I. — THE MAGUS ZOROASTER
"It undoubtedly
needs", Peter Stanhope said, "a final pulling together, but
there's hardly time for that before July, and if you're willing to
take it as it is, why—" He made a gesture of presentation and
dropped his eyes, thus missing the hasty reciprocal gesture of
gratitude with which Mrs. Parry immediately replied on behalf of the
dramatic culture of Battle Hill. Behind and beyond her the culture,
some thirty faces, unessentially exhibited to each other by the May
sunlight, settled to attention—naturally, efficiently, critically,
solemnly, reverently. The grounds of the Manor House expanded beyond
them; the universal sky sustained the whole. Peter Stanhope began to
read his play.
Battle Hill was one of the
new estates which had been laid out after the war. It lay about
thirty miles north of London and took its title from the more ancient
name of the broad rise of ground which it covered. It had a quiet
ostentation of comfort and culture. The poor, who had created it, had
been as far as possible excluded, nor (except as hired servants) were
they permitted to experience the bitterness of others' stairs. The
civil wars which existed there, however bitter, were conducted with
all bourgeois propriety. Politics, religion, art, science, grouped
themselves, and courteously competed for numbers and reputation. This
summer, however, had seen a spectacular triumph of drama, for it had
become known that Peter Stanhope had consented to allow the restless
talent of the Hill to produce his latest play.
He was undoubtedly the
most famous inhabitant. He was a cadet of that family which had owned
the Manor House, and he had bought it back from more recent
occupiers, and himself settled in it before the war. He had been able
to do this because he was something more than a cadet of good family,
being also a poet in the direct English line, and so much after the
style of his greatest predecessor that he made money out of poetry.
His name was admired by his contemporaries and respected by the
young. He had even imposed modern plays in verse on the London
theatre, and two of them tragedies at that, with a farce or two, and
histories for variation and pleasure. He was the kind of figure who
might be more profitable to his neighbourhood dead than alive; dead,
he would have given it a shrine; alive, he deprecated worshippers.
The young men at the estate office made a refined publicity out of
his privacy; the name of Peter Stanhope would be whispered without
comment. He endured the growing invasion with a great deal of good
humour, and was content to see the hill of his birth become a suburb
of the City, as in another sense it would always be. There was, in
that latest poetry, no contention between the presences of life and
of death; so little indeed that there had been a contention in
the Sunday Times whether Stanhope were a pessimist
or an optimist. He himself said, in reply to an interviewer's
question, that he was an optimist and hated it.
Stanhope, though the most
glorious, was not the only notorious figure of the Hill. There was
Mr. Lawrence Wentworth, who was the most distinguished living
authority on military history (perhaps excepting Mr. Aston Moffatt).
Mr. Wentworth was not in the garden on that afternoon. Mrs. Catherine
Parry was; it was she who would produce the play, as in many places
and at many times she had produced others. She sat near Stanhope now,
almost as tall as he, and with more active though not brighter eyes.
They were part of that presence which was so necessary to her
profession. Capacity which, in her nature, had reached the extreme of
active life, seemed in him to have entered the contemplative, so much
had his art become a thing of his soul. Where, in their own separate
private affairs, he interfered so little as almost to seem
inefficient, she was so efficient as almost to seem interfering.
In the curve of women and
men beyond her, other figures, less generally famous, sat or lay as
the depth of their chairs induced them. There were rising young men,
and a few risen and retired old. There were ambitious young women and
sullen young women and loquacious young women. They were all
attentive, though, as a whole, a little disappointed. They had
understood that Mr. Stanhope had been writing a comedy, and had hoped
for a modern comedy. When he had been approached, however, he had
been easy but firm. He had been playing with a pastoral; if they
would like a pastoral, it was very much at their service. Hopes and
hints of modern comedies were unrealized: it was the pastoral or
nothing. They had to be content. He consented to read it to them; he
would not do more. He declined to make suggestions for the cast; he
declined to produce. He would like, for his own enjoyment, to come to
some of the rehearsals, but he made it clear that he had otherwise no
wish to interfere. Nothing—given the necessity of a pastoral—could
be better; the production would have all the advantage of his delayed
death without losing any advantage of his prolonged life. As this
became clear, the company grew reconciled. They gazed and listened,
while from the long lean figure, outstretched in its deck-chair,
there issued the complex intonation of great verse. Never negligible,
Stanhope was often neglected; he was everyone's second thought, but
no one's first. The convenience of all had determined this afternoon
that he should be the first, and his neat mass of grey hair, his
vivid glance, that rose sometimes from the manuscript, and floated
down the rows, and sank again, his occasional friendly gesture that
seemed about to deprecate, but always stopped short, received the
concentration of his visitors, and of Mrs. Parry, the chief of his
visitors.
It became clear to Mrs.
Parry as the afternoon and the voice went on, that the poet had been
quite right when he had said that the play needed pulling together.
