Unknown (21 page)

“Father! you must stop that rubbing!” he suddenly cried out. “When a thing is clean, it is clean. It's no good going on and on like that!”

Mat Dekker stopped what he was doing at once and began putting the sacred vessels away.

“True enough, Sammy,” he said with a sigh. “The truth is I was thinking of something else.” He closed the cupboard, turned out the gas-jet, and they both emerged into the body of the church. It now became necessary to communicate to the worshippers at St. Joseph's vacant coffin that they were about to lock up the church. They moved to the door and the father held it open while the son crossed the aisle.

Since their appearance on the scene the two intruders had contented themselves with a whispered conversation. They had not dared to strike any more matches.

“Pardon me, gentlemen,” said Sam, “my father wants to lock up the church.”

The man upon his knees struggled stiffly to his feet, emitting a little groan as his bones creaked. They neither of them spoke a word, but began following their dismisser meekly and humbly to the church door. With a mute bow Mat Dekker indicated to them his gratitude for this obedience and moved aside to let them pass out. It was such a dark night that although he thought he had seen both the men before he could not recall their names. When the key was turned and the empty sarcophagus of the Arimathean was once more left alone with that Presence under the red lamp, the father and son followed the strangers down the flagged path, past the miraculous thorn bush, to the gate into the street. Here there was a suspended gas-globe, and here the strangers turned, revealing the black bowler hat and hooked Roman nose of Mr. Owen Evans, and a broad-shouldered, rather fleshy individual, without any hat, whose grizzled head under that suspended light seemed to Sam the largest human head he had ever seen. It was the head of a hydrocephalic dwarf; but in other respects its owner was not dwarfish. In other respects its owner had the normally plump, rather unpleasantly plump figure of any well-to-do-man, whose back has never been bent nor his muscles hardened by the diurnal heroism of manual labour.

“How do you do, Mr. Dekker? How do you do, Mr. Sam Dekker?” The Welshman threw into these words all the Ciceronian ceremoniousness of what John Crow called his “first manner.” “I know you two gentlemen, though you don't know me,” Owen Evans went on, “but of course you know my relative, Mr. Geard.”

Both father and son looked at “my relative, Mr. Geard,” with unashamed curiosity. It gave them both indeed a queer sensation to shake hands with this ambiguous person under the gas-lamp in that silent street; for although Mr. Geard's visits to Glastonbury had been few since he had left his family and gone to North-wold, all the air had been recently vibrant with gossip about him. The money that his employer had left him had been doubled and trebled by such gossip. Wherever, since his return, his bare hydrocephalic head had appeared, the envious feeling and the wondering awe had arisen. “There goes a very rich man!” Mr. Geard had become in fact a local celebrity, a fairy-slory hero; and the rumours about his purchase of Chalice House, vne of the famous show-places of the town, had kept alive a romantic interest, which, if the man had left the vicinity, would have soon died down.

“Of course we've heard of Mr. Geard/' said the elder Dekker politely, ”and we met only today, at Miss Drew's, a very interesting young man, who told us that he was a friend of vours, Mr. Evans."

“I must not keep you, gentlemen, for I know it's late,” went on the Roman-faced Welshman, “but I would like to hear vkich side you'd take in a dispute Mr. Geard and I have been having, under the aegis of St. Joseph.”

“I'd like to hear about it very much, Mr. Evans,” said Mat Dekker. “Won't you walk a step with us? For ! am a little afraid that our housekeeper will be getting anxious about us”

“Well . . . perhaps. . . .” murmured the Welshman, hesitating and glancing at his companion, “perhaps my relative, Mr. Geard, is feeling tired.”

But they all four set themselves in motion in the direction of the Vicarage; and it was not long before they reached the mediaeval front of the Pilgrims' Inn. Although the rest of the street was quiet, there were lights and the sound of raised voices inside the mullioned windows of this old building.

“I was trying,” said Mr. Evans, “to convince my relative that the fact that so many visitors come to this spot from all over the world is no proof that it is miraculous; but it is a proof that something important can at any moment occur.”

“Occur where?” enquired Mr. Dekker.

“In the mind!” cried the Welshman, raising his hand to his head and giving his bowler hat such a violent jerk downward that its brim rested on the bridge of his great nose.

