by H. E. Bates
Then, tea over and his housekeeper out in the kitchen washing up, he got ready to switch on the halo. He stood in the study in darkness, trembling. Was it going to work? He knelt with his hand on the switch, looking up at the figure of Christ, which he could hardly see. The curtains had not been drawn and through the windows he could see the wintry stars, brilliant over the black fringe of trees.
Suddenly it was as though they had been put out. The halo itself was switched on, shining brighter than all the stars, dimming them like a moon. He stood slowly up. It was wonderful. The light seemed to soothe and sanctify him, and he felt a curious ecstasy of joy and shame. But gradually the shame lessened; all his doubts on haloes were washed away. Who was he ever to have doubted at all?
He was disturbed by the running feet of his housekeeper in the passage, and by the opening of the study door.
‘Oh! Mr. Jordan what is it? I see the light shining and I thought you were on fire.’ He looked at her and smiled. ‘I am on fire, Mrs. Jolley,’ he said.
‘Oh! What is it, what’ve you got?’ she said.
‘That is my new Christ,’ he said. ‘It works by electricity. That is why I had the plug fitted.’
‘Oh! Mr. Jordan!’
‘Mrs. Jolley,’ he said. ‘I want you to promise me not to dust it. I’ll dust it. So that if anything goes wrong the blame will be on me.’
After that, every evening, he would sit in his study in darkness, and switch on the halo. It was like the performing of a little miracle. Darkness would become light, the tiredness of the day would be washed away, the pale face of Christ would be lit up for him into a new gentleness and meaning, the study would seem for a little while a holy place. Kneeling by the plug-switch he got into the habit of saying to himself:
‘Arise, shine, for thy light is come.’
Then, at the beginning of February, he had a distressing thought. Keeping the Christ to himself like that, what did it mean? Did it mean that he was worshipping false gods, a graven image? ‘Thou shalt have no other gods before me,’ he remembered. And being electric made it worse. He was very disturbed. He could not sleep and he felt shaken right to the depths of himself.
Then, as though in confirmation of it all, the Christ suddenly would not work. One evening he pressed the switch, but nothing happened. He switched off and on again, but the halo remained dark.
He went into the kitchen. ‘Mrs. Jolley,’ he said, ‘you haven’t touched the figure of our lord?’
‘Well, Mr. Jordan, sir, I took the halo off and dusted it.’
‘You took the—Mrs. Jolley, Mrs. Jolley.’
‘I apologize, sir.’
‘That’s enough, Mrs. Jolley. I only wanted to know.’
The next day he wrote a letter to the ecclesiastical suppliers in the city, asking them to send a mechanic to repair the Christ, but the letter was never posted. At the last moment his conscience rather troubled him. He had been very wrong, perhaps, to pay such devotion to the Christ, very remiss. And now if the halo would not light it would not light—that was all. He must accept it, resign himself. It could only be interpreted as a kind of judgment upon him.
So he kept the Christ in the study, going in to it every evening to see if, by some miracle, the halo would light again. But nothing happened. He felt dispirited as he touched the switch and saw the halo remaining dark. Quite quietly, he felt that the halo had been a little bit of a swindle. Not that he grudged the money. It was not that. He was retired, and when the time came there would be no dependants except his wife’s brother’s only daughter—what was her name? He had rather forgotten it now—and Mrs. Jolley. And somehow sixty-five guineas did not seem much, although it was half of what he used to pay a curate a year. Still, a curate and a halo—there was hardly a comparison.
No, it was not the money he grudged. But he had the feeling that a halo ought to have been infallible. It ought not to have gone wrong. He could not get away from the feeling that even an electric halo had a kind of divinity about it—a divinity by association. And somehow it ought not to have been the subject of earthly failings.
He felt quite worried about it. Then after a time he didn’t feel quite up to the mark; his system seemed to be a bit upset. He took a dose of Glauber’s salt and for a time he felt better, but the effect was only temporary. And one day when Mrs. Jolley brought in his lamb-chops he had to give them best.
‘Well, sir, if I was you,’ Mrs. Jolley said, ‘I’d go to bed for a couple of days. Your system needs a rest.’
‘I think perhaps I will,’ he said.
‘And I wouldn’t take any more of those Glauber’s, sir, if I was you. They’re weakening.’
In bed he felt that there was something in what she said. He felt very weak. If he closed his eyes and then suddenly opened them again he seemed to be in a ship that in turn was on an ocean of vast extent and in great turmoil. He was tossed and turned by its turbulence. And his head felt too big for him. It was like an immense cabbage on his shoulders, a ponderous weight of nothingness.
Towards evening he remembered the halo. He called Mrs. Jolley and asked her to go down and see if the switch would work.
‘Don’t worry yourself about switches,’ she said ‘You’re a bit feverish Mr. Jordan.’
