‘The desolation of its author’s looks and his abruptness of manner thinned away awhile as he warmed to his subject. But it was not so much his own sufferings in the cause as the thought of what Mrs Kempe’s last few years on earth must have been to her, that made me an attentive listener. Hers must indeed have proved a lingering death. He had never left her side, I gathered, for weeks at a time, except to tend his patch of garden, and to prepare their niggardly meals. And as her body had wasted, poor soul, his daily inquisition, his daily probings had become ever more urgent and desperate.
‘There was no doubt in the world that this afflicted old man had loved his wife. The softening of the vacant inhuman eyes as he told me of that last deathbed colloquy was enough to prove that. Maybe it was in part because of this affection that mere speculation had sharpened into what they call an idée fixe. Still, I hardly think so. More probably the insidious germ had shared his cradle. And after all, some degree of conviction on the subject is not out of place in men of his cloth. He had abandoned his calling indeed, he was assuring me, solely as a proof of his zeal!
‘He showed me also one or two late photographs of Mrs Kempe – taken with his own antiquated camera, and “developed” maybe in this very room. Soul indeed! There was little else. The face murkily represented in them wore a peculiar remote smile. The eyes had been hollowly directed towards the round leather cap of the machine. And so fallen were the features, now fading away on the discoloured paper, they might as well have been the presentment of a ghost.
‘What precise proofs he had actually demanded of this companion of his hermitage I cannot even guess. And what proofs might he still be pleading for, pursuing? Evidently none as yet had satisfied his craving. But it was at least to his credit that his own personal experiments – experiments on himself, I mean – had been as drastic. In one of them I had unwittingly shared. For the cliff path, I discovered, had long been his constant penance. A catlike foot was concealed beneath those Brobdingnagian boots. His had been the hand that had not only helped Nature protect her fastnesses, but had kept off all but one or two occasional stragglers as fatuous as myself.
‘It had been his haunt, this path – day and night. He questioned the idle heavens there. In the face of a peril so extreme the spirit wins almost to the point of severance from its earthly clay. Night and a half-moon and the northern constellations – I could at least in fancy share his vigils there. Only an occasional ship ventures into sight of that coast, but almost any day, it seemed, during these last few years a good spyglass might have discerned from its decks a human shape facing the Infinite from that appalling eyrie.
‘Both delusions and illusions, too, are rapid breeders. Which of the two, I wondered – still wonder – was this old man’s conviction – the conviction, I mean, that one is likely to be more acutely conscious of the spirit within when the body is suspended, as it were, from the lintel of death’s door. What dreams may come in such circumstances every practical psychologist no doubt would merely pooh-pooh. Still, after all, Mr Kempe had been something of a pioneer in this inquest. He had not spared himself. He could not live by faith, it seemed. He must indeed again and again have come uncommonly near dying in the pursuit of it.
‘He had fasted moreover, and was now little more than a mere frame of bones within his outlandish clothes. Those boots of his – they kept forcing themselves on my attention – a worse fit than any worn by some homesick desperate soldier clambering “over the top” in the Great War. They stuck in my mind.
‘“You don’t seem to realize – you folk out there don’t seem to realize” he suddenly began shouting at me, “that nothing in this world is of the slightest importance compared with a Yes or No to what I ask. If we are nothing more than the brutes that perish – and no sign ever comes from them, I may tell you – then let us perish, I say. Let fire descend from Heaven and shrivel us up. I care not in what cataclysm of horror. I have passed them all. I am suggesting no blasphemy. I make no challenge; no denial – merely a humble plodder, my dear sir. But no! Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Not a word.” He lifted himself out of his chair, opened the door, looked out and came back again.
‘“I disapprove” – he brandished his outspread fingers at me – “I disapprove absolutely of peering and prying. Your vile pernicious interferences with the natural mysteries which we as humanity inherited from the old Adam – away with them! I declare I am a visitor here. I declare that this” – he swept his hand down his meagre carcase, – “this is my mere tenancy. All that I seek is the simplest proof. A proof, that would not so much as stay a pulse-beat in the vile sceptics that give their wretched lives to what they call Science.
