All Hallows' Eve (30 page)

The Clerk made a quick savage motion and the clamor of the diseased creatures ceased. He looked round the circle, collecting their pitiable eyes; then he raised his hand, pointing it at the dwarf, and he said, “Drag it away!”

Most of them ignored him. A few of those least diseased did look round at the dwarf, but they looked back at once. It was not disobedience but impotence that held them there. Someone—it was difficult to know who, in that throng—said feebly, “Make us well, Father!” The dwarf, dragging at Betty's hand and pulling her after it, advanced another few steps. Now it was right up against the barrier and had, with a definite and powerful thrust, got one foot just over the circle by some half an inch. There it seemed to halt, as if it could press no farther. Betty still clung to its hand; it was all she could do. She called out, “Lester, do help me! I can't hold her.”

Indeed nothing—neither the Clerk's frown nor Betty's clasp—could now affect the mad determination of the lost spirit. Evelyn was overridden by the fear that even this refuge in which she somehow was might be snatched from her. She saw the barrier almost as a material wall; if she could get this body within it, she would be safe, or as safe as she could be. The attraction which that point exercised on the mere material image was strengthened by her own will; a false union held her and it. Since the house had been entered, there had been no need for Lester to drive the shape; it had been only too urgent to hurry on. Only Betty still clung to it. She flung out her other hand behind her, as if to Jonathan; and Jonathan sprang forward and caught it. As if aware of them for the first time, the Clerk lifted his eyes and saw the three friends.

Jonathan and Betty were too occupied to meet his eyes, but Richard did. And as he did, the sudden recollection of what this man had offered him rose bitterly in his heart. This fellow had offered to rule Lester for him, to give him back his wife or not as he might choose—he! He had been still lingering by the door, but now suddenly he too moved. If Lester was to go from him, she should go with all honors. He walked forward to join the others and when he had reached them he took the canvas from under Jonathan's arm. He said, “Father Simon, my wife wishes us to return your property. Take it.”

He lightly tossed the canvas towards the Clerk; it flew over the circles and struck Simon on the shoulder. The Clerk gave a sudden squeal. Richard went on, holding himself very upright and imperious. “If I had not been a fool in the past, you would not have been able to——”

“Darling, must you be quite so savage?” Lester's voice half-laughing interrupted. “Tell him what you ought to tell him—that will be enough.”

Richard had forgotten his commission. Now he remembered. He said, “Yes … well … but I think it's too late. Lester is free of you, and Betty is free, and the world will soon be free. But just before it is—I was sent to offer you everything—all the kingdoms in it and their glory. You were to be asked to meet those others who are like you; you were, all three of you, to be … how do I know what? masters, for all I do know. But I think we've come in time. Let's see if your friends will.”

A sudden silence fell. Richard listened—all of them, even the Clerk, all except Evelyn, listened—for that other voice. It did not then come. Lester was still clearly aware of what was happening. But she was also aware of a certain difference in her surroundings. She had seemed to enter the house with the others, even to come as far as the hall, but when the others had gone right in, when Richard had gone and had begun to speak, when she had broken in on him with that gay but serious protest, she had become aware that she was no longer related to that deformed image. It had itself released her, merely by entering the hall. For as it did so and she for the first second with it, she had found herself once more in the rain. It was driving down over and past her onto—the Thames? some wide river, flowing, flowing on beneath her; and the pale ghastly light in the hall had changed. Within the rain a fresher light was opening. It shone on the rain and on the river; and the room with its companies was still there, but it stood on the river, which flowed through it, and in the rain, which fell through it. The light was like dawn, except that it had in it a tinge redder than dawn, and the same tinge was in the river and the rain, exquisite and blood-roseal, delicate and enriching. Only she felt again the awful sense of separation. It was like a sharp pain in a great joy. She gave herself to it; she could no other; she had consented long before—when she married Richard perhaps—or was consenting now—when she was leaving him. Her heart sank; without him, what was immortality or glory worth? and yet only without him could she even be that which she now was. All, all was ending; this, after so many preludes, was certainly death. This was the most exquisite and pure joy of death, in a bearing of bitterness too great to be borne. Above her the sky every moment grew more high and empty; the rain fell from a source far beyond all clouds. Below her the myriad drops, falling in slanting lines, struck the great river in innumerable little explosions, covering the whole surface. She saw each of them with an admirable exactitude—each at the same time as she saw all, and the flowing river and the empty sky, and herself no longer bodily understood, but a point, a point reflected from many drops and pierced by many drops, a spark of the light floating in the air. But she was not very conscious of herself as herself; she no longer thought of herself as bearing or enjoying; the bitterness, the joy and the inscape of those great waters were all she knew, and among them the round hall, with those mortal figures within it, and its window open, as she now saw it, on the waters. Even Richard's figure there had lost its immediate urgency; something once necessary and still infinitely precious, which had belonged to it, now lay deep, beyond all fathoming deep, in the current below, and could be found again only within the current or within the flashing rain. Of any future union, if any were to be, she could not begin even to think; had she, the sense of separation would have been incomplete, and the deadly keenness of the rain unenjoyed.

