Unknown (160 page)

“I believe you are so little of a simple person, Sir,” John had the gall to say to him now, “that you are meditating what many people would bluntly call suicide, although there might be, I am ready to admit, other and prettier names for it.”

Bloody Johnny lifted his left eyebrow at this, a sign with him that he acknowledged the receipt of a palpable hit. He shuffled in his chair, leaned forward a little and smiled. “But I've hardly begun my talks to these foreigners,” he said.

“If you'll excuse my saying so, Sir,” said John, who now seemed driven on by some demon within him to try and frighten away his good luck even at the moment when it wras on the point of falling into his lap, “I think you express your ideas more effectively by just being what you are and talking casually to your friends. Leave it to Athling and Lady Rachel, in your Wayfarer, Sir, to make your thoughts reasonable and logical. Christ, if I may be allowed to refer to Him, left it to His followers to round off His ideas.”

Mr. Geard leaned back again in his chair. With half-shut eyes and with the tips of his fingers held together in the way old family lawyers hold them, he looked dreamily and a little quizzically at John.

“I . . . would . . . rather like ... to ask you a question, young man,” he said slowly.

“Say on, dear my Lord,” quoth John.

“Could you conceive anyone, could you, in fact, for there's no need to beat about the bush, conceive me, committing suicide out of love of life, instead of out of weariness of it or out of hatred for it?”

“Love of life?” questioned John.

He pulled up his legs under him in Megan's chair and leaning forward with his hands on its elbows allowed his lank frame to relax with a certain voluptuousness and then grow rigid with an eager, intense, magnetic curiosity, “Death and what's beyond death,” went on Mr. Geard, “are only what ye might call the unknown aspects of life. What I want to ask you is, do you suppose anyone's ever committed suicide out of an excess of life, simply to enjoy the last experience in full consciousness?” John's eyes were now shining with lively curiosity. He had forgotten all about his premonition of his master's benevolence. His whole being quivered with a hyena-like lust for spiritual blood. Curiously enough, it was exactly at that same hour, in this afternoon of sub-aquatic lights and shadows, that Paul Trent pulled up his legs, on to the bench by the Cattle Market railings, to reveal his secret feelings to the death-doomed Miss Elizabeth.

It was the privilege of that stricken lady to listen to the confession of a feline idealist. It was the privilege—or the trial— of Mr. Geard to be inquisitioned by a prowling sceptic. In a town of so many “heavy-weather” somnambulists, these light-footed jungle cats and jackals seemed lured, by a necessity in their nature, to rub themselves with excited tails or with panting nostrils against the most formidable characters, in their vicinity.

“But, Sir,” John protested now. “Don't you think that whatever the minds or spirits of people want to do, their bodies, or the central vital nerve in their bodies must always hold them back at the last? Don't you think, Sir, that though our minds can desire death for many reasons it's a different story when we come actually to try killing ourselves? Don't you think that something automatically leaps up then, that loathes death, and must fight against death, do what you can, until the bitter end?”

Hearing these words from the figure in his wife's chair, Mr. Geard emitted a sound that might be rendered by the syllables “rumti-dum-ti-dum.”

“But if this quick-spring-nerve or this jumping-jack-nerve in -us, boy,” he said, "gets in the way of what we yearn for, can't we pinch its throat, or give its fretful pulse a little tap?''

John sighed and the light died out of his face. He uncurled his long legs and straightened them out. He ceased to be the eager intellectual jackal, and became the helpless, slouching, sunshine-loving tramp. There had suddenly come over him as h? looked into the eyes of this man a chilly sense of something so monstrously different from anything he had ever met, that it frightened him. The tone in which Mr. Geard had said “pinch its throat” sounded like the shuddering heave of all the ground underneath all the things that were warm, familiar, natural. What were the huge antennae of Bloody Johnny's soul fumbling towards, out of the depths in which it stirred and moved?

“I shouldn't wonder,” thought John, “if the old man's not got bored, to extinction by all this Grail business and miracle business and new religion business. I shouldn't wonder if what he really wants is that delicious death-to-boredom that I get when I make love to Mary. The old girl upstairs couldn't give him any thrill of that kind and he's been snubbing Rachel lately. I know that; for I've seen 'em together; and he cares nothing for boys. I believe he's turned against the whole caboodle of this Glastonbury stunt. Sick to death of it he is; and I don't blame him, the poor old beggar! What he wants is a plump little Abishag to cuddle. He's a warm-blooded old rogue and he's gone cold i' the vitals.”

