The Burden

by Agatha Christie, writing as Mary Westmacott

  It was about that time he became conscious of Carol.

  He had known Carol all his life. They had gone to school together. She was two years younger than he was, a gawky, sweet-tempered child, with a brace on her teeth and a shy manner. Their parents were friends, and Carol spent a lot of time in the Knox household.

  In the year of taking his finals, Llewellyn came home and saw Carol with new eyes. The brace was gone, and so was the gawkiness. Instead there was a pretty coquettish young girl, whom all the boys were anxious to date up.

  Girls had so far not impinged much on Llewellyn’s life. He had worked too hard, and was, moreover, emotionally undeveloped. But now the manhood in him suddenly came to life. He started taking trouble with his appearance, spent money he could ill afford on new ties, and bought boxes of candy to present to Carol. His mother smiled and sighed, as mothers do, at the signs that her son had entered on maturity! The time had come when she must lose him to another woman. Too early to think of marriage as yet, but if it had to come, Carol would be a satisfactory choice. Good stock, carefully brought up, a sweet-tempered girl, and healthy – better than some strange girl from the city whom she did not know. ‘But not good enough for my son,’ said her mother’s heart, and then she smiled at herself, guessing that that was what all mothers had felt since time immemorial! She spoke hesitantly to Angus of the matter.

  ‘Early days yet,’ said Angus. ‘The lad has his way to make. But he might do worse. She’s a good lass, though maybe not overloaded with brains.’

  Carol was both pretty and popular, and enjoyed her popularity. She had plenty of dates, but she made it fairly clear that Llewellyn was the favourite. She talked to him sometimes in a serious way about his future. Though she did not show it, she was slightly disconcerted by his vagueness and what seemed to her his lack of ambition.

  ‘Why, Lew, surely you’ve got some definite plans for when you’ve qualified?’

  ‘Oh! I shall get a job all right. Plenty of openings.’

  ‘But don’t you have to specialize nowadays?’

  ‘If one has any particular bent. I haven’t.’

  ‘But, Llewellyn Knox, you want to get on, don’t you?’

  ‘Get on – where?’ His smile was slightly teasing.

  ‘Well – get somewhere.’

  ‘But that is life, isn’t it, Carol? From here to here.’ His finger traced a line on the sand. ‘Birth, growth, school, career, marriage, children, home, hard work, retirement, old age, death. From the frontier of this country to the frontier of the next.’

  ‘That’s not what I mean at all, Lew, and you know it. I mean getting somewhere, making a name for yourself, making good, getting right to the top, so that everyone’s proud of you.’

  ‘I wonder if all that makes any difference,’ he said abstractedly.

  ‘I’ll say it makes a difference!’

  ‘It’s how you go through your journey that matters, I think, not where it takes you.’

  ‘I never heard such nonsense. Don’t you want to be a success?’

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t think so.’

  Carol was a long way away from him suddenly. He was alone, quite alone, and he was conscious of fear. A shrinking, a terrible shrinking. ‘Not me – someone else.’ He almost said the words aloud.

  ‘Lew! Llewellyn!’ Carol’s voice came thinly to him from a long way away, coming towards him through the wilderness. ‘What’s the matter? You look downright queer.’

  He was back again, back with Carol, who was staring at him with a perplexed, frightened expression. He was conscious of a rush of tenderness towards her. She had saved him, called him back from that barren place. He took her hand.

  ‘You’re so sweet.’ He drew her towards him, kissed her gently, almost shyly. Her lips responded to his.

  He thought: ‘I can tell her now … that I love her … that when I’m qualified we can get engaged. I’ll ask her to wait for me. Once I’ve got Carol, I’ll be safe.’

  But the words remained unspoken. He felt something that was almost like a physical hand on his breast, pushing him back, a hand that forbade. The reality of it alarmed him. He got up.

  ‘Some day, Carol,’ he said, ‘some day I – I’ve got to talk to you.’