"It's all higgledy-piggledy," she said to herself, using a
word which a friend had once applied to a production of the Tempest,
and, in fact to the Tempest itself. Mrs, Parry thought that this
pastoral was in some ways, rather like the Tempest. Mr. Stanhope, of
course, was not as good as Shakespeare, because Shakespeare was the
greatest English poet, so that Stanhope wasn't. But there was a
something. To begin with, it had no title beyond A Pastoral.
That was unsatisfactory. Then the plot was incredibly loose. it was
of no particular time and no particular place, and to any cultured
listener it seemed to have little bits of everything and everybody
put in at odd moments. The verse was undoubtedly Stanhope's own, of
his latest, most heightened, and most epigrammatic style, but now and
then all kinds of reminiscences moved in it. Once, during the second
act, the word "pastiche" floated through Mrs. Parry's mind,
but went away again on her questioning whether a Pastiche would be
worth the trouble of Production. There was a Grand Duke in it who had
a beautiful daughter, and this daughter either escaped from the
palace or was abducted—anyhow, she came into the power of a number
of brigands; and then there was a woodcutter's son who frequently
burned leaves, and he and the princess fell in love, and there were
two farmers who were at odds, and the Grand Duke turned up in
disguise, first in a village and then in the forest, through which
also wandered an escaped bear, who spoke the most complex verse,
excepting the Chorus. The Chorus had no kind of other name; at first
Mrs. Parry thought they might be villagers, then, since they were
generally present in the forest, she thought they might be trees, or
perhaps (with a vague reminiscence of Comus) spirits. Stanhope had
not been very helpful; he had alluded to them as an experiment. By
the end of the reading, it was clear to Mrs. Parry that it was very
necessary to decide what exactly this Chorus was to be.
She had discouraged
discussion of the play during the intervals between the four acts,
and as soon as it was over tea was served. If, however, the poet
hoped to get away from discussion by means of tea he was mistaken.
There was a little hesitation over the correct word; fantastic was
dangerous, and poetic both unpopular and supererogatory, though both
served for variations on idyllic, which was Mrs. Parry's choice and
won by lengths. As she took her second cup of tea, however, she began
to close. She said: "Yes, idyllic, Mr. Stanhope, and so
significant! "
"It's very good of
you," Stanhope murmured. "But you see I was right about
revision—the plot must seem very loose."
Mrs. Parry waved the plot
up into benevolence. "But there are a few points," she went
on. "The Chorus now. I don't think I follow the Chorus."
"The Chorus could be
omitted," Stanhope said. "It's not absolutely necessary to
a presentation."
Before Mrs. Parry could
answer, a young woman named Adela Hunt, sitting close by, leant
forward. She was the leader of the younger artistic party, who were
not altogether happy about Mrs. Parry. Adela had some thoughts of
taking up production herself as her life-work, and it would have been
a great advantage to have started straight away with Peter Stanhope.
But her following was not yet strong enough to deal with Mrs. Parry's
reputation. She was determined, however, if possible, to achieve a
kind of collaboration by means of correction. "O, we oughtn't to
omit anything, ought we?" she protested. "A work of art
can't spare anything that's a part of it."
"My dear," Mrs.
Parry said, "you must consider your audience. What will the
audience make of the Chorus?"
"It's for them to
make what they can of it," Adela answered. "We can only
give them a symbol. Art's always symbolic, isn't it?"
Mrs. Parry pursed her
lips. "I wouldn't say symbolic exactly," she said slowly.
"It has a significance, of course, and you've got to convey that
significance to the audience. We want to present it—to interpret."
As she paused, distracted
by the presentation by the poet of two kinds of sandwiches, Adela
broke in again.
"But, Mrs. Parry, how
can one interpret a symbol? One can only mass it. It's all of a
piece, and it's the total effect that creates the symbolical force."
"Significant, not
symbolical," said Mrs. Parry firmly. "You mustn't play down
to your audience, but you mustn't play away from them either. You
must" —she gesticulated "intertwine... harmonize. So you
must make it easy for them to get into harmony. That's what's wrong
with a deal of modern art; it refuses—it doesn't establish
equilibrium with its audience or what not. In a pastoral play you
must have equilibrium."
"But the
equilibrium's in the play," Adela urged again, "a balance
of masses. Surely that's what drama is—a symbolical contrast of
masses."
"Well," Mrs.
Parry answered with infuriating tolerance, "I suppose you might
call it that. But it's more effective to think of it as significant
equilibrium—especially for a pastoral. However, don't let's be
abstract. The question is, what's to be done about the Chorus? Had we
better keep it in or leave it out? Which would you prefer, Mr.
Stanhope?"
"I should prefer it
in, if you ask me," Stanhope said politely. "But not to
inconvenience the production."
"It seems to be in
the forest so often," Mrs. Parry mused, dismissing cake.