‘Just see if it works,’ he begged.
‘All right. But if I don’t come up again you’ll know it doesn’t work.’
He waited, but she did not come up again. Fretting, he had a poor night and in the morning the day seemed so dark: the leafless February darkness, full of negation and the melancholy feeling that spring would never come. He tried to eat some breakfast, but it was too much for him. But he drank two cups of tea and afterwards felt as if two animals were quarrelling in his stomach.
‘I feel just as if two dogs were fighting inside me,’ he said to Mrs. Jolley.
‘You rest,’ she said. Funny thing to say, wasn’t it? dogs quarrelling inside him?
‘Did the halo work?’ he said.
‘The what, sir? Oh, no it didn’t turn on.’
‘Oh dear!’
He lay back in bed. A swindle. It ought to work.
‘Don’t keep worrying about that,’ Mrs. Jolley said ‘I dare say there’s nothing much wrong with it. I dare say my daughter’s husband could put it right.’
‘It’s a swindle!’ he said in a loud voice
‘Mr. Jordan, Mr. Jordan. You mustn’t talk like that!’
He lay weakly back on the pillows again. ‘I would so like to see it alight again.’ He said.
Towards evening he heard sounds downstairs. In his sleepy half coma they seemed like the bumps of great feet. They shook his whole body, so that his whole system seemed a strange great fluttering shaken mass that did not belong to him. He had never felt so strange. He felt detached from himself. The dogs had ceased fighting now, and it seemed as if his mind had been torn by them from his body.
Mrs. Jolley came up to bring some tea.
‘Who’s knocking?’ he said.
‘That’s my daughter’s husband. He’s mending the electric Jesus, the bit on the head. It’s the plug gone wrong. How do you feel?’
‘Tired. But the dogs have stopped.’
‘The what?’ Funny; dogs on the brain. What dogs? ‘Now you just drink your tea and rest.’ Dogs!
‘Tell me when it’s done, the halo.’
‘All right, I will.’
Downstairs Mrs. Jolley said to her son-in-law: ‘Keeps talking about dogs in his stomach. What d’ye make of that?’
‘Sounds loopy.’
‘That’s what I thought. You better call in for the doctor as you go by.’
‘All right. I got another screw to shove in. The wire had pulled out of the neck-hole.’
Between that time and the time the doctor came the Rev. Hezekiah Jordan got out of bed and managed to get downstairs. In his grey dressing-gown and his bare feet he shuffled along like a weak ghost. The dogs had ceased fighting in his stomach, he felt as light as a feather, an
d in the study he had a single moment of beatific joy as he switched on the halo and saw it bathe the face of the Christ in the old effulgence but with a new and comforting tenderness. He felt very happy. It was only when he had been kneeling by the switch for more than ten minutes that he discovered that he could not get up again. The dogs began to rumble in his stomach again and their angry movements and the lovely light of the halo were the last things he ever remembered.
He died the following day. A month later, when the effects were sold up, things went very cheaply and the Christ itself fetched nothing at all.
A Note on the Author
H. E. Bates was born in 1905 in the shoe-making town of Rushden, Northamptonshire, and educated at Kettering Grammar School. After leaving school, he worked as a reporter and as a clerk in a leather warehouse.
Many of his stories depict life in the rural Midlands, particularly his native Northamptonshire, where he spent many hours wandering the countryside.
His first novel, The Two Sisters (1926) was published by Jonathan Cape when he was just twenty. Many critically acclaimed novels and collections of short stories followed.
During WWII he was commissioned into the RAF solely to write short stories, which were published under the pseudonym ‘Flying Officer X’. His first financial success was Fair Stood the Wind for France (1944), followed by two novels about Burma, The Purple Plain (1947) and The Jacaranda Tree (1949) and one set in India, The Scarlet Sword (1950). Other well-known novels include Love for Lydia (1952) and The Feast of July (1954).
His most popular creation was the Larkin family which featured in five novels beginning with The Darling Buds of May in 1958. The later television adaptation was a huge success.
Many other stories were adapted for the screen, the most renowned being The Purple Plain (1947) starring Gregory Peck, and The Triple Echo (1970) with Glenda Jackson and Oliver Reed.
H. E. Bates married in 1931, had four children and lived most of his life in a converted granary near Charing in Kent. He was awarded the CBE in 1973, shortly before his death in 1974.
Discover other books by H. E. Bates published by Bloomsbury Reader at
www.bloomsbury.com/hebates.
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First published in Great Britain in 1964 by Michael Joseph Ltd
‘The Electric Christ’ first published in Great Britain in 1935 by John O’London’s Weekly
This electronic edition published in 2016 by Bloomsbury Reader
Copyright © 1964 Evensford Productions Ltd
The moral right of the author is asserted.
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eISBN: 9781448215263
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