The rain did not seem to her to be driving into the round hall; if it did, it was there invisible to her. The window was open, and she became aware that towards the window, from a great distance, two forms were moving. They came walking upon the waters, great-headed, great-cloaked forms, forms like Simon, two Simons far beyond the hall, coming towards the hall and Simon. She thought at first there were more—a whole procession of Simons, but it was not so; there were but the two. They were going directly towards the window, one behind the other, and as she saw them she had a sudden sense that never, never would she have asked either of them to bring her a drink of water in the night. She would have been terrified of what they brought; there would have been something in the glass—as if the Richard of past days had put secret poison in the drink; and much worse than that, for human malice was but human malice, and comprehensible and pardonable enough to any human; but this would have been a cool and immaterial—and the worse for being immaterial—antipathy to—to? to all, a drink the taste of which would have been a separation without joy. They came on, as it were below her—not that she had at all a place to see them from—and as they passed or seemed to pass, she had a moment's terror that it was not they but she. The great-headed, great-cloaked, steadily walking forms were wholly unlike her, but yet they were she—double, immense, concealed, walking through the unfelt rain on the unyielding water, antipathetic, relegated to antipathy; as if in the shadowy City of her early death she had gone another way and through the deep tunnels and tribes had come out on this water, and (grown in them to this size and covered in them with this wrapping to hide herself) were walking on to some quiet and awful consummation. This had been the other way, the way she had just not gone. Behind them, as they went, the faint roseal glow in the waters and the rain gathered thicker and followed and deepened as it followed. The color of it—rose or blood or fire—struck up the descending lines of rain and was lost somewhere in that empty upper sky above her; but below it was by now almost a wall which moved after those forms; and absorbed and changed the antipathy they diffused; and all behind them the freshness of the waters and the light was free and lovely.

On earth—that is, among those earthly—the turn of the night had come. The morning of the feast imperceptibly began, though none of them knew it—none? the Clerk knew. As a man feels the peculiar chill that comes, especially in early spring or late autumn, with the rising sun, so he, long before any sun had risen, felt a new coldness in the hall. The air within the charmed circle was heavy, but as the Acts of the City took charge and the nearness of all the hallows grew everywhere within the outer air, it became dank and even more oppressive with a graveyard chill. More than humanity was holy and more than humanity was strange. The round hall itself and its spare furnishings and the air in it were of earth, and nothing could alter that nature. The blessedness of earth was in them and now began to spread out of them. There too were the hallows, and their life began to awake, though the City itself seemed not yet awake. Invisible motions stirred and crept or stepped or flew, as if a whole creation existed there unseen. The Acts of the City were at hand. Simon's eyes were still on the dwarf, which by now had pressed still farther into the barrier, as if it was working its way through some thick molded stuff which could not quite halt it. It was delayed also by its paw, being still caught in Betty's; for all its spasmodic tugging it could not quite free itself from that young passionate clasp. But it had dragged Betty herself very near the barrier. Her other hand was in Jonathan's and his arm was round her. As her foot touched the outer circle, she looked round at him and said, “Don't hold me now, Jon. I must go with her.”

