All Hallows' Eve

by Charles Williams

  He drew a deep breath. As he did so, a phrase from the previous day came back to him. He turned on Jonathan; he said, but his eyes were still on the canvas, “With plain observation and common understanding?”

  “Yes,” said Jonathan. “I’ll swear it was. I don’t wonder Simon didn’t like it.”

  Richard could not bear the glow. It bore in upon him even more than it did on Jonathan—partly because it was not his painting, partly because he was already, despite himself, by his sight of Lester, some way initiated into that spiritual world. He walked to the window and stood looking out. The gray October weather held nothing of the painting’s glory, yet his eyes were so bedazzled with the glory that for a moment, however unillumined the houses were, their very mass was a kind of illumination. They were illustrious with being. The sun in the painting had not risen, but it had been on the point of rising, and the expectation that unrisen sun had aroused in him was so great that the actual sun, or some other and greater sun, seemed to be about to burst through the cloud that filled the natural sky. The world he could see from the window gaily mocked him with a promise of being an image of the painting, or of being the original of which the painting was but a painting.

  As he looked, he heard in the silence behind him a small tinkle. Something had fallen. Before his brain had properly registered the sound, he felt the floor beneath him quiver, and the tinkle was followed by a faint echo in different parts of the room. Things shook and touched and settled. The earth had felt the slightest tremor and all its inhabitants felt it. It was for less than a moment, as if an infinitesimal alteration had taken place. Richard saw in the sky upon which his eyes were fixed a kind of eyelid-lifting, an opening and shutting of cloud. He caught no direct light, but the roofs and chimneys of the houses gleamed, whether from above or in themselves he could not tell. It passed and his heart lifted. He was suddenly certain of Lester—not for himself, but in herself; she lived newly in the light. She lived—that was all; and so, by God’s mercy, he.

  He thought the phrase, and though it was strange to him it was very familiar. But he did not, in that second, feel he had abandoned his agnosticism for what he knew to be Jonathan’s belief. Rather his very agnosticism rose more sharply and healthily within him; he swung to a dance and he actually did swing round, so that he saw Jonathan planted before his canvas and frowning at it, and on the floor a silver pencil which had rolled from the table. He walked across and picked it up, playing lightly with it, and as he began to speak Jonathan forestalled him. He said, “Richard, it is different.”

  “Different?” asked Richard. “How different?”

  “I’m very good,” Jonathan went on, but so simply that there was no egotism in the remark, “but I’m nothing like as good as this. I simply am not. I could never, never paint this.”

  Richard looked at the painting. But his amateur’s eye could not observe with certainty the difference of which Jonathan seemed to be speaking. He thought he could have been easily persuaded that the shapes were more definite, that the mass of color which had overwhelmed him before now organized itself more exactly, that the single unity was now also a multitudinous union—but he would not by himself have been certain. He said, “You’re the master. How?”

  Jonathan did not answer the question directly. He said, in a lower voice, almost as if he were shy of something in his own work, “I suppose, if things—if everything is like that, I suppose colors and paints might be. They must be what everything is, because everything is. Mightn’t they become more themselves? mightn’t they? It was what I wanted to do, because it was like that. And if the world is like that, then a painting of the world must be. But if it is …”

  Richard went across to him. “If it is,” he said, “we weren’t done and can’t be done. If it is, we aren’t beetles and can’t be beetles, however they grin at each other in their holes. By all possible plain observation and common understanding, we aren’t. And as my own common understanding has told me on a number of occasions that Lester doesn’t like being kept waiting, I’d better try not to keep her waiting.”

  “Is she waiting?” said Jonathan with a slow answering smile.

  “I can’t possibly tell you yet,” said Richard. “But I shall try somehow to find out. Let’s do something. Let’s plainly observe. Let’s go to Highgate and observe Betty. Let’s persecute Lady Wallingford. Let’s love Simon; he likes love. Come on, man.” He stepped back and waved his hand towards Highgate. “Ecrasez l’infame. Give them the point, gentlemen. And no heeltaps. Come. Have you ever seen Lester in a rage? ‘Oh what a deal of scorn looks beautiful …’ but I don’t want it to get too beautiful.”

