Unknown (94 page)

Those queer analytic elementals, those inquisitive naturalists lhat very old places, full of contorted human history, attract by a species of spontaneous selection, must have derived a malignant pleasure from the words they heard spoken by Monsieur Cap-porelli when both the protagonists of the Passion had disappeared with Dr. Fell. In true French style, reducing every mortal human feeling to a rigid pattern of logical amorousness, the famous clown had uttered to Ned Athling words full of an ironic and blasphemous amusement when the unconscious King of the Jews and his blue-robed Mother had vanished together to the hospital. A touch of jealousy may have mingled, too, with his sly tone, for Capporelli had been really and truly caught by Percy's slender hips and her graceless tomboy humour. “An engaging situation,” the clown had remarked, as he was changing his clothes in the gentlemen's portion of the eastward-facing pavilion, “and a very piquant one, for those two, it's been, we may be sure, ever since they hoisted him up.”

The Middlezoy poet turned upon the laughing brown eyes of the speaker a pair of blue-grey eyes more chilly-cold than the wettest sea-fog that comes up out of Bridgewater Bay. “Do you think so?” he remarked. “It was lucky she had her car so near/1 Capporelli fixed a sentimental and whimsical eye upon the spot where he had been so happy with Percy. ”Who knows?“ he sighed* ”You people are all so peculiar and so—inhuman that it is difficult to say!"

The elementals of Glastonbury—those naturalists that had hovered over the vaporous humours of three thousand years of criss-cross human tangles—must have howled with laughter when they heard this clever Frenchman “explain,” in accents dry and logical, the relations between Mr. Owen Evans and Mrs. Persephone Spear.

Mr. Evans had, as a matter of fact, been caught up into a region of feeling utterly beyond the comprehension of any Latin or any Teutonic mind. This had gone on since he stood before Pilate until the moment when he shouted “Eloi, Eloi!” It was not, as St. Paul has put it so well—he the one among them all who would really have understood Mr. Evans—it was not with flesh and blood that he was contending, but with mysterious powers of evil upon levels revealed to few. No equivocal perversity gratified by divining the feelings of Persephone entered for a second into the terrible visions with which, as he hung between heaven and earth, his mind was bruised and broken. The perverse girl had detected, as Cordelia never could have done, the quality of Mr. Evans' feelings, but what she had no idea of was the tragic lengths to which he had carried them. The physical pain he suffered before he shouted that “Eloi! Eloi!” was more acute than he had ever dreamed of undergoing. Both Athling and the Dub-liners were to blame, and indeed still more so was John, for not insisting on Dr. Fell—they could have had confidence in him— being present at one of their rehearsals. Evans had suffered, but not acutely suffered, at these rehearsals, and what he had en* dured he had kept to himself, for it was what he wanted. It was the prolongation of the scene—drawn out so foolishly by that luckless Dance of Death of the two Marys—that had brought about his collapse, and it was the strain on his arms, bound too tightly by those ropes, and the tension of the*muscles of his shoulders, stretched between the cross-bars, thai had caused him such anguish. But not since the bloody King put the last Abbot of Glastonbury to death had such physical pain been experienced by anyone upon the slopes of Gwyn-ap-Nud's hill. But it would be a mistake to say that the spirit of Mr. Evans yielded, or weakened, or regretted his undertaking. Right up to the end. till bv straining his torso to the breaking-point he lost consciousness, he not only endured this anguish but he exulted in enduring it. His exultation kept mounting and mounting—extreme pain and ecstatic triumph embracing each other in dark mystic copulation. Mr. Evans became indeed Three Persons as he hung on his self-imposed cross. One person was his body, another was his soul. He felt his soul—or rather his soul felt itself—to be entirely outside of his body. This phenomenon was to him, as he hung alone there, looking down on that vast crowd, as much of a definite, concrete experience as the pain itself. The pain became a Third Person, and the soul of Mr. Evans kept urging on the pain. He felt as if that crowd beneath him was the whole human race and that by the transaction that was now proceeding between these Three Persons, thus suspended in the air above them, this crowd, an immense animal passivity, was in some way re-created, purged, cleansed, transformed. His body, as the pain increased— as his soul deliberately caused the pain to increase—began to overbrim the confines of its human shape. His body projected itself under the pain in great waves of filmy chemical substance. It flung forth this filmy substance in streams, in torrents, in a mighty, rushing rain! And then there arrived a moment when Mr. Evans knew that his body was the whole hill, the whole field, nay! the whole wide-stretching landscape. Into this landscape, into this earth-bulk that was his body, his soul kept driving the pain, compelling it to bury itself deeper and deeper into this living mass. This continued till his body became more than the mere immediate landscape. It became the whole round earth, swinging on its orbit through space. And above this earth-body hung the master-spirit of Mr. Evans still driving the pain on. He was the Zeus and Prometheus and the Vulture—all three linked indestructibly together! And all the while a triumphant ecstasy poured down from him like a bloody sweat

