Unknown (159 page)

“It's only a little way . . . just up the hill . . . it's necessary too . . . necessary . . . very necessary . . . Please move, Cordy, and let me go. . . . You'll be sorry if you don't. . . . You won't forgive yourself * afterwards ... if you don't.” He almost wept as he beseeched her. In his own mind just then to stop a murder and to taste an appalling sweetness were motives both lost in the wild necessity he was in to get out of this room!

But she kept her eyes upon him all the time and she now noticed that he had begun casting a furtive, hurried, crafty look at the window. Nothing indeed would have been easier for him than to lift up that bulging blind and get out of that window!

“I must do something to keep him here,” she thought, “and I mustn't struggle with him . . . because of the child. Besides, he'd hit me. He'd hit me savagely.” A wild strange thought came to her then; came to her from seeing the look of that lowered blind. Very often in the evening she had undressed for his pleasure, with the blind pulled down like that, and the door locked.

She began feverishly stripping off her clothes. He followed every movement of her hands, with those burning eyes, under the shadow of that bowler. His coat was buttoned up tight under his chin. He looked like a man ready to rush out upon pikes or bayonets. Crossing her arms over her chest she pulled her dress over her head and then her slip. Then she unloosed her petticoat and drawers. Stamping with her feet she extricated herself from these objects, letting her stockings and shoes remain. Backing against the door, she bent down and pulled off her vest, dragging it over her head. This final movement, when her head was bent low, and when her face was hidden, and when the garment, dragged forward by her eager hands was caught for a second on one of her hairpins, did stir some deep chord of excited desire in the man with the burning eyes.

He snatched off his hat and flung it in the purple chair. But she rose up to her full height now, her back still to the door, her long arms hanging limp by her sides, her chin lifted high, her head thrown back. Mr. Evans came slowly towards her. Poor Cordy's figure was anything but classical. She resembled a nude of Cranach. But there was such an heroic abandonment about her pose, and her eyes shone with such a lustrous appeal, that something happened within that other locked room, the room containing the iron bar. Not for nothing was this brave girl the child of Geard of Glastonbury. Roused to the uttermost her soul suddenly became a psychic force, a magnet of destruction, an annihilating ray, and the murderous instrument, summoning up page seventy-seven of that fatal book, crumbled into a pinch of dust.

Grotesque and Cranach-like though poor Cordy's naked body was, it was the body of a woman still, it was the ultimate symbol, the uttermost “Gleichnis,” of life's wild experiment. Grotesque it might be, as nakedness went, but combined with the look she managed to fling, like a passion of immortal wine over the dark flame of his obsession, it overcame, it triumphed. . . .

One hour later Mr. Evans and Cordelia might both have been seen jumping with frantic haste out of Solly Lew's taxi, and to the astonishment of that not easily surprised conveyor of mortal men, racing with desperate impatience up the slope of Gwyn-ap-Nud's hill. “They're there, Cordy! They're there! I see them!” panted Mr. Evans, trying in vain to out-distance Mr. Geard's daughter.

It had been with some reluctance that Tossie Stickles—now for some heavenly months Tossie Barter—had been persuaded to leave her babies and accompany her husband and John Crow on this fanciful excursion to see the night fall upon Glastonbury from the summit of the Tor. Barter himself had been followed by one good piece of luck after another ever since they had been married. He had hired spacious and airy rooms in the same house in Northload Street where John and Mary lived, and between the two menages there had been unruffled and uninterrupted harmony. With the establishment of the new regime in Glastonbury he had been entirely freed from the annoying presence of Red Robinson at the Factory. Robinson had now become what might be called the third triumvir among the magnates who, under Mr. Geard, dictatorially administered the affairs of the small community; and Barter was at liberty to manage the making of souvenirs entirely at his own discretion.

The one topic of conversation in these days that Barter indulged in and upon which he expatiated at inordinate length to Mary when they were alone was, what had been the psychological reason for the miserable way in which he had lived before he met Tossie. Into Mary's private thoughts—and they were subtle and ironical enough—as she listened to these discourses, it is not necessary to go; but what she said to Barter was, that all unattached men are curiously ignorant of “what things a girl can do”—such was Mary's expression—to make life pleasant.

