All Hallows' Eve (25 page)

“It's terribly like a fact,” Betty said. “I love it. I love you. But I'm
not
very intelligent, and I've got a lot to learn. Jon, you must help me.”

Jonathan said only, “I'll paint you next. By the lake. Or no—I'll paint you and all the lake living in you. It shall be quite fathomless and these”—he kissed her hands again—“are its shores. Everything I've done is only prentice work—even these things. I don't much want to keep them any more.”

“I'd just as soon you didn't keep the other one,” Betty said. “Could you bear not to? I don't really mind, but it's rather horrid to have about—now.”

“I could quite easily bear to get rid of it,” Jonathan answered. “What shall we do with it? Give it to the nation? as from Mr. and Mrs. Jonathan Drayton on their wedding. Publicity and all that.”

“Ye-es,” said Betty doubtfully. “I don't think I want the nation to have it. It seems rather rude to give the nation what we don't want.”

“What you don't want,” Jonathan corrected. “Myself, I think it's one of the better examples of my Early Middle Period. You must learn to think in terms of your husband's biography, darling. But if we're not to keep it and not to give it to the nation, what shall we do with it? Give it to Simon?”

Betty looked at him, a little startled; then, as they gazed, they each began to smile and Jonathan went on. “Well, why not? He's the only one who's really liked it. Your mother certainly doesn't, and you don't, and I don't, and Richard doesn't. That's what we'll do. We'll take it down to Holborn and leave it for him. Betty, you won't go back to Highgate tonight?”

“Not if you don't want me to,” said Betty. “Only I've got nothing with me, so I don't see how I can go to a hotel, even if we could find a room. And I don't at all mind going back.”

“No, but I mind,” Jonathan said, seriously. “To be honest, I don't think Simon's going to leave it at this. I'm not particularly bothered at the moment, because after what's happened I don't believe he's a chance. I think Almighty God has him in hand. But I'd like, as a personal concession, to have you under my eye. There's my aunt at Godalming. Or there's here. Or, of course, there's Richard's place. That's an idea, if he didn't mind; it's more fitted out for a woman.”

Betty said, “It would be very nice of Lester.” She did not know what Lester was now doing, but in that young and heavenly hero-worship which in heaven is always prejustified by fact and is one mode of the communion of saints, she was convinced that Lester was engaged on some great and good work. She was even willing in a modest candor to presume on Lester's good will. But instinctively she put forward her own. She said, “And anyhow, Jon, I was going to ask if we mightn't get Richard to come with us to dinner somewhere.”

“I'd thought of that myself,” said Jonathan. “We might; we most certainly might. I'd hardly met his wife, but she seemed a good sort—even before all that you told me.”

“Oh she's a marvel,” Betty exclaimed. “She's … she's like the light in that picture—and very nearly like you.”

Jonathan looked at the City on the canvas. He said, “If I'm going to start serious work, and if we're giving Simon his picture, and if you feel like that about her—and if Richard would care for it, do you think we might offer him this? Unless you'd prefer to keep it?—as, of course, I should.”

Betty opened her eyes. She said, “I think it's a marvelous idea. Jon, would you? I'd always wanted to give Lester something, but I never could, and if you'd give them this, it'd be perfect. If they'd take it.”

“If they—!” said Jonathan. “My girl, do you happen to realize that this is, to date, my best work? Are you suggesting that any decent celestialness wouldn't be respectful?”

Betty and all the air about her laughed. She said demurely, “She mightn't know much about paintings and she mightn't think them important—even yours.”

“I'm not so sure that you do yourself,” Jonathan said. But his lady protested anxiously, “Oh I do, Jon; well, in a way I do. Of course, I shall understand better presently.”

Jonathan abruptly interrupted. “You're entirely right,” he said. “But as and while I'm here, it's my job. We
will
ask Richard if he'd like it, and we'll ask him to dinner so as to ask him, and then we'll ask him if we can all sleep at his place—and on the way there we'll drop the other thing in on Simon. Come and help me telephone.”

When he left the others Richard had returned to his flat. There he just managed to get to bed before he went to sleep. It was well into the afternoon before he woke, and woke more refreshed and serene than, as he lay there pleasantly aware of it, he could ever remember having felt in his life before, or at least not since he had been a very small child. This freshness and energy reminded him of that. He had no sense of nostalgia; he did not in the least wish to be small again and a child, but he could almost have believed he was now as happy as he remembered he had sometimes been then. An arch of happiness joined the then and the now, an arch he ought to have known all the time, under which or even in which he ought to have lived. It was somehow his fault that he had not and yet it had never been there or but rarely. If this was life, he had somehow missed life, in spite of the fact that he had on the whole had a very pleasant and agreeable life. There was a great difference between what he had known and what he ought to have known. And yet he did not see how he could have known it.

When he got up, he found himself amused and touched by his own physical resilience. As he moved about the room, he misquoted to himself, “And I might almost say my body thought”; and then his mind turned to that other body which had meant so much to him, and he drifted aloud into other lines:

Whose speech Truth knows not from her thought Nor Love her body from her soul
.

