Come Away, Death

by Gladys Mitchell

  It occurred to Ian that he must have been a very long time gone. He began to run, but the going was treacherous, so he dropped to a walk, crossed the back of the staging of the theatre, and soon was on the rough but less treacherous little path which wound back beside the theatre gymnasium and the Roman market-place. It skirted the hills, and led on to the Selçuk road by way of the stadium and the gymnasium of Vedius.

  Once on the narrow, dusty road which ran between arable fields, Ian again commenced to run. He ran well, with bounding strides which yet seemed effortless and tireless. He enjoyed himself, and the distance, rather less than a mile, was nothing to a man accustomed to cross-country running. Well inside five minutes he had slowed to a walk to be sure he did not miss the opening which led from the road to the pond.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  ‘Well, there’s one which starts from rope and bench. You hang yourself.’

  1

  IAN HAD BEEN gone about three-quarters of an hour when Sir Rudri gave the signal for the party to move on towards the flooded site of the temple. The new moon, thin, and as yellow as a golden sickle, gave little light, but filled the night, nevertheless, with the virgin beauty of her presence. Kenneth surreptitiously turned his money, after he had bowed to her three times.

  ‘What are you doing, you silly ass?’ asked Ivor. But when he was answered, he followed Kenneth’s example. Stewart seemed wrapped in thought, and said nothing. He looked at the moon, and then at the dark, low-growing bushes, and then down at the stone as white as marble – marble it probably was – and at the broken columns by the wayside, all blue-white in the glimmering night as they walked. He said at last, dreamily, without a glance at the others, who were stumbling along behind Sir Rudri and Gelert in the van:

  ‘I wish we could think of a jolly good rag, don’t you?’

  But none volunteered a suggestion. By the open Roman market, its ground-plan sketchily visible, the dark bushes almost encroaching even upon the excavations, past broken buildings and all the deserted glory of the vast, once-marvellous city, the little band of pilgrims, treading the way St Paul had trod, and where, before him, the Greeks had gone, and, before them, Pelasgian men of whom no record remains, went forward towards the north-west gate of the city and so out on to the road. On the road they walked briskly, guided by torches carried by Gelert and Dick. Sir Rudri carried his sacrificial knife, an implement which had been regarded dubiously by everyone when he had produced it first at Mycenae, and which now was looked upon askance by all the serious-minded members of the party and also by Mrs Bradley.

  ‘He has to cut himself, if he thinks he’s the priest,’ said Ivor importantly to Kenneth.

  ‘I’m glad my father’s not cracked,’ said Kenneth pointedly. Ivor giggled, unaffected by the slur thus cast upon his father. Kenneth giggled, too, and gave him a shove. The dusty little road led on towards Selçuk, that huddle of sleeping roofs and sleeping birds. The way seemed long. The little boys flagged and were silent. They had run about all day, and were tired and in need of sleep.

  ‘I’m just as glad they’re not going to have us as Artemis Orthia victims,’ said Stewart precisely.

  ‘Hear, hear!’ said Kenneth, yawning.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said Ivor, belatedly loyal to his father. ‘After all, if it’s part of it, it’s part. It’s rotten to want to back out.’

  ‘Who’s backing out?’ said Kenneth. Again they proceeded in silence.

  ‘Do you remember that lousy sort of loft they wanted us to sleep in at that first place? What was it called?’ said Kenneth, after they had gone about two hundred yards without speaking.

  ‘Rather! Eleusis,’ responded Stewart, wishing that he did not feel so sleepy, and that his legs were not so heavy.

  ‘That was a funny sort of night, that night those asses planted that statue on the rock in that little opening. I wonder what the idea was?’ Kenneth resumed.

  ‘Joke,’ said Ivor, who wanted to change the subject. He was all the time glancing nervously right and left at the fields on either hand which bordered the road. ‘Let’s catch up Aunt Adela,’ he suggested. So they trotted, weary-legged, and caught up Mrs Bradley, and walked on either side of her; then Cathleen joined their party, and walked along next to Ivor.

  At last they reached the turning to the flooded site of the temple – the short and narrow opening between fields. The torches blackened the bushes and flung into sudden, witch-like silhouette a tree or two. The spiny vegetation again made innumerable tiny cuts on the boys’ legs and tore the women’s stockings. Gelert, also in shorts and bare-legged, cursed the prickles audibly, but his father bade him to be silent, since the mysteries were about to begin.

