Unknown (39 page)

“How do you mean, 'allowed,' ” said John.

“By the police, Mr. Evans means,” said Sam, “and by public opinion. You must remember, Crow, this is a Protestant country. You seem to have forgotten how they killed Abbot Whiting on this very hill.”

“I really meant by the Glastonbury people themselves,” explained Mr. Evans. “But it's true they let that devilish^ king kill their Abbot here.”

“He was a Welshman like you,” said John.

Mr. Evans surprised them by the depth of the sigh he gave at this point

iwWhat a sigh was there!*' quoted John. 'The heart k surely charged."

Mr. Evans sighed again.

''Whose is not?" he muttered.

Sam was now lost in heavy ponderings, as he stared at the brown-paper parcel containing Saint Augustine which he had tossed down on the grass when he began searching for that specimen of moss.

His was not a nature to be carried away by any sudden idea. The feelings that had been fomenting within him of late had onlv been stirred up. They had not been created by his passion for Nell. But the girl's having gone back to Zoyland's bed had been a shock to his deepest pride; and by his new gesture of complete renunciation he was, in some subtle way, recovering his threatened life-illusion.

As for Mr. Evans a most singular idea had just entered that Roman skull under the Jewish-comedian black hat. \Hiy should he himself not play the part of the Crucified in the blasphemous mummery of this mountebank?

In the agitation of this thought Mr. Evans actually took off his bowler hat and standing up on his feet stretched out his arms in the manner of a crucified person. That one of his hands held his hat while he did this was nothing to him. He was startled by the magnetic wave of emotion that poured through him as he made this sudden gesture.

Sam did not notice what he was doing. John thought he had got cramped and was stretching himself.

Mr. Evans let his arms drop and addressed John in an eager voice.

“I'll go over to your terrace, Crow,” he said, “and play the Crucified for you; so that you can see how it looks.”

John was delighted with this offer.

“Isn't.that splendid!” he cried in a high-pitched tone. “Bravo! That's the very idea! How decent of you, Evans! What a good thought!”

Sam regarded this transaction with a very uneasy eye. If he found it hard to say the Creed with the simplicity of his father, anything that smacked of blasphemy brought an evil taste into his mouth.

Mr. Evans walked up the hill till he reached the grassy terrace. This time he put down both his hat and his cane. He also buttoned up tightly his long black overcoat. In this guise he raised himself to his full height, flung back his head and stretched out his arms.

John leapt to his feet in an ecstasy.

“Wonderful! It's wonderful!” he cried. He came hurrying up to Mr. Evans.

“Seriously, Sir,” he blurted out, “you'll have to play Christ in my Pageant* You will! You will! You're not exactly the type . . . but that doesn't matter a bit. Oh, you will! You will! Why, you'll beat that Oberammergau person hollow.”

Mr. Evans picked up his hat and nondescript cane and advanced hurriedly to meet John. In his secret heart he was astonished and even puzzled by the feelings that again poured through him as he made the terrible symbolic gesture.

“I . . . don't . . . mind,” he panted in a hoarse voice. “Only you'll have to make it as real as you can.”

John regarded his friend through shrewd, screwed-up, meditative eyelids.

“Oh, we'll make it real enough,” he said. But he was too occupied with an imaginative picture of that future scene to care very much what he was promising Mr. Evans.

“Come on up to the top of the hill, you two, won't you?” he pleaded now.

“Can I leave this book here?” said Sam, looking first at Saint Augustine and then at Mr. Evans.

The Welshman surveyed the parcel which he had done up so carefully. He evidently remembered that it was worth twenty pounds.

“I'll carry it,” he said. “Boys might come. You never know.”

The fear of “boys” was one of Mr. Evans' peculiarities. In fact he was nervously scared of all children.

But Sam tucked the big parcel under his own arm.

“It's not heavy,” he said.

It must have been about thirty minutes after twelve when they all reached the top of the Tor. They survived the 93tat fiance to the hollow tower and John tapped with his stick at the boardings with which it had been closed up.

“Mayor Wollop had that done,” he remarked savagelv. w*01d Sheperd found a boy and girl making love inside; and that was enough for our precious procurator. Boarded up it must be; so that the king should not have to fight his enemies with bastards!'"

