All Hallows' Eve Page 22

  Richard went quickly past Jonathan to the table. He picked up his glass; he waved to the others and they came to him. He tried to speak and could not. But Betty did. She too took her glass; she held it up; she said, “Good luck, Lester!” and they all drank. Richard flung his glass to the floor. As it smashed, the dwarf with a little squeal turned round and began stumbling towards the door. The three friends went after it.

  It was very late when they came into the street, but in the light of a near standard they saw a single taxi moving slowly along. The driver was a big man; he saw Jonathan’s lifted hand, slowed and leaning back opened the door. They stood round the dwarf while, slowly and in utter silence, it scrambled clumsily in. Before either of the young men could speak, Betty had followed it and sat down by it. They sat opposite, Jonathan could not quite remember giving the address, but he supposed he must have done, for the door was closed on them and the carriage moved off in the night. In spite of Betty’s face opposite him a macabre horror fell on Jonathan; all he had ever read, in fiction or history, of fatal midnight drives recurred to him: discrowned kings fleeing, madmen carried off to Bedlam, or perhaps sane men by careful plottings certified as mad, gagged men borne to private assassinations, gangsters taken for rides by gangsters, and through all a ghastly element of another kind—arrest of heretics, seizure of martyrs, witches clutched or witches clutching—in all the cities of all the world midnight and dark coaches rolling and things unnamable for good or evil about to be done. Something still deeper—there and then, or had been, one plain simple act which could only be done in such a night. Unless this night were now about to give place to a more frightening day—a dawn on some town where such creatures lived as this opposite him or his own imagined insects and had their own occupation, grisly, unseen in this sun, but visible to sickness in another light so much like this but not this.

  Beside him Richard leaned back free from such distress, for he had already known that distress. He had been used to think that nothing could shock him; he had been wrong. The universe is always capable of a worse trick than we suppose, but at least when we have known it we are no longer surprised by anything less. Jonathan’s horrid nightmares, oppressive as they were to him, were less distressing than the pain of a mother listening to her child choking with bronchitis in the night. Richard’s endurance now, like hers, was of present and direct facts. He had seen something which, in the full sense of the words, ought not to be, and never before had he felt the full sense of the words. This was what everything that ought not to be was—this quiet agreement that it should be. It was a breach in nature and therefore in his own nature. His own self-indulgence was of this kind; his dispassionate consideration might be and might not—that depended on him. And now in this happier world he had thought to enter, a thing as extreme struck him. He could not disbelieve Lester when she spoke of going; he could not even doubt that it ought to be. But except for that “ought to be” the coldness in his heart was indistinguishable from the earlier chill. The new birth refused him. He was as yet ignorant of the fact that this was one method of its becoming actual. He despaired.

  But Lester, when she had walked in the dead City, piercingly aware of her own rejection, had known that despair, and its inflexibility had entered her and grown in her. She no longer drove her one-time friend with her old impatience; her strength was now the other side of her willingness to wait “a million years” or to know she was not even to be allowed that. In their swift passage to the dark coach she had felt the rain on the false flesh; she had felt it as the premonition of that lucid flowing water of separation. A double charge was laid on her, to expel this thing from the streets of London, and then herself to go. The falsity must go to its place of origin to be destroyed; to go, so literally, dust to dust. The City must have what belonged to it in the mode in which it belonged. She thought no more of tubes and tunnels filled with horrors. Matter was purified and earth was free, or to become so. But instead of the tunnel flowed the inexorable river. She too must go.

