All Hallows' Eve (29 page)

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 flung 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.

But the noise was multiple; that scream was not solitary. Rising through the drumming of the rain—of which all this time the Clerk had never been entirely unaware, as it is said that those in deep prayer can hear and even consider sounds without distraction—came the screams from beyond the threshold, but now from only just beyond. Those who screamed were already at the door. The house had thrown them from its upper rooms, or rather that which had entered the house. All in the bedrooms and in the offices and the rest had been locked and silent and asleep when through the night and the rain that single taxi had rolled to the outer door. It stopped; the driver leaned back, put out his hand and threw it open. Richard had been the first to descend; then Jonathan and Betty; lastly, the reluctant thing that had first got in. Jonathan gave some silver to the driver and the vehicle disappeared into the darkness. They turned to the house; the carved hand glowed; and then, as they passed it, Betty put out a hand with a movement as if she brushed a twig away and the thing went out suddenly. The dwarf, driven first of all the company, flinched as if it had itself been struck. It reached the door and was halted, for though alone of all in London, it might of its nature have passed through that door yet the high and now dominating spirit who controlled it knew that neither her husband nor her friend's lover could. Jonathan began to use the knocker. Richard looked for a bell and could find none, until a thought struck him, and taking a step or two back he peered by the light of a sheltered match at the center of the carved hand. He saw there a discolored spot in the palm, something which might have been a bell, the nerve of the physical machinery of that house, whose brain (now secluding itself into imbecility) lay in the round hall within. They could not hear the sound of the bell, nor was Jonathan's hammering and occasional kicking at the door much more than a relief to his own feelings. The noise seemed deadened and only an echo of itself. Presently, however, a window went up above them and a voice which Richard recognized as the doorkeeper's said, “What's all this? You can't see the Father now. It's too late.”

“We've something for him,” Jonathan called, “something of his own.”

“You can't do anything for him and you can't give him anything,” the voice of Plankin said. “It's late; it's too late.”

Another voice interrupted him. It came from the dwarf, but they knew it for Evelyn's and as it sounded the dwarf in a paroxysm of strength beat on the door with its hands. It cried, “Let me in! Let me in!”

Plankin, unseen above them, said, “I don't know, I'm sure. It isn't right to open the door after dark. The Father doesn't wish it. There's things in the dark that might frighten us.”

Evelyn screamed, “Let me in! It's raining; you can't leave me in the rain.” She added, more quietly and sniveling, “I shall catch a dreadful cold.” The dwarf struck again at the door and this time there broke out under the false hands a deep booming sound, as if the previous faint echo had now passed into a cavern of great depth. Jonathan had ceased to knock and Richard took his hand from the discolored palm. This, at last, was the proper summons to that gatehouse; that which they had brought must itself demand entrance. At its call—dead woman and inorganic shape—the gatekeeper, if at all, would come down and open. They could not now hear Plankin for the noise, any more than they could see him for the night. They waited.

The door began to open—less than a crack; they could hardly have known it had not the dwarf, tearing and scrabbling, flung itself at the crack. Both its possessing spirits urged it there; there, with a yelp of delight, it pressed. The threshold shook; Betty and her friends felt it move, and the door, as if of its own accord, swung more widely back, revealing Plankin half-dressed and carrying him with it. He stared at the intruder, as he staggered back. The dwarf sprang jerkily into the lit hall. Betty and the others followed and as they did so the eyes of the gatekeeper changed. Dismay came into them; he gasped; he threw his hands to his head; he cried, “Oh! Oh!” Richard, as he saw and heard, remembered a phrase from their interview of that morning—“a tumor in the head.” As he recollected it, and saw the dreadful consciousness of returning pain, he heard a clamor break out on the floor above. The dwarf had thrust past Plankin and was scuttling away down the hall. As it pierced into the house the clamor grew—a hubbub of cries and thuds and shouts and hurrying feet and crashing doors. This was the Return and this the operation of inflexible law.