"There's the distant song in the first act, when the princess
goes away from the palace, and the choric dialogue when... It isn't
Dryads, is it?"
A friend of Adela's, a
massive and superb young man of twenty-five, offered a remark.
"Dryads would rather wreck the eighteenth century, wouldn't
they?"
"Watteau," said
a young lady near Adela. "You could have them period."
Mrs. Parry looked at her
approvingly. "Exactly, my dear," she said. "A very
charming fantasy it might be; we must take care it isn't precious
—only period. But, Mr. Stanhope, you haven't told us—are they
Dryads?"
"Actually,"
Stanhope answered, "as I told you, it's more an experiment than
anything else. The main thing is—was—that they are non-human."
"Spirits?" said
the Watteau young lady with a trill of pleasure.
"If you like,"
said Stanhope, "only not spiritual. Alive, but with a different
life—even from the princess."
"Irony?" Adela
exclaimed. "It's a kind of comment, isn't it, Mr. Stanhope, on
futility? The forest and everything, and the princess and her lover
—so transitory."
Stanhope shook his head.
There was a story, invented by himself, that The Times had
once sent a representative to ask for explanations about a new play,
and that Stanhope, in his efforts to explain it, had found after four
hours that he had only succeeded in reading it completely through
aloud: "Which," he maintained, "was the only way of
explaining it."
"No," he said
now, "not irony. I think perhaps you'd better cut them out."
There was a moment's
pause. "But we can't do that, Mr. Stanhope," said a voice;
"they're important to the poetry, aren't they?" it was the
voice of another young woman, sitting behind Adela. Her name was
Pauline Anstruther, and, compared with Adela, she was generally
silent. Now, after her quick question, she added hastily, "I
mean—they come in when the princess and the wood-cutter come
together, don't they?" Stanhope looked at her, and she felt as
if his eyes had opened suddenly. He said, more slowly:
"In a way, but they
needn't. We could just make it chance."
"I don't think that
would be nearly as satisfactory," Mrs. Parry said. "I begin
to see my way—the trees perhaps—leaves—to have the leaves of
the wood all so helpful to the young people—so charming! "
"It's a terribly
sweet idea," said the Watteau young lady. "And so true too!
"
Pauline, who was sitting
next her, said in an undertone: "True?"
"Don't you think so?"
Watteau, whose actual name was Myrtle Fox, asked. "It's what I
always feel—about trees and flowers and leaves and so on —they're
so friendly. Perhaps you don't notice it so much; I'm rather mystic
about nature. Like Wordsworth. I should love to spend days out with
nothing but the trees and the leaves and the wind. Only somehow one
never seems to have time. But I do believe they're all breathing in
with us, and it's such a comfort—here, where there are so many
trees. Of course, we've only to sink into ourselves to find peace—and
trees and clouds and so on all help us. One never need be unhappy.
Nature's so terribly good. Don't you think so, Mr. Stanhope?"
Stanhope was standing by,
silent, while Mrs. Parry communed with her soul and with one or two
of her neighbours on the possibilities of dressing the Chorus. He
turned his head and answered, "That Nature is terribly good?
Yes, Miss Fox. You do mean 'terribly'?"
"Why, certainly,"
Miss Fox said. "Terribly—dreadfully—very."
"Yes," Stanhope
said again. "Very. Only—you must forgive me; it comes from
doing so much writing, but when I say 'terribly' I think I mean 'full
of terror'. A dreadful goodness."
"I don't see how
goodness can be dreadful," Miss Fox said, with a shade of
resentment in her voice. "If things are good they're not
terrifying, are they?"
"It was you who said
'terribly',"Stanhope reminded her with a smile, "I only
agreed."
"And if things are
terrifying," Pauline put in, her eyes half closed and her head
turned away as if she asked a casual question rather of the world
than of him, "can they be good?"
He looked down on her.
"Yes, surely," he said, with more energy. "Are our
tremors to measure the Omnipotence?"
"We'll have them in
shades of green then," Mrs. Parry broke in, "light to dark,
with rich gold sashes and embroidery running all over like twigs, and
each one carrying a conventionalised bough—different lengths, I
think. Dark gold stockings."
"To suggest the
trunks?" asked Adela's friend, Hugh Prescott.
"Quite," Mrs.
Parry said, and then hesitated. "I'm not sure—perhaps we'd
better keep the leaf significances. when they're still—of course
they could stand with their legs twined..."
"What, with one
another's?" Adela asked in a conscious amazement.
"My dear child, don't
be absurd," Mrs. Parry said. "Each pair of legs just
crossed, so."—she interlaced her own.
"I could never stand
still like that," Miss Fox said, with great conviction.
"You'd have your arms
stretched out to people's shoulders on each side," Mrs. Parry
said dubiously, "and a little gentle swaying wouldn't be
inappropriate. But perhaps we'd better not risk it. Better have green
stockings—we can manage some lovely groupings. Could we call them
'Chorus of Leaf-Spirits', Mr. Stanhope?"
