Unknown (38 page)

It was one of those occasions when a casual group of people seems held together by some invisible bond, contrary to the individual desire of every person composing the group. The dreamy passivity of both Mr. Evans and Sam was partly due to the fact that their own fate seemed to them to be hanging in the balance. Sam retained an obstinate clutch upon the edition of Saint Augustine which he had borrowed. This he could sweep into the master-current of his feelings more easily than any vague purpose of John Crow's in Tor Field.

Mr. Evans was able to get rid of every embodiment of his dark temptation, except one single passage in “The Unpardonable Sin,” which some supernaturally crafty devil might have composed especially to devastate and overwhelm him. Certain images called up by this particular passage were so seductive that his knees grew weak as he thought of them. The worst of these images had to do with a killing blow delivered by an iron bar.

The three men had reached the Abbey Barn at the corner of Bere Lane when things came to the worst with Mr. Evans.

The wild and desperate thought seized him ... as it had done only once before since he came to Glastonbury . . . “Why not fling away every scruple?”

His mind seemed at that second absolutely balanced on a taut and twanging wire between two terrible eternities, an eternity of wilful horror, and an eternity of bleached, arid futility, devoid of all life-sap. He could feel the path to the horror, shivering with deadly phosphorescent sweetness. He could feel the path to the renunciation filling his nostrils with acrid dust, parching his naked feet, withering every human sensation till it was hollow as the shard of a dead beetle! The nature of his temptation was such that it had nothing to redeem it. Such abominable wickedness came straight out of the evil in the heart of the First Cause, travelled through the interlunar spaces, and entered the particular nerve in the erotic organism of Mr. Evans which wa- -r-:jd »-tii;ed to respond to it.

The unhappy man now surveyed with a sick eye those svir.bols of the Evangelists which endow this ancient barn with such a majestic consecration. He felt a sudden loathing tor the human spirit, so hampered by matter as to be driven to shifts like thi-— to the ransacking of the kingdoms of terrestrial life for their clue to the beyond-life.

Drifting forward up Chilkwell Street went the three men: and it was between the Barn and St. Michael's Inn that the bloody sweat of Mr. Evans' mental struggle poured down till he felt actually faint.

“If I yield/' he said to himself, ”what then?"

0h5 with what blasting clearness he saw that terrible alternative! He saw himself obsessed again with the old bite, the old itch, the old sting, the old insatiable torture of desire-------

“The thing has no end,” he thought. '"The other way leads to places where you can rest. This goes on . . . and on « . . and on . . . without an end. The struggle to renounce it is pain. Each day new pain. The pain of unspeakable dreariness. But if I don't struggle against it, it is worse than that. These men don*t know whom they are walking with. They don't know! Oh, why should there be such a thing in the world as this?*'

His mind recoiled from an attempt to envisage the nature of what it was that had first engendered the poison-seed which had attracted to itself so much kindred evil from the heart of the universe.

“If I yield to it—if I yield to it-------” he kept repeating; while

the image that worked the madness in him slid again into the fibres of his being and nestled, nestled there, like a soft-winged bird. And his imagination, as they drew near St. Michael's Inn, settled itself like a dung-wasp upon the nature of his conscious life if he did yield to it. He saw his soul in the form of an unspeakable worm, writhing in pursuit of new, and ever new mental victims, drinking new, and ever new innocent blood. And he saw the face of this worm. And it happened to him now that he obtained what is given to few to obtain, an actual certain knowledge of what thoughts they were, if they could be called thoughts, that would come to stir in the darkness under the mask of that face that was no face!

Absolutely alone except for its consciousness of a certain little, round, red eye—the eye of the Evil in the double-natured First Cause—fixed upon it with a bottomless enjoyment of its suffering, the worst of the thoughts of this creature would be the intolerable effort required of it if it were to struggle to escape its doom. It would know that it could escape if it struggled. But the effort would be worse than what it suffered. And it would know its doom. It would see Remorse slowly changing its nature and becoming Something Else in the process of self-torture. It would know that its doom was no crashing annihilation, but a death as slow as the disintegration of certain mineral deposits wrhich under chemical pressure gradually lose their identity and are converted into amorphous dust.