  The torches were stamped out, and the party disposed themselves in a semi-circle, facing west, for they circum-navigated the pond until they were gazing at what would have been the long side of the temple. There was profound, unearthly silence. Then Sir Rudri poured wine for an oblation, scattered corn, beans, olives, grapes, pomegranates, and flowers, and prayed aloud, with splendid effect, in Greek, addressing Artemis first as a fertility goddess, on the ‘marking backwards’ principle, as Alexander muttered, grinning, to Mrs Bradley.

  The sickle moon rode the high sky, the stagnant water which covered and marked the foundations of the temple smelt slightly unpleasant – or perhaps that was imagined by the worshippers – a night-bird flew from a bush with a suddenness which made most of the party start and touch the next person for reassurance, and a distinct ‘plop’ in the water, inexplicable in the circumstances, since it was not supposed by any of the party that there were fish swimming over the ruins of the temple where Croesus once had worshipped, were the only evidences that the goddess herself was present.

  After ten minutes of this, Sir Rudri gave it up.

  ‘Not to the Greeks. Not to the Greeks,’ he said gravely, causing Alexander to snort with sardonic amusement. ‘Disperse a little, please. Men and boys, I want you to retire on to, or near, the road. Leave what would have been the precincts of the temple. Women, please remain. We are now going to worship the goddess as huntress and maiden.’

  The male element, as Megan would have called it, shuffled away, and Sir Rudri raised his arms, and began to pray. There was silence when he had finished. Cathleen was holding Mrs Bradley’s arm in a tight and terrified clutch. It hurt, but Mrs Bradley made no move to free herself from the vice-like, long, thin fingers.

  Sir Rudri then tip-toed away, and left the two of them there together by the water. A breeze rustled dryly in the tangled vegetation low-growing on the fringe of the flood, and then died down, and everything was still.

  ‘I can’t bear it!’ Cathleen whispered in sudden agony. But scarcely had she said the words when down the road came the sound of running feet.

  ‘All right! All right! It’s Ian,’ said Mrs Bradley, gripping the girl with the arm she had managed to free. They stood still, listening, and in a moment the sound of the footsteps ceased, and they heard Sir Rudri’s disappointed tones.

  ‘Oh, it’s you, Ian, is it? I’m afraid you’ve ruined the atmosphere, my boy.’

  The men and boys, at Sir Rudri’s suggestion, came back to the temple precincts, and everybody moved about a bit, and Cathleen was asked by Gelert whether she had been scared. She admitted to having been panic-stricken when she heard the footsteps on the road.

  ‘I thought,’ said Dick, speaking suddenly out of the darkness, on her right, ‘that we really were going to get something. I don’t think I’m psychic, either, but the atmosphere seemed to change in the most remarkable way. I feel that we almost stepped over.’

  ‘Stepped over what?’ asked Kenneth. The little boys, however, were keeping very close together, Mrs Bradley noticed.

  ‘Fourth dimension stuff,’ said Gelert, answering for Dick. ‘It was a bit odd. I noticed something myself. Of course, I’ll tell you what. This is father’s chef-d’œuvre. He really believes in this one. He was pretty serious about Eleusis, not serious
at all about Epidaurus, a bit superstitious, but nothing more about Mycenae – it broods, that place, don’t you think? – but here he feels altogether different. Artemis was worshipped hereabouts, in various guises, well into Christian times. The Greeks first, then the Romans, and afterwards the early Christians worshipped her. You remember legend tells us that Ephesus was the last home of the Virgin Mary.’

  These trite remarks were soon interrupted by the leader of the expedition.

  ‘We’re ready to try again now,’ he said. ‘Will you please go back as you were at the beginning. We shall try, this time, the worship of the Attic Artemis, goddess of the moon, of women in labour, goddess of hunting and of maidens, goddess of Corinthian, Athenian —’ His voice died away. The worshippers, feeling slightly self-conscious after the anticlimax of Ian’s arrival, moved unwillingly to the edge of the pond in twos and threes, and placed themselves in a semicircle again.

