Unknown (49 page)
Authors: Unknown
It would have been better for Mat Dekker, at that moment, if he had been endowed with a little of the analytic irresponsibility which John Crow possessed. He would have known better, then, what was going on in his deep, heavy, massive nature. He would have known better, then, why it was that he burst out upon his only-begotten son, as he did, in such a spasm of blundered, ill-chosen words! Gazing through that richly storied arch into the body of the Virgin's Chapel and out through a south window into the sunlit branches beyond, Sam listened to his father with lowering astonishment, his chin working frantically, and his little green eyes full of queer lights. In the roaring, raving, towering, cresting, cascading whirl of its huge centrifugal flames the superhuman consciousness of that noon-day sun recognised, amid the billions upon billions of other organisms that floated through its non-human awareness, his brief-lived biped enemy—the stalwart priest of Christ. The sun's awareness of any particular living creature may be for good and may be for evil, but towards these two men, each of whom, deep in his heart, was crying out—just like poor Tom—“Fd like to, Nell!” it was certainly for evil.
The sun indeed blazed down in unusual strength for a Glaston-bury March day. It turned all this mass of complicated stone imagery into something as radiant as it was obscure, into something resembling the checquered patterns of dead leaves and dead twigs, mingled with little mosses and funguses, that are suddenly revealed in a forest opening, and yet into something so hot and dry and dusty that it suggested the carved stonework in classical southern countries, across which lizards slide and abo\* which the air seems to droop and gasp and pant. Thai unique stonework doorway under which for at least sever, hundred } ears hu:r.a:i skeletons, clothed in flesh, had been passing, was or- this Marcl: day a proof of what far-removed opposites in Nature the mind a man can reduce to an imaginative unity. While the hot and dusty texture of these deep mouldings suggested that languorous feelins of burning noons under copper skies when the hot bosom of the air lies sweltering and swooning upon the slabs of shadowiest stone thresholds, and where upon the marble brims of dried-up fountains the coiled snake scarce seems even to breathe in its glittering sleep, the actual shapes and forms of this limestone imagery were born of dripping forest boughs and dark rainy moorlands and the wind-swept ramparts of Gothic castles.
As Sam gazed now at these four concentric rings of convoluted sculpture, listening to his father's troubled voice, he could not be called conscious that these sun-warmed intricacies of obscure carving represented the birth of his Man-God . . . that magical Event which could thus bring together the tents of the South and the chilly ramparts of the North ... but a feeling did come over him that he was staring into the very roots of the earth where the creatures that he so loved were engendered by the mingling of primordial heat and cold.
“We have to renounce,” the priest was saying with a dangerous quiver of his long, clean-shaven upper lip, “and she is the test oiven unto you now, my son, as to whether you can renounce.” His words burst out in a jerky, violent, spasmodic manner, for the force behind them was nothing less than that “Fd like to! Fd like to!” which, in Tom Chinnock's case, had been accompanied by sticks and stones. He was secretly proud that this child of his sturdy Quantock loins had made the son of the great Marquis of P. a shamefaced wittol. In those imaginative senses below the senses which create that terrible glamour-world of thrilling illusion wherein all exquisite temptations lie, Mat Dekker had derived a wild and savage joy from the thought that his son had lain in bed by the side of those unequalled breasts.
The conventional phrases, “desire of the flesh” . . . “sins of the flesh” . • • “ksts 0* ^ &^” &re totally at variance with the real phenomena of erotic temptation. In real temptation the “flesh” does not enter at all. There is the generative nerve where like a twisted serpent the scales of the embryo Lust-Dragon simmer and ferment, and there is the brain nerve towards which that quivering forked tongue sends out its cry of confederacy! The repercussions of both these things are mental, spiritual, ethereal, astral, immaterial, psychic and as utterly removed from the “flesh” as they are from ''matter.“ It is a thing of nerves, this ”brutish sting,“ this erotic obsession, of nerves and of the psyche, the soul, the self! The flesh is pathetically, beautifully, grotesquely innocent. It is in the nerves that all lecheries, all lusts, all passions lie • . . in the nerves and the imagination. It is the erotic nerve, the tightly coiled snake with the flickering tongue, always waiting to leap, that creates that under-sea of fluctuating images, wherein Matter and Flesh have been reduced to tenuous and filmy wraiths, but from which the ”nerve perilous*" can feed with its vibrant tantalisations the excited soul! All good springs from the nerves and from the mind. All evil springs from the nerves and from the mind. Innocent, neutral, harmless, beautiful, neither good nor evil, is the mortal flesh of men and of beasts and of the grasses of the field!