“Let's sit down for a minute,” said Sam.

They all obeyed him, sitting side by side on the grass, with their backs leaning against the western flank of the cold, slate-coloured base of the tower. Before them to the westward stretched the green water meadows, among which, a mile or so out of town, could be detected the wide Lake Village Fen and even the little shanty of Abel Twig; while to the southwest, beyond the fens, rose the blue-grey ridge of the low Polden hills. All these were softly suffused by the cloud-latticed vapour-filmed sun; a sun which, though riding at high noon, lacked the potency to dominate what it bathed with that glamorous and watery light.

Here under St. Michael's Tower sat these three figures, the lean shabby-genteel John, the hulking wreather-bleached Sam, the black-coated Mr. Evans—all atheists towards the life-giving Sun-God, and all expanding now, in their thoughts, their feelings, their secretest hopes, because of the victory of vapour over light and of dampness over heat!

A landscape of green and grey, a landscape with all hard outlines obliterated, was what just suited these three fantastical human beings. A common relaxation, a common inertia, a common languor descended upon them as they sat there, gazing down on that pastoral scene.

And as they sat there they each thought of a particular girl. They thought of these three feminine identities so intently that by the automatic preoccupation of their feelings the souls of all three girls were drawn towards them; three wraithlike eidola! Ah! How little da the feminine creatures of the human race realise what long journeys they are compelled to take • . . what long, rapid journeys . . . swifter than light ? . . under %the compulsive magic of their men's imaginations!

To the supernatural eyes of that veiled sun as he dreamed his indescribable planetary thoughts, vaguely hostile and vaguely menacing, one of these feminine forms came naked to the waist— that was Nell; one came naked from the thighs downward—that was Mary; and one came garmented like a nun, from head to foot in black—and that was Cordelia!

Together these three men represented—in Remorse, in Renunciation, in Roguery—everything that separates our race from nature. Their three intelligences floated there, on that hilltop, above their clothed and crouching skeletons, like wild demented birds that had escaped from all normal restraint.

Any student of ancient mythology might well have fancied that Gwyn-ap-Nud, with a host of his elementals, finding these three detached intelligences—Remorse, Renunciation, Roguery—separated from natural human life—had cast his immemorial spell over them; that oldest of supernatural spells against which St. Michael's aid had been so often implored in vain.

“What slaves we all are,” remarked Mr. Evans suddenly, “to traditional ideas! People say we ought to be always admiring Nature. God help me! There are endless occasions when I loathe Nature. I think the truth is that God is outside Nature . . . altogether outside . . . creator of it . . . but often loathing it as much as I do! I feel sometimes that Matter is entirely evil . . . and that to cleanse our minds we must destroy its power . . . destroy ... its power.”

He repeated these last words in his most serious tone; that tone which John had noticed when they first met; that tone in which each word seemed torn out of him like the deep-burrowing dock root.

Sam's hulking form swayed like a gnarled thorn bush in a high wind.

“I protest against what you've just said, Evans, with every instinct I have! That's the essence of the Incarnation . . . that's the . . .”

He had become so excited that without knowing what he did he was plucking great handfuls of the turf-grass from between his huge thick-soled boots.

“That's what they really killed the Abbot for,” he went on, “because he wouldn't let anything come between him and It. It's the secret. It's where the most commonplace Christians can efute the greatest sages. Matter must be redeemed: and only Christ can redeem it. Christ, I say; not Jesus. Verbum caro fac-um est. Your making Matter evil undoes the whole thing. It's he Incarnation that transforms Nature. It has been done once. Nothing can reverse it. Something has come into it from outside; rom that Outside you talk about. But It's in it now! You can't *et rid of it. The simplest person has an instinct about this, wiser han the greatest philosophers. Something has taken up Matter nto Itself. Two and two can now make five! It's the Thing Out-ide breaking into our closed circle. And every atom of Matter eels it. Matter is no longer separate from Spirit. It has become he living flesh of Spirit. Verbum caro factum est!”

Sam stopped. He gazed with confused surprise at the little veeds he had grubbed up in his agitation. He began planting hem again in the hole he had made. He squeezed them into the fielding sod. He pressed them down with his strong thumbs; vhile his retreating chin, with all its quivering muscles, seemed o echo his discourse, in a mute ripple of the Matter whose re-lemption he had been defending.

