When it was Dark

by Guy Thorne

  Far away in the ancient Middle Eastern city, he had indeed realised the momentous nature of the strange and awful thing he had found. But of the consequences to himself he had thought nothing, and of the effects on the world he had not had time to think.

  Hands had never wished to be celebrated. His temperament was poetic in essence, retiring in action. He longed to be back under the eye of the sun, to move among the memorials of the past with his Arab helpers, to lie on the beach of the Dead Sea when no airs stirred, and suddenly hear a vast, mysterious breaker coming from nowhere, with no visible cause, like some great beast crashing through the jungle.

  And he had exchanged all this for lunches at institutions, for hot rooms full of flowers, and fools of women who said, "Oh, do tell me all about your delightful discovery," smiling through their paint while the world's heart was breaking. And there was worse to come. At no distant date he would have to stand on the platform at the Albert Hall where Mr. Constantine Schuabe, MP, and Mrs. Hubert Armstrong, the writing woman, would hand him a cheque for some preposterous sum of money which he did not in the least want. There would be speeches....

  He was not made for this life.

  His own convictions of Christianity had never been thoroughly formulated or marked out in his mind, although all that was mystical in the great history of Christ had always attracted him. He took an intellectual pleasure in the beautiful story. To him more than to most men it had become a vivid panoramic vision. The background and accessories had been part of his daily life for years. It was as the figure of King Arthur and his old knights might be to some loving student of Malory.

  It had always been thus to him -- a lovely and poetic picture, and no more. He had never made a personal application of it to himself. His heart had never been touched, and he had never heard the Son of God calling to him.

  At the end of a fortnight Hands found that he could stand the strain no longer. His nerves were failing him. There was a constant babble of meaningless voices in his ear which took all the zest and savour from life. His doctor told him quite unmistakably that he was doing too much, and he must go away to some solitude by the sea to rest.

  The advice not only coincided with his own wishes, but made them possible. A good many engagements were cancelled, a paragraph appeared in the newspapers to say that Mr. Hands's medical adviser had insisted on a thorough rest, and the man of the moment disappeared. Save only Basil and the secretary of the Exploring Society, no one knew of his whereabouts.

  In a week he was forgotten. Greater things began to animate Society -- harsh, terrible, ugly things. There was no time to think of Cyril Hands, the instrument which had brought them about.

  The doctor had recommended the remotest parts of Cornwall. Standing in his comfortable room at Harley Street, the doctor explained the peace that was to be found in that lost country of frowning rocks and bottle-green seas, where Cornishmen still talk of "going into England" as if it were an adventure to foreign parts.

  Two days found him at a lonely fishing cove, rather than a village, lodging in the house of a coastguard not far from Saint Ives.

  A few whitewashed houses ran down to the beach of the little natural harbour where the boats sheltered.

  On the shores of the little "Porth," as it was called, the fishermen sat about with sleepy eyes, waiting for the signal of watchmen on the moor above -- the shrill Cornish cry of "Ubba! Ubba!" which would tell them the mackerel or pilchard shoals were in sight.

  Behind the cove, running inland, were the vast, lonely moors which run between the Atlantic and the Channel. It is always grey and sad on these rolling solitudes; sad and silent. As far as the eye could reach, they stretched away with a forlorn immensity that struck cold to Hands's heart. Peace was here indeed, but how austere. Quiet, but what a brooding and cruel silence.

  Every now and again his roving eye, in its search for incident and colour, was caught and arrested by the bleak engine house of some ancient deserted tin mine and the gaunt chimney which pointed like a leaden finger to the stormy skies above. Great humming winds swept over the moor, driving flocks of Titanic clouds, an Olympian army in rout, before their fierce breath.