  He caught up his hat. Jonathan said, “I feel like a bit of my own painting. All right; come on. Let’s get a taxi and go to Highgate and tell them where they stop. I don’t quite know how.”

  “No,” said Richard, “but the sky will or the earth or something. Simon control Lester? Simon couldn’t control a real beetle. Nor could I, if it comes to that, but I don’t pretend to. Come.”

  When they ran together out of the house, it was already something more than an hour since the Clerk had re-entered Betty’s room. He knew that the crisis was on him; he had come to direct it. Up to now he had been content to send his daughter on her ghostly journeys as his messenger and in some sense his substitute. He had begotten her for this and for more than this; since she had grown out of early childhood he had trained her in this. Now the time of more had come and the mystical rain which had defeated her should mock him no longer. The tale of the enchanters held a few masters—not many—who had done this. One of the earlier, another Simon, called the Magus, had slain a boy by magic and sent his soul into the spiritual places, there to be his servant. This Simon would make a stronger link, for he would send his child. But to establish that link properly, the physical body must be retained in its own proper shape, that in future all commands might be sent through it to its twin in the other air. The earlier Simon had kept the body of the boy in a casing of gold in his bedchamber, and (as it was said) angels and other powers of that air had visibly adored it, at the will of the magician laid upon them through the single living soul, and exposed all the future without the slow tricks that had otherwise to be used, and shown treasures and secrets of the past, until their lord became a pillar of the universe and about him the planetary heavens revolved. But in those days magicians had public honor; now for a little while a secret way was better. It was to be today no bloody sacrifice; only a compulsory dissolution of bonds between soul and body—a making forever all but two of what must be at bottom forever one; the last fact of known identity alone remaining. When the uncorrupting death was achieved, the body should be coffined for burial. After the burial it would be no less than natural that the distressed mother should go to her own house in the North to be quiet and recover; and no less than likely that she might take with her a not too great case—Betty was not large—of private effects. She could go, nowadays, by car. It would be easy, on the night before the funeral, to make from dust and air and impure water and a little pale fire a shape to be substituted for the true body. That should lay itself down in the coffin, clasping a corded brick or two to give it weight, for though magic could increase or decrease the weight of what already had weight, yet these magical bodies always lacked the mysterious burden of actual flesh. But it would serve for the short necessary time, and afterwards let earth go indeed to earth and dust to dust. The substitution made, and the true body laid in the chest, it could be conveyed away. It should lie in the lumber-room of the Northern cottage, and there serve him when he wished, until when he and his Types were united, and the world under him made one, he could house it becomingly to himself in his proper home.

  The time had come. He could utterly pronounce the reversed Name—not that it was to him a Name, for his whole effort had been to deprive it of any real meaning, and he had necessarily succeeded in this for himself, so that it was to him no Name but vibrations only, which, directed as
he chose, should fulfill what he chose. He had quite forgotten the original blasphemy of the reversal; the sin was lost, like so many common sins of common men, somewhere in his past. He did not now even think of there being any fact to which the Name was correspondent. He had, that very morning, aimed the vibrating and recessional power on the latest and the nearest of the dead—the wife of the man who had come foolishly inquiring. And though she had not come, yet her companion in death had come—one who was, it must have chanced, more responsive than she. He had his own intentions for her. But first a balance must be preserved; where one was drawn in one must go out. He had drawn back the other woman’s soul to wait now outside the house; there she crouched till the act was finished. So prepared, he came into his daughter’s room.

