by H. F. Heard
I saw in a flash, we all die voluntarily, just because the pain of being salvaged is too great. I think that was all I was meant to see then. For I now realized that the dense pack round me should by this time have invaded me, should have touched me, I ought to have become part of them and been involved in that final act. I ought now to be making that ultimate choice—the foul, suffocating flood that flows forever down, or the searing grip which, if the soul could be parted, would tear it asunder. But I was not. Something, not myself, not the forces that had crowded round me, was now in action.
I became aware that this was nothing that had to do with my own immunity—there was some immunity just where I was. Then my numbed mind had time enough, as the reprieve lasted, to do a little feeble thinking. Of course, it was the frontier, that very first current that I had sensed, the first thing I had noticed about this awful place when, it seemed lives ago, I had blundered, trespassed into it. The frontier was there—in its way the deepest thing in that place, deeper than anything that had life or ever had had life. And I was safe then, provided I was this side of it. The other forces couldn’t cross it. They could try to involve me, horrify me, attract me, or drive me in panic to some extratemporal doom. But they could not actually invade me as long as I was human and as long as I was just in this spot, with that steady flowing river of primal force between them and me. With that, knowledge dawned on my mind that I could, if I chose, get away. I was held only by an awful sympathy and a kind of prophetic sense. I was seeing ahead to a crisis which one day I must meet but which was not mine now save by sight, not by actual contact. I drew myself up slowly until I could feel my back against the bench back. I slid along sideways, keeping my eyes on that figure by the plinth. It was true, I was withdrawing from that vortex, I was passing out of that field. The pack was as great, the pressure as awful, the doubtful issue of that battle of the abyss was still sustained with, indeed, mounting agony. But I was already making a greater and greater distance between myself and them. There was less purchase on me, and they were, I felt sure, less and less aware of me as something that was part of that tide and so for or against one or other of the two implacable forces. I felt my right hand at the bench’s end. I got myself somehow on my feet. I was in the tunnel-passage. The door was at my hand.
I took it and swung myself out onto the grass. It clacked to, and with that little noise came again a great noise, a fresh outburst of firing, bombing, and roaring planes. A bound of excitement and, yes, delight went through my veins. I’m never going to see the middle forties again, but I ran like a schoolboy headlong down the hill, a boy racing to a bonfire. There was a fine one ahead, a house was well alight. I found I was being joined by others. The organized squads of fire fighters were all off lower down in the town fighting the first big hits. We elderlies raced along. It was our show. There were ladders up the side of the blazing building. And need enough: there were people caught up aloft. We pushed to be first up. My energy was evidently greater than that of those round me, and well it might be.
I remember the sheer joy I felt swarming up that ladder toward the flames, and how that inner glow mounted in me as I scrambled into the room. Two small boys were huddled in their bed still, while flames poured through the door and had carpet and curtain already in their hold. I’ll never again feel such spirits—I suppose that is what Homer calls the joy of battle—but there was no hate in it. Tell the truth, I felt more like a kind of Father Christmas. There was something jolly, cheery, sane, and exultant about those flames, dangerous, of course, like a tiger or a huge anaconda, but beautiful in their lashing strength and coil. And the children: I felt that I had courage not only for myself but for them, yes, and to spare. I roared at them through the roaring of the fire—a burning house when it is well alight makes much the same sound that an enthusiastic meeting makes when its orator has made a splendid peroration, the same tide of enthusiasm. I caught them up, and they seemed light as bolsters, rushed them toward the window, laughing so loud that they caught my spirits and began to laugh, too. I don’t know how we got down the ladder. There was a lot of help, of course. But we ought to have broken our necks.
And the friendship at the foot! Have I ever liked human beings, have I ever seen a group of human beings so happy with each other! The closest of relations couldn’t care for each other more than we cared and liked, yes, loved each other in that wild light as the house in front of us, like a furnace, collapsed into ruin. As we turned away—it stood by itself and there was no more to do in salvage—and set off to find places and food and treatment for the inmates—for one or two had scars, I saw, but not my two, I felt with silly pride—I saw a car sweep up. Out of it jumped the doctor.
He caught sight of me, and I saw something of the same cheeriness in his face. He shouted across to me as the first-aiders brought up their quarry, “This is the stuff to blow cobwebs from the mind, eh? No more difficulties for a long time after this blowout!” I shouted back some cheery reply.
We all got to bed in the later of the early hours. My lodging house hadn’t been hit. I woke up with the two sides of my mind so far apart that I couldn’t be said to be in anything but a kind of arrest. I knew I must wait till the two came together and then decide what should be the policy and behavior pattern for that thing that called itself me. I ate my breakfast and was told while at it that one of the best hits had been on our office, the old seaside hotel, and that, till some sort of order could be brought, it was no use for me to report for work. I then spent as much time as I could over my food; my body was hungry, and well it might be. I let it have its head, or perhaps it’s more truthful, if less nice, to say its stomach. Afterward I smoked in a small place at the back of our house where the sun made a restful pool of light. As I smoked I glanced toward the countryside. I could see from where I sat the shoulder of the down, the crest of the slope down which I had come pelting last night. I finished my pipe. Then I knocked it out, walked through the house, out into the street and turned up the hill.
