All Hallows' Eve (21 page)

She sat down on the bottom step, sideways, with her eyes on the door and her legs drawn up. She forgot about the scratch, except occasionally and resentfully because the door was a tangle of thorns. Whenever her lungs began to hurt her, she talked to herself aloud. Soon, though she did not realize it, she was keeping up a small continuous monologue. She did not talk of herself, but of others. The monologue was not (primarily) self-centered but mean. Men and women—all whom she had known—dwindled in it as she chattered. No one was courteous; no one was chaste; no one was tender. The morning—for it was morning with her too—grew darker and the street more sordid as she went on.

In the middle of some sentence of attribution of foulness she stopped abruptly. The door had opened; there he was. He looked at her and she scrambled to her feet. He had come away from the conflict within the house, for purposes of his own. He had said to Lady Wallingford, “Keep her here.” But he would not wait, for he knew that he had now a spy in the spiritual places, who could, when he could talk to her, tell him of Betty and what had interfered with the great operation. He had left her where she was, holding her by that sympathy between them, by her instinctive obedience to the reversed Name, which had made itself known to her in the curious smell. She had lingered in it, as he knew she would. Now, as she rose, he lifted a finger. He was still in his own world and she in hers, but they were already visible to each other. He went so quickly that men did not see him, but behind him she was more truly invisible, as the actual streets of London were to her.

He came to the house behind Holborn and he passed down the corridor into the secret hall. He went to his chair and sat down. Evelyn did not quite like to follow him there; she waited just inside the door. Her lungs were beginning to hurt her again, but she did not dare to speak without his permission. But she hoped he would soon be kind and not as cruel as Lester. The fish smell was strong and the hall dim. It might have been in the depth of waters; waters of which the pressure lay on her lungs, and the distance was dark around her. As she stood there, she felt both light and lightheaded, except for that increased pressure. She was floating there, and beyond her he sat like the master of all water monsters, gazing away through the waters, and she must float and wait.

At the moment when the pain was becoming really troublesome, he turned his head. His eyes drew her; she ran forward and when she came to his seat, she sank on its steps as on the steps of the house. She had either to float or crouch; she could not easily stand. This did not astonish her; once she had been able to do something which now she could not do. The Clerk let her sit there; his eyes reverted to the distance. He said, “What do you know of that house?”

She began at once to chatter. After two sentences she found herself opening and shutting her mouth, but her voice had ceased. The pain was now really bad. She
must
speak, but she could only tell him what he wished to know. The tears again came into her eyes and ran down her face. That did not help. She choked and said—and immediately felt relief—“Betty was there and Lester had gone to her.”

The name of the obstacle, of that first interference, of the other girl on the bed, was Lester. The Clerk frowned; he had thought Betty was, through all the worlds, secluded from any companionship. He knew that there must always be some chance that a strange life, in those depths, should loom up, but he had supposed he had certainly cut his daughter off from any human friendship, and this sounded human. He had now to deal with it. He said, “Who is—Lester?”

Evelyn answered, “She was at school with Betty and me, and whatever she pretends now she didn't have any use for Betty then. She never liked her. She was killed—when I was.” The last three words had to be spoken, but she shook all over as she spoke. When the Clerk said, “Was she a friend of yours?” she answered, “Yes, she was, though she was always hateful and superior. We used to go about together. She ought to be with me now.”

The Clerk considered. He knew of the fierce hunger for flesh, for their physical habitations, which sometimes assails the newly dead, even the greatest. He knew how that other sorcerer of his race, the son of Joseph, had by sheer power once for a while reanimated his body and held it again for some forty days, until at last on a mountainside it had dissolved into a bright cloud. What Jesus Bar-Joseph had not been able to resist, what he himself (if and when it was necessary) was prepared to do, he did not think it likely that this other creature, this Lester, would be able to resist. Especially if this other woman by him, her friend, drew her. He stretched out his hand over Evelyn's head, and she felt its weight where she crouched, though it was above her and did not touch her. He said, “What do you most want now?”

