Unknown (50 page)
Authors: Unknown
“I'm going to take the liberty of reading to you the poem I've just written. Its landscape is an imaginary one, like that of Kubla Khan. I've called it 'Merlin, the Enchanter.'”
“One minute, if you don't mind!” cried John, getting up himself and hurrying to the counter. Here he scrupulously and meticulously paid for his milk and cheese, prolonging this transaction all he could, and commenting in the ears of young Pet Othery —a dreamy maid with a Pansy novelette always on her lap—on the unseasonableness of the day's heat. John rushed to pay his bill at this moment because of the i^I;_Iu._ Li n::.i ". .. v *\\ -• I impulse to escape from this lad and a:. L,,::.. L
ing* anyone's feelings. It was his r
Pet Othery. however, as she laid her novelette dnwii -./,
counter, between a great bowl of milk and a smaller ! “,'. : Devonshire cream, closing a pair of scissors within ii. and c»”i: her thimble and thread, so that her place should nut fat* k»st. br_ja to address John in an excited whisper. “Don't *ee know. Mister, who that gentleman be who's talkin* to *ee? Tis Mr. Athling from Middiezoy, who everybody says be keeping company with Lady Rachel, the Marquis's onl\ girl. Her father won't ha\e none of im, so they say, though the Athlings be a good Somerset family; but Lady Rachel, from all accounts, do bide by her own choice and small blame to her, I sayP Having uttered her grand piece of communication Miss Othery picked up her novelette again and spread it out luxuriously upon her lap. Her place now proved to have been kept, not only by thimble and thread and scissors, but also by a bit of chocolate, done up in silver paper, which she now proceeded to enjoy. The idea that Mr. Crow might prefer her conversation to that of Lady Rachel's young man never for a single second entered her romantic head. Ever afterwards indeed Pet Othery associated this particular volume, which was called ”Lizzie Upton's Temptation," with this encounter between the Mayor's secretary and Lady Rachel's lover.
John was compelled therefore to return to his little, round, china-topped table, upon which, heedless of spilt milk. Edward Athling had spread out his poem. The Middiezoy poet read his lines in a low chanting sing-song that mounted up to a quite stirring climax at the end.
Pet Othery lifted her rounded chin from her sewing and from her story, and regarded him with eyes of soft and melting tenderness. The sunlight flooded the gravel outside the open door with such a warm dusty glow that it gave to the interior of this little shop a dim cloistral coolness that lent itself well to this occasion.
“This wind has blown the sun out of his place! I look towards the West and lo! a vast, Lost-battle-broken bastion covers up The natural sky: to what rain-ramparted Region of huge disaster, do these hills. Toppling above each other, ridge on ridge. With trees that in the night are heaped like mosss With trees that darken into tapestries Of vaporous moss, with roads that travelling Thro' terraces of twilight lose themselves In green-black tumuli of mystery, In piled-up mounds of moss and mystery, Lead my soul thro' the silence? Not a stone But talks in muffled tongue to other stones. There's not a wild, wet-beaked, night-flying bird That does not scream upon this tossing wind To other, darker birds, my cry, my cry, Of rumours and of runes and reckonings, Of rain-whir led storm-wrack rolls of malediction! And I the Enchanter, riding on these hills, And on the stags that trample on these hills, And on this twilight and on these heaped mounds Of mystery and on these wild birds* wings, Death-runes, death-rumours, ruins and rains of death Am now myself this wind, this wind, this wind, This wind, that's blown the sun out of his place!”
John Crow's countenance would have been worthy of the stage as it changed from nervous boredom to startled surprise and from surprise to imaginative arrest and from imaginative arrest to a rush of excited resolution. But it was characteristic of him to jump at once—without any intervening steps—to the main issue. “Come on, Mr. Athling, come on, Sirl” he cried, rising to his feet, and, clutching at the poet's modest bill, which was inscribed on a slip of paper with the words “Othery^s Dairy” printed on the top of it, he rushed over to the young lady. Unfortunately for this impulsive motion of premature hospitality John's pockets contained no more than a penny half-penny, whereas Athling's debt to the shop was fourpence.
But the farmer-poet produced sixpence, and ignorant of the fact that he was tipping the daughter of the house he left the change, in addition to John's penny half-penny, upon the counter.