  His mistress entered with him. In the eyes of the servants he was a foreign consulting doctor who had sometimes done Miss Betty good and was a friend of the family. For the law, there was an ordinary practitioner who was well acquainted with her sad case and could do all that was necessary. Both of them would find now that for Betty they could do nothing. The pretense was to last just this hour; therefore his mistress came. Yet bringing the living woman it was unfortunate for him that he had not brought in with him the dead woman also whom he had left to her own ghostly place. So wise and mighty as he was, his wisdom had failed there. Had he done so, that poor subservient soul might have conveyed to him some hint of what else was in that room. He could see those he called; not, those he did not. He did not see the form that waited by the bed; he did not see Lester. He knew, of course, nothing of the exchange of redeeming love that had taken place between those two—no more than of that gallant Betty who had risen once from the lake of wise water. And if he had known anything, of what conceivable importance could the memories of two schoolgirls be to him? even though the memories of those girls should be the acts of souls? Because it would have been, and was, so unimportant, he did not see in the pale and exhausted girl in the bed any of the sudden runnels of roseal light which Lester now saw, as if the blood itself were changed and richly glowing through the weary flesh. Lester saw them—the blood hiding something within itself, which yet it did not quite succeed in hiding from any who, in whatever shy efforts of new life, had sought and been granted love. Lester might not have believed it, but then she did not have to try. She looked and saw; in that state what was, was certain. There was no need for belief.

  The Clerk and she were very close. Lester did not recognize the identity of the shape she had seen on the stairs, and otherwise she did not know him. But as his great form came slowly into the room, she felt him to be of the same nature as that other shape. He now, and that he on the stairs, were inhabitants of this world in which she was. Their appearance, first in night and then in day, was overwhelming to her. The great cloak was a wrapping up of power in itself; the ascetic face a declaration of power. Those appearances, and that of the laughing Betty, belonged to the same world, but these were its guardians and masters. Lester felt unusually shy and awkward as she stood there; had he commanded then, she would have obeyed. She knew that she went unseen by men and women, but as his eyes passed over her she felt rather that she had been seen and neglected than that she had not been seen.

  The giant, for so he seemed to her to be, paused by the bed. Lester waited on his will. So, behind him, did Lady Wallingford. Betty switched a little, shifted restlessly and finally turned on her back, so that she lay facing the gaze of her master and father. He said to her mother, “Lock the door.” Lady Wallingford went back to the door, locked it, turned and stood with her hand on the handle. The Clerk said to her again, “Draw the curtains.” She obeyed; she returned. The room lay in comparative darkness, shut off and shut in. The Clerk said, in a gentle voice, almost as if he were waking a child, “Betty, Betty, it’s time to go.” But he was not trying to wake her.

  Lester listened with attention. She believed that the giant was laying some proper duty on Betty, some business which she did not understand, but the inflexibility of the voice troubled her. The friendship which had sprung in the time of their talk made her wish to spare the present Betty this austere task. Besides she herself wished, as soon as was possible, to have a place in this world, to be directed, to have something to do. She made—she so rash, so real, so unseen—a sudden movement. She began, “Let me——” and stopped, for Betty’s eyes had opened and in fear and distress were looking up at the Clerk, and her fingers were picking at the bedclothes, as the fingers of the dying do. Lester years before had seen her father die; she knew the sign. Betty said, in a voice only just heard through the immense stillness of the room, “No; no.”

  The Clerk thrust his head forward and downward. Its leanness, and the cloak round him, turned him for Lester to some great bird of the eagle kind, hovering, waiting, about to thrust. He said, “To go,” and the words sprang from him as if a beak had stabbed, and the body of Betty seemed to yield under the blow. Only the fact that no blood gushed between her breasts convinced Lester that it was not so. But again and once again, as if the wounding beak drove home, the Clerk said, “To go … to go.” A faint sound came from the door; Lady Wallingford had drawn a sharp breath. Her eyes were bright; her hands were clenched; she was drawn upright as if she were treading something down; she said—the light word hung in the room like an echo: “Go.”