Very gravely, as they all four stood still upon the illuminated pavement outside the ancient inn, Mat Dekker extended his hand to this bowler-hatted oracle.

“Good-night, Mr. Evans,” he said. “We won't take you further, but it interests me profoundly that you should make that remark, because ifs what I've been feeling for several years. I associate it myself, as I told them just now at Whitelake, with the conquest of the air; but as you------” Mr. Evans did not let

him finish the sentence. He had already taken the priest's hand and was shaking it vigorously; but he dropped it now as if it had hurt him.

“The air?” he murmured gloomily. “Did you say the air?” And pushing hack the brim of his hat, as if it had been a visor, he snuffed with angry nostrils at the element referred to. “No, Mr. Dekker, no! What I was referring to was the mind. When the mind is clean, the change we are looking for will come. It's to clean the mind, Mr. Dekker; to purge it, to wash it, to give it a New Birth, that all these people”—he removed his hat altogether now and waved it, without finishing his sentence, towards the illuminated windows.

“You do see a little what I mean?” he added then, addressing the enormous cranium of Mr. Geard.

But the beneficiary of William Crow's fortune was engaged just then in a private quest of his own. He had advanced cau-:iously towards one of the lighted windows and was peering in. His air was so exactly the air of an inquisitive servant, gazing -vith aloofness and yet respectful curiosity at a remote revel of lis masters that Sam was betrayed into a jest.

“Are they behaving decently or indecently in there, Mr. 3eard?”

The Canon's friend swung round upon his heel and surveyed he young man. The lad was astonished at the look of affectionate reproach on his large face. Had Sam been an impertinent young Sadducee addressing an insolent remark to some great Rabbi ihose Holy Innocence confounded him, he could hardly have felt aore ashamed of himself and more of a flippant fool than he did :t that moment. Mr. Geard, however, made no audible reply to these rude words. It was the descendant of the House of Rhys did answered for both of them as they all nodded a final good-night.

“My relative, Mr. Geard,” he said, “intends to bring a great many people to Glastonbury . . . more than have come since . . since the time of the Druids . . . and we must pray that all who come will he allowed to . . . to wash . . . their minds clean!”

These singular words, spoken in Mr. Evans' second manner, kept repeating themselves inside the hollow skulls of all his three listeners, as they walked silently home to their different pillows. When Mr. Evans took out his latch-key and let himself into his little Antique Shop, he was disturbed by a particular sadistic image that he had not been troubled by since he saw John Crow embrace the Hele Stone at Stonehenge. This image was concerned with a killing blow delivered by an iron bar. Mechanically he closed the street door; mechanically he lit a candle; mechanically he met the marble gaze of an alabaster bust of Dante; mechanically he ascended the flight of narrow stairs to his bedroom above. Once in his chamber it was with the same automatic movement that he laid the flickering candle down on a rosewood chest of drawers and clicking open the stiff latch of the casement gazed out into the empty street. He saw nothing of the massive chimney across the way. He saw nothing of the carved Gothic doorways. He caught no floating essences of diffused sweetness from the beds of jonquils in the little gardens beyond these houses. The mystical breath of sleep rising from the summit of the Tor and from the pinnacles of Saint John's Church and from the broken cornices of the ruined Abbey arches passed him by untouched. One single image of homicidal violence, at once a torment of remorse and a living temptation, wiped out completely all these impressions.

Had the soul of that planet of love which had done so much that night for Nell Zoyland been made aware of this figure of a lean, hook-nosed man at a window, with a bowler hat upon an unmade bed behind him, what would its attitude to such a one have been?

“He has taken my own violence of ravishment, natural and passionate and sweet,” that planet might have thought, “and has turned it into a crime against nature and against life. Never can he be forgiven!”

But long after that star of the west went down behind Brent Knoll, Mr. Evans' tormented murmur floated out over the Glas-tonbury roofs—“If only I could see it once ... just once . . . with my own eyes . . . what Merlin hid . . . what Joseph found . . . the Cauldron of Yr Echwyd ... the undying grail . . . this madness would pass from me . . . but . . . but . . .”

He craned his neck out of the window, pressing the palms of his hands upon the sill. His pose was grotesque. It was as if he were about to address a crowd assembled on the opposite roof.