  She looked up at him and laughed, satisfied. She was not particularly anxious for him to come to the point. Things were best left as they were. She enjoyed in an innocent happy fashion her own young girl’s hour of triumph, courted by the young males. Some day she and Llewellyn would marry. She had felt the emotion behind his kiss. She was quite sure of him.

  As for his queer lack of ambition, that did not really worry her. Women in this country were confident of their power over men. It was women who planned and urged on their men to achieve; women, and the children that were their principal weapons. She and Llewellyn would want the best for their children, and that would be a spur to urge Llewellyn on.

  As for Llewellyn, he walked home in a serious state of perturbation. What a very odd experience that had been. Full of recent lectures on psychology, he analysed himself with misgiving. A resistance to sex perhaps? Why had he set up this resistance? He ate his supper staring at his mother, and wondering uneasily if he had an Oedipus Complex.

  Nevertheless, it was to her he came for reassurance before he went back to college.

  He said abruptly:

  ‘You like Carol, don’t you?’

  Here it comes, she thought with a pang, but she said steadfastly:

  ‘She’s a sweet girl. Both your father and I like her well.’

  ‘I wanted to tell her – the other day –’

  ‘That you loved her?’

  ‘Yes. I wanted to ask her to wait for me.’

  ‘No need of that, if she loves you, bach.’

  ‘But I couldn’t say it, the words wouldn’t come.’

  She smiled. ‘Don’t let that worry you. Men are mostly tongue-tied at these times. There was your father sitting and glowering at me, day after day, more as though he hated me than loved me, and not able to get a word out but “How are you?” and “It’s a fine day.” ’

  Llewellyn said sombrely: ‘It was more than that. It was like a hand shoving me back. It was as though I was – forbidden.’

  She felt then the urgency and force of his trouble. She said slowly:

  ‘It may be that she’s not the real girl for you. Oh –’ she stifled his protest. ‘It’s hard to tell when you’re young and the blood rises. But there’s something in you – the true self, maybe – that knows what should and shouldn’t be, and that saves you from yourself, and the impulse that isn’t the true one.’

  ‘Something in oneself …’ He dwelt on that.

  He looked at her with sudden desperate eyes.

  ‘I don’t know really – anything about myself.’

  2

  Back at college, he filled up every moment, either with work or in the company of friends. Fear faded away from him. He felt self-assured once more. He read abstruse dissertations on adolescent sex manifestations, and explained himself to himself satisfactorily.

  He graduated with distinction, and that, too, encouraged him to have confidence in himself. He returned home with his mind made up, and his future clear ahead. He would ask Carol to marry him, and discuss with her the various possibilities open to him now that he was qualified. He felt an enormous relief now that his life unfolded before him in so clear a sequence. Work that was congenial and which he felt himself competent to do well, and a girl he loved with whom to make a home and have children.

  Arrived at home, he threw himself into all the local festivities. He went about in a crowd, but within that crowd he and Carol paired off and were accepted as a pair. He was seldom, if ever, alone, and when he went to bed at night he slept and dreamed of Carol. They were erotic dreams and he welcomed them as such. Everything was normal, everything was fine, everything was as it should be.

  Confident in this belief, he was startled when his father said to hi
m one day:

  ‘What’s wrong, lad?’

  ‘Wrong?’ He stared.

  ‘You’re not yourself.’

  ‘But I am! I’ve never felt so fit!’

  ‘You’re well enough physically, maybe.’

  Llewellyn stared at his father. The gaunt, aloof, old man, with his deep-set burning eyes, nodded his head slowly.

  ‘There are times,’ he said, ‘when a man needs to be alone.’

  He said no more, turning away, as Llewellyn felt once more that swift illogical fear spring up. He didn’t want to be alone – it was the last thing he wanted. He couldn’t, he mustn’t be alone.

  Three days later he came to his father and said:

  ‘I’m going camping in the mountains. By myself.’

  Angus nodded. ‘Ay.’

