Unknown (35 page)

“I think I'll adjourn, if you people don't mind,” said Tom Barter, addressing the whole company and making a little nod with his head as he leaned his hand against the back of a chair. “Philip can bear witness,” he glanced furtively at his employer, “that I've got a lot to do at the office tomorrow; so I think bed is the place for me. Good-night, Mrs, Spear, you'll excuse me, won't you?” He had isolated himself completely from the rest of them by this time; not exactly by what he said but by the way he looked at them. He might have been a Frenchman in that group, instead of the descendant of a family of Methwold squires who were landowners when the Crows were just Isle-of-Ely farmers.

Some visitor from Venus or Mars, interested in human social differences, would have been puzzled to know what the real psychic cause was of Barter's repeated humiliations. How could such an one know that the sole and simple cause of it was the manner in which, when a boy, he had been bullied at Greylands School? But this was the cause and none other. Barter had been so humiliated at Greylands, at Gladman's House there, that in his heart he felt himself to be inferior to every educated man he met. And this feeling in his own mind every educated man he met, without knowing why, was compelled by some invisible urge to take advantage of! “Bullied at Greylands—always bullied” might have been a truth-speaking Wessex proverb. It was only at rare moments, when he lost his temper, that he dared to look Philip straight in the face; and yet, curiously enough, Philip came much nearer being afraid of Barter than of anyone else in Glastonbury. It was that Greylands bullying, those memories of what went on at Gladman's House, that made a neurotic catch-pole of this sturdy descendant of Norfolk fox-hunters.

Philip ran immediately upstairs to his small bedroom. Here he snatched a rough overcoat from a nail and an old sporting cap of the same faded cloth. This latter he instinctively—as if bound for some dark adventure—pulled low down over his narrow forehead. The ugly looking-glass by the window made him think of dead flies. His angry contempt for Barter, “going to bed like that because he'd been insulted by a hulking zany,” made him think of “heads without name, no more remembered”—and with this on the mute lips of his mind he turned the gasjet low and hurried down again. Here, in the porch of the little inn, he found Persephone, wrapped, she too, in a long cloth coat, and wearing over her fuzzy, dusky hair a boyish cap. They went out together in silence. In silence he led her up the road, round a turn to the right, till they came to a closed gate in the hedge. This he opened for her, lifting it bodily off its latch and replacing it by the same main force when she had stepped through. He now led her, still in a sort of guilty silence, up a narrow winding hill-path on each side of which grew large, indistinct trees, their roots in the sloping bank. At this point Philip produced an electric flashlight from his overcoat pocket and held it so as to illuminate their way.

Persephone became aware now of the sound of water, down somewhere in the darkness to their right, and it was not long before he made her stop and look between the tree trunks, upon whose rough surface he threw the light of his flashlight. There she saw a single bright lamp burning, throwing morbid shadows upon an expanse of grass. By this radiance a link la^n v.itl. rbairs and tables set out became apparent, al! tii^e tiling rji'^ij^s and deserted, looking ghostly, and even gka-tlv ih« •:••.*. **I k *op it lit,“ whispered Philip in her ear. Thert* was nu n:>;-i- ^ -ri^d for him to whisper. It was hard to raise his \rov j,;rt ihtn. ”It's my electric plant. That's where we serve tea to vi-it.jrs. I expect you've been there yourself, only \u;i came in a diiierent way."

They went on again, the path they followed growiii^ *tea

They were isolated from human interference as completely as if they had descended into some cavern at the bottom of the sea. There was only that one entrance to Wookey Hole Caves, at least only one known to modern man, and the key to that one entrance lay in Philip's pocket. It was his money that had opened these caves. It was his money that would presently electrify these caves. He was like a solitary magician, whose secret kingdom hidden in the howels of the earth and guarded by invisible demons, was as impenetrable to invasion as the private thoughts in his own mind were impenetrable. Philip had never, in all his conscious days, known a moment to compare with this moment. He had got her! The rapacity of his desire to possess her wholly, to ravish, not only her body, but her inmost soul, compelled him now to exercise an adamantine restraint upon his passion. He suddenly became a Fabius Cunctator of erotic strategy. A cold and calculating calm rose up from the crater of his desire, as if a volcano had engendered a shaft of ice. He supported her now down a long, narrow, winding flight of rough steps and not until they reached the bottom of these steps did he utter a word. Once at the bottom, however, and on the edge of a limestone platform leading into a vast cathedral-like cavern, he raised aloft his flashlight and directed it against the amazing walls that surrounded them.

These were walls composed of enormous stalactites hanging from the roof and of equally monstrous stalagmites rising up from the floor. These strange things—objects for which, since so few of mortal men ever beheld them, there are in our language no adequate descriptive words—showed themselves to be, under the beam of light which he threw upon them, of the most staggering variety of iridescent colours. A livid greenishness and a livid blu-ishness were what predominated; and next to these* a ghastly kind of phosphorescent orange.

Philip found it possible to lift up his voice now; but it was still an effort for him to speak above a whisper and he yielded to this weakness without shame. “See those two, over there, Perse?” he said, holding out his flashlight with one hand and pointing his other towards what he wanted his companion to see. What he pointed at were two of these barbarous shapes that had advanced, one from below and one from above, in slow accretions, until they were within an ace of each other, their extreme points, in fact* almost touching.

“How long did they take?” whispered Persephone.

“To grow, you mean?” he whispered back. “I forget exactly. About an inch in a thousand years. Those two things would only have been separated from each other by about two inches when Christ was crucified!”