“But,” Mr. Evans screamed in his twanging, quivering, twitching nerves; and although no sound but a lamentable sigh passed his open lips it would have been hard for anyone watching him not to believe he was shouting, "but . . . but ? . . I . . . don't o o . went , , , to see it!

THE LOOK OF A SAINT

John Geard lived in a house in Street Road, a road branching westward out of Magdalene Street which itself lies to the west of the Abbey Ruins. In their old sewing-room at the top of their father's ramshackle brick house—a building which seemed completely unaware of the unexpected riches of its owner—there were talking eagerly together, one mid-March day, and with intense absorption in what they were saying, Mr. Geard's two daughters, Cordelia and Crummie. These were “the great sprawling girls” to whom Philip Crow had made such contemptuous reference at the Northwold tea-table.

The sewing-room where they were talking was also Crummie"s bedroom, and Crummie, the younger of the two, ivas certainly, at that moment, answering Philip's description. She was lying on her back in the bed, her fair, wavy hair disordered, her violet-coloured eyes full of sleepy petulance, her skirts rumpled, her skin showing white between her drawers and her stockings, her slippered feet kicking peevishly the already crumpled coverlet of the bed.

Cordelia, on the other hand, was in no sort of way fulfilling Philip's unkind picture. A very plain, very dark girl, with nothing lovable in her face except an occasional smile of melancholy amusement and wistful indulgence, and with a thin, awkward, bony figure, Cordelia Geard was an unsympathetic critic of her father, a practical support to her mother, and at once the adviser and the confidante of her lively sister. At the present moment she was sitting bolt upright in front of a little working-table engaged on a piece of embroidery.

“I'm not indiscriminate! How dare you call me indiscriminate, Cordy!”

“Do you want me to count them all for you?”

“I'm talking about, now, now, now!” cried Crummie. “There's only Mr. Barter and Red Robinson now. And Red is afraid of me now we are supposed to be rich; so he doesn't count I”

“If by 'now,' you mean since we got rich,” said Cordelia gravely, “I believe Mr. Barter would marry you tomorrow if you'd have him.”

Crummie toyed coquettishly with her skirt; and then began caressing, with the conscious narcissim of a girl inordinately proud of her legs, the soft flesh above one of her knees. “I'd like to marry Mr. Barter—in a way,” she said meditatively.

Cordelia shook her head. “He would never be faithful to you. He's too indiscriminate himself.”

“I hate the way you say that—every time,” protested Crummie. “I could keep him faithful, you'd see! He's never lived with me. So he doesn't know.”

“If he's never lived with you, you've never lived with him. You'd find it horrid, Crummie, when he wrent off with other girls!”

“What about you yourself?” retorted Crummie. "You know perfectly well what Mr. Evans said the other night to Mother about your being what he calls 'Cymric.' Cordelia dug her needle into her work and sat up very straight. Her pale cheeks had flushed a little.

“I told you last night, Crummie,” she flung out, "I won't hear anything more about Mr. Evans! Mr. Evans is Dad's friend and it's not right to make fun of him.'*'

Crummie removed her soft hand from her satiny flesh and pulled down her skirt with an abrupt jerk. She was a good-natured girl and next to her own rounded limbs she loved Cordy better than anything in the world. But she adored chattering about men; and for Cordelia to rule out of court as a topic for gossip any living man was an annoyance and a vexation.

“You've never stopped me before,” said Crummie. “We always discuss Dad's friends. Besides, Owen Evans isn't Dad's friend. He's a cousin of Mother's. He's our cousin—so I can say anything about him I like.”

Cordelia bit her lip. She felt at that moment that the one thing she could not bear was that her sister should draw her into a discussion of the only man who had ever—in all her virginal life of thirty years—taken any real notice of her. If Crummie loved Cordelia, the elder girl's devotion to Crummie knew no bounds. Megan Geard, their mother, was a reticent woman, even with her children. She wTas uniformly cold to both and the girls had long ago decided that in her heart she was dissatisfied because neither of them was a boy.

“What . . . I . . . think . . . zs,” went on Crummie, Svhat . . . I . . . think . . . is that Mr. Evans and you-------"

“Don't!” cried Cordelia. “I won't have you say it!”

“Well ... if I mustn't say . . . you know what,” went on Crummie obstinately; “at least I can say that I think Dad is fonder of Mr. Evans than Mummy is. I believe Mummy thinks that Mr. Evans is after your-------”