I went slowly but deliberately. I suppose something in me knew what it was going to do. I know I was content to allow it to show its hand when it would. After I had left those last two desolate houses behind me I began to be able to see the top of the chapel bell cote. It came fully in sight when I was not more than a hundred yards away from it, so steep was the rise that side, and I noticed it was set a little farther toward the slope leading down to the next combe. I went toward it.
I had never approached it from that side before. That was why I had never seen, never suspected, that the place had two doors. The one I had used under the bell cote was on the southwest corner. But there was another, just as small, set flat in the north wall, not far from the east end. It must lead into the sanctuary. Well, I could look at it with a good archaeological conscience, for the first glance suggested it would repay inspection. True enough, it did. There was the simple round arch, but the bolster molding was richly embossed with those sinister big-beaked birds’ heads, their beaks hooked round the roll of the molding. The cushion capitals of the two small side pillars were also richly carved. But, as this work was small and finely carved, it had weathered more. I couldn’t make out what the figures wound into the curves of the small pillar-capitals were meant to convey. There were two on each side. That on the left showed one figure seated close to the top of the capital—indeed, his seat or throne was made out of the abacus of the capital. The other figure was standing underneath, looking up, as far as I could make out, and with coils of some sort draped round him. The figures on the left were composed in the same way, but the lower standing figure had no drapery of coils about him but—if it were not an effect of the weathering of the stone—seemed to be stippled over with dots. I didn’t spend much time in trying to make out these little puzzle-pictures—if they were that. For the pièce de résistance was that the door had a tympanum. The space between the arch and the lintel of the door itself was a panel of stone, a semicircular slab, and it was filled with a composition, a
carving in high relief. Though worn, it was easy to make out the vigor of the archaic execution and also the force with which the subject had been rendered. It was a Michael at the moment of his victory. His spread wings with immense pinions filled the upper part of the half-circle. With a pile-driver’s force he was striking home with his spear, and under him was a tangle of webbed and taloned wings, of claws, fangs, and spines, in the middle of which was contorted a face of real malignity.
I stood looking at this fine piece of symbolism for a little while, and then my eye was caught by something lower down. On the door was fastened, rather incongruously, a little picture frame, glazed with weather-blurred glass. Through it I could see, however, a piece of paper which the glass had not been able really to protect. Rain had made contour maps on it of various browns, and the writing on the paper had been brought by the sun to almost the same faded fawns.
I started to decipher it in the idle way one will read anything that is not quite easy to make out. When I had finished I was sure I had got all that it had to say and also that I had found what, when I set out on my walk, my mind had made itself up to find. The text ran as follows: “The curate attached to the chapel of ease of St. Michael gives notice of the following services.” I need not give them. The concluding sentence ran: “He is also very willing to see anyone who will make appointment with him previously should they desire spiritual direction or confession. A notice left at the address given below will find him and an appointment to meet at this place can then be arranged.” In the same angular Italic handwriting, that took my mind back to grand-aunts’ letters of my childhood, the name underneath was signed, “U. St.J. Tuohill, Clerk in Holy Orders S.T.P.” and the address, “2 Kimberley Drive.”
I was certainly not going to decline that invitation, however long it had been issued—and disregarded. I knew where Kimberley Drive was. I had just come up it, for it was the lonely road that linked this spot with the town—a developmental failure of the very early years of the century, as its name showed. And No. 2 must be one of that couple of prematurely aged houses which stood like flotsam left by the tide of local builders’ speculative hope which had long retreated.
I felt that I was now on the track of an enigma which if I didn’t solve might well become an obsession. For, though in the full day and sunlight I could treat the place as one of archaeological interest, I knew that this was but a film of surface distraction. Just below I felt the pull of an immediate, instant, most present concern, something so present and so pressing that the obvious appearances of things, the smashed houses, some of them visible from here, down in the town, and this old accumulation of weathered stones, all history and the urgent present, were somehow, if not irrelevant, at least without their clue, unless this strange force or fancy could be understood. One thing I knew with rising certainty—either here lay a secret that would give me a new understanding of life, would make living incomparably more important to me than ever it had been (and I think I can say I had not lived a life of triviality), or I should know that I myself was done, that some force, subjective and fanciful to all others but to me fatally powerful, had laid hold of me and was going to drag me from the world where men lived their ordinary lives into a darkness from which there was no returning.
