The Pilgrim's Progress

by John Bunyan

  The adventure left me in an uncomfortable mood. I was ashamed of myself for playing the fool, and at the same time hopelessly puzzled, for the oftener I went over in my mind the incidents of that afternoon the more I was at a loss for an explanation. One feeling was uppermost, that I did not like this place and wanted to be out of it. I had already broken the back of my task, and by shutting myself up for two days I completed it; that is to say, I made my collation as far as I had advanced myself in my commentary on the text. I did not want to go back to the Hall, so I wrote a civil note to Dubellay, expressing my gratitude and saying that I was sending up the manuscript by the landlord’s son, as I scrupled to trouble him with another visit.

  I got a reply at once, saying that Mr Dubellay would like to give himself the pleasure of dining with me at the inn before I went, and would receive the manuscript in person.

  It was the last night of my stay in St Sant, so I ordered the best dinner the place could provide, and a magnum of claret, of which I discovered a bin in the cellar. Dubellay appeared promptly at eight o’clock, arriving to my surprise in a car. He had tidied himself up and put on a dinner jacket, and he looked exactly like the city solicitors you see dining in the Junior Carlton.

  He was in excellent spirits, and his eyes had lost their air of being on guard. He seemed to have reached some conclusion about me, or decided that I was harmless. More, he seemed to be burning to talk to me. After my adventure I was prepared to find fear in him, the fear I had seen in the faces of the men-servants. But there was none; instead there was excitement, overpowering excitement.

  He neglected the courses in his verbosity. His coming to dinner had considerably startled the inn, and instead of a maid the landlady herself waited on us. She seemed to want to get the meal over, and hustled the biscuits and the port on to the table as soon as she decently could. Then Dubellay became confidential.

  He was an enthusiast, it appeared, an enthusiast with a single hobby. All his life he had pottered among antiquities, and when he succeeded to Vauncastle he had the leisure and money to indulge himself. The place, it seemed, had been famous in Roman Britain – Vauni Castra – and Faxeter was a corruption of the same. ‘Who was Vaunus?’ I asked. He grinned, and told me to wait.

  There had been an old temple up in the high woods. There had always been a local legend about it, and the place was supposed to be haunted. Well, he had had the site excavated and he had found – Here he became the cautious solicitor, and explained to me the law of treasure trove. As long as the objects found were not intrinsically valuable, not gold or jewels, the finder was entitled to keep them. He had done so – had not published the results of his excavations in the proceedings of any learned society – did not want to be bothered by tourists. I was different, for I was a scholar.

  What had he found? It was really rather hard to follow his babbling talk, but I gathered that he had found certain carvings and sacrificial implements. And – he sank his voice – most important of all, an altar, an altar of Vaunus, the tutelary deity of the vale.

  When he mentioned this word his face took on a new look – not of fear but of secrecy, a kind of secret excitement. I have seen the same look on the face of a street-preaching Salvationist.

  Vaunus had been a British god of the hills, whom the Romans in their liberal way appear to have identified with Apollo. He gave me a long confused account of him, from which it appeared that Mr Dubellay was not an exact scholar. Some of his derivations of place-names were absurd – like St Sant from Sancta Sanctorum – and in quoting a line of Ausonius he made two false quantities. He seemed to hope that I could tell him something more about Vaunus, but I said that my subject was Greek, and that I was deeply ignorant about Roman Britain. I mentioned several books, and found that he had never heard of Haverfield.

  One word he used, ‘hypocaust’, which suddenly gave me a clue. He must have heated the temple, as he heated his house, by some very efficient system of hot air. I know little about science, but I imagined that the artificial heat of the portico, as contrasted with the cold outside, might create an air current. At any rate that explanation satisfied me, and my afternoon’s adventure lost its uncanniness. The reaction made me feel friendly towards him, and I listened to his talk with sympathy, but I decided not to mention that I had visited his temple.

  He told me about it himself in the most open way. ‘I couldn’t leave the altar on the hillside,’ he said, ‘I had to make a place for it, so I turned the old front of the house into a sort of temple. I got the best advice, but architects are ignorant people, and I often wished I had been a better scholar. Still the place satisfies me.’