Thus did John struggle, by the use of the most cynical considerations from his heathen Stone-worshipping nature, to cover up the primordial ice-crack, the glacier-crevasse among his sunlit earth-rocks, which the problem of Mr. Geard perhaps quite erroneously—had uncovered before his pessimistic imagination. To an earth-loving vicious East-Anglian it was impossible even to conceive the idea that Geard of Glastonbury might deliberately kill himself in order to gain more life. He could do it to escape from life; that was easily imaginable; but not this other.

''No, no,“ thought John. ”There never has been, and there never will be, among all the millions and millions and millions of suicides, since the beginning of the world, one single one like this. It's as impossible as for a man to get out of his own skin. Life itself would fight against it with tooth and nail. The old chap is just fooling himself. What he really wants is a sweet young doxy to his bed . . . but, heigh-ho! The fellow would never hurt his old woman to that tune ... so there we are . . . I wonder if he is going to pension me off?"

It was at this point in this memorable interview—the last that John was ever destined to have with his grandfather's friend— that Mr. Geard did turn to practical matters, lie laid before his secretary the whole array of the startling things he had already—though strongly against the advice of Mr. Robert Stilly—arranged with the bank to have done.

It was a sad witness to the difficulty of starting a real independent commune in the midst of an old kingdom like England ihal the Glastonbury bank remained absolutely untouched by the new regime, save in so far as the large sums of money piled up by the town passed into its hands.

Mr. Geard had bought small annuities for his wife, for Cordelia, and for Crummie. He had also—John was perfectly right in his instinct there—purchased for John himself an annuity of one hundred and fifty pounds a year.

He had, in these arrangements, entirely exhausted the whole forty thousand pounds' legacy left by Canon Crow.

And so John was wondering as he.stood by Tossie's dresser watching those four feminine heads, whether to wait till tonight to tell Mary, or whether to tell her at once, and obtain her reaction—and Tossie's too—to the exciting news before Tom came in. He recalled exactly how Mr. Geard had looked, as he let him out of his front door only an hour ago, and how the man had abruptly cut short his almost tearful gratitude by the curious words: “Tis His Blood-money, lad. 'Tis His Blood-money. And ye must never forget that, none o' ye, when Easter comes round and ye eat and drink the Life in the Death!”

John found himself, when later in that spring twilight they were walking past the Vicarage gate together, sorry he had not waited till he got Mary alone to tell her about it, instead of blurting it all out as he had done, and making her jump up from the table with her grey eyes big as saucers.

It was the way Tom had taken it, when he came in, that troubled him now. They hadn't been very considerate of Tom's feelings, chattering together, he and Mary, about how they would clear off to Northwold at once and hunt for a cottage on the Didlington Road.

It was Toss, of course, wTho had been the one—not he or Mary at all—to notice how Tom was hit. The girl had begun hurriedly talking at once about how Tom and she would have to save up and come and join them in a few years when the twins were bigger.

“But Toss,” Mary had murmured at that point, “you'd never bear to leave Glastonbury, would you?” and the words had hung suspended in the air, full of subtle reproach for them both. It was then that he had for the first time caught the grim bitterness of what Tom was feeling and his aching longing for his native soil and his craving to show Tossie the wide waters of Didlington Lake full of pike and perch and waterlilies.

They caught sight of the shirtsleeves of Mr. Weatherwax as they passed the Vicarage gate. The old rogue was pulling up weeds underneath some rhododendron bushes at the edge of the shrubbery; and as he laboured he sang: “The Brewer, the Miller, the Malster and I lost a heifer, lost a filly, lost a Ding-Dong; When Daffadowndillies look up at the sky; Pass along boys! Pass along! The Brewer, the Miller, the Malster and I Left a heifer, left a filly, left a Ding-Dong; DowTn in a grassy green grave for to lie; Pass along boys! Pass along!”

