We went through the same incompetent search for the end of the flex, which we were too dizzy with hunger and fatigue to find. At last we had it. In half an hour we were back in the lit passage. We were still alive. We shivered a little less in fresh, dry coats. That was all. There was no sign that anyone had opened the hatch.
Turning off the light to save the batteries, we tried to sleep. I suppose we did, for I remember feeling suddenly stiff, sore and immovable. When I groaned, Fosworthy groped his way to the light switch, audibly limping. I think he had long been lying quite still and awake. My watch read half past seven, but I was no longer certain whether we had been underground for thirty hours or forty-two.
‘I have been considering your future after you have dissolved,’ he said placidly. ‘Come with me! It will help you.’
The pools of dim, white light in the passage were as depressing as darkness. That crude illumination of silent rock emphasised the pitiless inhumanity of the place. As Fosworthy led me on towards the blocked entrance I reminded myself severely that we had not been long enough without food to be exhausted, and that if I had been in the outer world I should have recognised my physical distress as due to nothing but frantic activity. Consequently I began to feel that dissolution was a lot less imminent.
We came to the horizontal cleft on the right of the path, outside which was the last of the lights. Fosworthy stooped, entered and felt for a switch. Two soft floodlights at ground level and one powerful reflector overhead lit up the wearisome, eternal limestone. I could not imagine why so much trouble had been taken in a cave which was not at all remarkable except for an overhang of smooth rock like the initial curve of a dome and another irregular slope at an angle of about sixty degrees to the floor.
Then I made out the mammoth, vividly drawn in a rust-red pigment, and I swear that my first impression was not of the physical form of the animal, but of its bearing, its mood. In spite of the spears stuck in flanks and belly, it was unaggressive. It was melancholy in the moment of death, almost trusting. It received. One could well imagine that it forgave.
At first I paid no attention to the animated black lines around it and turned to the floodlit overhang covered with beasts, sometimes in groups deliberately composed, sometimes overlying each other where bosses of rock had tempted the artist into bas-relief. There were deer, bison and horses and some strange sitting creature with short, beseeching forepaws which could have been—if the painter preserved his scale—a very large squirrel or some kind of sloth. The short ears proved that it was not rabbit or hare.
The paintings were covered by the thin glaze of the limestone walls which had preserved them like the glass over a picture. A better geologist than I, who knew how long it took to form a millimetre of the deposit, could probably date the paintings within a thousand years. They belonged to the same tradition as the art of Altamira, Lascaux and the Pyrenean caves, yet were livelier and perhaps less delicate. Movement and expression were what the artist was after, just as in the prehistoric picture galleries of the Spanish caves. But, unlike his southern contemporaries, this animal lover—was he hunter, priest or gourmet?—did not leave out human beings though he drew them conventionally, with no attempt at the tender realism of the animals. A lively little black figure with angular lines for arms and legs was good enough for a man.
‘Now you understand,’ Fosworthy said. ‘They believed that in my distress I had told you, and that you had lent me money so that I could go into hiding and keep quiet.’
I did understand. Buy your hotel, buy up any land available for the hot-dog stands, the motor-coach parks and the souvenir shops, and when all is safely in the bag, send a postcard to the British Museum! No wonder Aviston-Tresco was confident that I would give nothing away to the police until I had completed my plans! The cave system—that and that alone—had puzzled me as a motive for so much desperation, since it was on Jedder’s land and he could control access as he liked. But this was a possession for the whole world. It would and ought to become a place of pilgrimage.
All the same, I could only stare at Fosworthy’s agitation. People were certainly going to make a lot of undeserved money when the secret was out. But what about it?
‘It is not the paintings themselves,’ he said. ‘It is their profound religious significance.’
This was what Dunton had got hold of. He knew the beliefs from one or more patients; he knew, as many other local inhabitants must have, of meetings; he knew of the Apology for giving death, of the fellowship with animals and the seemingly inconsistent obsession with hunting. But he had not the faintest suspicion that the small sect preserved an objective secret.
‘So this is what started you off?’
‘No, no!’ Fosworthy exclaimed as if I had doubted his power to think independently. ‘Our group had been in existence for some years. Many of us were impressed by the Quakers who are influential in this part of the county. Excellent people, but too easily content!’
He meant, I suppose, the same criticism as when he described Dunton as limited. Nobody could be more sane and healthy than Quakers; but I can well see that the mystics and eccentrics still inseparable for the Isle of Glass might find the admirable influence of the Friends too simple for them.
I gathered that Fosworthy, the Bank Manager and a handful of others had formed a mild vegetarian circle which used to contemplate the Unity of Life. That was the start. I wish I had listened more patiently; but when his eyes began to shine and his gestures to be too emphatic, I could only see the abnormality.
‘Who found the cave?’ I asked.
‘Miss Filk. Her wretched Dobermans put up a fox which went to ground under a rock. Jedder, who is a keen rider to hounds, visited the place a week later to stop the earth, as I believe it is called, and made his way inside. He kept quiet about it. He saw it as a mere curiosity which he would not allow to disturb his life. Another man would have thought only of the admission fees. But Alan Jedder looks inward.’