‘“I am not even a philosopher,” he ejaculated. “I am here alone, a wayfaring man and a fool. Alone – in the face of this one supreme mystery. And I need aid!” His voice ceased; he threw out his hands and sat there emptily gazing at me.
‘And so he continued. Now he would lift himself out of his chair and prowling from shelf to shelf, scanning at but an inch or two distant the titles of their contents, would thrust volume after volume into my hands for evidence, accompanying his clumsy motions with peevish and broken comments impossible to follow. I was presently surrounded with these things as with a surf.
‘Then he would once more seat himself, and embark on a protracted harangue with that cracked disused voice rising steadily until it broke in a discordant screech of argument.
‘“Almighty God,” he yelled at me, “you sit there, living, breathing, a human being; and the one justification of this hideous masquerade left uncertain.” He flung his hand into the air. “What right has he even to share the earth with me!” he shouted into the quiet.
‘Then once more there followed as swift a return to silence, to self-possession – that intent devouring stare. One at least knows oneself to be something objective in any chance-encountered pair of human eyes. In his, as I have said already, I appeared to have no material existence whatsoever. Mr Kempe might have been surveying, talking to, his own shadow. It was peculiarly disconcerting.
‘After yet another such outburst he had for a moment lain back in his chair as if exhausted. And I was so intent in my scrutiny of him that a second or two went by before I sprang forward to pick up the few dingy photographs that had fallen out of his hand on to the grimy patch of carpet beneath. But he himself had stooped even more abruptly, and our skulls collided together with a crack that for the moment all but dazed me.
‘But the eye moves almost as swiftly as the mind, and the collision had not been hasty enough to prevent my snatching a glimpse of one or two of them, photographs of which neither this widower nor his wife had been the original. I drew back appalled – their details fixed in my mind as if etched there by a flash of lightning. And, leaving him to gather up his further evidences as best he could, I instantly found myself edging towards the door. Those squalid oblongs of cardboard were easily concealed in his immense palm. He pawed them together as clumsily as a bear might combs of honey; then slowly raised his grey dishevelled head, and met my eyes.
‘I paused. “You have had other visitors at times?” I queried as mildly as my tongue would allow.
‘“What visitors, young man, do you mean, may I ask?” An extraordinary change had come into his voice – a flatness, an obsequiousness. The ingratiating tones were muffled, as if he could hardly trust himself to speak. For a while I could only gape in reply.
‘“Like myself,” I blurted out at last. “Visitors who come to – well, out of sheer curiosity. There’s the other route, I suppose?”
‘My one desire just then was to keep my thoughts about Mr Kempe rational and within bounds. To make a monster of him would be merely to lose my head once more as I had already lost it on that afternoon’s journey. None the less I was now looking at him through the after-image of those chance-seen photographs. They were a disturbing medium. The body of a human being who has fallen from a great height is not pleasing and pacifying to look at even though
for a while its owner may have survived the fatality. There were others, too; and yet, it was less his photographs than the amateur photographer that had set my teeth on edge. He looked so old and so helpless – like an animal, as I say, enslaved by – and yet incapable of obeying – some heaven-sent instinct. That terrifying, doglike despair!
‘But then, open your newspaper any fine morning of your life, and which is the more likely to greet you on the news-page: the innocent young lady in the pink gauze petticoats over there, or that old figure of fun in the monk’s cowl?’
The tortoiselike shape of the man in leggings once more stirred on its stool. But this time his little eyes were turned in my direction.