  Here, day by day, Cyril Hands took his solitary walk; or sometimes he would sit sheltered in a hollow of the jagged volcanic rocks which set round about the cove like a barrier of jagged teeth. Down below him a hard, green sea boiled and seethed in an agony of fierce unrest. The black cormorants in the middle distance dived for their cold prey. The seabirds were tossed on the currents of the wild air, calling to each other with forlorn, melancholy voices.

  In the afternoon a weary postman tramped over the moor. He brought the London newspapers of the day before, and Hands read them with a strange sensation of spectatorship.

  He had more time to think about what he read. It was in this lost corner of the world that the chill began to creep over him. As his brain grew clearer, the words his eyes conveyed to it filled it with a more awful reverberation.

  The awful weight grew. He began to realise with terrible distinctness the consequences of his discovery. They stunned him. A carved inscription, a crumbling tomb in half an acre of waste ground. He had stumbled upon so much. He, Cyril Hands, had found this.

  His straining eyes day by day turned to the columns of the papers.

  Chapter 25

  Hands awoke to terrible realisation. The newspapers provided him with a bird's-eye view, a summary of a world in tumult. Out of a wealth of detail, culled from innumerable telegraphic despatches and articles, certain facts stood out clearly.

  In the Balkan States, always in unrest, a crisis, graver than ever before, suddenly came about. The situation flared up like a petrol explosion.

  A great revival of Muslim enthusiasm had begun to spread from Jerusalem as soon as Europe had more or less definitely accepted the discovery he had made, and subsequently confirmed by the international committee.

  Hands read an extract from a leading article in The Daily Wire showing that the underlying reason and cause was thoroughly appreciated and understood in England no less than it was abroad.

  In this labyrinth of myth and murder, is a sudden and spontaneous outburst of Muslim hatred for the Christian. The stupendous fact which has lately burst upon the world has had effects which, while they might have been anticipated in some degree, have already passed far beyond the bounds of the most confirmed political pessimist's dream.

  Then news of unrest in India shook the whole country to its depths. Men began to look into each other's eyes and ask what these things might mean. English officers and civilians began to send their wives home. The great P&O boats were inconveniently crowded as troops from all over India began to concentrate near the Sri Ulang Pass in the Hindu-Kush.

  Simultaneously with these ominous rumours of war came an extraordinary outburst of Christian fanaticism in Russia. The peasantry burst into a flame of anger against England. The priests of the Orthodox Church not only refused to believe in the Palestine discovery, but they refused to ignore it, as the Roman Catholics of the world were endeavouring to do.

  They began to preach war against Great Britain for its infidelity, and the political powers seized the opportunity to use religious fanaticism for their own ends.

  All these events happened with appalling swiftness.

  In the remote Cornish village, Hands moved as in a dream. His eyes saw nothing of his surroundings. His face was pallid under the brown of his skin. Sometimes, as he sat alone on the moors or by the sea, he laughed loudly. When a passing coastguard heard him, the man told of it among the fishermen, and they regarded their silent visitor with something of awe, with the Celtic compassion for those mentally afflicted.

  One Sunday, Hands heard the deep singing of hymns coming from the little white chapel on the cliff. He entered in time for the sermon, which was preached by a minister who had walked over from Penzance.

  Here all the turmoil of the world beyond was ignored. It seemed as though nothing had ever been
heard of the thing that was shaking the world. The pastor preached and prayed, the men and women answered with deep "Amens." The discovery mattered nothing to them. They heeded it no more than the wailing wind in the cove. The voice of Christ was not stilled in the hearts of this little congregation of the Faithful.

  This chilled Hands. He could find no meaning or comfort in it.

  That evening he heard the daughter of the coastguard with whom he lodged singing. It was a wild night, and Hands was sitting by the fire in his little sitting room. Outside, the wind and rain and waves were shouting furiously in the dark.

  The girl was playing a few simple chords on the harmonium and singing to them.

  "For ever with the Lord."

  An untuneful voice, louder than need be, but with what conviction!

  Hands tried to fix his attention on the newspaper he held.