  ‘I hope it satisfies Vaunus,’ I said jocularly.

  ‘I think so,’ he replied quite seriously, and then his thoughts seemed to go wandering, and for a minute or so he looked through me with a queer abstraction in his eyes.

  ‘What do you do with it now you’ve got it?’ I asked.

  He didn’t reply, but smiled to himself.

  ‘I don’t know if you remember a passage in Sidonius Apollinaris,’ I said, ‘a formula for consecrating pagan altars to Christian uses. You begin by sacrificing a white cock or something suitable, and tell Apollo with all friendliness that the old dedication is off for the present. Then you have a Christian invocation—’

  He nearly jumped out of his chair.

  ‘That wouldn’t do – wouldn’t do at all!… Oh Lord, no!… Couldn’t think of it for one moment!’

  It was as if I had offended his ears by some horrid blasphemy, and the odd thing was that he never recovered his composure. He tried, for he had good manners, but his ease and friendliness had gone. We talked stiffly for another half-hour about trifles, and then he rose to leave. I returned him his manuscript neatly parcelled up, and expanded in thanks, but he scarcely seemed to heed me. He stuck the thing in his pocket, and departed with the same air of shocked absorption.

  After he had gone I sat before the fire and reviewed the situation. I was satisfied with my hypocaust theory, and had no more perturbation in my memory about my afternoon’s adventure. Yet a slight flavour of unpleasantness hung about it, and I felt that I did not quite like Dubellay. I set him down as a crank who had tangled himself up with a half-witted hobby, like an old maid with her cats, and I was not sorry to be leaving the place.

  My third and last visit to St Sant was in the following June – the midsummer of 1914. I had all but finished my Theocritus, but I needed another day or two with the Vauncastle manuscript, and, as I wanted to clear the whole thing off before I went to Italy in July, I wrote to Dubellay and asked if I might have another sight of it. The thing was a bore, but it had to be faced, and I fancied that the valley would be a pleasant place in that hot summer.

  I got a reply at once, inviting, almost begging me to come, and insisting that I should stay at the Hall. I couldn’t very well refuse, though I would have preferred the inn. He wired about my train, and wired again saying he would meet me. This time I seemed to be a particularly welcome guest.

  I reached Faxeter in the evening, and was met by a car from a Faxeter garage. The driver was a talkative young man, and, as the car was a closed one, I sat beside him for the sake of fresh air. The term had tired me, and I was glad to get out of stuffy Cambridge, but I cannot say that I found it much cooler as we ascended the Vaun valley. The woods were in their summer magnificence but a little dulled and tarnished by the heat, the river was shrunk to a trickle, and the curious hill-tops were so scorched by the sun that they seemed almost yellow above the green of the trees. Once again I had the feeling of a landscape fantastically un-English.

  ‘Squire Dubellay’s been in a great way about your coming, sir,’ the driver informed me. ‘Sent down three times to the boss to make sure it was all right. He’s got a car of his own, too, a nice little Daimler, but he don’t seem to use it much. Haven’t seen him about in it for a month of Sundays.’

  As we turned in at the Hall gates he looked curiously about him. ‘N
ever been here before, though I’ve been in most gentlemen’s parks for fifty miles round. Rum old-fashioned spot, isn’t it, sir?’

  If it had seemed a shuttered sanctuary in midwinter, in that June twilight it was more than ever a place enclosed and guarded. There was almost an autumn smell of decay, a dry decay like touchwood. We seemed to be descending through layers of ever-thickening woods. When at last we turned through the iron gate I saw that the lawns had reached a further stage of neglect, for they were as shaggy as a hay-field.

  The white-faced butler let me in, and there, waiting at his back, was Dubellay. But he was not the man whom I had seen in December. He was dressed in an old baggy suit of flannels, and his unwholesome red face was painfully drawn and sunken. There were dark pouches under his eyes, and these eyes were no longer excited, but dull and pained. Yes, and there was more than pain in them – there was fear. I wondered if his hobby were becoming too much for him.