‘How did you manage to get out at last?’ I enquired of the schoolmaster.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘all this time Mr Kempe had been watching me as circumspectly as I had been watching him, but as if, too, he were uncertain how many paces distant from him I stood. Then once more voice and manner changed. He feigned to be reassured. “It has been a wonderful day,” he remarked, with the dignity of an old retired scholar whose dubious fortune it has been to entertain a foreign prince; “a wonderful day. And my only regret is that I was unprepared for the occasion; that I have so poor a hospitality to offer. You may have had an exceedingly painful experience this afternoon. Why, my dear sir, in the absence of mind that comes over me once I embark on this hobby of mine, I haven’t even asked you to wash your hands.”
‘Almost involuntarily I glanced down at them. Like Macbeth’s they needed the invitation. But I must confess I preferred this old minister when he was not talking to me as if I were an imbecile child in a Sunday School. Besides, I knew perfectly well that – whether from that tumbling watch-tower of his, or from some hiding-place in the woods – there had been one intent witness of that experience. I thrust my hands into my pockets out of his sight.
‘“If you will await me here a moment,’ he went on – and his utterance began to thicken again, “I will get the key to the chapel – a remarkable, even unique example of its order. There was a well, too, in former times, and even archeologists have failed to agree about its date. They used to come; they used to come: and would argue, too. Why I can prove it is in parts at least not later than the ninth century. And the interior … but, dear me, it will soon be dark; and – no – you mustn’t think of leaving the house to-night. I need company; I need it.” He poked forward at me again, while yet furtively and rapidly edging towards the door.
‘With a peculiar disinclination to come into the very slightest contact with his person, I had to dodge out of his way to allow him to pass, and attempted to do so without appearing to show like a visitor who has strayed by mischance into the cage of a dangerous animal in some zoological garden. The old grey tousled head turned not an inch upon its heavy angular shoulders as he passed me; but in the dimming light of the window I caught a glimpse of the wide sea-like eyes intently fixed on me – like lifeless planets in the waste of space.
‘Even a young man may have intimations of the fool he is about to prove himself. Intimations, I mean, that come too late. Before the cumbrous door had closed behind him, I was listening for the sound of the key being turned in the lock. I didn’t even wait to try the handle, but tiptoed as rapidly as possible over the heaped-up books on the floor towards the window. It was one of dingy oblong panes, and the hasp was broken. The drop beneath its sill – to any one at least who had reached the house by the less easy way of the two roads – was almost as easy as getting into bed. It would land me some ten feet below on a heap of vegetable rubbish. But the hinges of the window had been allowed to rust, and the wood to shrink and swell with the changing seasons.
‘Not a sound had followed the locking of the door, and unless Mr Kempe had disencumbered his feet of their boots, he was at that moment collecting his wits immediately outside of it. I tiptoed across once more. “Please don’t let me be any trouble,” I bawled. “I could come again another time.”
‘The next instant I was back at the window, listening. The answer boomed down at me at last from some room above. But I could distinguish no words – merely a senseless babble. It would be indiscreet, it seemed, to hesitate any longer. I seized a frowsy cushion and with all my force thrust it against the rotten frame of the window. It flew open with but one explosive crack. I was prepared for it. Once more I paused. Then after a last hasty glance round that dismal laboratory, its scattered books, fusty papers, blackened ceiling, broken lamp – and that one half-obliterated portrait of the gentle apologetic faded young woman on the wall, I clambered soundlessly on to the sill, and dropped. The refuse below was thoroughly rotten; not a twig snapped.
‘The moment I touched ground I regretted this ignominious exit. There was I, a young man – thirty to forty years at least the junior of Mr Kempe – a young man who, whether or not possessed of a soul, was at least fairly capable in body. Surely I might have ventured! – life has more riddles than one. But I did not pursue these thoughts far. The very look and appearance of the house as I glanced up at the window out of which I had descended so abruptly, its overhanging gable, its piebald darkened walls rising towards the first stars under the last of twilight – it was hardly less unhappy and unpleasing company than its tenant.
‘I groped my way beyond its purlieus as quickly and silently as I could, mounted a low wall and was already in the woods. By luck I had caught a glimpse of the Plough straddling above the chimneys, so I knew my north, and edged off upwards and westwards for some little distance under the motionless trees before I came to a halt.