  He read that in Rhodesia the mine capitalists were moving for slavery pure and simple. It was proposed openly that slavery should be the penalty for law-breaking for natives. This was the only way, it asserted, by which the labour problem in South Africa could be solved.

  "Life from the dead is in that word,

  'Tis immortality."

  It seemed that there was small opposition to this proposal. It would be the best thing for the Kaffir, perhaps, this wise and kindly discipline. So the proposal was wrapped up.

  "And nightly pitch my moving tent

  A day's march nearer home."

  Hands saw that, quite suddenly, the old horror against slavery had disappeared.

  This, too, was coming, then? This old horror which Christians had banished from the world?

  "So when my latest breath

  Shall rend the veil in twain."

  His thoughts came back to the house in which he sat. The girl's voice touched him immeasurably. He heard it clearly in a lull of the storm. Then another tremendous gust of wind drowned it.

  Two great tears rolled down his cheeks.

  It was midnight, and all the people in the house were long since asleep. The firelight played on the pictures on the wall, the simple ornaments, the ship worked in worsted when the coastguard was a boy in the Navy, the shells from a Pacific island, a model gun under a glass shade. But his thoughts were not imprisoned by these humble walls and the humble room in which he sat. He heard the groaning of the peoples of the world, the tramp of armies, the bitter cry of souls from whom hope had been plucked for ever.

  He remembered the fair morning in Jerusalem when, with the earliest light of dawn, he had gone to work with his Arab helpers before the heat of the day.

  How utterly unaware he had been on that radiant morning outside the Damascus Gate! He had seen the men at work, and was sitting under his sun tent writing on his pad. He was just lighting a cigarette, he remembered, when Ionides, the Greek foreman, came running up to him, his shrewd, brown face wrinkled with excitement.

  He had opened the little rock tombs Ionides had shown him, and it seemed that the blows of the picks had set free a troop of ruinous spirits who were devastating mankind.

  Pandora's box -- that legend fitted what he had done, but with a deadly difference.

  He could not find that Hope remained. It would have been better a thousand times if the hot Eastern sun had struck him down that distant morning on his way through the city.

  The awful weight, the initial responsibility rested with him.

  He alone had been the means by which the world was being shaken with horrors -- horrors growing daily, and that seemed as if the end would be unutterable night.

  How the wind shrieked and wailed!

  Εγω Ιωσηφ ὁ ἀπο Αριμαθειας.

  "I, Joseph of Arimathea."

  The words were written in fire on his mind.

  The wind outside was shrieking louder and louder.

  So the government were asking for another commission! Well, they might try that as a forlorn hope, but he knew his discovery was real. Could he possibly be mistaken? Could that congress of the learned which had visited the site all be mistaken? It was not possible. It could not be. Would that it were possible.

  There was no hope. For centuries the world had been living in a fool's paradise. He had destroyed it. It would be a hundred years before the echoes of his deed died away.

  But the terrible weight of the world's burden was too heavy for him to bear. He knew that. Not for much longer could he endure it.

  The life seemed oozing out of him, pressed out by a weight -- the sensation in his chest was physical.

  He wished it was all over. He had no hope for the future, and no fear.

  The weight was too heavy. The outside dark came through the walls and began to close in on him. His heart beat loudly. It seemed to rise up in his throat and choke him.

  The pressure grew each moment. Mountains were being piled on him, heavier, heavier.

  The wind was but a distant murmur now, but the weight was crushing him. Only a few more moments and his heart would burst.

  The dark thing huddled on the hearth rug, which the girl found when she came down in the morning, was the scholar's body.

  A newspaper he had been reading lay on his chest.

  Chapter 26

  Constantine Schuabe's great room at the Hotel Cecil had been entirely refurnished and arranged for the winter months.

  The fur of great Arctic beasts lay on the heavy Teheran carpets, which had replaced the summer matting -- furs of enormous value. The dark red curtains which hung by windows and over doors were worked with threads of dull gold.