John regarded him with intense curiosity, as if he had been Balaam's ass suddenly endowed with the gift of speech. “I sup->ose,” John said, “you would call the Mass this kind of miracle?”

Sam's reply to this was a vague groan.

“Maybe you're right,” he muttered. “Maybe you're right.”

“I suppose,” said John to Sam, “you don?t want to come to our ehearsals of the Miracle Play? The chap I'd meant for the cen-ral figure will be glad enough to give it up to Evans. Shall I nake the lad who is doing St. Peter, hand that part over to you?”

Sam felt at that moment as if he were a child whose secretest ind most private game, a game he'd never revealed to a living soul, had become the sport of a noisy dormitory of jeering boys. -le lowered his freckled face and drew down the corners of his nouth. Three times he swallowed his saliva; and then he said vith a forced unnatural chuckle, “I'll pay the entrance-fee and ;ome and see your Circus, Crow. But nothing you could give me, lothing; not all the fortune of your Rector of Northwold, would nake me take part in it.”

“Oh, don't say that, Dekker! What makes you say that?”

“We'll . . . call . . . it . . . shyness . . . Crow,” said Sam slowly, but in a tone that was decisive.

“Well, gentlemen,” said Mr. Evans rising to his feet, “I'm afraid I must get back to my shop! There's always a chance of visitors after lunch and it's half-past one already.”

“Don't you have lunch yourself, then?” enquired John. “I was just going to suggest that we all have lunch together at that little tea-shop in George Street------”

Mr. Evans pondered. He felt very hungry and there was nothing in his larder except half a roll and a small piece of butter.

Sam had felt so restless that morning that he had told his father not to expect him back to their mid-day dinner. If he hadn't found Mr. Evans in his shop he would have probably gone ofi on a long solitary walk—perhaps in the direction of Queen's Sedgemoor and perhaps not.

He got up slowly upon his feet, as also did John. They were all three erect now under the tower of St. Michael; that same tower against which the murderous Tudor's executioners had leaned as they prepared for butchering Abbot Whiting.

Sam spoke up boldly.

“You two have given me so much to ... to think about . . . that I . . . that I shall . . . have to walk off ... my excitement. I wonder . . .” he hesitated for a second with bowed head and working chin. Then his words came out with a rush. “... I wonder if you'd mind leaving this book at the Vicarage as you go by?”

There was no difficulty thrown in Sam's way by either Mr. Evans or John, and he strode off alone down St. Michael's Hill. In order to leave them abruptly while it was easy for him to do so", he descended the Tor by its eastern slope. He had indeed stated no less than the exact truth when he said he wanted to walk off his excitement.

His gaze swept the countryside as he climbed down into the valley. He glanced at Pennard Hill and Folly Wood and at the fields and hedges round Stony Stratton. He glanced at the low-lying downs near Chesterblade; and thought to himself—“That's the source of the Alham; and where the Alham runs into the Brue is only a mile south of Hornblotton.”

Thus was the little river Alham compelled to be the bearer of a lover's memory. For it was at Hornblotton that Sam had ridden with Nell when at that circus, so fatally remembered by Pennv Pitches, he had taken her on the roundabout.

When he reached the valley he struck across country heedless as to lanes or paths. His instinct for geography was only second to that of his father; and it was easy for him by following the meadows beyond the town-reservoir, between Norwood Farm and Havyatt, to reach the village of West Pennard without touching any road. Here he turned due north; and still crossing every hedge and ditch with the same animal-like straightness of direction, he made his way over Hearty Moor, across the tracks of the Burnham and Evercreech railroad, till he came to Whitelake River at Whitelake Bridge.

This he reached when the watch in his pocket pointed at seventeen minutes past three. He had no idea what the time was. In fact he did not give the matter a thought. His thoughts followed one another like horses round a treadmill. Anyone reading his thoughts, and contemplating the motion of the hands of his watch in his pocket might have been tempted to an extremely deterministic view of life. The mainspring in the one case was made of metal, and the other case made of the brutish sting of desire; but there was in both cases the same monotonous revolution around predetermined figures of demarcation.