  She saw the taxi roll through the streets; she saw the four sitting in it. She knew that, if her new sight strengthened, she would see even more clearly the whole construction, not only of the vehicle, but of false mortality and true mortality. She almost did see Richard so, in his whole miraculous pattern, all the particles of him, of the strange creature who was in every particle both flesh and spirit, was something that was both, was (the only word that meant the thing he was) a man. She loved him the more passionately for the seeing. And then she saw Betty move. She saw her turn to that contorted thing in the corner which, under those vivid and suffering intelligences, was now beginning to lose even the semblance of a woman, and she saw her put her living hand on its dead paw. She heard Betty say, “Evelyn!” and then again, “Evelyn, let’s talk!” and through a dim mumble she heard Evelyn say, “I don’t want you now.” She saw—and could not see farther—a fixed pallid mask of a face molded in and looking out of the false flesh with a scared malice, and she too cried out, “Evelyn, don’t leave us!” She even made an effort to dominate it, but that failed at once; the false flesh she could command but not now the thing within the flesh. Evelyn said, “I hate you.” The dead paw—now hardly five-fingered—made an effort to shake off Betty’s hand and when that tightened on it, jerked and pulled in order to get away. As it succeeded, the taxi came to a stop.

  Chapter Ten

  THE ACTS OF THE CITY

  On the vigil of the hallows, it was gloomily and steadily raining. Few people were out in the streets of London and the curtains at most windows were again drawn together. Even delight in the peace could hardly find satisfaction in keeping them wide on such a night. Unpropitiously, the feast approached.

  The Clerk was sitting in his hall. He had remained secluded there since he had dismissed the false woman into the outer world, and with that (as he believed) the spirit that had interrupted his work. He was a little more troubled than he wished to admit to himself, and that for two reasons. He had been more pricked than he had allowed by Betty’s silence about him when she repeated to him the tumultuous records of the world’s future. There was, to his mind, but one explanation—that some new weakness had taken her, and when he had been defeated in his operation he had even been able to use that as an explanation. This other being—now imprisoned and banished from him—had affected her and silenced her. The future was not therefore as she had said. The alternative possibility—that the future was as she had said and that he would so soon have utterly vanished from the world—was too dreadful for him. He encouraged his mind into illusion. Illusion, to the magician as to the saint, is a great danger. But the master in Goetia has always at the center of his heart a single tiny everlasting illusion; it may be long before that point infects him wholly, but sooner or later it is bound to do so. It was infecting Simon now. It was hurrying him.

  He was reluctant to do what he was being driven, by that scurry in his mind, to intend. He knew well that for the greater initiate to fall back on the methods of the lesser initiate was unwise. In sorcery as in sanctity there is no return. The master in any art who abandons the methods of his mastery and falls back on prentice habits runs a fearful risk. No lover, of any kind, not even the lover of himself, can safely turn from maturity to adolescence. His adolescence is in his maturity. The past may be recalled and redeemed in the present, but the present cannot be forsaken for the past. Lester was exposed to the true method; Evelyn was seeking the false. But the magician runs a greater risk even than Evelyn’s, for if he begins to return, his works begin to return to him. All this Simon had learned many years before, but till now it had never been a temptation to him; now it was. He had begun to fall back on crude early methods of magic. He had already conceded to his need the making of the false body; now he was about to concede more. To recover Betty by spiritual means would mean much careful planning and working. He sat with his eyes fixed on that window through which he desired to see her spirit come, and he knew he must first suspend and se
parate her physical life. Her body, especially with this new knowledge, this love relation to another, was her safeguard. He must at once, by easy and quick methods, overthrow her body. The great face that gazed towards the window was more like the face of Jonathan’s painting than anyone, even Jonathan, had ever seen it before.