They appeared; they came, stumbling and roaring, down the stairs—all those who carried the Clerk's mark in their bodies. First, an old woman, in a nightgown, eyes running tears and hand clutching her side where the cancer had begun again to gnaw, and she had been waked by it with only one thought, and that all confused—to be healed, to get to her Comforter. A few steps behind came a young man partly dressed, coughing and spitting blood onto the stairs, and feeling vainly for the handkerchief he had in his first waking spasm forgotten. And after him a still younger man, who as he came was being twisted slowly back into deformity, his leg withering and drawing up, so that he was presently clinging to the banisters and hopping down sideways. Others followed, some with unseen ailments and some with open wounds, but all hurrying with one instinctive desire—to get to Simon, to find their Father, to be healed and at rest. Only one of all that household was not there—one, the paralytic, who had waked to find her flesh turning again a prison, she already half-immobile, and now lying part in and part out of bed anguished and alone in her room. The rest were down the stairs and in the hall and hurrying as best they could round the corner into that corridor in the wall to the hole that gave on the center of all. In front of them, and quicker than any, went the dwarf, and as if in a miserable retinue they followed, Plankin the first. The hunt for the miracle-monger was up; they rushed to be again sealed his own, but there was something dangerous in the way they went.

Betty had paused in the open door till the scurry had gone by. Her hand was in Jonathan's, who still carried the canvas of the painting under his other arm. Richard was on Betty's other side. At last, she too began to move; she went quietly and her face was very serious and calm. As they went down the hall, they saw that the walls there and still more those of the narrow corridor when they entered it were running with drops and thin streams of water. Richard looked up. He saw that, here and there, the rain was beginning to come through the roof; he felt a few drops on his head, on his face, on his eyelids. But for the most part the rain was not yet upon the walls; it was the condensation of something in the air, some freshness of water that lay on them, but left the air dry and sterile for want of it. The walls absorbed it; under it they changed to a kind of slime.

When they came to the hall it was not so. There the roof was still sound and the walls, as far as they could see, still dry. Before them the diseased throng were hurrying across the floor and the three friends could not clearly see the dwarf beyond them or the two encircled figures beyond it. The woman, as all this crowd burst in, did not move, but the Clerk turned his eyes. Plankin was coming so fast that he outwent even the dwarf, who indeed seemed to pause and totter as it took there the first step, so that the others all broke out around it, and came first to the invisible barrier. That perhaps would not have held against any indifferent human beings; it was not primarily meant for such protection—much less against divine scepticism or heavenly joy. Brutality might have trampled it, scattered about the outer circle, tottering and crawling round it, surrounding it, beating with their hands on an invisible wall, wailing and moaning, and one howling dog-like. The Clerk took no slightest notice; he was looking, and his eyes were very wary, at the other thing that now began to advance.

It walked more steadily now, as if it had found some center of determination in itself. When Lester's influence had been on it, there had been in its movements an irrepressible jerkiness. But now that jerkiness had passed; it moved inflexibly, as if it neither could nor wished to stop. When it had almost reached the barrier, Betty pulled her hand from Jonathan's and ran after it. She caught up with it; in a swift and strong motion she caught its hand; she exclaimed, “Evelyn, do stop!”

The Clerk had been watching it come. Now he stood up. As he did so, he released from the intensity of his concentration the endoplasmic image in the hands of his paramour; it fell; and she, unable to let it go, fell forward also at that sudden unbalancing release. The Clerk had, at the same time, taken a step towards the barrier, so that she fell against the chair, and the doll, to which her hands were still fastened by her own blood, lay on the seat. She lay propped there and she turned her head, so that she saw, at a little distance, not only the dwarf, of which she knew nothing, but handlinked with it her daughter, her rival and enemy. That Betty was wholly free from her. She saw her almost as Jonathan saw her, beautiful and good, very much Betty. That Betty was quite unlike the doll she helplessly held. The doll was all she had of Betty and even the doll was becoming, as her blood soaked into it, less and less like Betty and more and more like herself. She was being, by an operation which her own will had in the beginning encouraged, slowly substituted for Betty. She lay, rigid and fixed, propped by the edge of the chair, and into the insatiable image through those two small pricks her blood continued to drain.