They were now passing the entrance to St. Michael's Inn, a simple little tavern, frequented chiefly by the poorer class, and possessed cf only two storeys.

As Mr. Evans cast his eye upon the windows of the upper storey he saw the muslin curtains of one of them pulled aside. They were not pulled far . . . only a little way . . . and the hand that pulled them remained clutching them tightly, as if in fear of being interfered with. Between these curtains Mr. Evans saw a face looking out at him, apparently the face of a woman. The head of this apparition shocked Mr. Evans and indeed caused him to feel queasy in the pit of his stomach; for it was totally bald. An ordinary observer would have regarded this face as that of an idiot; but Mr. Evans knew better. It was the face of a remorseful sadist. Yes! it was a face of unspeakable cruelty, but the nature of its cruelty had changed. The mind behind that face was still occupied with devices for causing suffering; but the object of these devices was no longer—by the blessed interposition of chance—external to the woman herself.

He imagined her, or rather he saw her, for the woman looked at him and he looked at the woman, slowly torturing herself to death; and this by a process that Mr. Evans completely understood. It was a process of pleasure-killing. He knew the part played in this process by everything in the woman's room. He saw her refusing to pick up ciumta from the rloor. althi»i:/ji to »e-move crumbs from the floor was a piea^uie to her. He j^nv her draw the muslin curtains across the -window when it rained—and he knew she liked rain—and drawing them back when the sun shone; and he knew she loathed the sun. He could see the chair she longed to sit upon and never.allowed herself to sit upon. He could hear the ticking of the clock which she wound up so carefully every night; although it was the ticking of this clock more than anything else that she found intolerable.

Mr. Evans was well aware of the efforts that the people of the house must be making all the while to persuade the woman to cease this maniacal self-punishment, this slow murdering of all the little diurnal sensations of pleasure. But these efforts were doubtless of no avail. Oh, no! They were wrong to call her an idiot. Mr. Evans knew all about her. He knew how she poured water out of her washing-jug over the red coals in her grate the minute she caught herself getting any pleasure from the warmth.

He knew—but he had already lingered ridiculously long behind John and Sam. He must catch them up.

They arrived now at an old rickety gate on their right which led direct into Tor Field where at Michaelmas for a thousand years, the great Glastonbury Fair had been held; although of recent years it had been moved to a meadow on the further side of the town.

Sam opened the gate and they all three entered the field. When Sam turned to his companions, after lifting the gate back into place, he was met by a somewhat bewildered, vaguely appealing stare from both of them. It was entirely instinctive, this movement of theirs. It must have been a deep unconscious impulse. Just in this manner, on countless forgotten pilgrimages, men must have turned to some fate-appointed leader, drawn by what Mr. Weath-erwax would have called “nat'rel authority.”

It was as if they both secretly in their hearts expected Sam to say: “Follow me up the hill.”

Sam, however, said nothing of the sort. He laid down his parcel on the grass and began searching about at the side of an ancient fallen tree for a certain kind of moss that he knew grew here, of a rather uncommon variety.

John and Mr. Evans both turned their eyes to St. Michael's Tower. The Tower upon Glastonbury Tor varies in appearance as much as any hill-erection in Wessex. This is due to the extraordinary variety of atmospheric changes which the climate of that district evokes.

On this particular day the weather conditions had assumed a cloud-pattern, an air-pressure, a perspective of light and shadow, such as dwellers in Glastonbury recognized as more natural and normal than any other. Over the surface of the sky extended a feathery white film of vapour. The effect of this filmy screen upon the sun was to make it seem as if it shone through a roof of water. As a matter of fact, this vaporous film reduced the sun-rays to so mild a diffusion that they ceased to be rays. The sun's orb, thus shorn of its outpouring of radiance, came to resemble the disk of the moon. The great Luminary was so reduced by this film of clouds that, like Agamemnon in the toils of Clytemnestra, it could hardly be said to shine at all. It peered helplessly forth over the green meadows of Avalon; so that stubborn Christian spirits, such as Mat Dekker, had the satisfaction of being able to confront the great Light-Lord, and stare him full in the face without blinking.