"Sweet!" said
Miss Fox. Adela, leaning back to Hugh Prescott, said in a very low
voice, "I told you, Hugh, she'll ruin the whole thing. She's got
no idea of Mass. She ought to block it violently and leave it without
a name. I wouldn't even have 'Chorus'. I hope he won't give way, but
he's rather weak."
However, Stanhope was, in
the politest language, declining to have anything of the sort. "Call
it the Chorus," he said, "or if you like I'll try and find
a name for the leader, and the rest can just dance and sing. But I'm
afraid 'Leaf-Spirits' would be misleading."
"What about 'Chorus
of Nature-Powers'?" asked Miss Fox, but Stanhope only said,
smiling, "You will try and make the trees friendly," which
no one quite understood, and shook his head again.
Prescott asked:
"Incidentally, I suppose they will be women?"
Mrs. Parry had said, "O,
of course, Mr. Prescott," before the question reached her brain.
When it did, she added, "At least... I naturally took it for
granted... They are feminine, aren't they?"
Still hankering after
mass, Adela said, "It sounds to me more like undifferentiated
sex force," and ignored Hugh's murmur, "There isn't much
fun in that."
"I don't know that
they were meant to be either male or female," Stanhope said. "I
told you they were more of an experiment in a different kind of
existence. But whether men or women are most like that is another
matter." He shed an apologetic smile on Mrs. Parry.
"If they're going to
be leaves," Miss Fox asked, "couldn't they all wear huge
green leaves, so that no one would know if they were wearing
knee-breeches or skirts?"
There was a pause while
everyone took this in, then Mrs. Parry said, very firmly, "I
don't think that would answer," while Hugh Prescott said to
Adela, "Chorus of Figleaves! "
"Why not follow the
old pantomime or the present musical comedy," Stanhope asked,
"and dress your feminine chorus in exquisite masculine costume?
That's what Shakespeare did with his heroines, as often as he could,
and made a diagram of something more sharp and wonderful than either.
I don't think you'll do better. Masculine voices—except boys—would
hardly do, nor feminine appearances."
Mrs. Parry sighed, and
everyone contemplated the problem again. Adela Hunt and Hugh Prescott
discussed modernity between themselves. Pauline, lying back, like
Stanhope, in her chair, was thinking of Stanhope's phrases, "a
different life", "a terrible good", and wondering if
they were related, if this Chorus over which they were spending so
much trouble were indeed an effort to shape in verse a good so alien
as to be terrifying. She had never considered good as a thing of
terror, and certainly she had not supposed a certain thing of terror
in her own secret life as any possible good. Nor now; yet there had
been an inhumanity in the great and moving lines of the Chorus. She
thought, with an anger generous in its origin but proud and narrow in
its conclusion, that not many of the audience really cared for poetry
or for Stanhope's poetry—perhaps none but she. He was a great poet,
one of a very few, but what would he do if one evening he met himself
coming up the drive? Doppelgaenger, the learned called it, which was
no comfort. Another poet had thought of it; she had had to learn the
lines at school, as an extra task because of undone work:The Magus Zoroaster, my
dead child,Met his own imageWalking in the garden.
She had never done the
imposition, for she had had nightmares that night, after reading the
lines, and had to go sick for days. But she had always hated Shelley
since for making it so lovely, when it wasn't loveliness but black
panic. Shelley never seemed to suggest that the good might be
terrible. What would Peter Stanhope do? what could he? if he met
himself?
They were going: people
were getting up and moving off. Everyone was being agreeably grateful
to Stanhope for his lawn, his tea, and his poetry. In her fear of
solitude she attached herself to Adela and Hugh and Myrtle Fox, who
were all saying good-bye at once. As he shook hands he said casually:
"You don't think they are?" and she did not immediately
understand the reference to the measurement of Omnipotence by mortal
tremors. Her mind was on Myrtle, who lived near her. She hated the
pang of gratitude she felt, and hated it more because she despised
Miss Fox. But at least she wouldn't be alone, and the thing she hated
most only came, or had so far only come, when she was alone. She
stuck close to Myrtle, listening to Adela as they went.
"Pure waste,"
Adela was saying. "Of course, Stanhope's dreadfully
traditional"—how continually, Pauline thought, people misused
words like dreadful; if they knew what dread was!—"but he's
got a kind of weight, only he dissipates it. He undermines his mass.
Don't you think so, Pauline?"
"I don't know,"
Pauline said shortly, and then added with private and lying malice:
"I'm no judge of literature."
"Perhaps not,"
Adela said, "though I think it's more a question of general
sensitiveness. Hugh, did you notice how the Parry talked of
significance? Why, no one with a really adult mind could possibly—O,
good-bye, Pauline; I may see you to-morrow." Her voice passed
away, accompanied by Hugh's temporary and lazy silence, and Pauline
was left to Myrtle's monologues on the comforting friendliness of
sunsets.