I was about to say that he wouldn’t much like what he saw. But he probably did. No doubt he congratulated himself, like the rest of us, on being an individual of wonderful potentialities.
‘Then one day, exploring alone, he found the paintings. He invited Aviston-Tresco and myself to see them. We all realised very soon that here was the synthesis we sought.’
The earnestness of the synthesis went on and on and I tried to take it in—since Aviston-Tresco’s opinions were responsible for my almost certain death—while mind and eyes were day-dreaming among the lovely simplicities of human life twenty-five thousand years ago. I could see how the dying mammoth might stir the imagination of our crowded world in which an animal is a pet or a potential carcass. The recognition between hunter and hunted of the divinity in each is lost to us.
Then the lights went out. I could not think for fear. After a few seconds they came on again. I thanked God, and tried to reconstruct causes, all unlikely, of a breakdown in so elementary a system. They went out again, and stayed out.
‘I told you he would look for me,’ Fosworthy said.
I hoped he was right and that someone had come down through the hatch and switched off the lights to immobilise us, if either of us were alive. Assuming that a fuse had gone, we had no hope of ever finding our way back along the passage. In theory it could be done by feeling for the wires, but I doubted if that would be possible in practice; there were too many openings and obstacles where the line was overhead and out of reach. In darkness the passage was merely a random route, undiscoverable except by chance. Turn round twice and that was the end.
‘Where will he look?’ I asked.
‘If I am not near the entrance, he will look here, where of course I should choose to wait.’
‘And what then?’
‘I presume he will help me to dissolve peacefully. He seemed certain that I should be alone.’
I had forgotten the puncture from the van seat. Naturally! By now I was equally sore all over. However, I felt quite capable of w
aiting for a far sorer Aviston-Tresco along the track. What good it would do was more doubtful. According to Fosworthy, nobody committed himself to that labyrinth unless a companion was left at the top of the hatch.
Pulling Fosworthy by the hand, I felt my way out of the painted cave. It was the only time when he seemed reluctant to live. Perhaps the haunting influence of that calm mammoth overcame his desire for Undine. We followed the wires some little way and then turned into a confused tumble of ledges and pinnacles just off the track. I had passed it three times and knew it would give cover from any searching beam and from the passage lights. As for getting out again, one had simply to scramble downhill in any direction and follow the cave wall.
First of all we heard Aviston-Tresco’s voice.
‘Barnabas! My poor Barnabas! Where are you?’
It boomed and trilled and echoed and died away, once returning seconds later with a faint, uncanny ‘Barnabas!’
They passed the recess where we were. Jedder had a miner’s lamp on his forehead and carried a twelve-bore gun. Aviston-Tresco had one arm in a sling and a lantern in his free hand. They were careless and confident, showing that Fosworthy was right and that they did not expect to have to deal with me.
They went on into the painted cave. If we had had any light, then was our chance to reach the entrance before they could. As it was, we were helpless. I was sure only of finding my way back to the wired passage, and that might well have taken ten minutes of patient concentration.
So far as we could tell, they were now examining the blocked entrance where they must have been impressed by Fosworthy’s burrowings. Aviston-Tresco still was calling. The wail of his voice through the black emptiness at last got on Fosworthy’s nerves. He jumped to his feet before I could stop him and shouted:
‘You can go to blazes, Tom! I’ll get out of here yet!’
He sounded like a cocky schoolboy. He really was the most contradictory man. A pity that he ever had a fixed income behind which he could retire! If he had been compelled to come to terms with the world, he was as likely to have ended up as a mad mercenary in the Congo as a vegetarian in a country cottage.
They came running back, but it was impossible for them to fix the direction of the sound. I whispered to Fosworthy to lie still and shut up, reminding him of the gun under Jedder’s arm. He apologised, far too loud, for forgetting his duty to protect me.
‘We had better have the lights on,’ Jedder said.
He had arranged a relay system for this. He walked round the next corner and yelled ‘Light!’ Far away I heard the call repeated. Then there was silence while some other helper presumably shouted the message back. The lights came on.
The pair did not attempt to look for Fosworthy. From their point of view, he might be anywhere—the maze of rock where he actually was or in some cleft or above or below them—and half a dozen strides would take him into darkness. Aviston-Tresco wanted, I believe, to avoid that, and was genuinely anxious that his former friend should dissolve without the long agony of starvation and blindness.
‘There will be a meeting tonight, Barnabas,’ he said in a voice which would have been normal and inviting if the sinister echoes had not repeated it.
They retired slowly towards the changing-room, carrying out some perfunctory searches on the way to look for my dead or prostrated body. I suspected that Jedder was not quite convinced that Aviston-Tresco had dealt with me successfully. He liked to have space and plenty of light around him and was continually turning round in case the unknown was following him. It was. We did in fact make some distance towards the entrance before the lights went out; but it was impossible to get ahead of the pair or to attack from behind.