The result of this veiling of the sun was that only a watery suffusion of liquid luminousness flowed over every object that emerged into prominence at all, over every object that had any form or any outline.

All were equally blurred and softened. Thus it came about that a moon-like circle of pallid whiteness looked forth upon a world from which every harsh projection, whether of stone, or wood, or metal, or horn, or scale, or feather, or bone, or rock, had been obliterated; a world of flowing curves and sliding shadows, a world of fluctuating shapes and melting contours.

What this veiling of the sun further did was to heighten the effect of colour. Colour as a phenomenon in the world became doubly important. Every shade, every richness, every variety of colour, lent itself to this colour-invasion of the kingdom of form.

Thus as these three men stood together at the foot of Glastonbury Tor the grass of the hillside seemed of an incredibly rich depth. It was like a mounting wave of palpable Greenness Into which, if you began to walk, your feet would sink dov.n.

“My idea is,” said John at length. v>hen Sam had risen :\\ from his search for mosses on the underside of the prostrate tre;.\ "my idea is to have the regular Fair down here, on this level ground. But the Miracle Play, or whatever you like to call it. 1 want to have on the slope of the hill, with that Tower as my background. Do you catch my idea?'5

“Let's sit down a second,” said Sam. taking his seat on the fallen tree.

' “What I want to do,” said John, looking around him, “is to try and realise this place with a crowd of people moving about, and booths and tents and bands and so on. I can't imagine it! But, after all, when you cross any ordinary fair-field at this time of the year, it's impossible to see it as it is when it's crowded with people.”

He seated himself by Sam's side as he spoke and Mr. Evans sat down, too. The position of the three men when thus seated was as follows: John was nearest the Tor; that is to say, southward of the others; Mr. Evans was nearest Chalice Hill; that is to say, northward of the others; while Sam had the middle place, opposite that spot in the horizon where the gap called Havyatt breaks the ancient line of trenches, thrown up to repel the Danes.

Mr. Evans sat starkly upright on their log. His black overcoat hung about his thin knees like a priest's cassock. His black bowler hat was pulled so low down over his forehead as to resemble the hat of a Jewish comedian on a music-hall stage. He leaned forward on a nondescript cane, picked up anywhere, but he bent his head over his folded hands as if he had been a chieftain out of Ossian's poetry, brooding over some irrevocable doom.

Sam wore a very rough, thick, Norfolk jacket. His knickerbockers were stained, worn threadbare, very faded, his woolen stockings were slipping down, and as they slipped they no longer concealed his heavy woolen drawers. Sam's cap had been pushed back off his forehead, and his wrinkled, animal physiognomy scowled forth in a puzzled and nonplussed protest at a world that contained both good and evil to a degree beyond the fathoming of his simple spirit.

As for John, he had bought by Mary's advice an overcoat at Wollop's which was really a bargain. Not that this new overcoat destroyed his trampish appearance, but it made him look more like a thief or a rogue or even a furtive-eyed cardsharper than he had done when tidied up for his English adventure by his French grisette. Mary's attempts to give him a gentlemanly air had only given him a shabby-genteel air; an air that was very disconcerting to the girl, and for which she could not quite account.

John looked, in fact, exactly like the tricky showman he was, calculating the possibilities of his Midsummer Circus. The overcoat which Mary had chosen for him hung on his lean figure like a garment he had stolen. It was as if some well-dressed man, passing down a road, had tossed that coat over the wooden crossbeam of a dilapidated scarecrow. He sat sideways, in a hunched-up posture, prodding the earth with his hazel-stick and looking first at one of his companions and then at the other. Every now and then, however, he glanced stealthily at St. Michael's Tower on the top of the Tor, as if that were a Fourth Person in this colloquy, whose temper, just as incalculable as that of the other two, had to be kept an eye upon, lest it should make trouble.

It was after one of these surreptitious glances that he suddenly broke out—“You see that ledge over there? That's where I'm going to have my Crucifixion.”

The terrible word came with a shock to the ears of the other two men.

“Will it be allowed?” asked Mr. Evans.