Even that had to stop when
they reached the Foxes' hole. Myrtle, in a spasm of friendship for
Messias, frequently called it that. As they parted upon the easy
joke, Pauline felt the rest of the sentence pierce her. She took it
to her with a sincerity of pain which almost excused the annexation
—"the Son of Man hath not where to lay his head." It was
the cry of her loneliness and fear, and it meant nothing to her mind
but the empty streets and that fear itself. She went on.
Not to think; to think of
something else. If she could. It was so hopeless. She was trying not
to look ahead for fear she saw it, and also to look ahead for fear
she was yielding to fear. She walked down the road quickly and
firmly, remembering the many thousand times it had not come. But the
visitation was increasing—growing nearer and clearer and more
frequent. In her first twenty-four years she had seen it nine times;
at first she had tried to speak of it. She had been told, when she
was small, not to be silly and not to be naughty. Once, when she was
adolescent, she had actually told her mother. Her mother was
understanding in most things, and knew it. But at this the
understanding had disappeared. Her eyes had become as sharp as when
her husband, by breaking his arm, had spoiled a holiday in Spain
which she—"for all their sakes"—had planned. She had
refused to speak any more to Pauline that day, and neither of them
had ever quite forgiven the other. But in those days the comings—as
she still called them—had been rare; since her parents had died and
she had been sent to live with and look after her grandmother in
Battle Hill they had been more frequent, as if the Hill was fortunate
and favourable to apparitions beyond men; a haunt of alien life.
There had been nine in two years, as many as in all the years before.
She could not speak of it to her grandmother, who was too old, nor to
anyone else, since she had never discovered any closeness of
friendship. But what would happen when the thing that was she came up
to her, and spoke or touched? So far it had always turned aside, down
some turning, or even apparently into some house; she might have been
deceived were it not for the chill in her blood. But if some day it
did not ...
A maid came out of a house
a little farther down a road, and crossed the pavement to a
pillar-box. Pauline, in the first glance, felt the sickness at her
heart. Relieved, she reacted into the admission that she was only
twenty-three houses away from her home. She knew every one of them;
she had not avoided so much measurement of danger. it had never
appeared to her indoors; not even on the Hill, which seemed to be so
convenient for it. Sometimes she longed always to stay indoors; it
could not be done, nor would she do it. She drove herself out, but
the front door was still a goal and a protection. She always seemed
to herself to crouch and cling before she left it, coveting the peace
which everyone but she had... twenty-one, twenty... She would not
run; she would not keep her eyes on the pavement. She would walk
steadily forward, head up and eyes before her... seventeen,
sixteen... She would think of something, of Peter Stanhope's play—"a
terrible good." The whole world was for her a canvas painted
with unreal figures, a curtain apt to roll up at any moment on one
real figure. But this afternoon, under the stress of the verse, and
then under the shock of Stanhope's energetic speech, she had
fractionally wondered: a play—was there a play? a play even that
was known by some? and then not without peace... ten, nine... the
Magus Zoroaster; perhaps Zoroaster had not been frightened. Perhaps
if any of the great—if Caesar had met his own shape in Rome, or
even Shelley... was there any tale of any who had?... six, five, four
...
Her heart sprang; there, a
good way off—thanks to a merciful God —it was, materialized from
nowhere in a moment. She knew it at once, however far, her own young
figure, her own walk, her own dress and hat —had not her first
sight of it been attracted so? changing, growing... It was coming up
at her pace—doppelgaenger, doppelgaenger—her control began to
give... two... she didn't run, lest it should, nor did it. She
reached her gate, slipped through, went up the path. If it should be
running very fast up the road behind her now? She was biting back the
scream and fumbling for her key. Quiet, quiet! "A terrible
good." She got the key into the keyhole; she would not look
back; would it click the gate or not? The door opened; and she was
in, and the door banged behind her. She all but leant against it,
only the doppelgaenger might be leaning similarly on the other side.
She went forward, her hand at her throat, up the stairs to her room,
desiring (and every atom of energy left denying that her desire could
be vain) that there should be left to her still this one refuge in
which she might find shelter.
II. — VIA MORTIS
Mrs. Parry and her
immediate circle, among whom Adela Hunt was determinedly present,
had come, during Pauline's private meditations, to several minor
decisions, one of which was to ask Lawrence Wentworth to help with
the costumes, especially the costumes of the Grand Ducal Court and
Guard. Adela had said immediately that she would call on Mr.
Wentworth at once, and Mrs. Parry, with a brief discontent, had
agreed. While, therefore, Pauline was escaping from her ghostly
twin, Adela and Hugh went pleasantly along other roads of the Hill
to Wentworth's house.