That, you see, was my choice: A meaning far more comprehensive, vast, and intense than ever I had suspected, since I became what I held to be an informed man—or, in brief, madness. I am not, you may judge, the kind of man who goes out of his way to call on strangers. Even should I have felt the need of company other than my office afforded and the social life of the place demanded, I had not had the kind of background in upbringing and vocation that would make me pick out, as a venture in companionship, what was obviously an old-fashioned clergyman and pretty obviously eccentric also. But, without a moment’s hesitation, just as a dog goes that at last has a breast-high scent after questing, I wheeled round and went down the hill. I did not even try to see whether that small door was open. I knew the chapel had no further knowledge to give me, though it might, and pretty certainly would, at its chosen hours give me its dreadful call to witness something I could not understand and to be involved in that which I could not help but which could undo me.
The two houses rose in view in a couple of moments. I guessed, rightly, that I should come on No. 2 first. The curate in charge certainly preferred to live as near as possible to his post, or as far as possible away from the world. And his isolation was really quite considerable. I had never looked at the houses as I went down in the dusk hastening to get home. Now I saw that No. 1 was obviously, in the dreary, house-agent’s term, untenanted, and, when I came close to the two, there was really little to prove that No. 2 on any agent’s books was in any better standing. It was of three stories, if one does not count as a story the result of that strange excavatory passion which for a century made people of means dig holes under their houses, called basements, in which they secreted their domestics—no doubt part of the process which they called keeping the lower classes in their place. This house had a basement, though there was no reason why it should have tunneled its own foundations. Unoccupied land was around it on every side save that of its Siamese twin.
I amused myself with these Fabian reflections, but all the while I was getting up my courage for the interview and trying really to diagnose what sort of being I should meet. Surely just a withered eccentric, who for the sake of a few pounds per year keeps going a service unrequired by any. That was the sane side of my civil service mind speaking. But it did not reassure me, for, granted that would be all, as well it might, would that make things better, would there be any comfort there, just to find that this poor old piece of professional flotsam, living up in this stranded house and serving this piece of fossil ecclesiasticism, didn’t know anything about the place he served and would treat me as only fit for the lunatic asylum? For of course he would be far too ancient ever to have heard of Freud. And the grim edge to that would be that he would be right. For if he could throw no light on my mystery, then the outlook for me was dark indeed. I knew enough of psychoanalysis (practically the only kind of psychology admitted by us economically obsessed intellectuals) to know that it certainly could not help me.
I stopped a moment abreast of the house and looked squarely at it. It was just clean—the windows had been washed some time; there were faded curtains in the window of the ground floor and in the room above. They were drawn in the way in which gentility of that date defended itself, feeling that it was far better to live in darkness than that people should be able to look in on your domestic intimacies. Following the rule of the house, even the top windows complied, though only birds could have acted as Peeping Toms at that level. Dark blinds of the material air raids had made obligatory, even now in the morning light, kept the place looking somnolent. Perhaps, I thought, the reverend gentleman had so disturbed a night through the air raid that his housekeeper has advised him to stay in bed. And as I said that, and tried to smile at the thought of somnolent security it gave, I went up the three steps which led to the door.
I was, to be exact, on the first, when the door opened, and, sure enough, there was a housekeeper. At least I caught a glimpse of what used to be called “a very respectable body” of those years which are certified, I believe, by Canon Law in the Roman Church as being “over canonical age.” But before I could tell more, the door shut, and my attention was distracted. For down the steps was coming a man, a clergyman, but quite the reverse of the figure I had already begun to shape as suitable to issue from this place and carry the name on the church door.
I expect you guess, that I don’t take very readily to what Trollope used to call “men of the cloth.” So, you see, it is a kind of discourteous compliment when I say that I didn’t take the man to be a clergyman because I took to him at once. Yet there was no doubt as to his profession. There was that forbidding, inconvenient black, clinched by that deliberately inconvenient reversed collar. Even the black homburg which he all
owed himself to wear looked like a sane piece of secularism which had had an accident and been drowned in ink, after which its original owner had given it to a church bazaar. But I was really in no mood to try and amuse myself with these surface things. Granted this man was quite unlike anything I had expected, still I should have to speak to him, for he alone, slenderest of hopes, could help me.
I hesitated, though. Just because at the very first glance I liked the man I shrank from showing that I was as good as a nervous wreck. What help could this fine, upstanding man be to me? Better a cobwebbed scholar. Then there might be a ghost of a chance that an ecclesiastical bookworm might have found some reference in one of his folios pointing toward the dark passage into which I had strayed and where I was caught. But this man, who might have played cricket for his county or rowed for his university—of course, he would be of some use, in a way, last night with all the smashing and burning. Odd as his faith and cut of clothes might be, he was clearly a man who would awake confidence—at least among people in normal distress such as death and mutilation. I don’t know whether I would not have let him go past as, like Milton’s Devil, I stood “dividing the swift mind.” I think I might. Anyhow, it was he who turned as he went past and said in a voice as reassuring as his appearance: “Excuse me, sir, were you going to call here?”
“Yes, yes …” I hesitated.