  He greeted me like a long-lost brother. Considering that I scarcely knew him, I was a little embarrassed by his warmth. ‘Bless you for coming, my dear fellow,’ he cried. ‘You want a wash and then we’ll have dinner. Don’t bother to change, unless you want to. I never do.’ He led me to my bedroom, which was clean enough but small and shabby like a servant’s room. I guessed that he had gutted the house to build his absurd temple.

  We dined in a fair-sized room which was a kind of library. It was lined with old books, but they did not look as if they had been there long; rather it seemed like a lumber room in which a fine collection had been stored. Once no doubt they had lived in a dignified Georgian chamber. There was nothing else, none of the antiques which I had expected.

  ‘You have come just in time,’ he told me. ‘I fairly jumped when I got your letter, for I had been thinking of running up to Cambridge to insist on your coming down here. I hope you’re in no hurry to leave.’

  ‘As it happens,’ I said, ‘I am rather pressed for time, for I hope to go abroad next week. I ought to finish my work here in a couple of days. I can’t tell you how much I’m in your debt for your kindness.’

  ‘Two days,’ he said. ‘That will get us over midsummer. That should be enough.’ I hadn’t a notion what he meant.

  I told him that I was looking forward to examining his collection. He opened his eyes. ‘Your discoveries, I mean,’ I said, ‘the altar of Vaunus …’

  As I spoke the words his face suddenly contorted in a spasm of what looked like terror. He choked and then recovered himself. ‘Yes, yes,’ he said rapidly. ‘You shall see it – you shall see everything – but not now – not tonight. Tomorrow – in broad daylight – that’s the time.’

  After that the evening became a bad dream. Small talk deserted him, and he could only reply with an effort to my commonplaces. I caught him often looking at me furtively, as if he were sizing me up and wondering how far he could go with me. The thing fairly got on my nerves, and to crown all it was abominably stuffy. The windows of the room gave on a little paved court with a background of laurels, and I might have been in Seven Dials for all the air there was.

  When coffee was served I could stand it no longer. ‘What about smoking in the temple?’ I said. ‘It should be cool there with the air from the lake.’

  I might have been proposing the assassination of his mother. He simply gibbered at me. ‘No, no,’ he stammered. ‘My God, no!’ It was half an hour before he could properly collect himself. A servant lit two oil lamps, and we sat on in the frowsty room.

  ‘You said something when we last met,’ he ventured at last, after many a sidelong glance at me. ‘Something about a ritual for re-dedicating an altar.’

  I remembered my remark about Sidonius Apollinaris.

  ‘Could you show me the passage? There is a good classical library here, collected by my great-grandfather. Unfortunately my scholarship is not equal to using it properly.’

  I got up and hunted along the shelves, and presently found a copy of Sidonius, the Plantin edition of 1609. I turned up the passage, and roughly translated it for him. He listened hungrily and made me repeat it twice.

  ‘He says a cock,’ he hesitated. ‘Is that essential?’

  ‘I don’t think so. I fancy any of the recognised ritual stuff would do.’

  ‘I am glad,’ he said simply. ‘I am afraid of blood.’

  ‘Good God, man,’ I cried out, ‘are you taking my nonsense seriously? I was only chaffing. Let old Vaunus stick to his altar!’

  He looked at me like a puzzled and rather offended dog.

  ‘Sidonius was in earnest…’

  ‘Well, I’m not,’ I said rudely. ‘We’re in the twentieth century and not in the third. Isn’t it about time we went to bed?’

  He made no objection, and found me a candle in the hall. As I undressed I wondered into what kind of lunatic asylum I had strayed. I felt the strongest distaste for the place, and longed to go straight off to the inn; only I couldn’t make use of a man’s manuscripts and insult his hospitality. It was fairly clear to me that Dubellay was mad. He had ridden his hobby to the death of his wits and was now in its bondage. Good Lord! he had talked of his precious Vaunus as a votary talks of a god. I believed he had come to worship some figment of his half-educated fancy.