It stood not very far from the Manor House, a little
lower than that but still near to the rounded summit of the rise of
ground which had given the place half its name. Lawrence
Wentworth's tenancy was peculiarly suitable to the other half, for
his intellectual concern was with the history of battle, and
battles had continually broken over the Hill. Their reality had not
been quite so neat as the diagrams into which he abstracted and
geometricised them. The black lines and squares had swayed and
shifted and been broken; the crimson curves, which had lain bloody
under the moon, had been a mass of continuous tiny movement, a mass
noisy with moans and screams. The Hill's chronicle of anguish had
been due, in temporalities, to its strategic situation in regard to
London, but a dreamer might have had nightmares of a magnetic
attraction habitually there deflecting the life of man into death.
It had epitomized the tale of the world. Prehistoric legends,
repeated in early chronicles, told of massacres by revolting
Britons and roaming Saxons, mornings and evenings of hardly-human
sport. Later, when permanent civilization arose, a medieval
fortalice had been built, and a score of civil feuds and pretended
loyalties had worn themselves out around it under kings who, though
they were called Stephen or John, were as remote as Shalmanezer or
Jeroboam. The Roses had twined there, their roots living on the
blood shed by their thorns; the castle had gone up one night in
fire, as did Rome, and the Manor House that followed had been
raised in the midst of another order. A new kind of human civility
entered; as consequence or cause of which, this hill of skulls
seemed to become either weary or fastidious. In the village that
had stood at the bottom of the rise a peasant farmer, moved by some
wandering gospeller, had, under Mary Tudor, grown obstinately
metaphysical, and fire had been lit between houses and manor that
he might depart through it in a roaring anguish of joy. Forty years
later, under Elizabeth, the whispering informers had watched an
outlaw, a Jesuit priest, take refuge in the manor, but when he was
seized the Death of the Hill had sent him to its Type in London for
more prolonged ceremonies of castration, as if it, like the men of
the Renaissance, seemed to involve its brutal origin in
complications of religion and art. The manor had been forfeited to
the Crown, but granted again to another branch of the family, so
that, through all human changes, the race of owners had still
owned. This endured, when afterwards it was sold to richer men, and
even when Peter Stanhope had bought it back the house of his poetry
remained faintly touched by the dreadful ease that was given to it
by the labour and starvation of the poor.
The whole rise of ground therefore lay like a cape, a
rounded headland of earth, thrust into an ocean of death. Men, the
lords of that small earth, dominated it. The folklore of skies and
seasons belonged to it. But if the past still lives in its own
present beside our present, then the momentary later inhabitants
were surrounded by a greater universe. From other periods of its
time other creatures could crawl out of death, and invisibly
contemplate the houses and people of the rise. The amphibia of the
past dwelt about, and sometimes crawled out on, the slope of this
world, awaiting the hour when they should either retire to their
own mists or more fully invade the place of the
living.
There had been, while the workmen had been creating the
houses of the new estate, an incident which renewed the habit of
the Hill, as if that magnetism of death was quick to touch first
the more unfortunate of mortals. The national margin of
unemployment had been reduced by the new engagement of labourers,
and from the work's point of view reduced, in one instance,
unwisely. A certain unskilled assistant had been carelessly taken
on; he was hungry, he was ill, he was clumsy and slow. His name no
one troubled to know. He shambled among the rest, their humorous
butt. He was used to that; all his life he had been the butt of the
world, generally of an unkind world. He had been repeatedly flung
into the gutter by the turn of a hand in New York or Paris, and had
been always trying to scramble out of it again. He had lost his
early habit of complaining, and it only added to his passive
wretchedness that his wife kept hers. She made what money she could
by charing, at the market price, with Christmas Day, St. Stephen,
and such feasts deducted, and since she usually kept her jobs, she
could reasonably enjoy her one luxury of nagging her husband
because he lost his. His life seemed to him an endless gutter down
which ran an endless voice. The clerk of the works and his foreman
agreed that he was no good.
An accidental inspection by one of the directors
decided his discharge. They were not unkind; they paid him, and
gave him an extra shilling to get a bus some way back towards
London. The clerk added another shilling and the foreman sixpence.
They told him to go; he was, on the whole, a nuisance. He went;
that night he returned.
He went, towards the buses a mile off, tramping blindly
away through the lanes, coughing and sick. He saw before him the
straight gutter, driven direct to London across the lanes and
fields. At its long end was a miserable room that had a perpetual
shrill voice.
He longed to avoid them, and as if the Hill bade him a
placable farewell there came to him as he left it a quiet thought.
He could simply reject the room and its voice; he could simply stop
walking down the gutter. A fancy of it had grown in him once or
twice before. Then it had been a fancy of a difficult act; now the
act had suddenly become simple.
Automatically eating a piece of bread that one of the
men had given him, he sat down by the roadside, looking round him
to find the easiest way to what had suddenly become a resolve. Soft
and pitiless the country stretched away round him, unwilling that
he should die. He considered. There were brooks; he knew it was
impossible for him to hold himself down in them while he drowned.