Nor must it be supposed that Mr. Evans' rational mind—that portion of his consciousness that indulged its activity apart from pain or pleasure—was paralysed all this while. Those two manners, which John Crow had noted as long ago as their encounter at Stonehenge as peculiar to the man, were not superficial. They represented the workings of his deepest nature. His pedantry as people called it, was as much heightened by his present suffering as was his imagination. As other men visualise their past lives at the moment of drowning, so Mr. Evans, in the midst of his anguish,—even while he identified the substance of his flesh with the whole round earth from which it was projected—was intensely aware of the peculiar history of the spot beneath him. The pain he endured turned his pedantic acquisitiveness into a living medium, acutely sensitive, quiveringly receptive, through which the whole history of Glastonbury began to pour.

Glastonbury seemed to have waited for the sacrifice of Mr. Evans to exhale upon the air its darkest and most terrible secrets. That no one heard these secrets, except the man himself who was the medium for them, mattered nothing to these singular rev-enants. They found Mr. Evans' anguished entity suspended above the soil of that historic spot and they seized upon it, just as a horde of wild and gusty winds, blown here, blown there, might seize upon an ^olian harp hung aloft in a lonely place. Thus it came about that another Pageant,—much more grim and much less romantic than the one that had been played that day—passed through Mr. Evans' brain. Kings and Prelates, Saints and Sodomites, Madmen and Monks, Whores and Nuns, People Executed and People Imprisoned, together with a woeful procession of common, nameless People upon whose toil and hunger others lived, streamed in a wild torrent of heads and faces and arms and limbs through the tormented consciousness of Mr. Evans. And the crowd was not only human! There lay one of the worst horrors of it Mingled with the human torrent were other living things, animals, birds, and even fish. All the eyes that in the long history of this place had looked in vain into those of the killer— all these tormented eyes gathered now about Mr. Evans! And it was all connected with his deadly, his irremediable vice. The figures that flooded his brain were all torturers or victims, every one of them; and as the thing grew and grew upon him. as he hung there, all the victims flowed into one and became one, and «Tl the torturers flowed into one and became one. Then it came about that between Mr. Evans as the torturer and this one victim, who yet was all victims, a dialogue arose; so that from their divided localities in space they addressed each other, and from their horrible association in time they answered each other.

“Forgiveness for you” cried this voice, rising from all the victims of Glastonbury since the tribes of men had first come there, “can never, never be. For you did this thing, and went on doing it, knotting ichat it meant! Others tortured me from brutality, from insensitiveness, from stupidity. You and those who were like you did it, knowing what it meant. It was that knowledge, knowing what I felt, and yet not stopping, that has made forgiveness impossible.”

The terror of the voice made Mr. Evans feel, like a thing that twisted on the floor of the Pit and yet out of the smoke of his torment he uttered a reply. “In Eternity we are as one!” he cried hoarsely. There was a silence for a moment or—so it seemed to him, as he hung there—for a thousand years.

Then the voice was lifted up again. “Never can we be as one! I have looked into your eyes and you did not stop. Each moment you went on made the difference greater. It can never be crossed now. It is a gulf in eternity now. You could not hear me if I did forgive you.”