“Stop! Is that water?” she cried suddenly, breaking the spell in her excitement. Her cry was caught up by a singular echo that did not confine itself to a single note but repeated her last four syllables.

“Is that water?” reverberated the echo. “Is that water?”

“It's uncanny!” she cried, catching hold of his arm.

“Uncanny!” repeated the echo.

The girl still clung tight to his arm, but child-like she wanted to show off her courage. “Who are you?” she shouted at the top of her voice.

“Who are you?” returned the echo.

“Are you a devil?” cried Persephone Spear.

“—you a devil?” threwr back the echo.

Philip interrupted this dialogue by directing his flashlight to wards the water. It was of an indescribable tint, this Avater. It might indeed have been the Styx, that mysterious river by which the gods swrore their only inviolable oath.

“Is it the Axe?” she asked.

“A tributary from it, I think” he said. “One day I'm going to make it carry me to the Axe!”

The girl yielded to a delicious shiver. “Down there, do you— oh, there's a boat, Philip! There's a boat!”

“Yes, that's my boat” said Philip Crow in a tone wherein Jason might have said, “my Argo.”

“Let's go down to that water,” she said. “Can we do that?”

Since this wras precisely what he had long since decided upon, he promptly acceded to the girl's request. They walked with careful steps down to the very edge of this prehistoric estuary. He was trembling too much with the near approach of the consummation of his desire to have time for such imaginations; and she was too excited by the sight of the boat down there; otherwise they might have wondered what strange shapes of what neolithic cavemen, long before the epoch of Abel Twig's Lake Dwellers, had bent down to drink, or to wash the blood from their hands, in that Stygian flood. “In the bowels of the Mendips,” his wild feelings ran, “my girl . . . my pleasure ... I, I, I, . . . taking my pleasure . . . conquering this land underneath the earth ... as I conquer it in the air . . . I, I, I, stamping my will on life ... on woman ... on ... on ... on the Future!”

“Can't we get into the boat, Philip?” she whispered. Her subdued voice made his pulses beat. Had her girl's instinct already divined his proud intention?

He made no reply, but seizing the rope which moored the boat to an iron stake at their feet pulled it to land. At the bottom of the boat were lying a pair of oars. He helped her to get in and to sit down on one side of the two small benches. Hauling the rope after him he sat down himself on the other bench and gathered up the oars from where they lay. He handed the flashlight into her keeping. She put up her free hand and touched his shoulder as he began to row, taking long, hard strokes.

"You are Charon!7' she wThispered into the back of his Bayeux Tapestry skull.

He panted in qTiick little gasps as he rowed. The light from the flashlight which she held fell upon the water and upon the black stones of the shore.

It suddenly occurred to Philip's mind as he rowed—what if their little flashlight went out? He let his oars rest on the surface of the livid water, where strange terrific shadows kept moving, shadows that might wTell have heen the upheaving forms of monstrous, antediluvian creatures—ichthyosauri perhaps— that had escaped the doom, down here below the Mendips, of the evolutionary process of a hundred thousand years. With feverish fingers he searched his pockets. Thanks be! In both his coat and his overcoat reposed boxes of good Swan Vesta matches. So that was as it should be. He knew the place well enough to be perfectly safe, with all those miniature torches in his possession!

“Why don't you go* on, Philip? You make me nervous. What are you looking for? Cigarettes?”

“You shall have your cigarette presently, my girl,” he thought.

But aloud he cried, “Careful, Perse! Careful! Hold it a bit higher!”

Their craft grounded now upon a broad, low slab of prehistoric limestone. Above it a great, slippery, precipitous wall ascended to the roof. Here there was a very strangely shaped formation of petrification such as would have required the grossest of modern minds to endow with a human image; although Dante might not have hesitated to find words for it. “They call tlmt^ he said, pointing at this curious stalagmitic conformation as he helped her from the boat, ”they call that, the Witch of Wookey Hole. They say a monk from Glastonbiiry turned her into-—1 say! What's the matter, child? What is it? Oh, for God's sake, what is it, Perse?"

The girl had fallen into a hunched-up crouching position upon the slippery limestone slab by the water's edge and had covered her head with both her hands. He was convinced she was weeping by the movement of her shoulders, though she did not utter a sound. There was not in all Philip Crow's profoundest being one least little grain, one tiniest atom, of what Mr. Evans suffered from. With all his maniacal lust for power, his was probably the least cruel human soul within a radius of twenty miles from that singular spot. That his high-spirited Percy—his secretest, most private “possession”—should suddenly be seized with an excess of trouble to which he lacked the clue, shook the foundations of his pride. There was something nobly courteous, nobly tender, in the timorous gesture with which, having tossed the oars back in the boat and pulled its prow up the shelving rock, he bent dowTn and folded his long fingers round that head in the boy's cap. What was his astonishment and relief when, under this grave caress, the extraordinary girl rose to her knees before him. Persephone Spear was shaking with laughter! She had not been weeping at all. For a second he thought she was hysterical; but when, through the contortions of her childish paroxysm, she .put out her tongue at him, he wras assured. So disturbed had he been, however, that for a minute or two all the erotic feelings in him became as petrified as that stone image of the Witch that stood over against him. The girl could see he was disturbed and the sight of his gravity increased her mirth.

She dropped the flashHght upon the ledge of rock and clutching at her sides she swayed to and fro in a breath-taking laughing-fit. Every time she came near to stopping, something about her lover's face would send her off again. It almost seemed as if the pent-up little-girl gaiety of her whole mature life had broken loose by the waters of this miniature Styx!