  His eyes, the eyes of a mystic, looked at his son with comprehension.

  Llewellyn thought: ‘I’ve inherited something from him – something that he knows about, and I don’t know about yet.’

  3

  He had been alone here, in the desert, for nearly three weeks. Curious things had been happening to him. From the very first, however, he had found solitude quite acceptable. He wondered why he had fought against the idea of it so long.

  To begin with, he had thought a great deal about himself and his future and Carol. It had all unrolled itself quite clearly and logically, and it was not for some time that he realized that he was looking at his life from outside, as a spectator and not a participator. That was because none of that mapped-out planned existence was real. It was logical and coherent, but in fact it did not exist. He loved Carol, he desired her, but he would not marry her. He had something else to do. As yet he did not know what. After he had acknowledged that fact, there came another phase – a phase he could only describe as one of emptiness, great echoing emptiness. He was nothing, and contained nothing. There was no longer any fear. By accepting emptiness, he had cast out fear.

  During this phase, he ate and drank hardly anything.

  Sometimes he was, he thought, slightly light-headed.

  Like a mirage in front of him, scenes and people appeared.

  Once or twice he saw a face very clearly. It was a woman’s face, and it roused in him an extraordinary excitement. It had fragile, very beautiful bones, with hollowed temples, and dark hair springing back from the temples, and deep, almost tragic eyes. Behind her he saw, once, a background of flames, and another time the shadowy outline of what looked like a church. This time, he saw suddenly that she was only a child. Each time he was conscious of suffering. He thought: ‘If I could only help …’ But at the same time he knew that there was no help possible, and that the very idea was wrong and false.

  Another vision was of a gigantic office desk in pale shining wood, and behind it a man with a heavy jowl and small, alert, blue eyes. The man leant forward as though about to speak, and to do so emphasized what he was about to say by picking up a small ruler and gesticulating with it.

  Then again he saw the corner of a room at a curious angle. Near it was a window, and through the window the outlines of a pine tree with snow on it. Between him and the window, a face obtruded, looking down on him – a round, pink-faced man with glasses, but before Llewellyn could see him really clearly, he, too, faded away.

  All these visions must, Llewellyn thought, be the figments of his own imagination. There seemed so little sense or meaning to them, and they were all faces and surroundings that he had never known.

  But soon there were no more pictorial images. The emptiness of which he was so conscious was no longer vast and all-encompassing. The emptiness drew together, it acquired meaning and purpose. He was no longer adrift in it. Instead, he held it within himself.

  Then he knew something more. He was waiting.

  4

  The dust-storm came suddenly – one of those unheralded storms that arose in this mountainous desert region. It came whirling and shrieking in clouds of red dust. It was like a live thing. It ended as suddenly as it had begun.

  After it, the silence was very noticeable.

  All Llewellyn’s camping gear had been swept away by the wind, his tent carried flapping and whirling like a mad thing down the valley. He had nothing now. He was quite alone in a world suddenly peaceful and as though made anew.

  He knew now that something he had always known would happen was about to happen. He knew fear again, but not the fear he had felt before, that had been the fear of resistance. This time he was ready to accept – there was emptiness within him, swept and garnished, ready to receive a Presence. He was afraid only because in all humility he knew what a small and insignificant entity he was.

  It was not easy to explain to Wilding what came next.

  ‘Because, you see, there aren’t any words for it. But I’m quite clear as to what it was. It was the recognition of God. I can express it best by saying that it was as though a blind man who believed in the sun from literary evidence, and who had felt its warmth on his hand, was suddenly to open his eyes and see it.

  ‘I had believed in God, but now I knew. It was direct personal knowledge, quite indescribable. And a most terrifying experience for any human being. I understood then why, in God’s approach to man, He has to incarnate Himself in human flesh.

  ‘Afterwards – it only lasted a few seconds of time – I turned around and went home. It took me two or three days, and I was very weak and exhausted when I staggered in.’

  He was silent for a moment or two.