Just in time we had passed the stretch of track with the foul drop on the right and were now in one of the finest caverns, high and with many openings, though most of them were dead ends. The only sane course was to stay exactly where we were till the time of the meeting. If we were not to exhaust ourselves looking for each other, we had to keep in actual, physical touch.
I asked Fosworthy what on earth Aviston-Tresco and that grim-faced brute Jedder were doing in his circle, some of whom would refuse to swat a mosquito. He accused me in his most academic tone of not paying attention to his precious synthesis and had another shot at it—now very much clearer since he was not distracted into mysticism by the presence of the paintings.
I will explain it very shortly at the risk of losing the metaphysical undertones. His unworldly, kindly little sect believed that all living things were individual radiations from a Whole and therefore equally worthy of respect. Yet they could not help seeing, being surrounded by a rural, traditional society, that the hunters of foxes, the fishers of trout and the shooters of game had a far more sympathetic understanding of animals than they did.
Put it this way! If a tame fox could choose the most loving and generous boss for himself, he would certainly pick a master of fox hounds, not a well-intentioned Fosworthy.
This, however, did not bother them so much as the paradox of Aviston-Tresco. All of them felt great admiration for him, yet his profession involved as much killing as healing. They were groping for the common ground between those who detested killing, those who had to do it and those who found it healthy and natural, when Jedder discovered the paintings. There were these ancestors of ours accepting that there was no difference between themselves and the animals, certain that the spirits of all continued to exist, yet killing to eat as steadily as any sabre-tooth tiger.
So all of them arrived at the madly logical conclusion that since Life was one and survival unavoidable, killing was immaterial. But admittedly it caused pain and inconvenience. Therefore it must be carried out with formality and a request for forgiveness.
Absurd? Well, meet the eyes of any bird or animal which is dying by your hand! In the last throes the eyes, which at first were terrified, accept what is coming. I have never said ‘Forgive me!’ but I recognise that I have wanted to. I cannot pretend to know, as those fanatics did, what the mammoth was thinking as its life drained out, but I am sure what that brilliantly perceptive artist and his fellow hunters were thinking.
I have no way of reconstructing the steps by which a vet, a handful of vegetarians and a few sportsmen came to find consolation in the same creed. Obviously they were all intensely religious in the sense that they wanted answers to unanswerable questions. Before I turned up, it had never occurred to Aviston-Tresco and Jedder that taking the life of a man was no different to taking that of an animal, but once they had convinced themselves that Fosworthy and I threatened their peace, it did occur to them.
‘What caused the row?’ I asked him.
‘I told you. I wanted my woman. I said that what happens to love after dissolution was the only essential, that it was nonsense to talk of momentary inconvenience. A bird in the hand—if I may permit the vernacular to simplify my argument—is worth two in the bush. It was all so vital to me that I did, as Tom Aviston-Tresco said, threaten to make the controversy public and the cave too. I fear that sometimes my voice grows too excited. They thought I was out of my mind. People do, you know. I think you yourself were at first unsure of my sanity.’
I was. But even this explanation did not wholly account for the persistence with which Fosworthy had been hunted down.
‘And then I ran out,’ he went on, ‘with all of them shouting after me. Eventually they put me under restraint.’
‘Suppose Aviston-Tresco had caught you before you reached me, what would he have done?’
‘Put me back.’
‘Where?’
‘Here.’
‘You mean, you were held here? All alone?’
‘Yes. Until I would give my word of honour to keep silent.’
There at least they understood his character. It was unthinkable that so scrupulous a formalist would break his promise, even if given under duress.
‘For how long?’
‘It was very disturbing in the dark. Especially
to a person of my temperament.’
‘How long do you think?’ I repeated.
‘Jedder cut off the light and took away my matches. It was not until I reached you that I found it had been only twenty-four hours. I must indeed have seemed to you distraught.’
‘And how did you get out in the end?’
‘I am much afraid they drove me to violence when they came down to see if I were ready to surrender. As they were not expecting such behaviour from me, it was temporarily successful. But not decisive. Aviston-Tresco was already half-way up the ladder behind me when I got out of the hatch.’
So there at last was the full motive. It was not wholly because they wanted to protect the cave and to go on contemplating their discovery in peace. Above all they wanted to protect their precious selves, like most other criminals.
Those potentially dangerous people, as Dunton had called them, flared up at the very thought that their private chapel might be vulgarised and, to them, desecrated; then they were even more alarmed that Fosworthy might report what they, prominent and respectable local citizens, had done to him; and finally, when they were convinced that both their secret and their cruelty had come to the knowledge of a stranger who was only out to make money, at least two of them decided that dissolution—their gende and fatuous euphemism—was the only way out.
We slept for some hours, huddled together to keep ourselves warm, and were awakened by the line of lamps. The big cavern where we were concealed was fairly well lit. Jedder, impressed by it, had at some time climbed up to fix two overhead lights. In contrast, the darkness of the holes was absolute. We found one which offered several ways of retreat.
The Courtesy of Death Page 8