  Sir Rudri himself did not join them for a moment or two. When he appeared, it was seen that he had lighted a great torch, of the kind they had used at Eleusis. He handed it to Dick, who seemed somewhat surprised at the gift, and went back into the darkness. He reappeared again with offerings, which he proceeded to distribute among the worshippers, retaining for himself the head of a lamb.

  ‘Where on earth did he get that from?’ Gelert inquired of Ian in a whisper which could not be heard by anyone else. Ian shrugged and noiselessly laughed. Sir Rudri moved forward to the very fringe of the pond. Then, with a gesture, he cast the head of the lamb upon the water, and said in Greek, as it splashed and immediately sank:

  ‘Be this offering brought to the altar of Artemis, goddess of the moon and of maidens; and do thou, the true, the beautiful and the free, the protector of youth, the friend of women in labour, whose bow we see bent in heaven, accept our gifts and look upon us with favour.’

  He paused, as though to draw breath; then, raising his arms, palms upwards again, he cried loudly:

  ‘O thou who carriest the bow of the hunter, who art the grave and most fair sister of Phoebus Apollo; thou, who with divine light shinest upon us now; come, manifest thyself to these thy worshippers, that we, dedicating to thee our diverse gifts, may know that thou art favouring unto us and wilt bring us without undue hardship or the travail of dark night, to the conclusion of our journeying.’

  Before its ending, Mrs Bradley had given up following the prayer, for in the distance she could hear again the sound of running footsteps. As, this time, Ian was with the party, she could not think who was coming. The prayer ended. In the silence that followed, the sound of the footsteps, which were now appreciably nearer, was audible to them all. The party closed in on one another.

  ‘Make way!’ cried Sir Rudri suddenly. He waved the torch so that the flames leaped and sparks flew up in clouds. The worshippers, with strained faces, moved out of the orbit of the flaring, smoking torch, unwillingly, and keeping close together. In a moment, into the circle of ruddy, fitful light which rudely eclipsed the gentle light of the crescent moon, there ran a girl. She was tall and fair. Her head was adorned with a Phrygian head-dress such as the Artemis in Athenian sculpture wears; she had on the big cloak, the short tunic, and the buskins of the goddess. She stepped into, and out of, the torchlight, flung up her arms, one heavenwards, the other across her eyes as though in grief. They all saw her clearly. The next instant she was gone, and Sir Rudri had flung the great torch sizzling into the water.

  Cathleen, on Ian’s shoulder, was sobbing with fear. The three little boys were huddled against Gelert’s long legs, and he was tightly grasping, without his own knowledge, Kenneth’s thick red hair. Dick, after his first gasp of horror, had held Mrs Bradley’s hand and had muttered, ‘Not Artemis! Iphigenia! Iphigenia! Iphigenia!’ Alexander Currie was swearing softly and fearfully. Then he glanced up at the moon and, with quick and jerky movements, like those of a man who is acting under compulsion and in defiance of his sense of the ridiculous, he bowed three times and solemnly crossed his fingers.

  ‘Reactions of an avowed agnostic,’ said Mrs Bradley, with a heartening chuckle.

  ‘Now!’ said Sir Rudri in the trembling tones of great triumph following greater strain. ‘Now will you all believe?’ He had lighted another torch, and was holding it on high, his left arm was stretched out, palm upwards, to the heavens. Everyone stood still except Mrs Bradley. Releasing her hand from Dick’s grasp, she waited a minute, and then, unobtrusive as a shadow, she began to walk back away from the light of the torch, which was smoking and flaring wildly, a brown column of reddish, rough, crude brightness, yellow flame, dense, dark, cloudy vapour, and falling and flying sparks, and edged her way on to the road. There, concluding that the party had now had all the entertainment out of the worship of Artemis which they were likely to enjoy that night, she turned and made at a brisk pace for the ruined city and her bed.

  2

  Whilst Sir Rudri was still standing in a rapt and prayerful attitude, nobody else liked to move, so they all stood about, recovering themselves and restoring to the place from which the vision of Artemis, capped and buskined, had caused them to fall for the moment, their critical and sceptical gifts.