There were motors, cars, or buses; apart from his unwillingness to
get other people into trouble, he feared lest he should be merely
hurt or maimed. He wanted to get himself completely out of trouble.
There were the half-finished buildings away behind him. A magical
and ghostly finger touched his mind; in one of those buildings he
remembered to have seen a rope. In a dim way, as he sat gnawing his
bread, he felt that this was the last trouble he would give to his
fellows. Their care this time would be as hasty and negligent as
ever, but it would be final. If the rope were not there, he would
find some other way, but he hoped for the best. He even believed in
that best.
He got up, sometime in the early evening, and began to
plod back. It was not far and he was not old. In covering the short
distance he covered age also, toiling doubly through space and
time. The Republic, of which he knew nothing, had betrayed him; all
the nourishment that comes from friendship and common pain was as
much forbidden to him as the poor nourishment of his body. The
Republic had decided that it was better one man, or many men,
should perish, than the people in the dangerous chance of helping
those many. It had, as always, denied supernatural justice. He went
on, in that public but unspectacular abandonment, and the sun went
down on him.
Under the moon he came on the Hill to a place which
might have been an overthrown rather than an arising city. The
chaos of that revolution which the Republic naturally refused had
rolled over it, or some greater disaster, the Vesuvian terror of
Pompeii, or an invisible lava of celestial anger, as that which
smote Thebes, or the self-adoring Cities of the Plain. Unfinished
walls, unfilled pits, roofless houses, gaping holes where doors and
windows were to be or had been spread before him. His body was
shaking, but he went on. Here and there a ladder stretched upward;
here and there a brazier burned. An occasional footstep sounded.
The cold moon lit up the skeletons of houses, and red fires
flickered rarely among them. He paused for a moment at the edge of
the town, but not in doubt, only to listen if a watchman were near.
From mere physical stress he whimpered a little now and then, but
he did not change his purpose, nor did the universe invite him to
change. It accepted the choice; no more preventing him than it
prevents a child playing with fire or a fool destroying his love.
It has not our kindness or our decency; if it is good, its goodness
is of another kind than ours. It allowed him, moving from shadow to
shadow, cautious and rash, to approach the house where he
remembered to have seen the rope. All the. afternoon the rope had
been visible to his eyes. He knew exactly where it was; and there
indeed it was. He slunk in and touched it, shivering and senseless
but for the simple sense of life. The air of that infected place
suffered his inhalations and filled his lungs as he dragged the
rope, gently and softly towards the nearest ladder beyond. The
ladder frightened him, lest it should be too much boarded, or else,
bone-white in the moon, should, while he climbed, expose his yet
living body to those universals who would have him live. But it was
open for him, and he crouched within the lower shell of a room,
holding the rope, peering, listening, waiting for he did not guess
what until it came. He thought once he heard hurrying feet at a
distance, but they were going from him, and presently all was again
quiet. The moonlight gently faded; the white rungs grew shadowy; a
cloud passed over the sky, and all was obscured. The heavens were
kind, and the moon did not, like the sun, wait for a divine
sacrifice in order to be darkened. A man served it as well. He
rose, and slipped to the foot of his ladder. He went softly up, as
the Jesuit priest had gone up his those centuries earlier paying
for a loftier cause by a longer catastrophe. He went up as if he
mounted on the bones of his body built so carefully for this; he
clambered through his skeleton to the place of his skull, and
receded, as if almost in a corporeal ingression, to the place of
propinquent death. He went up his skeleton, past the skeleton
frames of the ground floor, of the first floor. At the second the
poles of the scaffold stretched upward into the sky. The roof was
not on, nor his life built up. He dragged himself dizzily on to the
topmost landing, pulling the rope after him, and there his
crouching mind stayed. The cloud passed from the moon; another was
floating up. His flesh, in which only his spirit now lived, was
aware of the light. He still hoped for his best; he lay
still.
Presently he peered over. The world allowed him to be
capable and efficient at last; no one had seen him. The long gutter
of his process was now coiled up into the rope he held; the room
with its voice was away in and looked on him from the silent moon.
He breathed, and a cloud floated over it again. There was nothing
more to happen; everything had already happened except for one
trifle which would be over soon. He tiptoed to the scaffold pole on
his right hand, uncoiling the rope as he went; he pulled and gently
shook it. It was slender, but it seemed strong. He took one end of
the rope, began to fasten it to the end of the pole, and suddenly
hesitated. It was a long rope; suppose it was too long, so that
when he jumped he fell to the ground, not dead but broken. Then all
those people more fortunate than he, who had governed him and
shoved him into the gutter, would come to him again —he could hear
a footstep or two of theirs upon the ground now, and lay still
while they sounded and ceased—they would come to him and mind him
and turn him out again, down a miry path under a perpetual talking
moon that knew no wane. This was his one chance, for ever and ever,
of avoiding them. He knew he must not miss it.