  He turned his mind to his paramour. She was then sitting at her solitary dinner, in her house at Highgate, and presently she felt herself beginning to breathe heavily and her left hand began to shake. She knew the signs, and she set herself to making her mind empty. Such communications demand a technique not dissimilar to that of prayer. First she thought of nothing but him; when she had nothing but his image in her mind, she set herself to exclude that too. Her coffee was before her; no one would come till she rang. She sat—that woman only just past fifty, though since that very morning she had aged and looked full ten years older—gazing out over the coffee, a statue of quiet meditation; and the image of him faded from her mind and she sank into an inner stillness. It was in that stillness, the stillness of the threshold of a ghostly temple, that she heard her own voice saying aloud, “Hair. Bring me her hair.” She heard it clearly the first time she said it, but she heard herself repeat it several times before she acted, where once she would have moved at once. But she was stiff tonight and tired, and in great wanhope, and it was only slowly that at last she raised herself, pressing on the arms of her chair, and went clumsily upstairs to Betty’s room. There, peering among the bristles of the brushes, she found two or three short golden hairs. She picked them carefully out, put them in an envelope, and going downstairs got out her car and drove down to Holborn. It was an hour afterwards that the maid found that, for the first time in her experience, her mistress had left the dining-room without ringing.

  When she reached the house she found Plankin just about to lock the door. As she reached it and he waited for her, she almost thought that the small carved hand showed through the darkness palely lit and in motion, waving her to go on. Plankin said, “Good evening, my lady. It’s a nasty night.” She nodded to him and he nodded back. He said, “It’s good to belong to the Father and to be inside. We’ll be in our beds soon, most of us. The Father’s got good beds for those he takes care of,” and as she went down the hall she heard him behind her still saying, “Good beds; good beds.”

  Round the corner, through the small door. The hall was dark. She switched on one light—the single light that was just over the door. It did not penetrate far—just enough to let her dimly see the Clerk sitting in the throned chair and something shining upon his knees. He was waiting for her. She went straight across to him, took the hairs out of the envelope and gave them to him. He was sitting quite still and holding on his knees a little lump of what seemed paste. It was that which shone. He took the hairs from her and laid them on the paste; then he began to mold it. It was very small, not more than two inches long, and as he pressed and molded it he made it less; presently it was not much more than an inch. Then, as if he needed more, he put his hand inside his cassock and took it out again full of all kind of soft amorphous stuff, also shining. He added that to what he already held and worked at it. There was in the hall now only the light over the door and the phosphorescent glow of the image.

  When it was finished, it was a rough shape of a woman, nothing like so finished as that other larger shape he had made that morning. He stood up and put it on the seat of his chair. He said to the woman by him, “I will make the enclosure now. You shall hold it when we are ready,” and she nodded. He took three paces to the front of the throne and bending his great height he began to walk backward round it in a circle, drawing after him the point of his left thumb upon the floor. It left behind it a softly shining trail as if it were the streak of a snail’s path. When he had finished the circle, he took a pace nearer the chair and began another circle, and when that in turn was finished, he went in turn to the four points of the compass and joined the two circles by four straight lines. As he did so the air within the circles grew heavy and stifling, as if they formed a kind of round thick wall which shut out health and easy breath. He stood up and paused for a few moments as if to recover, then he lifted the fixed endoplasmic shape in his hands, turned and took his seat again upon the now secluded throne. He nodded heavily at the woman, and she came and knelt in front of him with her face towards him. She seemed much older now than she had been when she entered the hall; it was the fallen face of a woman of ninety that stared at him, and was still ageing, and the hands she put out were older too, thin and faintly tremulous. He gave the image, built round those golden hairs, into them, and she held it at about the height of her shoulders, a little above his knees. The only sound now was that of the rain upon the roof.

  The Clerk said, “Call her; call her often!” She obediently began; she could not make her voice anything but flat and lifeless, but she began automatically. “Betty!… Betty!… Betty!” and presently the repetition seemed to strengthen her. While she called, the Clerk put his hand again inside his cassock, but this time near his breast, and drew out what seemed a long needle. It too was bright, but with the brightness of actual steel; it was not like the doll and it glinted in the efflorescence of the doll. There was about it almost a natural beauty, but the presence of that slip of loveliness accentuated the strange horror of the rest. The Clerk took it in his left hand. It had at its head a tiny gold knob, and on this he settled his forefinger, holding it about half-way down, between his thumb and his second and third fingers; the fourth came round to the ball of his thumb. He said, “Louder!” In that oppressive air, Sara Wallingford could not easily obey, but she made an effort and her body unexpectedly responded. Her voice came out with a summons that was like a thin shriek: “Betty!… Betty!” And all the time she held up the doll to her master. The Clerk leaned forward and raised the needle.