  ‘My mother was dreadfully worried over me! She couldn’t make it all out. My father, I think, had an inkling. He knew, at least, that I had had some vast experience. I told my mother that I had had curious visions that I couldn’t explain, and she said: “They have the ‘sight’ in your father’s family. His grandmother had it, and one of his sisters.”

  ‘After a few days of rest and feeding up, I was strong again. When people talked of my future, I was silent. I knew that all that would be settled for me. I had only to accept – I had accepted – but what it was I had accepted, I didn’t yet know.

  ‘A week later, there was a big prayer meeting held in the neighbourhood. A kind of Revivalist Mission is how I think you describe it. My mother wanted to go, and my father was willing, though not much interested. I went with them.’

  Looking at Wilding, Llewellyn smiled.

  ‘It wasn’t the sort of thing you would have cared for – crude, rather melodramatic. It didn’t move me. I was a little disappointed that that was so. Various people got up to testify. Then the command came to me, clear and quite unmistakable.

  ‘I got up. I remember the faces turning to me.

  ‘I didn’t know what I was going to say. I didn’t think – or expound my own beliefs. The words were there in my head. Sometimes they got ahead of me, I had to speak faster to catch up, to say them before I lost them. I can’t describe to you what it was like – if I said it was like flame and like honey, would you understand at all? The flame seared me, but the sweetness of the honey was there too, the sweetness of obedience. It is both a terrible and a lovely thing to be the messenger of God.’

  ‘Terrible as an army with banners,’ murmured Wilding.

  ‘Yes. The psalmist knew what he was talking about.’

  ‘And – afterwards?’

  Llewellyn Knox spread out his hands.

  ‘Exhaustion, utter and complete exhaustion. I must have spoken, I suppose, for about three-quarters of an hour. When I got home, I sat by the fire shivering, too dead to lift a hand or to speak. My mother understood. She said: “It is like my father was, after the Eisteddfod.” She gave me hot soup and put hot-water bottles in my bed.’

  Wilding murmured: ‘You had all the necessary heredity. The mystic from the Scottish side, and the poetic and creative from the Welsh – the voice, too. And it’s a true creative picture – the fear, the frustration, the emptiness, and then the sudden up-rush of power, and after it, the weariness.’

  He was silent
for a moment, and then asked:

  ‘Won’t you go on with the story?’

  ‘There’s not so much more to tell. I went and saw Carol the next day. I told her I wasn’t going to be a doctor after all, that I was going to be a preacher of some kind. I told her that I had hoped to marry her, but that now I had to give up that hope. She didn’t understand. She said: “A doctor can do just as much good as a preacher can do.” And I said it wasn’t a question of doing good. It was a command, and I had to obey it. And she said it was nonsense saying I couldn’t get married. I wasn’t a Roman Catholic, was I? And I said: “Everything I am, and have, has to be God’s.” But of course she couldn’t see that – how could she, poor child? It wasn’t in her vocabulary. I went home and told my mother, and asked her to be good to Carol, and begged her to understand. She said: “I understand well enough. You’ll have nothing left over to give a woman,” and then she broke down and cried, and said: “I knew – I always knew – there was something. You were different from the others. Ah, but it’s hard on the wives and mothers.”

  ‘She said: “If I lost you to a woman, that’s the way of life, and there would have been your children for me to hold on my knee. But this way, you’ll be gone from me entirely.”

  ‘I assured her that wasn’t true, but all the time we both knew that it was in essence. Human ties – they all had to go.’

  Wilding moved restlessly.

  ‘You must forgive me, but I can’t subscribe to that, as a way of life. Human affection, human sympathy, service to humanity –’

  ‘But it isn’t a way of life that I am talking about! I am talking of the man singled out, the man who is something more than his fellows, and who is also very much less – that is the thing he must never forget, how infinitely less than they he is, and must be.’

  ‘There I can’t follow you.’

  Llewellyn spoke softly, more to himself than to his listener.