The gardener's back was turned to them and he did not rise from his stooping position as they passed. Something, however, about the sound of his thick bass voice, mufHed and muted by his bending position, was so gross, so earthy, so suggestive of rank-smelling roots, tossed up lob-worms, slug-slime on a pronged fork, and bitter-sweet human sweat, that when Barter, who always relished talking in Rabelaisian fashion to Tossie in front of the fastidious though not exactly squeamish John, made some coarse joke about the fellow's enormous rump, John got a sudden, quick, spontaneous revulsion from his old friend* which was not lessened when Tossie started off on one of her ringing peals of Benedict Street laughter.

“Oh, how glad I'll he,” he thought to himself, “when Fm safe back in that boat on the Wissey! By God! I know what I'll do. I'll hire that boat in Alder Dyke from that fellow, so that we'll have it when we want it.”

It suddenly occurred to him that it was in connection with the smell of alders and with the look of their dark sturdy foliage that he had thought of Tom that day he was with Mary and he set himself to recall the boyish figure of his childish memories.

As they debouched into Chilkwell Street and were passing the old Tithe Barn, John heard Tossie, Glastonbury girl as she was, say something about one of the evangelistic creatures. It must have been a remark of more surprising lewdness and more amusing originality than John could quite follow, and it did not win much favour in his ears.

“The truth is,” he thought, “I'm not suited for a sociable life, or to make merry with my friends. When once I've got Mary to myself in Northwold, I swear I won't see a single soul; and I won't invite a single soul. We'll live absolutely alone, Mary and I; absolutely alone and to ourselves! This girl's a decent girl, and her kids are nice kids; but I couldn't have stood living in the same house and having everything a quatre much longer. This hundred and fifty from the old man is a heavenly escape. It's a windfall out of the air; it's a benediction. Tonnerre de DieuJ It's as much one of his miracles as his curing any of those people. Christ! I'd soon be converted to the worship of Geard the Saviour if the old chap did kick the bucket. I hope he saw how grateful I was. I did kiss his hand. I'm damned glad I did that; for I think it pleased him. Perhaps in his whole life, the life I daresay of one of the greatest men who've ever lived, I'm the only person who's ever kissed his hand! And think of the number of ridiculous society-whores whose hands are kissed every day. Oh, damn and blast this human breed!”

They were passing all Mr, Geard's improvements on Chalice Hill now. In the green twilight, in spite of the litter and the presence of many unsightly shanties, the Mayor's Saxon arch stood out nobly and impressively. Beyond the Grail Fount, too, they could see the newly erected Rotunda and this also had a dignity of its own at this hour. It was indeed a sort of heretical temple Lhat Bloody Johnny's architect was building. John surveyed it with infinite disgust.

“The dear old chap,” he thought, “ought never to be betrayed into playing the mountebank. If he's anything, he's the founder, not the expounder. He'll spoil it all if he goes on trying to explain.”

“Who were them Saxons, Tom?” enquired Tossie as they passed these various erections. “Were 'un savages, them Early Christians? Did 'un worship King Arthur?”

Her question seemed to tickle Barter hugely and he at once began chaffing her about her ignorance of history. But John thought to himself, “Evans would say that the real cause of old Geard's getting on the rocks and talking of suicide is his disregard of Arthur and his Welsh Demons. I wonder if it's possible that------” and his mind went back to that inexplicable

event that had happened to himself at Pomparles Bridge. John's hatred of Glastonbury and its traditions was betrayed to the end by his incorrigible interest in psychic problems. Mr. Geard's mysticism had always influenced him more than he was willing to admit; and in any case he was a temperamental heathen rather than a materialist. He was quite as sceptical of materialistic explanations as he was of the occult occurrences that gave rise to them.

The fancy came into his head now that in his daily visits to Chalice Hill and his constant disturbance of that dangerous earth Mr. Geard might have come under some deliberately evil spell prepared long ago by these old Celtic magicians.

“Evans ought to have stopped him,” he said to himself as they passed St. Michael's Inn, “from fooling those Welsh fairies by resuscitating a great thundering Saint like Dunstan!”

“Mad Bet's window be shut,” said Tossie, “and she's curtain drawn. I be afeared \hik means her's peeping out at we and making faces at we.”

“Bosh!” muttered Barter crossly.

For some reason this particular fuss that all the Glastonbury girls made about Mad Bet irritated the man's Norfolk stolidity.