Meanwhile, so happy was Tom Barter these days, that in a brief two months his whole expression changed and the whole cast of his countenance was altered. He positively looked fatter, too; and his manner of speech was different. He spoke in a tone much more easy, much more assured. It was their Rabelaisian sense of humour that was one of the greatest links between Tom and Tossie; and morning and night—with the twins sometimes included and sometimes not—their fits of giggling and chuckling and unrestrained laughter, going on and on and on, made the second storey of that gloomy old house sound as if a party of hilarious schoolboys was staying the night with a party of hilarious schoolgirls.

The mention of school is relevant enough in this connection; for what this vita nuova of Tom Barter really meant was that Tossie had picked up what might be called the man's lost flesh-and-blood pride just where he had dropped it in his youth under his unlucky experiences at Gladman's House at Greylands. Something in him, some psychic organ full of a delicious, animal gusto for simple things, and an invincible desire to giggle at everything in existence, had been restored to him by his contact with Tossie and not only this: for it soon became apparent, even to John and Mary, that Barter was no longer afraid to “stand up,” as Toss would put it, to “they bloomin5 gentry.” This aspect of what the girl had done for him had been brought especially into evidence of late by reason of his association with Lady Rachel, who—still unmarried to young Athling but still constantly at his side—found herself asking Barter, in place of anybody else, to meet her father whenever he came to the Pilgrims'.

Lord P. was constantly coming to the Pilgrims' now; not because he loved a communistic Glastonbury, for he was still excessively nervous of the mob that had attacked him; but because he had become seriously worried about Rachel's relations with her Ned; and the queer thing was that with his Norfolk youthfuiness restored to him, and the Gladman House years erased from his life, by these perpetual giggling fits with Tossie, Barter proved much more a match for the elderly nobleman and a much more agreeable table-companion to him than anyone else that Rachel could have picked up.

Lady Rachel's own genius, too, for these little souvenir figures that his factory was now turning out by the thousands and sending all over the world, had by this time really got Barter interested in his. job. The souvenir factory was doing by far the most flourishing business in Glastonbury. More money was beino made by it than either by the new dye works that the municipality had communized or by the old dye works that Philip was still running, and far more than by the Crow tin mine at Wookey, which now began to show signs of having exhausted its vein of the precious metal; and Barter's professional pride, as the head of so flourishing a business, being mingled with his new psychological self-respect and his new freedom from the wearisome hunt for erotic novelty, made him just now the happiest and best-balanced male animal in the town; although in the intoxication of a pure zest for life in its essence he was probably surpassed not only by his own radiant Tossie but also by Tossie's relative by marriage, the beautiful and mystical Nancy.

“Tis a shame,” Tossie remarked to Mary as she poured out tea for her and John while awaiting Barter's return from the factory, “ 'tis a shame for you to stay and look after the kids. They'd really stay, asleep just as they be and no one would disturb 'em if I just locked up the place.”

“I wouldn't think of it, Toss dear,” said Mary emphatically, “so don't speak of it again. Tom'll be back soon, John; so don't finish the tea-cakes!”

“I wasn't thinking of finishing them,” protested John indignantly, “but to make sure, I'll put 'em on the stove, if I may, Toss?” He rose, as he spoke, and replaced the dish in question near the big smoking tea-kettle. As he surveyed the scene at the table, Mary's dark head and Tossie's fair one, both bent towards the cradle at its side, and a bowl of snowdrops, their stems protruding from green moss, resting near its edge with a baby's milk-bottle propped against it, John got a sudden delicious feeling of the continuity of these domestic vignettes, as they gather themselves together and take varied patterns all the way down the centuries! He paused for a second, his hand on the dresser shelf above the stove where Tossie kept her pepper-pot and salt-bowl, and the fanciful idea seized him that groups of this sort—the two girls' heads, the cottage-loaf on the rough linen tablecloth, the two babies' heads in the cradle on the floor —were all answering and responding as they reappeared down the ages, from the dawn of lime5 to some invisible pattern of pre-ordained harmony which was forever being struggled after by Nature and forever being just missed, or lost as soon as it came together.

