The Purple Cloud
Page 20
to pick my way, lest I should desecrate the dead with my foot, andthey all should rise with hue and cry to hunt me. However, the bodieshere were not numerous, most, as before, being foreigners: and these,scattered about this strict old English burg that mourning dark night,presented such a scene of the baneful wrath of God, and all abominationof desolation, as broke me quite down at one place, where I stood intravail with jeremiads and sore sobbings and lamentations, crying outupon it all, God knows.
Only when I stood at the west entrance of the Cathedral I could discern,spreading up the dark nave, to the lantern, to the choir, aphantasmagorical mass of forms: I went a little inward, and strikingthree matches, peered nearer: the two transepts, too, seemedcrowded--the cloister-doorway was blocked--the southwest porch thronged,so that a great congregation must have flocked hither shortly beforetheir fate overtook them.
Here it was that I became definitely certain that the after-odour of thepoison was not simply lingering in the air, but was being more or lessgiven off by the bodies: for the blossomy odour of this church actuallyovercame that other odour, the whole rather giving the scent of oldmouldy linens long embalmed in cedars.
Well, away with stealthy trot I ran from the abysmal silence of thatplace, and in Palace Street near made one of those sudden immoderaterackets that seemed to outrage the universe, and left me so woefullyfaint, decrepit, and gasping for life (the noise of the train wasdifferent, for there I was flying, but here a captive, and which way Iran was capture). Passing in Palace Street, I saw a little lampshop, andwanting a lantern, tried to get in, but the door was locked; so, aftergoing a few steps, and kicking against a policeman's truncheon, Ireturned to break the window-glass. I knew that it would make a fearfulnoise, and for some fifteen or twenty minutes stood hesitating: butnever could I have dreamed, my good God, of _such_ a noise, sopassionate, so dominant, so divulgent, and, O Heaven, so long-lasting:for I seemed to have struck upon the weak spot of some planet, whichcame suddenly tumbling, with protracted bellowing and _debacle_, aboutmy ears. It was a good hour before I would climb in; but then quicklyfound what I wanted, and some big oil-cans; and till one or two in themorning, the innovating flicker of my lantern went peering at randominto the gloomy nooks of the town.
Under a deep old Gothic arch that spanned a pavered alley, I saw thelittle window of a little house of rubble, and between the twodiamond-paned sashes rags tightly beaten in, the idea evidently being tomake the place air-tight against the poison. When I went in I found thedoor of that room open, though it, too, apparently, had been stuffed atthe edges; and on the threshold an old man and woman lay low. Iconjectured that, thus protected, they had remained shut in, till eitherhunger, or the lack of oxygen in the used-up air, drove them forth,whereupon the poison, still active, must have instantly ended them. Ifound afterwards that this expedient of making air-tight had been widelyresorted to; and it might well have proved successful, if both thesupply of inclosed air, and of food, had been anywhere commensurate withthe durability of the poisonous state.
Weary, weary as I grew, some morbid persistence sustained me, and Iwould not rest. About four in the morning I was at a station again,industriously bending, poor wretch, at the sooty task of getting anotherengine ready for travel. This time, when steam was up, I succeeded inuncoupling the carriages from the engine, and by the time morningbroke, I was lightly gliding away over the country, whither I did notknow, but making for London.
* * * * *
Now I went with more intelligence and caution, and got on very well,travelling seven days, never at night, except it was very clear, neverat more than twenty or twenty-five miles, and crawling through tunnels.I do not know the maze into which the train took me, for very soon afterleaving Canterbury it must have gone down some branch-line, and thoughthe names were marked at stations, that hardly helped me, for of theirsituation relatively to London I was seldom sure. Moreover, again andagain was my progress impeded by trains on the metals, when I would haveto run back to a shunting-point or a siding, and, in two instances,these being far behind, changed from my own to the impeding engine. Onthe first day I travelled unhindered till noon, when I stopped in opencountry that seemed uninhabited for ages, only that half a mile to theleft, on a shaded sward, was a large stone house of artistic design,coated with tinted harling, the roof of red Ruabon tiles, and timberedgables. I walked to it after another row with putting out the fire andarranging for a new one, the day being bright and mild, with greatmasses of white cloud in the sky. The house had an outer and an innerhall, three reception rooms, fine oil-paintings, a kind of museum, and alarge kitchen. In a bed-room above-stairs I found three women withservants' caps, and a footman, arranged in a strange symmetrical way,head to head, like rays of a star. As I stood looking at them, I couldhave sworn, my good God, that I heard someone coming up the stairs. Butit was some slight creaking of the breeze in the house, augmented ahundredfold to my inflamed and fevered hearing: for, used for years nowto this silence of Eternity, it is as though I hear all sounds throughan ear-trumpet. I went down, and after eating, and drinking someclary-water, made of brandy, sugar, cinnamon, and rose water, which Ifound in plenty, I lay down on a sofa in the inner hall, and slept aquiet sleep until near midnight.
