic, bare-headed man, wrapped in a skin or a blanket.

“I've been told,” remarked John, “that the origin of these Stones is entirely unknown.”

“Not true,” growled the other, in a tone that seemed to say, You are the most irresponsive vandal that has eve** entered Stonehenge and your folly is only equalled by your ignorance. “It is well known,” he continued aloud, “that this is the greatest Temple of the Druids.”

John's blistered foot caused him at that moment a sharp pang. He lost his self-control and cried aloud in a scandalous voice that rang out far over the silent Plain, “Damn your Druids!” The moment he had uttered the words he knew he had followed the gathering-up and the mounting-up in his nature of an emotion which, unexpressed, would have disgraced him in his own eyes. He moved away towards the centre of the titanic Circle. “He'll bolt now and leave me in the lurch,” he thought, “but I can't help it.” He stood still and looked eagerly round, observing how two of the largest monoliths had fallen across the ends of a yet larger one but without concealing the centre of it. “If this isn't the Altar Stone, it ought to be,” he muttered audibly; and falling down on his knees he tapped his forehead three times against the rough surface of the stone and then continued to hold it there, pressing it against the cold substance with a painful force. This action gave him extraordinary satisfaction. When at last he scrambled to his feet he found his Druidic friend seated on one of the prostrate “foreign stones,” surveying him with fearful curiosity.

“You've been here before,” he said severely, and heaved a deep sigh, as a man sighs when he finds an intruder at his hearthstone. John came over to him and sat down by his side. “To what kind of stone,” he enquired politely, “does that Altar Stone belong?”

The man turned gratefully towards him, free of all suspicion. “The best opinions seem to agree,” he said, “that this stone is micaceous sandstone. It no doubt comes from that portion of Wales where the Druids were most powerful; probably from South Wales, like the others; but the others are of a different geological formation.”

John Crow felt at that moment as if he were endowed with some magical gift of becoming inhumanly small and weak. And not only small and weak! He felt that he possessed the power of becoming so nearly nothing at all—a speck, an atom, a drifting seed, a sand-grain, a tiny feather, a wisp of thin smoke—that he was completely liberated from the burden of competing with anyone, or disputing with anyone, or assuming any definite mask or any consistent role. He seemed to have been given a sort of exultant protean fluidity. He felt an intense desire to make a fool of himself, to act like a clown, a zany, an imbecile. He longed to dance round the grave personage at his side. He longed to go down on all fours before him and scamper in and out of those enormous trilithons like a gambolling animal. He felt as if all his life until this moment he had been concealing his weakness of character, his lack of every kind of principle, his indifference to men's opinions, and a something that was almost subhuman in him. But now beneath these far-off misty stars and under these huge blocks of immemorial stone he felt a wild ecstatic happiness in being exactly as he was.

“Very few people,” he remarked to his companion, “could have told me about that Altar Stone being made of micaceous sandstone or about it having come from Wales. I am deeply in your debt, Sir, and I am overjoyed at having met you. My name is John Crow. May I ask what your name is?”