As he stood there watching those four feminine heads, the grown ones and the others, grouped about that cottage-loaf and that bowl of snowdrops, the scene wavered and fluctuated before him, melted, dissolved and changed. Through that Glaston-bury room, as he gave himself up to his waking-trance, flowed the big river at Northwold, rose the span of Foulden Bridge, whitish and narrow, deepened and darkened the dim pools of Dye's Hole, under their ancient willow roots! Why should he wait for old Tom's return, why should he wait till he and Mary were alone together, to tell her the thrilling news with which his mind was brimming over that afternoon? He had come to this tea-party at Tossie's to find Mary already there; and except for what his wife could read in his excited face—and he knew she had read something already!—he had had no chance even to whisper to her by herself. Where had John come from on this twenty-fifth of February, this day of such unusual atmospheric effects ?

He had found a little note from the Mayor when he reached his office-shanty down by the railway after lunching with Mary at his favourite Othery Dairy in Street Road; and back again to Street Road he had immediately dragged himself, not a little peevish at having to retrace his steps across the whole width of the town. But once inside Cardiff Villa, once ensconced in Mrs. Geard's chair, with the well-known knitted antimacassar of bright coloured wools behind his head, and old Geard nodding his great white face opposite him, he had known, by one of his swift vagabond instincts, that, as far as he was concerned, this day of strange under-water lights was a bringer of incredible, undreamed-of luck. To the end of his days would John Crow remember that interview with his master. The first thing he had noticed—for he had seen little of Mr. Geard since the man had become so much more than the Mayor of Glastonbury—was that Bloody Johnny had got older. Yes, his hair was greyer, his face was whiter, his plump hands were more wrinkled and the stomach over which they were folded was more capacious.

“And that's why, lad,” Mr. Geard said, "I can talk to 'ee about things I can't speak of to anyone else. 'Twould make Crummie unhappy, and the sweet lass is unhappy enough over Holy Sam,

and 'twould make Cordy nervous; and as for my dear wife------

The truth is, lad, I've been telling He, ever since our opening of the arch, that His work for me here be about done. At first He wouldn't give ear to what I said. He thought 'twas laziness, or the Devil in me bosom. But when I went on telling He how 'twere, He came little by little to give heed. Tweren't that He were deaf, even afore, ye must understand, sonny; but 'twere that I be such a queer one, and that I had summat in me—yes, laddier that's the solemn truth—what He couldn't get the hang of!"

John looked at the diabolical black eyes—now gleaming like cvvo fuliginous mine shafts out of some Tartarean tin mine— and he thought to himself: “I don't wonder that Christ finds it hard to understand him. The truth is the old chap's never been more than half a Christian.”

“You are not easy to understand, Mr. Geard,” he murmured aloud.

The remark seemed to displease the Mayor of Glastonbury. “That's because I'm too simple for 'ee. I be too simple for anything in this clever town. I be a Montagu man, I be.”

“I don't call you simple, Mr. Geard!” John was growing excessively bold in this interview with his master. Was it that his drifting tramp's mind had gathered up an inkling that this was the very last time, upon this earth, that he would talk to Mr. Geard face to face? It is not often given to human beings to be able to treat a fragment of time that can never return again with the intense and ritualistic concentration appropriate to a moment irretrievably slipping away into an everlasting impossibility of repetition.

But on this February afternoon John Crow did touch exactly and precisely such an intense concentration. He attained it—and again and again, after it was all over, he thanked his stars he had attained it—partly because of his childish and greedy high spirits under the pressure of his instinct about some incredible good fortune and partly because, beneath the semi-hypnotism that Geard's blacic eyes exercised over him, there was a direct transference of thought between them.

But was it really possible that Christ Himself found it hard to understand in this singular Servant of His, what he, John Crow, the eternal heathen, the Stone-worshipper, the forehead-tapper upon Stones, understood quite easily? What he did see was, or at least, what he imagined he saw was that Geard of Glastonbury, having built his Saxon arch, having worked his Miracle, having inaugurated his new, mystical, Johannine and anti-Pauline cult, had decided that it was an appropriate time— although there was no hurry about it and it was necessary to avoid any unpleasant shocks—to leave this misty, rainy, subaqueous atmosphere of Glastonbury and pay an exploring visit to the Isles of the Dead.