  For almost a minute her voice shrieked alone and then it was no longer alone. Other shrieks from the house beyond answered it and joined with it. The sudden multiplication of sound sang in her ears; she jerked and almost dropped the endoplasmic doll. She recovered herself immediately, but in that half-second’s loss of control the Clerk had stabbed at the doll. The needle struck the tip of her middle right-hand finger, and as he pulled back his weapon a drop of blood stood out and oozed onto the fixed jelly. The Clerk looked at her; his eyes drew her yet more upright on her knees. Her finger continued to bleed; the shoulder of the doll showed crimson from the drops.

  She went very white and had stopped her high old woman’s scream. It was he and not the secrets for which she had cared, and she did not know much of them, but something she could not help knowing and what she knew made her afraid. His great face loomed over her and would not let her go. The face was the face of the Exile of Israel, of the old Israel and the new, and all Israel else was free to the Return. She saw, unknowing, as she looked up, the face of all exile, the face of the refusal of the Return, and it seemed to her as imbecile as it had been in the painting, though now indeed she had forgotten the painting. She tried to let go the doll, and failed. Her left hand could loosen it, but it remained fixed to her right, sealed to it by the blood. She held it in her left and tried to pull her right free, but she could not. She felt indeed all the pain of the rending flesh, but the flesh was not rent. As her blood ran into the doll, so her heart’s indifference passed into her flesh; her brain knew what ought to be, but her body refused her brain. The organic nature of her blood made her one with the doll and more intimately much than the golden hairs could unite Betty to it. She realized the substitution that was taking place; she was likely to die in Betty’s stead.

  She knew she was about to die. She knew that the Clerk would not spare her and that even the thought of sparing would not occur to him. She had hated all things for his sake and so did he, but now his hate was against her too. But she was allowed justice; she was allowed to hate even herself for his sake. After that instinctive effort to escape, she accepted that; she even gloried in it. Her heart flu
ng itself up into that great alien sky of his face and was absorbed in it. She had but one thing to ask and that unvocally; that he should strike to kill before the doll had become even more she than Betty. She had a vague and terrible fear that the substitution might be so complete that Betty would not die. Let him stab before that happened! let him strike both of them into whatever waited! let her have but the chance to meet her daughter there, and see which of them could rule!

  She was conscious of one other thing, though she did not properly know what it was. There passed through the face above her a series of vibrations, waves passing down it from forehead to chin. They reverberated in her as a kind of perpetual drumming, increasing as the face changed sea-like down from brow to point, and dying as the pause came, and again beginning as from beneath the hair the wave issued and swelled and sank and swelled, change after change of heavy cloud in that now to her almost shapeless sky. These waves, could she have realized it, came from the drumming rain—heavy, rapid, continuous; October closing in a deluge. The vigil of the saints was innumerably active in the City and all London lay awake under it.

  As if her prayer had moved the opaque cloud to yield to it, the slender steel flashed and struck again. She saw it; and, whether through his error or her shrinking, she felt the sudden sting in her forefinger—as if she were to be united to the image, member by member, blow by blow. But, for all the sudden pain and fear, it was not her mouth from which even now those screams were issuing; she after her first wound had become dumb. They came from two sources. The first was within the double barrier; it was held between her hands. In the head of the rough endoplasmic shape a hole opened and out of the hole came screams much like her own had been. It was the most startling and the most dangerous. It had been the first sound of this which caused her to quiver and deflected Simon’s aim, for it meant that a weakness and a peril were already within the circle. The wall had not yet been broken by any pressure from without—as the operation in Betty’s bedroom had been. The magic here was mechanically shrilling under some turn within it; it was beginning to twist upon itself. The thing done was in active and antagonistic return.