  The morning papers were resting on a chair by his side. He was reading one of them. It announced the death from heart disease of Mr. Cyril Hands while taking a few days' rest in a remote village of Cornwall. Not a shadow of regret passed over the regular, impassive face. The eyes remained in fixed thought.

  He paced the long room slowly. On the whole, the incident seemed without meaning for him. If it meant anything at all it meant that his position was stronger than ever. The voice of the discoverer was now for ever silent. His testimony, his reluctant but convinced opinion, was on record. Nothing could alter that. Cyril Hands might perhaps have had doubts in the future. He might have looked more keenly into the way in which he came to examine the ground where the new tomb was hidden. Yes, this death of Hands was better. That danger, remote as it had been, was over.

  As his eyes wandered over the rest of the news columns they became more alert, speculative, and anxious. Parts of the world were in tumult, which grew louder and louder every hour.

  He sank down in his chair with a sigh, passing his hand wearily over his face. Who could have foreseen this? It was beyond belief. He gazed at the havoc and ruin in terrified surprise, as a child might who had lit a little fire of straw, which had grown and devoured a great city.

  It was in this very room -- just over there in the centre -- that he had bought the brain and soul of Robert Llwellyn, the great Professor of ancient history.

  The big man had stood exactly on that spot, blanched and trembling. His miserable promises to pay had flamed up in this fire.

  And now? India was slipping swiftly away; a bloody civil war was brewing in America; Central Europe was a smouldering torch; the whips of Africa were cracking in the ears of Englishmen; the fortunes of thousands were melting away like ice in the sun. In London, gentlemen were going from their clubs to their houses at night carrying pistols and sword-sticks. North of Holborn, south of the Thames, no woman was safe after darkness had fallen.

  He saw his face in an oval silver glass. It fascinated him as it had never done before. He gripped the leather back of a chair and stared fiercely, hungrily, at the image. It was this, this man he was looking at, some stranger it seemed, who had done all this. He laughed -- a mirthless, hollow laugh. His brain became darkened for a time, lost in an awful wonder he could not realise or understand.

  And no one knew, except his partner and instrument. No one knew!

  The secret seemed to
be bursting and straining within him like some live, terrible creature that longed to rush into the light. For weeks the haunting thought had grown and harassed him. If only he could share his own dark knowledge.

  Turning away from the mirror, he shuddered as a man who has escaped from a sudden danger. He knew, none better, the end, the extinction of the brain that has got beyond control. No, come what may, he must watch himself, that he did not succumb. A tiny speck in the brain, and then goodbye to thought and life for ever.

  He was a benefactor of the Lancashire Asylum -- had been a visitor there several times -- and he had seen the soulless lumps of flesh the doctors called "patients."

  "I am the master of my fate. I am the captain of my soul," he repeated to himself, and even as he did so, his other self sneered at the weakness which must comfort itself with a poet's rhyme.

  He tried to shut out the world's alarm from his mental eyes and ears. He went back to the scenes of his first triumph. They had been sweet indeed.

  Yes! Worth all the price he had paid and might be called on to pay.

  All over England his life's ambition had been gloriously vindicated. They had hailed him as the prophet of Truth at first -- a prophet who had cried in the wilderness for years, and who had at last come into his own.

  The voices of great men and vast multitudes had come to him as incense. He was to be the leader of the new religion of common sense. Why had they doubted him before, led away by the old superstitions?

  Men who had hated and feared him in the old days, who had spoken against him and his doctrines as if both were abhorred and unclean, were now his friends and servants. Christians had humbled themselves to the representatives of the new power. Bishops had consulted him as to the saving of the Church, and its reconstruction on "newer, broader, more illuminated lines." They had come to him with fear -- anxious, eager to confess the errors of the past; swift to flatter and suggest that, with his help, the fabric and political power of the Church might yet stand.