‘The house was now out of sight, its owner once more abandoned to his own resources, and researches. And I was conscious of no particular desire to return to examine the interior of the small stone chapel nor the inscriptions on the few headstones which memoralized those who had been longest slumbering in the ground nearby.
‘Possibly I was not the only visitor who had bidden the recluse in this valley so unmannerly a farewell. I cannot at any rate imagine anyone simpleton enough to venture back even in response to the sound of hysterical weeping that came edging across the silence of the woods.’
‘D’ye mean that old man was crying?’ queried our friend in leggings.
The drizzle in the lane outside the Inn had plucked up courage as daylight ebbed, and had increased to a steady downpour. He had to repeat his question.
‘I mean,’ said the schoolmaster a little acidly, ‘exactly what I say. I am nothing much of a traveller, or perhaps I could tell you what resemblance the noise of it had to the cajolings of a crocodile.’
‘My God!’ coughed the other derisively. With this he seemed to have finally made up his mind, and lurched heavily off his stool. And without even so much as a ‘good-night’ to our landlady, he betook himself out of the bar.
Except for the noise of the rain a complete silence followed his departure.
‘And you never went back?’ I ventured presently. ‘Or – or spoke about the matter?’
‘I mean, do you see,’ said the schoolmaster, ‘I acted like a fool. I should have taken Mr Kempe simply on his face value. There was nothing to complain about. He hadn’t invited me to come and see him. And it was hardly his fault, I suppose, if an occasional visitor failed to complete so precarious a journey. I wouldn’t go so far as that. He was merely one of those would-be benefactors to the human race who go astray; get lost, ramble on down the wrong turning. Qua pioneer, I ask,’ he rapped his fingers on the pewter of the counter, ‘was he exceptional?’ He was arguing with himself, not with me.
I nodded. ‘But what was your impression – was he sure – Mr Kempe? Either way?’
‘The Soul?’
‘Yes,’ I echoed, ‘the Soul.’
But I repeated the word under my breath, for something in the sound of our voices seemed to have attracted the attention of the landlady. And, alas, she had decided to light up.
The solemnity of man’s remotest ancestors lay over the schoolmaster’s feat
ures. ‘I can’t say,’ he replied. ‘I am not certain even if he was aware how densely populated his valley appeared to be – to a chance visitor, I mean. What’s more, to judge from the tones of his voice, he had scarcely the effect of a single personality. There were at least three Mr Kempes present that evening. And I haven’t the faintest wish in the world to meet any one of them again.’
‘And afterwards? Was it comparatively easy finding your way – on to the new cliff road?’
‘Comparatively,’ said the schoolmaster. ‘Though it took time. But nights are fairly short in May, even in country as thickly wooded as that.’
I continued to look at him without speaking; yet another unuttered question on my lips.
To judge from the remote friendly smile he just blinked at me, he appeared to have divined it, though it produced no direct answer. He got down from his stool, looked at his empty glass – and for the first time I noticed he was wearing mittens over his small bluish hands. ‘It’s getting late,’ he said, with an eye fixed vacantly once more on the automatic machine in the corner of the tap-room. There was no denying it; nor that even the musty interior of the Blue Boar looked more hospitable than the torrential darkness of the night outside.
How strange is man. The spectacle depressed me beyond words – as if it had any more significance than that for its passing hour a dense yet not inbeneficent cloud was spread betwixt this earth of ours and the faithful shining of the stars.
But I did not mention this to the schoolmaster. He seemed to be lost in a dark melancholy, his face a maze of wrinkles. And beyond him – in a cracked looking-glass – I could see his double, sitting there upon its stool. I was conscious that in some way I had bitterly disappointed him. I looked at him – my hand on the door-handle – waiting to go out …
1 First published in London Mercury and Harper’s Magazine, November 1925.
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Short Stories 1895-1926 Page 34