I went out then, still possessed with the foolish greed to reach London,and after getting the engine to rights, went off under a clear black skythronged with worlds and far-sown spawn, some of them, I thought,perhaps like this of mine, whelmed and drowned in oceans of silence,with one only inhabitant to see it, and hear its silence. And all thelong night I travelled, stopping twice only, once to get the coal froman engine which had impeded me, and once to drink some water, which Itook care, as always, should be running water. When I felt my head nod,and my eyes close about 5 A.M., I threw myself, just outside the arch ofa tunnel upon a grassy bank, pretty thick with stalks and flowers, theworkings of early dawn being then in the east: and there, till neareleven, slept.
On waking, I noticed that the country now seemed more like Surrey thanKent: there was that regular swell and sinking of the land; but, infact, though it must have been either, it looked like neither, foralready all had an aspect of return to a state of wild nature, and Icould see that for a year at the least no hand had tended the soil. Nearbefore me was a stretch of lucerne of such extraordinary growth, that Iwas led during that day and the succeeding one to examine the conditionof vegetation with some minuteness, and nearly everywhere I detected acertain hypertrophie tendency in stamens, calycles, pericarps, andpistils, in every sort of bulbiferous growth that I looked at, in therushes, above all, the fronds, mosses, lichens, and all cryptogamia, andin the trefoils, clover especially, and some creepers. Manycrop-fields, it was clear, had been prepared, but not sown; some hadnot been reaped: and in both cases I was struck with their appearance ofrankness, as I was also when in Norway, and was all the more surprisedthat this should be the case at a time when a poison, whose action isthe arrest of oxidation, had traversed the earth; I could only concludethat its presence in large volumes in the lower strata of the atmospherehad been more or less temporary, and that the tendency to exuberancewhich I observed was due to some principle by which Nature acts withfreer energy and larger scope in the absence of man.
Two yards from the rails I saw, when I got up, a little rill beside arotten piece of fence, barely oozing itself onward under masses of fouland stagnant fungoids: and here there was a sudden splash, and life: andI caught sight of the hind legs of a diving young frog. I went and layon my belly, poring over the clear dulcet little water, and presentlysaw two tiny bleaks, or ablets, go gliding low among the swayingmoss-hair of the bottom-rocks, and thought how gladly would I be one ofthem, with my home so thatched and shady, and my life drowned in theirwide-eyed reverie. At any rate, these little creatures are alive, thebatrachians also, and, as I found the next day, pupae and chrysales ofone sort or another, for, to my deep emotion, I saw a little whitebutterfly staggering in the air over the flower-garden of a rusticstation na
med Butley.
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It was while I was lying there, poring upon that streamlet, that athought came into my head: for I said to myself: 'If now I be herealone, alone, alone... alone, alone... one on the earth... and my girthhave a spread of 25,000 miles... what will happen to my mind? Into whatkind of creature shall I writhe and change? I may live two years so!What will have happened then? I may live five years--ten! What will havehappened after the five? the ten? I may live twenty, thirty, forty...'
Already, already, there are things that peep and sprout within me...!
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I wanted food and fresh running water, and walked from the engine half amile through fields of lucerne whose luxuriance quite hid thefoot-paths, and reached my shoulder. After turning the brow of a hill, Icame to a park, passing through which I saw some dead deer and threepersons, and emerged upon a terraced lawn, at the end