He measured out the rope to twice the length of his
outstretched arms, and when the ruined city was once more silent he
peered over, letting that measured section run through his hands.
The end dangled much more than his height from the ground, and at
that he twisted and knotted the next yard or two around the pole,
straining against it, tugging it, making certain it could not ease
loose. The moon emerged as he finished, and in a panic he dragged
up the loose end, and shrank back from the edge, well back, so that
no watcher should see him from the road. There, lying flat on his
empty belly, he began his penultimate activity. He knotted, as best
he could, the end of the rope about his neck, with a great and
clumsy, but effective, slip knot. He tried it again and again, more
fearful than ever lest its failure, because of his own, should
betray him back into a life which his frenzy felt as already
ghostly. He felt that he could not bear that last betrayal, for he
would never have courage to repeat this mighty act of decision. The
dreadful universe perhaps would spare him that, if he were careful
now. He was very careful.
As, exhausted by the necessary labour, he lay flat on
that stage of the spectral ascent, amid the poles and unroofed
walls, he did not consider any future but unfortunate accident or
fortunate death. He was almost shut up in his moment, and his hope
was only that the next moment might completely close him in. No
dichotomy of flesh and spirit distressed or delighted him nor did
he know anything of the denial of that dichotomy by the creed of
Christendom. The unity of that creed has proclaimed, against
experience, against intelligence, that for the achievement of man's
unity the body of his knowledge is to be raised; no other fairer
stuff, no alien matter, but this to be impregnated with holiness
and transmuted by lovely passion perhaps, but still this. Scars and
prints may disseminate splendour, but the body is to be the same,
the very body of the very soul that are both names of the single
man. This man was not even terrified by that future, for he did not
think of it. He desired only the end of the gutter and of the
voice; to go no farther, to hear no more, to be done. Presently he
remembered that time was passing; he must be quick or they would
catch him, on his platform or as he fell, and if he fell into the
safety of their hands he would fall into his old utter insecurity.
All he knew of the comfort of the world meant only more pain. He
got awkwardly to his feet; he must be quick.
He was not very quick. Something that was he dragged at
him, and as he crawled to the edge dragged more frantically at
something still in him. He had supposed he had wanted to die, and
only at the last even he discovered that he wanted also not to die.
Unreasonably and implacably, he wanted not to die. But also he
wanted not to live, and the two rejections blurred his brain and
shook his body. He half struggled to his feet in his agony; he
twisted round and hung half over, his back to the abyss; he
clutched at the rope, meaning to hold it and release it as he fell,
to such an extreme of indecision pretending decision did his
distress drive him, and then as the circling movement of his body
ended, twining the rope once more round his neck, he swayed and
yelped and knew that he was lost, and fell.
He fell, and as he fell he thought for a moment he saw
below him a stir as of an infinite crowd, or perhaps, so sudden and
universal was it, the swift rush of a million insects toward
shelter, away from the shock that was he. The movement, in the
crowd, in the insects, in the earth itself, passed outward towards
the unfinished houses, the gaps and holes in half-built walls, and
escaped. When at last he knew in his dazed mind that he was
standing securely on the ground, he knew also, under the pale light
which feebly shone over the unfashioned town, that he was still
alone.
He stood for a moment in extreme fear that something
would break out upon him from its hiding-place, but nothing moved,
and as his fear subsided he was at leisure to begin to wonder what
he had to do there. He recognized the place; it was the scene of
his last job, the job from which he had been dismissed, the place
to which, for a reason, he had returned. The reason? He looked
round; all was quite still. There were no footsteps; there were no
braziers, such as he had half expected, for he had thought a watch
was set at night. There was no moon in the sky; perhaps it was not
night. Indeed it was too light for night; perhaps it was dawn, but
there was not yet a sun. As he thought of dawn and another day, he
remembered why he was there. He had come there to die, and the rope
was on the platform above. He did not quite understand why he was
standing at the foot of the ladder, for he seemed to remember that
he had mounted it, up to his head, unless he had jumped down to
frighten something that had vanished, but it did not matter. What
mattered was that dawn was here and his time was short. Unless he
acted, his chance and he would be lost. He went again, very quickly
and anxiously, up the ladder. At the top he got on to the platform
and hurried to find the rope. He had had it ready; he must not
waste it. He looked round for it. The rope was not
there.
At first he did not believe. This was certainly the
place, though in the dawn which was less bright than the moon, and
he knew he had hated the moon because it watched him, the corners
of that stage between earth and sky were now in darkness. But he
went and peered into them and felt. Uselessly. He knelt down,
staring round, unaware of any sickness or exhaustion, only of
anxiety. He almost lay down, screwing up his eyes, dragging himself
round. It was all useless. The rope was not the
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