Land Under England

by Joseph O'Neill

  I remember the time on the precipitous ground between Dewingshields and Thirlwall when our antiquarian work of those early days came abruptly to an end.

  We were eating our lunch, perched on a crag under a hot August sun, when John Codling, a farmer who knew us well, appeared below us, shouting and waving a newspaper. We got off our perch and went down to find out what was the matter. The matter was that Germany had invaded Belgium, and the papers said that England must defend Belgium and France against the Teutonic attack on Latin civilisation.

  I shall never forget the look on my father’s face. It was the look of a man who wakens from a dream to find that it is a reality. There he stood, like his forbears 1,500 years before, listening to the cry that penetrated up to the Roman Wall for help for Gaul against the tribes beyond the Rhine.

  A week afterwards he had answered the call and joined up, to save, as he thought, the remnant of Roman civilisation from the onrush of the barbarians.

  I will not trouble the reader with the details of my life during the years when my father was away at the war. While he was in training in the south of England, my mother and I stayed with relations of hers outside London so as to be near him, and when, after eight months, he left for the front, my mother volunteered as a nurse and sent me to a boarding-school in Brighton.

  I cannot say that the years at school had much effect on my life, except in so far as it was a better thing for me, at that stage of my life, to have had to live with boys of my own age than with a dreaming father in a twilight life mixed of past and present.

  The work was easy for me, since my knowledge of classics was far beyond that of any of the masters. I was pretty fluent at French, which my father had made me learn owing to its connection with Latin, and I was so advanced in history and literature that I could spend all my study hours at mathematics and science, for both of which I unexpectedly showed an aptitude far above the average.

  For the rest, I cannot remember that I learned anything at that school, except some valuable information as to the hard edges of present-day facts and the need to turn aside frequently from pleasant imaginings in order to come to terms with realities. I learned this somewhat painfully, during the first years, at the hands of the bigger boys. At the time the experience made my life rather miserable, but I am naturally a sturdy type of creature, and, looking back now on that period, I can see that the impact of tough realities was necessary as an antidote to the dream-life that I had lived before the war. It certainly did me no harm to have to face the world of living people during my most impressionable years.

  The vacations I spent in part with my mother’s people, and here my keenness for the sciences got a practical turn, for they were manufacturers of motors and munitions, and my connection with them had important results in my life at a later stage.

  During all the war years I never saw my father, for he had been sent to the East in 1915, and later, when he was on his way home on furlough, the Italian front gave way and he asked to be transferred to the British force that was rushed to restore it. The news that came from him, and about him, was, however, very satisfactory, for not only was he not seriously wounded at any time, but he showed such a combination of zeal and capacity that he went from rank to rank rapidly. He had joined up as a private, but he was a colonel when the war ended. My mother’s people, the Sacketts, who had never thought much of him, changed their opinion as the war went on, and began to express a hope that, when he came back, he would give up his idle dreaming. They even spoke of getting him to come into the munitions business.

  My mother was full of the same hope, and, when she spoke to me about it, I had no great difficulty in agreeing with her, since my science work at the school and my vacations at the Sacketts’ had wakened in me a new interest in practical work that had largely displaced the old romantic dreams about the Wall and its legions. At the same time my father had remained my hero—a hero now who had proved his worth on the most terrible battlefields of history, and, unlike the others, I felt that whatever he chose to do would be the right thing, which I would accept gladly if only I could get him back into my life.

  CHAPTER TWO

  He Hears the Julian Call

  I SHALL not easily forget the first time I met my father after the war. It was on Dover Quay, when he disembarked from the boat. I was looking round for him when I saw my mother dart away from me towards a tall harsh-faced soldier who was standing on the quay looking round him with a cold detached look. My mother threw her arms round him. It was my father. I came up to them timidly. I was watching him embracing my mother, and it struck me that he was going through it automatically, as a man does whose mind is far away. When I came up to him, he stared at me. “You have grown a good deal, Anthony,” he said, with a cold stare, and gave me his hand. I pressed it, but there was no answering pressure. I felt a rush of tears coming to my eyes, and turned away. Through the mist that seemed to envelop me, I heard my mother’s voice explaining to my father that she had found a lovely house in Hove, and they were holding it for her until he could come to see it. Then his voice came back chill and insensitive: “You needn’t hold it any longer. I am going back to live at Julian’s Pond.”

  That evening when I went back to school I knew that everything was changed. The father I had known and the life I had known were gone, and there was something very different in their place.

  A few months afterwards my father was demobbed and, when the school term ended, I went back to the Pond House.

  During my father’s stay in the south, my mother and I had gone to see him twice, but I had made as little contact with him during these two visits as when I met him at Dover, and I could see that, whatever little contact my mother had had with him before the war, it was completely broken. He had become a stranger.

  It may be thought that this change in my father’s manner and attitude to us was a natural result of his war experience, which would wear off, at least partly, in the course of time. My mother tried to console herself with this explanation in the beginning, and, in my desolation over the loss that I was suffering, I was only too glad to grasp at it too.