“Have you time to come to the Mayor's house?” said John eagerly. ;Tt's quite close. I was gonig to wa:ch the >>o*s ^Lv,:::j rounders on Wirral Hill for a bit. and then go back t.j ihe i-f.i •«:. but I know Mr. Geard will jump at your help if h-j hear> :!.at poem. It's exactly the sort of thing we want! It's almost a^ if \.j;i were thinking of us when you wrote it. You must come to our ilr*t rehearsals. Those Dublin people won't be able to coir»e till we've got pretty far advanced and there are ... I cor/t know quite how to put it . . . several ways of taking the Grail-Cult . . . which . . . which • . . the -Mayor and I . . . don't want to appear at all! There are ... a few things too . . . that I am very keen to get put in . . . and if you-----«¦''
Never has any cardsharper, never has any pickpocket, never has any scallywag of a circus camp-follower, leered as craftily as John did then, into the open countenance of Edward Athling. The young man himself was struck by the look, and he had penetration enough to detect the fact that this excess of exaggerated cunning was really as transparent as the lying of a child.
“I feel,” Athling said to John, as they approached Cardiff Villa, “as if I were the Player King being taught my sprinkling of mich-ing malleeho.”
“This Pageant,” said John with a quick sidelong glance to see how the youth would take it, “is going to upset a great many people.”
“Of course,” said Athling, “any original work of art is upsetting to the mob.”
John held his peace at this point. It was not his custom to wTeigh a person's character by anything that he said, least of all by any of these rather sententious remarks that Mr. Athling seemed to have a tendency to utter. John had his own secret and peculiar method of sounding a stranger's intellectual and emotional nature. It was a kind of etheric, psychic embrace, but not necessarily of an amorous character. The truth is that for John the soul of every person he met wras something that he was doomed to explore. His own soul was like a vaporous serpent, and it rushed forth from the envelope of his body and wround itself round this other, licking this other's eye-sockets with its forked tongue, peering into its heart and into its brain, and pressing a cold snake-head against its feverish nerves.
The resuit of the coiling of John's soul round the soul of Athling as he walked by his side along this hot dusty path, towards Cardiff Villa, was that he realised that nothing could conceivably ever make Athling understand the mystical ecstasy of destruction and the deep metaphysical malice with which he longed to undermine the Grail Legend. The whole tone of the lad when he said that original art was upsetting to the mob was distasteful to John. John's instincts were profoundly anti-aesthetic. When he enjoyed anything it was by direct contact, as if the thing were a physical sensation, and the laws, principles, rules, methods, purposes, intentions, and above all the opinions that led up to this especial thing, seemed to him nothing but exhausting and tedious pedantry, devoid of all value.
They came now to Cardiff Villa, and John, opening the iron gate with a click, led Edward Athling up the little path between the privet bushes to the front entrance. Sally Jones, who had been watching their approach through the kitchen door, which opened straight upon the street, hurried through the hallway in a fever of excitement to let them in. She too, like Pet Othery, knew Ned Athling, as a local celebrity, and like all the Glastonbury girls had been thrilled by the rumours connecting him with Lady Rachel Zoyland, the daughter of the Marquis of P.
The master of Cardiff Villa gave his visitors a very cordial welcome when he found them in his dining-room, and John lost no time in making his captured poet recite the lines about Merlin.
The Mayor listened with his big head sunk on his chest and his eyes closed; but when Athling had finished it wras clear that something in the verses had touched a kindred chord in him, for he clapped his plump hands together and uttered several times a sound which it is impossible to represent in print otherwise than by the syllables “urr-rorr . . . urr-rorr . . . urr-rorr!” This sound was eminently satisfactory to John, and apparently not less so to the author, for the latter plunged at once into an impassioned description as to what he would do if they gave him a free hand with the libretto.
One of the most practical results that followed from this introduction of young Athling to Mr. Geard—and John was not one to suffer from jealousy—was the fact that a iev, dsv? Ia:or the whole place was placarded with potters anr.oun.'J::^ 12 r.ui.ii.: meeting in the Abbot's Tribunal to consider “a no-v; ^clieiiie i'.-r increasing the prestige of our ancient Town.” This puWJc reeling was announced for eight o'clock on the first of the month, and as a result of this choice of a date the word circulated ainor.2 the frivolous that the Mayor-elect was to address his fellow-citizens adorned with a f6oFs cap. It was characteristic of the man that in order to gather together his ideas for this momentous oration— the first that it was his destiny to deliver to the general public since those early street-corner harangues—he should make a private visit on the morning of April Fool's Dav to the recesses of Wookey Hole.