“She is the test for you, my son,” went on Mat Dekker while his erotic nerve kept repeating: “I'd like to, Td like to!” like a rat gnawing in a hollow wTall, “she is the test for you. You have done what you wanted to do. But it must go on no longer. Any man can give wTay to physical temptation once. Where a man shows his mettle is where he refuses to go on yielding.” As he spoke Mat Dekker took off his hat and wiped his forehead. This gave his superhuman enemy, the sun, his supreme opportunity, and he poured down his burning noon rays upon that bare grey head with redoubled concentration. “Not to go on with a fleshly sin,” continued Mat Dekker, “is the great victory of the spirit over the body. None of us can help yielding once. It ... is . . . too * . . sweet. But after the excess of the first plunge a man with any character must pull himself together and climb back into the trench of the faithful.”
“Don't, Dad!” muttered Sam sulkily. “I've got to think. You only worry me, talking like that.”
They moved away together now out n£ the Abler Or.-,;::idf: ?.:.d by a short cut, permitted onl\ to resided oi :;y i:,v>:;. - fc>?1.J into Silver Street. Sam surprised his parent bi hi* :::::-o:-» i-.u-.:-, ^? to anew appeal. “Sorry. Father.” he muttered presently, “I v^ thinking of something else ... I didn't hear vhai you said!*”
As the twTo Dekkers were turning into Silver Street. John Cr »v*. playing truant from his little office by the station, was da^diiuu in front of the old men's almshouses and staring up at the Lell-cot of St. Margaret's thirteenth-century chapel.
It wTas part of John's deep “'selfishness;' of this egoism which he deliberately and shamelessly cultivated, that he always preferred to allow his imagination to be stirred by little out-of-the-way buildings of this kind rather than by more famous ancient erections. The aura of ”visitors“ gathered for him round any notable show-spot, and was enough to turn him against it But a fragment of old wall, a broken piece of old coping, or, much more, a building like this that had retained its own humble, patient identity throughout so many generations, always held his imagination in a dream-heavy trance of curious felicity. As he now surveyed this old bell-cot of St. Margaret's Chapel, out of whose stones grew intermittent stone-crop and green moss, the thought of how long this little tower, with its two bells and its statue of the saint, had been mingled with the thoughts of the generations of life-broken, life-weary, life-sated, life-hungry old men, going in and out of these men's almshouses, gave the selfish John a thrilling rapture of delight. Like a lovely wine, light and dreamy, made out of old, old mosses softer than sleep, this incorrigible and mischievous wanderer drank deep of these ancient men's long secular lives under St Margaret's bell tower* He had drifted now to where Street Road branched off to the west and instead of walking on to Hill Head and crossing that strip of w-aste land which was the arena of Tom Chinnock's erotic activities he turned down Street Road. He had in his mind a little dairy-shop, not far from Cardiff Villa where the new Mayor lived. This meant a furtive and foxy shuffle, for the misanthropic John, along the other side of the road. It might indeed be said that the whole of John Crow's life was a sequence of ”other sides"—
“other sides'5 of roads, ”other sides“ of thoughts, ”other sides" of ideas, religions, labours, activities, in the whole great, dusty, bustling panorama of life. It was the same thing, even when he held Mary in his arms, for he liked better to hold her as if he had caught her escaping from him, than as if she had rushed to meet him with outstretched arms.
He pretended to be extremely interested in the small suburban gardens on his right as he advanced hurriedly and surreptitiously along the path. He was seized, however, with such a strong feeling of being waved at and called to and summoned to stop from the single upper window, the window of CrumrrriVs bedroom, visible between the tall bushes, that he raised one quick nervous glance at that dark aperture. But though his fancy filled that small space with the heads of the whole Geard family he knew in his mind that no one was there and he hurried on, trailing the point of his stick along the hedges, the gates, the railings, the walls of "the other side1' of Street Road. At last he came to the little isolated dairy-shop. It stood close to the road, this little shop, and occupied the wrhole ground floor of a small square Jacobean house that made an odd contrast to the Victorian tradesmen's villas that formed its neighbourhood.