Jonathan said, “You'll do nothing of the sort. What's the good? Let her go where she wants. It's I who need you, more than ever she can.”

Betty answered breathlessly, “No, really, Jon. I
must
go; after all, we did know each other. And you're different; you can manage. Besides, I shouldn't be the least good to you if—— Let me go, darling. I can't leave her to die again. I was glad she was dead the first time, so I must be with her now.”

Jonathan tried to resist, but all his energy and all the energy of his art was in vain. He set his feet; they slipped. He dragged at Betty's slim form; it advanced. He said, “Don't; it's hell. What shall I do?”

Betty, faintly, panted, “Hell? it won't hurt me; of course it won't. I
must
go; darling, let me.”

Their voices, quiet enough, were dreadfully loud in the hall where there was no other sound except always of the rain. Jonathan called, “Richard, come and help me!”

Richard said—and if there was an impurity in his answer, it was hardly avoidable; a deadly touch was in his heart and more than Jonathan he knew that certain departures must be; if he spoke with the least possible impatience, it was but mortal—Richard said, “I shouldn't worry. You won't have her if you keep her; when she wants to go she ought to go.”

His eyes were still on the Clerk and the Clerk's on Betty. At this moment, suppose as he might that he still had his whole ancient purpose in mind, it was a dream and an illusion. The sight of his daughter and slave, whole, well and free, distracted him. He forgot the theory of magic, the principle of the physical and spiritual categories of identity, the philosophy and metaphysic of Goetia. Spells had failed and images had failed. He was more a common man than ever before and he forgot all but the immediate act. That remained: killing remained. He saw the body of Betty, and the hand that held the needle crept slowly up his side. Inch by inch she drew nearer; inch by inch he raised the weapon. He fixed his eyes on her throat.

They were all now in a world of simple act. The time for thought, dispute, preparation was done. They were in the City. They were potent to act or impotent to act, but that was the only difference between any of them. The eyes of the woman who lay, incapable of act, against the abandoned chair, were also on Betty and greedy with the same murderous desire. The diseased creatures, also incapable, who lay around the circle, trembled and moaned a little with their helpless longing for the act of healing. She and they alike yearned towards act and could not reach it. The dwarf-form was still in motion and its motions as it forced its way on were both its own and Evelyn's—it magically drawn to its origin, she spiritually driving to her refuge. Betty felt that invisible soft mass press against her everywhere—against head and breasts, hands and thighs and legs. She gasped out to Jonathan, “Let go—you must. I may; not you. Only one of us, and I knew her.” She wrenched her own hand free from his and struck it backward against him, as Lester had struck at Richard, one gesture whether accursed or blest. In the fierceness of her knowledgeable love, she struck so hard—all heaven in the blow—that he loosed his arm from her and fell back a pace. Richard caught and steadied him. At that moment, as Betty entered the circle, the rain broke in.

It came with a furious rush, as if it had beaten the roof down under it. But in fact the roof had not fallen. The rain drove through it and down over all of them, torrential, but torrential most over the center of the circle as if the center of a storm was settled there. Under the deluge the doll on the chair at once melted; it ran over the woman's hand and wholly disappeared, except for a thin film of liquid putrescence which covered them, pullulating as if with unspermed life. She saw it and under it her hands still bloody; she shook them wildly and tried to tear at them, but the thin pulsing jelly was everywhere over them and her fingers could not get through it. For the first time in her life she began to sob, with a hideous harsh sound; and as her obstinacy melted like the doll under the rain she scrambled to her feet and made for Simon, the tears on her aged cheeks, clutching at him with those useless and helpless hands. He did not notice her; it was his misfortune.