  On my way home at the end of term I was buoying myself up with this hope and imagining that the life in the old familiar surroundings and the sight of the Wall would bring back the father that I knew.

  If I expected the change to have begun already, and I believe that I did expect this, I soon discovered my mistake. My father was not at the station to meet me, and the first sight of my mother’s face showed me that things were unchanged.

  That summer vacation of 1919 at Julian’s Pond stands out, even now, very clearly in my memory, in spite of all the experiences that have intervened between this and then, for over it all the figure of my father seems to hang like a menacing cloud.

  In the old days one of the most charming things about him had been his swift transitions from one mood to another—from a state of romantic dream to outbursts of mocking brilliance or fantastic humorous laughter, and then perhaps to fascinating talk about history or literature. Above all things, there was his gift of laughter. When he was in one of his merry moods he would laugh at me, at my mother, at everybody and everything in the most attractive way, and his fantastic humour was all the more enjoyable for that touch of charming malice that gave it spice and flavour. Now he never laughed, and rarely talked. If we tried to talk to him about any subject but one, he answered abstractedly. That subject was not the war, but the Wall and the chances of finding a descent through it to a world below. Even about this he did not want to speak to my mother, and, when I tried to get into touch with him through it, he showed little desire to talk much about it with me. Whatever he did say, however, was real, not mere abstract answering, such as he was apt to give us if we talked about other matters.

  Most of his time he spent alone, either on the Wall or poring over our family records, and the attempts of outsiders to draw him out about his war experience, or, indeed, to get into touch with him in any way, were
received with such frigid indifference that we soon found ourselves isolated in a way we had never been before.

  After some time, rumours began to be put about that my father’s war experience had unhinged his mind.

  Whether there was any truth in this or not, it is certain that, whereas his old fantastic humour and joyous mirth had vanished, his fantastic romance had not only remained, but had engulfed everything else, so that the visions that before the war had merely lured him away a good deal from the world of men now began to take a shape that, though it was bred out of a dream, seemed likely, unless it was checked, to prove as stern a reality to us as the war itself.

  In order to make clear the danger that now threatened us, it is necessary to mention that amongst the family documents there were some very curious ones that purported to give accounts of the adventures of Julians who had gone down through the Pond or the Roman Wall to an underground world peopled by a kindred race.

  There was, for instance, a circumstantial story of a Julian who had gone down in the reign of Edward II and had come back, after a year, with extraordinary tales. If he had gone, he had certainly returned, for he was killed at the Battle of Bannockburn.

  There was another Julian who was supposed to have gone down in the reign of Henry VIII, and who fought at Flodden afterwards and died at home some months after the battle from wounds received there. He also had left a curious, and, indeed, incredible, account of his adventures in the underworld.

  Then there was Anthony Julian, who disappeared in 1765 and returned the following year with still stranger tales about a world of curious lights and strange darkness, and a people that he could not communicate with who tried to make him a slave.

  According to the family records, indeed, it seemed to be almost a custom of the Julian race from generation to generation to send adventurers into the underworld, just as other families sent them to the Crusade or, in later centuries, to Africa or America. With the exception of the three men mentioned above, however, the Julians who took that road did not come back, and when, after the Napoleonic wars, Lucius Julian went down and did not return, there were no more descents recorded.

  One reason may have been that the old map, showing the part of the Wall that held the door of descent, had disappeared, and with it the detailed descriptions of the land given by the three Julians who had been supposed to have made the journey and returned from it. Lucius Julian was said to have taken these documents with him, and the loss of them would have lessened the chances of other Julians being able to follow him.

  The more probable cause of the loss of interest in the old romance was, however, the fact that, during the nineteenth century, the fortunes of the Julians were crashing, and they had much more serious matters to occupy them than dreams of descents into underground lands.

  Although, however, all detailed plans and accounts of descents had been lost in the scattering of the family, there was sufficient matter left to feed the mind of a dreamer, and this was the stuff that my father’s mind was now brooding over intensely.

  Mostly these “records” were obviously romances that could not be accepted as having any relation to fact, but there were some of them that had a more convincing ring and there was in particular one rhyme, written in ancient and only half intelligible words, that seemed to have come from a real experience. It went something this way when translated into modern speech:

  He that hears the Julian call

  He shall pass beneath the Wall.

  When the Pond makes dry its bed

  He shall count amongst the dead,

  If he can find the rocking-stone

  And stand its Eastward end upon.

  And if he reach the Fungus Lands,

  And if he pass the Spider Bands,

  And if he ’scape the Serpent Doom

  He then may find the Lords of Rome.

  But if he find, he’ll long in vain

  To feel the sun and hear the rain

  And see green grass in fields again

  Since Julian’s Pond is Julian’s bane.