The hot sun beat down on the front of this little establishment where the ground before the open door had been strewn with gravel. There were twTo wooden benches on either side of the entrance, and inside there were several little wooden tables. The spot had an old-fashioned, mellow look, and yet the fact that milk in place of beer was the beverage sold gave a peculiar character to the whole place which it would have been hard to define. John had discovered this innocent refuge several weeks ago and it had grown to be a favourite retreat of his, though so far he had not revealed its whereabouts to Mary. The blending of Jacobean brickwork with warm dusty sunshine and both of these with large, cool, white receptacles full of milk, made of Othery's Creamery in Street Road and oasis of senuous, West-Country peace for such as did not require the more biblical stimulant of alcohol to bathe them in enchantment. John walked in and ordered a pint of milk and a couple of cheese sandwiches. These he carried himself to a place at the back of the room, from whose cooL dark shelter he could sec the hoi: sunshine ciiislf"?. i,nt so much lying upon, as absorbing into itself, the gravel, the* w >
The fingers which held this person's pencil were those ox a manual labourer, but the face that alternately bent down and rose to stare into vacancy was that of a refined scholar. Panic seized the misanthropic John and he thought to himself: “All is lost . . . all is spoilt.” He began gobbling his sandwich and gulping his milk. “I'll clear out of here before he speaks. He's sure to speak if I stay. He's a born hailer of strangers!” But the fair young man5 who must have been about ten years younger than John, showed no sign of speaking. He continued to stare alternately at his manuscript and at space. John's mind worked in a most characteristic manner now. “My good meal has been spoilt, my good moment has been ruined. But in for a penny in for a pound. I may as well take the plunge.”
“Are you a visitor to Glastonbury, Sir?” he asked in a friendly tone. The young man did not seem surprised at being addressed, nor did he seem to take it in ill part* He laid his glass of milk on the top of his manuscript to prevent the wind from ruffling it and pulled his chair a little nearer John's table.
“In a way I am, and in a way I'm not. Fm Edward Athling, from Middlezoy. I live at Haw Bottom Old Farm out there. But perhaps you are a stranger? It's nice on a day like this in Glastonbury, isn't it?”
John, in his easily acquired manner of Pageant Advertiser, began at once talking about the new Mayor and his scheme of a Passion Play. Edward Athling listened with extreme interest
“I believe I could help you over this if you'll let me,” he said. “I helped Mr. King with that Greylands Pageant, in which the Headmaster played Saint Aldhelm.”
“We're negotiating,” said John, "with two people from the Abbey Theatre in Dublin to come and do the directing for us.
What we are in vrant of—though most of the affair will be just pantomime and dumb show—is a little fragment of libretto. Is that a poem you're writing, Sir. may I ask? It looks like poetry from here."
But the young man waved aside the topic of his immediate occupation. “I'd like uncommonly well,” he said, “to try my hand at that bit of libretto for you. Is it about Arthur you'll want it?”
So differently do events work out from what we anticipate that the evasive John, who had locked up his office and was looking forward to a couple of hours of solitary mystic-sensuous enjoyment, now found himself confronted by a regular circus master's dilemma—fear of losing a unique talent and fear of fatally committing himself to the untried!
Ned Athling must have read his thoughts. “I know the kind of poetry you want,'5 he said eagerly. ”It must be easy to recite; it must be a bit rhetorical; it must be grandiose; but it must have a touch* a flavour, somewhere about it, of genuine magic."
John experienced a shock of an extremely unpleasant kind when he heard these words. Deep in his sidelong, shifty, dodging, sheering-off nature there was lodged an invincible distaste for all artistic theories. He could recognise genius in the raw; but a certain particular expository tone made him feel as if his stomach was full of grey ashes.
Ned Athling scrutinised this lean, uncomfortable person who was now occupied in making little bread pellets of the crumbs of his meal. With every trace of absent-mindedness gone, the young man had the wit to see that his last remark had made the Mayor's secretary wince. He got up boldly therefore and brought both his manuscript and his chair over to John's table.