And once more as he heaved himself to and fro he replied to the voice. “Christ can forgive me. Christ holds eternity in His hand.” And again there was a silence of a thousand years, “I am Christ!” cried the voice, in a tone that made the flesh wrinkle like blown sand upon Mr. Evans' bones. “Every victim, whether you've done it for your science or your ambition or your religion or your lust; whether it be a beaten prisoner, a trapped beast, a dog strapped down for vivisection, a racked heretic, a burnt Negro, a tortured child, is I; yes, is I myself! And you are right when you say that I hold Eternity in my hand! These voices come, these voices that are my voice! Can you gather them up, these victims of yours, these tortured, hunted, trapped victims, by their thousands upon thousands? Can you gather them up where you have crucified them? Can you cause the earth to yield again to you their black blood? Can you cause the air to return to you their pitiful cries? I have heard tht voices of men—yes! and of wise men too—how they have said, 'All is equal, all is permitted.' It is I and none other—I, the Christ—who speak thus to you from Eternity, and I say unto you 'All is not equal! All is not permitted!' ”

Even yet, even after hearing these things—such power hath the spirit of a mortal creature to fight for its life—Mr. Evans was still able to reply to the voice. “I could not answer you,” he murmured hoarsely, “if I were not answering you from the Cross.”

“You forget what you have done,” went on the voice, and it was like the voice of the wind over the sea. “You forget! You forget!”

Mr. Evans' tone had a terrible veracity now. “Is it you who say that to me?” he cried out. “No! No! Christ or Devil, you are wrong there! Never have you let me forget, never for one moment!” And it was then that the voice became a vast anonymous voice, gathered up, it seemed, from so much suffering in the world as to be rendered almost inarticulate! It came to Mr. Evans' ears out of the gills of fishes, out of the gullets of beasts, out of the shards of insects, out of the throats of birds, out of the wounded coils of slowworms, out of prisons, out of hospitals, out of madhouses and domestic torture-rooms, and as it rose and sank, as it sank and rose, it accused Man—man the cruel, man the blood-fiend, man the voluptuous tormentor, man the rejoicer in pain, man the inventor of pain, man the pain-begetter, the pain-eater, the pain-drinker, the pain-devil! And from the abysses of Mr. Evans' consciousness leaped up into the day, like an eel, out of fathomless mud, a question for the crucified Man-God. "So evil, so cruel, so base, 0 Lord, are the generations of men, why dost Thou seek to redeem them with Thy suffering? Why dost Thou not cause a flood to arise—as at the beginning—and drown forever their itching, biting, stinging, scorpion-lusts in smooth, deep fathoms of oblivious water?**

And the voice replied to him again and it was now so low and yet so searching that it was like a wind stirring the horns of snails and touching the hairs in the throats of night-jars, and moving the antennae of butterflies, and lifting the gold-dust from the cracks of puff-balls, and blowing the gre\ dust from the droppings of weasels, and rippling the brown rain-fall in the cups of fungi, and fretting the light scurf on the brittle skulls of the newborn, and the rheum-drops on the eyelids of extreme ase. and the sweat-drops on the forehead of death. And the voice wrhispered—“For those that are forgiven there shall be a new heaven and a new earth!” And Mr. Evans groaned forth his retort to this: “But what of those that cannot be forgiven? Is that new heaven and that new earth built upon the Golgotha of the Second Death?” The voice at this became so low that the ears of the man, clairaudient as he was through his suffering, could not distinguish words.

“It is God and He is lying to me,” thought Mr. Evans. *:He is lying to me. People lie to the condemned for whom there is no hope."

And Mr. Evans hanging there in his great anguish hardened his heart against the voice. “We are alone,”5 his soul whispered to his body and to the pain that he was inflicting on his body. “They have left us quite alone.”

And it wTas then that he lost consciousness. This was what only one person afterwards would believe when he told them about it, namely, that he had no recollection of shouting with a great shout that “Eloi! Eloi!” w7hich brought the blood from his mouth.

Cordelia would not believe it, nor wTouid Persephone, nor would John, nor would Mr. Barter, nor would Aunt Laura, the matron of the ward where he “came presently”—as the ironic human phrase runs—“to himself.*” The only person who believed it was Mr. Geard; and the extraordinary thing was, when, a couple of weeks after, the Mayor of Glastonbury was visiting him in the hospital, and he was telling him about this, such must have been the heat of the day, or the distressing sights in that particular ward, that Mr. Geard, after accepting his account without question, fainted dead away!

IDOLATRY

It was now already two whole months since the Pageant: and the ebbings and Sowings of Glastonbury lives were proceeding under a scorching mid-August sun.