Intentionally or not Mr. Geard paid his sixpence at the gate of Wookey Hole at such an early hour that the person who received it was not Will Zoyland but Mr. Lamb, the landlord of the Zoy-land Arms, an individual who, though he had heard of the new Mayor of Glastonbury, had never set eyes on him, and had not, therefore, the least idea that he was admitting to his subterranean domain Philip's grand antagonist. Bloody Johnny had never, as it happened, visited the cavernous shrine of the Witch of Wookey since Philip had electrified the famous caves and it was an exciting experience for him to wTander down that illuminated pathway, watching the amazing metallic colours which these brilliant globes of light drew forth from the stalactites. He had the whole place to himself, a thing that Zoyland, when he was at the gate, always tried to avoid, being afraid of people losing then> selves, and also afraid of the intrusion of tin-mining agents from alien firms; but Mr. Lamb, naturally a very easy-going person, was not one to have his wits about him at nine in the morning. What he ought to have done was to make this early visitor sit down in the little shanty at the entrance and wait till more strangers arrived, before turning on the lights, but Mr. Geard got the full benefit, as he often did in the general drift of things, of this example of human negligence.
He descended slowly between the rows of stalactites till he came to the level floor in the biggest of the caverns where ran that tributary of the subterranean River Axe. Here he saw Philip's boat, pulled up on a shelving bank of sand and left exactly as it was when Persephone had stepped out of it. After a moment's hesitation, for he was no oarsman, Mr. Geard entered this boat, and with a good many blunderings and splashings, contrived at last to rowT himself to the strip of shingle beneath that huge array of phallic symbols over which the formidable stone image of the Witch of Wookey held her obscene vigil of immeasurable aeons. Here Bloody Johnny awkwardly disembarked, feeling, though he knew nothing of Dante, very much what that mediaeval Harrower of Hell felt, when he, still a man of flesh-and-blood, moved among the infernal wraiths. He advanced under the precipitous wall of the vast cavern, his feet sinking, as he walked, in the loose shingle of that Acherontic shore. Here he seated himself on a strip of dry sand and leaned his back against the wall of stone. He could not help wondering to himself what it would feel like if these electric lights were suddenly to be extinguished!
Staring into the face of that stone image, in that place lighted up by the science of his enemy, Mr. Geard found it easy enough to restore to Wookey Hole the thick, long darkness into which it had fallen after the last human tribe deserted it. It was out of the midst of this long darkness rather than in the new electric light that his nature nowT expanded. His large hands lay palms down, and with the fingers spread out, like two great, white starfish, on the shingle at both sides of him. No sign of life was there, no grass-blade, no insect, no bird. He was alone with the metallic elements out of which all organic entities are formed.
Mr. Geard was not good at concentrated thinking. His deepest thoughts always came to him, as the author of Faust declared his did, crying, like happy children, “Here we are!” and the result of this was that a brief half an hour spent in composing his speech for that night exhausted him far more than the most protracted physical exertion would have done. He found himself caught and, as it were, pilloried, in the repetition of certain particular phrases. This happened to him every time he deserted his vague, rich, semi-erotic feelings and tried to condense his scheme into a rational statement, and it became really troublesome when, with his eyes tightly closed, he set himself to call up that audience of people and to imagine their response to what he said. The thought of the audience and of this accursed appeal to reason =ee:.;ed t^ throw a thin dust of unpalatable sand over his whole* life-^umoae.
He continued to sit in the same position, with In? Angers uul-stretched on that subterranean shingle, and his eyes closed: but the rational effort his mind had begun to make broa^ht about him all the unpleasant aspects of his normal life. A certain little piece of lead-piping scrawled with a mark that always looked to him like a crocodile's snout, and which he invariably caught sight of from the window of the water-closet on the landing of Cardiff Villa, now presented itself before his closed eyes as he began to phrase his speech. A certain stair-rod that had got hopelessly loose and that caused a peculiar rumpling of the stair-carpet obtruded itself before his vision. A certain indescribable familiar-ity which hung about the old doormat at Cardiff Villa and the scraper—as if these things had been placed at his gate by the Evil One himself, especially to keep down the tempo of his mystical thoughts—came stealing over his mind. The painted metal cover of a certain matchbox which was kept on the dining-room mantelpiece and which always seemed to evoke the sterile aridity of hours of flat, spiritless repletion hove also in sight. Certain physical aspects of his wife and his elder daughter, certain tones of their voices, when they were least sympathetic to him, rushed pell-mell into his head. The gigantic phlegm of Mr. Geard and his massive, lumbering, lubberly passivity seemed to bring it about that these trifles adhered thus viciously to his memory, like burrs and prickles to the fur of some great drowsy beast. With what repulsive clearness too, as he went on struggling to formulate his ideas, a certain glittering and yet curiously insipid light appeared before his fast-shut eyes, the “two o'clock” and “three o'clock” light, falling on the galvanised-iron roof of the unused toolshed in his neglected garden!