  ‘Hefty wench,’ said Gelert, aside, to Ian. Ian, who had managed to reassure Cathleen and now had his arm about her – a gesture more possessive than protective – grinned and replied:

  ‘Strange things are seen on this tour. A god in Eleusis, a goddess in Ephesus – it is too much to swallow. The dose should be smaller, I am thinking.’

  ‘But how did he work it?’ asked Gelert. ‘No Turkish girl, surely, would do a job like that and pull it off. The hussy was most convincing. Except that she was a trifle buxom, she was the spit and image of a bit of sculpture – know it? – in the British Museum.’

  ‘I’ll not have seen it, but, man, if Artemis came, she wouldn’t look like Artemis! Isn’t that what you’re saying the now?’

  ‘Yes, I am. What’s the game, I wonder?’ He crossed over to where Dick, small, and pathetically lost, was standing alone. ‘What do you make of it?’ he asked. Dick shook his head.

  ‘You don’t think it could have been a genuine manifestation then?’ he said.

  ‘Genuine jiggery-pokery, very likely. Too strapping a wench for a ghost. To tell you the truth, if I didn’t know she was stuck in Athens with my mother, I’d have said it was my sister Megan. It was just her height and build.’

  ‘Cathleen was saying it was Megan, but she thought maybe it was Megan’s spirit she was seeing. Cathleen has said all along that someone would die on the tour. She thought it was a sign of Megan’s death.’

  ‘Nasty thought!’ said Gelert, with a smile which went slightly awry. ‘Oh, I think we shall find her all right when we get back to Athens, you know.’

  The conversation was interrupted by Sir Rudri.

  ‘We ought to sit down and wait for the moon to set,’ he observed belligerently, for the tone of the comments had reached him although he had not caught the words in which the comments were expressed. ‘However, the ground is quite unsuitable for sitting, therefore I propose that we all walk quietly back to the great theatre, employing ourselves with our thoughts about the goddess and the wonderful manifestation we have all seen.’

  At this, convinced that what they had seen was Megan Hopkinson, the devil entered into Kenneth.

  ‘What have we all seen?’ he whispered loudly to Stewart.

  ‘I don’t know,’ replied Stewart, who knew this game. ‘Ivor, what have we seen?’ All the little boys, frightened by the sudden arrival of the buskined goddess upon first seeing it, had made up their minds by this time that all they had seen was Ivor’s sister Megan.

  ‘Oh, the old moon and things,’ said Ivor, playing up. All the same, he glanced fearfully over his shoulder, superstitious to the last.

  ‘What’s that? What’s that?’ said Sir Rudri.

  ‘Kenneth was asking what we’re supposed to have seen, sir, and I said I was afraid I couldn’t tell him,’ St
ewart replied.

  ‘You don’t mean to say —’ Sir Rudri sounded quite staggered. ‘Alexander! Alexander! What do you make of this?’

  ‘Make of what?’ asked Alexander Currie, whose awe had now changed to a great determination to minimize the effect on the party of the sudden vision of the goddess. ‘What was there to make of anything? Mass hallucination, that’s all.’

  Neither he nor Sir Rudri could see the other in the darkness.

  ‘But these boys, these children say that they did not see the projection of the goddess!’

  ‘Well, a good thing, too.’

  ‘What goddess?’ asked Kenneth, whose plastic mind, having recovered from the advent of the goddess, was now ready to receive the amusement due to it. He drew confidingly near and switched on a little electric torch the better to contemplate Sir Rudri’s surprise and interest.

  ‘Surely,’ said Sir Rudri, leading the way back to the road, ‘you saw what came running into the torchlight?’

  ‘Oh, the deer!’ said Kenneth.

  ‘I think I caught sight of its antlers, now I come to remember,’ said Stewart slowly. ‘I thought at the time it was one of the wild pigs they hunt round here.’

  ‘Do you know,’ said Sir Rudri, taken somewhat out of his depth, ‘this, to me, is one of the most extraordinarily interesting things that has happened yet.’

  He sounded, not interested, but puzzled.

  ‘I suppose they were paying no attention,’ said Alexander Currie.

  ‘Not paying any attention!’ said Stewart, as one calling heaven to witness that he was being wronged. Sir Rudri put his hand on the thin shoulder of his younger son who was walking silently beside him.

  ‘What did you see, Ivor?’ he inquired. Ivor answered slowly and unwillingly.