  However, to come back to my father. This was, as I have said, the stuff his mind was now feeding on, and, whatever the neighbours might think of his mental condition, neither my mother nor I had any doubt as to what would be the upshot of it. My father would discover the way of descent, and, when he had found it, he would follow the same road, that so many Julians had followed, to whatever fate awaited him below.

  It may seem strange that my mother and I believed sufficiently in the existence of such a descent to cause us to worry seriously about him. But the fact was that we did both believe it, although she would not have acknowledged her belief.

  The dreadful thing was that there was no way out of our trouble. No one looking into my father’s eyes now could have any hope of deflecting him from the purpose that made them burn so fiercely.

  Even if my mother were the type of woman who would normally have an influence over him, it is certain that she could not have done anything at that stage, and neither could anybody else, short of physical seizure and detention, which would not have been feasible without a doctor’s certificate of mental disorder. The idea of getting this never occurred to us, for, whatever the neighbours might say, it was quite clear to both of us that, though the man was in the grip of a terrible obsession, he had grounds for his imaginings that even we could not deny. Since both my mother and I believed in the stories of those other Julians who had gone down below, we could no more ascribe insanity to my father than we could ascribe it to explorers who look for the North or South Poles or try to gain the summits of Everest or Kangchenjunga.

  It was not that either my mother or I was superstitious or credulous. I was certainly neither one nor the other, and she was, for all her gentleness, as hard-headed and courageous as any daughter of the industrial Midlands, but, before we were back at the Pond House for a month, she knew as well as I did that calamity was hanging over us.

  She had always had an instinctive horror of the Wall, as of something uncanny and unclean and inexplicable. It and the Pond had been from the beginning a hateful part of the family into which she had married—a part that she could not assimilate, and that, even before the war, displaced her and put her aside—but now they began to loom up as something monstrous that filled the horizon and drew darkness from the very brilliance of the sun.

  That was the dreadful part of it—that the brighter and hotter the sun grew, the closer came darkness to our home, for, as the heat mounted up, the Pond shrank, and all the legends told that it was when the Pond emptied that the secret trapdoor in the Wall stood revealed. As the heat grew and the Pond sank lower, my father’s obsession waxed steadily greater.

  At any other time my mother would have made an attempt to get him to go to the seaside for the month of August—as we had frequently done when the weather was hot— but she made no effort now. It was perfectly obvious that he would not listen to any suggestion, and she made none. She seemed, indeed, to fold her hands and resign herself fatalistically to the coming fate. That it was not far off, she knew, for my father now lived only for the Pond and the Wall.

  The Pond sank lower and lower. Towards the end of the month it had already got so low that he camped by its banks at night to keep watch over it. More ominous still, he refused to allow me to stay out with him, and he showed signs of resentment if I came near the Pond during the day, as if he objected to my keeping a watch over him.

  In the olden days a man of the Julians had always kept watch over the Pond, and on its northern bank, between it and the Wall, there was still an ancient-looking little house— the guard-house of the watchers of the Pond. Here old Josiah Carshaw lived, the last survivor of the Julian retainers, and, though he was said to be over eighty years of age, I believed that he would keep a watch on my father’s doings and let us know if anything was happening.

  Such was the position of things on the evening of my nineteenth birthday—the evening on which the drought broke. For three d
ays my father had not come near the house—the first time that he had ever failed to celebrate my birthday, except during the war years.

  As evening fell, we were standing silently looking out through the window that faced in the direction of the Pond, but not daring to go towards it, when the gate clanged and I saw the Rector coming up the path to the house. He was not the sort of man who would be likely to come for an afternoon call without some pressing reason, and I knew at once that he had some news about my father. My mother knew it also, for, after a glance at his face as he came into the drawing-room, she sent me off to the study. I had no choice but to go, though, when I got to the study, I couldn’t even make a pretence of opening a book.

  I kept walking uneasily round the room, opening the door into the dining-room and shutting it, opening the door into the east-room and peering in, in the hope of seeing some sign of the return of my father, as this was the room in which we kept our family documents.

  At last the study-room door opened. It was only Anne, the maid, but her face showed me that she was the bearer of bad news.

  “Yah poor faitlierless bairn,” she said, looking at me with eyes full of pity.

  “Wliat—what is it, Anne?” I cried. “Is he gone?”

  “Ize never wunder but he’s waur nor deid,” she said slowly. “Josiah see’d t’ Pond empty two neets agone—but, when t’ call cum for Julian, Julian mun go——”

  “Who told you that?” I cried.

  “Meenister be telling missus all aboot it—an’ I put an ear t’ key-hold an’ heerd it all—and he sed it’s fair flaysome she let maister go on that gait, but he be a strainger, he doan’t unnerstan’—when Julian be called Julian mun go.”

  I didn’t wait to hear any more, but rushed out of the house and along the road that led northward to the Wall. “He’s waur nor deid! Waur nor deid!” The words kept burning my ears. I had no idea as to what had happened, but I felt that I must get to the Pond and the Wall as quickly as I could.