  I think I must have slept for a couple of hours. Then I woke dripping with perspiration, for the place was simply an oven. My window was as wide open as it would go, and, though it was a warm night, when I stuck my head out the air was fresh. The heat came from indoors. The room was on the first floor near the entrance and I was looking on to the overgrown lawns. The night was very dark and utterly still, but I could have sworn that I heard wind. The trees were as motionless as marble, but somewhere close at hand I heard a strong gust blowing. Also, though there was no moon, there was somewhere near me a steady glow of light; I could see the reflection of it round the end of the house. That meant that it came from the temple. What kind of saturnalia was Dubellay conducting at such an hour?

  When I drew in my head I felt that if I was to get any sleep something must be done. There could be no question about it; some fool had turned on the steam heat, for the room was a furnace. My temper was rising. There was no bell to be found, so I lit my candle and set out to find a servant.

  I tried a cast downstairs and discovered the room where we had dined. Then I explored a passage at right angles, which brought me up against a great oak door. The light showed me that it was a new door, and that there was no apparent way of opening it. I guessed that it led into the temple, and, though it fitted close and there seemed to be no keyhole, I could hear through it a sound like a rushing wind… Next I opened a door on my right and found myself in a big store cupboard. It had a funny, exotic, spicy smell, and, arranged very neatly on the floor and shelves, was a number of small sacks and coffers. Each bore a label, a square of stout paper with very black lettering. I read ‘Pro servitio Vauni’.

  I had seen them before, for my memory betrayed me if they were not the very labels that Dubellay’s servants had been attaching to the packages from the carrier’s cart that evening in the past autumn. The discovery made my suspicions an unpleasant certainty. Dubellay evidently meant the labels to read ‘For the service of Vaunus’. He was no scholar, for it was an impossible use of the word ‘ servitium’, but he was very patently a madman.

  However, it was my immediate business to find some way to sleep, so I continued my quest for a servant. I followed another corridor, and discovered a second staircase. At the top of it I saw an open door and looked in. It must have been Dubellay’s, for his flannels were tumbled untidily on a chair, but Dubellay himself was not there and the bed had not been slept in.

  I suppose my irritation was greater than my alarm – though I must say I was getting a little scared – for I still pursued the evasive servant. There was another stair which apparently led to attics, and in going up it I slipped and made a great clatter. When I looked up the butler in his nightgown was staring down at me, and if ever a mortal face he
ld fear it was his. When he saw who it was he seemed to recover a little.

  ‘Look here,’ I said, ‘for God’s sake turn off that infernal hot air. I can’t get a wink of sleep. What idiot set it going?’

  He looked at me owlishly, but he managed to find his tongue.

  ‘I beg your pardon, sir,’ he said, ‘but there is no heating apparatus in this house.’

  There was nothing more to be said. I returned to my bedroom and it seemed to me that it had grown cooler. As I leaned out of the window, too, the mysterious wind seemed to have died away, and the glow no longer showed from beyond the corner of the house. I got into bed and slept heavily till I was roused by the appearance of my shaving water about half-past nine. There was no bathroom, so I bathed in a tin pannikin.

  It was a hazy morning which promised a day of blistering heat. When I went down to breakfast I found Dubellay in the dining-room. In the daylight he looked a very sick man, but he seemed to have taken a pull on himself, for his manner was considerably less nervy than the night before. Indeed, he appeared almost normal, and I might have reconsidered my view but for the look in his eyes.

  I told him that I proposed to sit tight all day over the manuscript, and get the thing finished. He nodded. ‘That’s all right. I’ve a lot to do myself, and I won’t disturb you.’

  ‘But first’, I said, ‘you promised to show me your discoveries.’

  He looked at the window where the sun was shining on the laurels and on a segment of the paved court.

  ‘The light is good,’ he said – an odd remark. ‘Let us go there now. There are times and seasons for the temple.’

  He led me down the passage I had explored the previous night. The door opened not by a key but by some lever in the wall. I found myself looking suddenly at a bath of sunshine with the lake below as blue as a turquoise.