Evelyn answered, “To get back—or else to have someone to talk to. No one will listen to me.”

The constriction which was his smile showed on the Clerk's face, in sudden contempt for this wretched being and for all those like her—how many millions!—who were willing to waste their powers so: talk of friends, talk of art, talk of religion, talk of love; all formulae and all facts dissolved in talk. No wonder they were hypnotically swayed by his deliberate talk. They swam and floated in vain talk, or sometimes they crouched in cruel talk. They fled and escaped from actuality. Unknowing, they spoke as he did, knowing; therefore they were his servants—until they dissolved and were lost. That might happen to this one. Let it, but before then perhaps she could be his auxiliary and draw that other shape from his daughter's bed.

It did not occur to him that he too was moving in the same direction. Sara Wallingford, Betty, Evelyn. Evelyn was a feebler instrument than Betty; even had there been no translucent Betty—and indeed for him there was none. But the helpless obedience of Betty was more exactly directed, more even of an accurate machine than this phantom in the worlds. There was indeed, even for her, a chance, could she have taken it. It lay precisely in her consenting not to talk, whether she succeeded or no. The time might be coming when she would have thrown that chance away, but for now she had it. She was looking up stealthily under his hand, that lay over her like a shadow on water; he was still gazing right away. But he said, “That might be done. I could give you a body—and as for talking, who would you most like to talk to?”

She knew that at once. In a voice stronger than she had hitherto been able to use in that world, she exclaimed, “Betty!”

He understood that. It seemed to him a poor and feeble wish, to be content to possess one other soul—to him who thought that numbers made a difference and even that quantity altered the very quality of an act, but he understood it. “The last infirmity of noble mind” can in fact make the mind so infirm that it becomes ignoble, as the divine Milton very well knew, or he would not have called it infirmity, nor caused Messias to reject it with such a high air; for paradise is regained not only by the refusal of sin but by the healing of infirmity. He looked down on her; she was touching her lips with her tongue. He said, “I could give you Betty.”

She only looked up. He went on, “But first you must find her and this Lester. Then I will give her to you.”

She said, “Always? Can I have her always?”

“Always,” he said. As he spoke a hint of what he said was visible to them, a momentary sense of the infinite he named. The hall for each of them changed. It opened out for him; it closed in for her. He saw opening beyond it the leagues of the temporal world; he saw one of his Types exhorting crowds in a city of the Urals and another sitting in a chamber of Pekin and softly murmuring spells to learned men of China, and beyond them vague adoring shadows, the skies coalescing into shapes, and bowing themselves towards him. But for her the hall became a quite small room, which still seemed to grow smaller, where she and Betty sat, she talking and Betty trembling. Infinity of far and near lived together, for he had uttered one of the names of the City, and at once (in the way they wished) the City was there.

He dropped his hand nearer, and with a mortal it would have touched, but an infinity of division was between them (as between Betty and Lester), and it did not touch. He said, “You must get Lester away from her and bring her here. Then you shall have Betty. Go and look for them; look for them and tell me. Look and tell me; then you shall talk to Betty. Look and tell me. Go and find her; look and tell me.…”

She was willing to yield to his command; she did yield. But she had not yet been dead long enough to know and use the capacities of spirit; she could not instantaneously pass through space, or be here and there at once. But that was what he wished and his power was on her. She was to be at once with Betty and with him, to see and to speak. She was still aware of herself as having the semblance of a body, though it was dimmer now, and she still, as with the pain in her lungs or the words she heard or uttered, understood her spiritual knowledge in the sensations of the body. She was compelled now to understand, in that method, the coincidence of two places. She felt, by intolerable compulsion, her body and her head slowly twisted round. She opened her mouth to scream and a wind rushed into it and choked her. The pain in her lungs was terrible. In her agony she floated right up from the place where she sat; still sitting, she rose in the air. This apparent floating was the nearest she could get to the immaterial existence of spirit. She thought she heard herself scream, and yet she knew she did not; her torment was not to be so relieved. Presently she sank slowly down again on the steps of the pseudo-throne, but now rigid—contorted, and sealed in her contortion, staring. The Clerk had again lifted his eyes from her; inattentive to her pain, he waited only for tidings of that obstacle on whose removal he was set.