  Lester saw, though she was not directly looking. Her manner of awareness was altering. Touch was forbidden her; hers and Betty’s hands had never met. Taste and smell she had no opportunity to exercise. But sight and hearing were enlarged. She could somehow see at once all that she had formerly been able to see only by turning her head; she could distinctly hear at once all sorts of sounds of which formerly one would deaden another. She was hardly aware of the change; it was so natural. She was less aware of herself except as a part of the world, and more aware of her friend. There was as yet no distrust of the grand shape opposite her, but the tiny vibrations of that single syllable spun within her. She saw Betty receding and she saw Betty struggling. She spoke with passion; and her voice, inaudible to those others, in the room, was audible enough to any of the myriad freemen of the City, to the alien but allied powers of heaven which traverse the City, to the past, present and future of the City, to its eternity and to That which everywhere holds and transfixes its eternity; audible to all these, clear among the innumerable mightier sounds of the creation, she exclaimed: “Betty!”

  Her friend’s eyes turned to her. They entreated silently, as years before they had entreated; they were dimming, but what consciousness they had still looked out—a girl’s longing, a child’s call, a baby’s cry. A voice lower than Lady Wallingford’s, so low that even the Clerk could not hear it, though he knew she had spoken, but perfectly audible to Lester and to any of that other company whose business it might be to hear, said: “Lester!” It was the same timid proffer of and appeal to friendship which Lester had once ignored. She answered at once. “All right, my dear. I’m here.”

  Betty’s head lay towards her. The Clerk put out his hand to turn it again, so that his eyes might look into his daughter’s eyes. Before it could touch her, the spiritual colloquy had gone on. Betty said, “I don’t at all mind going, but I don’t want him to send me.” The voice was ever so slightly stronger; it had even a ripple of laughter in it, as if it were a little absurd to be so particular about a mere means. Lester said, “No, darling: why should he? Stay with me a little longer.” Betty answered, “May I? Dear Lester!” and shut her eyes. The Clerk turned her head.

  Lester had spoken on her spirit’s instincts. But she did not at all know what she ought to do. She realized more than ever that she was parted from living men and women by a difference of existence, and realizing it she knew that the grand figure by the bed was not of her world but of that, and being of that and being so feared, might be hostile and might even be evil. She did not any longer squander power by trying to speak to him. She was not exactly content to wait, but she knew she must wait. She bec
ame conscious all at once of the delight of waiting—of the wide streets of London in which one could wait, of Westminster Bridge, of herself waiting for Richard on Westminster Bridge, as she had done—when? The day she was killed; the day before she was killed. Yes; on that previous day they had agreed to meet there, and he had been late, and she had been impatient; no wonder that, after death, she had been caught again to the scene of her impatience and played out again the sorry drama. Oh now she would wait and he would come. She seemed, bodiless though in truth she was and knew it more and more, to feel her body tingling with expectation of him, with expected delight. She had once walked (he would have told her) in a kind of militant glory; she stood so now, unknowing. Her militancy was not now to be wasted on absurdities; as indeed it never need have been; there had been enough in herself to use it on. Her eyes, or what were once her eyes, were brighter than Lady Wallingford’s; her head was up; her strong and flexible hands moved at her sides; her foot tapped once and ceased. The seeming body which the energy of her spirit flung out in that air was more royal and real than the entire body of Lady Wallingford. She gave her attention to the Clerk.

  He was speaking slowly, in a language she did not understand, and sternly, almost as if he were giving final instructions to a careless or lazy servant. He had laid his left hand on Betty’s forehead, and Lester saw a kind of small pale light ooze out everywhere between his hand and Betty and flow over the forehead. Betty’s eyes were open again, and they looked up, but now without sight, for Lester’s own quickened sight saw that a film had been drawn over them. Betty was again receding. Lester said, “Betty, if you want me I’m here,” and meant it with all her heart. The Clerk ceased to give instructions, paused, drew himself up, and began to intone.