It was at this moment that Lester saw her. She had known that she had been withdrawn from Richard. The moment that had been given them was at once longer and more intense than the previous moments had been, and she was more content to let it go. Dimly there moved in her, since her reconciliation with Betty, a sense that love was a union of having and not-having, or else something different and beyond both. It was a kind of way of knowledge, and that knowledge perfect in its satisfaction. She was beginning to live differently. She saw Richard look where she had been, and saw him also content. The men went out of the room with Lady Wallingford. The room, but for the dead girl and the living girl, was empty. They spoke to each other freely now across the division. Betty said, “Darling, what happened?”

“Nothing.” Lester answered. “At least, very little. I think he tried to push you somewhere, and then … well, then he tried to push me.”

“You're not hurt?” Betty asked, and Lester, with a rush of laughter, answered only, “
Here?
”

Betty did no more than smile; her gratitude possessed her. She stood and looked at her friend, and the charity between them doubled and redoubled, so that they became almost unbearable to each other, so shy and humble was each and each so mighty and glorious. Betty said, “I wouldn't have lost a moment, not a moment, of all that horrid time if it meant this.”

Lester shook her head. She said, almost sadly, “But mightn't you have had this without the other? I wish you'd been happy then.” She added, “I don't see why you couldn't have been. Need I have been so stupid? I don't mean only with you.”

Betty said, “Perhaps we could go there sometime and see.” But Lester was not immediately listening; she was laboring with the unaccustomed difficulties of thought, especially of this kind of thought. Her face was youthfully somber, so that it seemed to put on a kind of early majesty, as she went on. “Must we always wait centuries, and always know we waited, and needn't have waited, and that it all took so long and was so dreadful?”

Betty said, “I don't think I mind. I don't think, you know, we really did have to wait—in a way this was there all the time. I feel as if we might understand it was really all quite happy—if we lived it again.”

Lester said, all but disdainfully, “Oh if we lived it
again
——”

Betty smiled. She said, “Lester, you look just like you used to sometimes—” and as Lester colored a little and smiled back, she went on quickly, “There, that's what I mean. If we were living the other times
now—
like this—Oh I don't know. I'm not clever at this sort of thing. But the lake or whatever it was—and then Jonathan—and now you.… I feel as if all of you had been there even when you weren't, and now perhaps we might find out how you were even when you weren't. Oh well,” she added, with a sudden shake of her fair head that seemed to loose sparkles of gold about all the room, “it doesn't much matter. But I'd like to see my nurse again. I wonder if I could.”

“I should think,” said Lester, “you could almost do anything you wanted.” She thought, as she spoke, of the City through which she had come. Were the other houses in it—the houses that had seemed to her so empty then—as full of joy as this? but then perhaps also of the danger of that other death? If now she returned to them, would she see them so? if she went out of this house and—— She broke in on Betty, who had now begun to dress with an exclamation: “Betty, I'd forgotten Evelyn.”

Betty paused and blinked. She said, with a faint touch of reserve in her voice, “Oh Evelyn!”

Lester smiled again. “Yes,” she said, “that may be all very well for you, my dear, and I shouldn't wonder if it was, but it's not at all the same thing for me. I made use of Evelyn.”

Betty made a small face at herself and Lester in the mirror of her dressing-table. She said, “Think of the use she was trying to make of me!” and looked with a kind of celestial mischief over her shoulder at her friend.

“So I do,” said Lester, “but it isn't the same thing at all, you must see. Betty, you do see! You're just being provoking.”