He had never before so clearly understood that sense of Lester as now when that second line must be rationally untrue. But his sleep had restored to him something he had once had and had lost—something deeper even than Lester, something that lay at the root of all magic, that the body was itself integral to spirit. He had in his time talked a good deal about anthropomorphism and now he realized that anthropomorphism was but one dialect of divine truth. The high thing which was now in his mind, the body that had walked and lain by his, was itself celestial and divine. Body? it was no more merely body than soul was merely soul; it was only visible Lester.

His mind turned again to that house by Holborn. He thought of it, after his sleep, as a nightmare to which he need not return unless, for any reason, he chose. In the sleep from which he had come there could be no nightmares. They were possible only to his waking life and sometimes from that cast back into the joy of sleep. He drew a deep breath. Simon was only an accident of a life that had not learned to live under that arch of happiness. It was astonishing how, this way, Simon dwindled. That last moment when something disagreeable had floated in at the window of the hall, some remote frigid exchange between imbeciles, was still repugnant to him. But now it was at a distance; it did not even distress him. What did distress him, as it crept back into his mind, was a memory of himself in the street outside the house, of his indulgent self. This unfortunately was no nightmare. He had, in that distant Berkshire wood, been just so; he had been kind to his wife. She (whatever her faults) had never been like that to him; she had never been dispassionately considerate. But he—he undoubtedly had. His new serenity all but vanished and he all but threw his hairbrush at his face in the mirror, as he thought of it. But his new energy compelled him to refrain and to confront the face, which, as he looked at it, seemed to bear the impress of love behaving itself very unseemly. Her love had never borne that mark. Rash, violent, angry, as she might have been, egotistic in her nature as he, yet her love had been sealed always to another and not to herself. She was never the slave of the false luxuria. When she had served him—how often!—she had not done it from kindness or unselfishness; it had been because she wished what he wished and was his servant to what he desired. Kindness, patience, forbearance, were not enough; he had had them, but she had had love. He must find what she had—another kind of life. All these years, since he had been that eager child, he had grown the wrong way, in the wrong kind of life. Yet how to have done other? how to have learned, as she had learned, the language without which he could not, except for a conceded moment, speak to the imperial otherness of her glory? He must, it seemed, be born all over again.

A vague impression that he had heard some such phrase somewhere before passed through him. But it was lost, for as he dwelled on the strange notion of this necessary fact, it was swamped by the recollection of Simon. Not that he was now afraid of Simon's having any power over Lester. But if there was that newly visioned life, there was also—he had seen it—a creeping death that was abroad in the world. There was something that was not Lester, nor at all like her, issuing from that hideous little hall. Those who lay in that house, once sick, had been healed. Had they? He did not like to think of that healing. He would almost rather have remained unhealed; yes, but then he did not need healing. He thought uneasily of those who, themselves reasonably secure, urge the poor to prefer freedom rather than security. How could he have done it himself—have lived in pain? have perished miserably? Yet the cost of avoiding that was to be lost in the hypnotic mystery of the creeping death: an intolerable, an unforgivable choice! And perhaps, unless someone interfered, Simon would spread his miasma over the world: the nations swaying as he had seen men swaying. If even now—

The telephone interrupted him. Answering, he found at the other end a colleague of his at the Foreign Office, who began by asking whether Richard were (as he had said) coming back the next day. Richard said that he was. His colleague intimated that there was a particular reason and (pressed to say more) asked whether Richard were not acquainted with the activities of a certain Simon the Clerk. Richard began to take an interest.

“Well—no and yes,” he said. “I know of him and as it happens since this morning I may be said to know him. Why?”

“Since you've been away,” his friend said, “it's become rather urgent to get into touch with him—unofficially, of course. It's more and more felt here that if the allied discussions could—could infiltrate through him and the other popular leaders there might be a better chance of … of——”

“Of peace,” said Richard.

“Well, yes,” his colleague agreed. “They must, all three of them, be remarkable men to have such followings and there don't seem, where they go, to be any minorities.… What did you say?”

“Nothing, nothing,” said Richard. “No minorities?”

“No—or practically none. And it'll be in the best interests of the new World Plan that there should be no minorities. So that it's been hinted that if a kind of—well, not a conference exactly but a sort of meeting could be adumbrated … Someone here thought you knew Simon.”

“I do,” said Richard. “And you want me to——”

“Well, since you know him,” his colleague answered, “it'd be easy for you to ask him indefinitely, as it were. Could you manage it, d'you think? You can see the kind of thing we want. The fact is that there's a sort of pressure. Even the Russians are feeling it—and we hear a couple of Chinese armies have gone over complete to their own prophet. So the Government thinks it would rather deal with the three of them together than separately. If we could sound them——”

Richard was silent. This language was one he very well knew, but now it had a deeper sound than his colleague's voice could give it. The Foreign Office did not mean badly; it was no more full of “darkness and cruel habitations” than the rest of the world; and when Oxenstierna had complained of the little wisdom with which the world was governed, he had not clearly suggested how anyone was to get more. But if the official governments were beginning to yield to pressure, to take unofficial notice of these world leaders, then those healed bodies behind Holborn must be only a few of a very great number, and those swaying shoulders the heralds of great multitudes of devotion: devotion to what? to the man who had smiled at the dead woman, and claimed to hold Lester at disposal, and knelt in some obscure effort by Betty's bed, the man to whom the wicked little carved hand pointed. He himself might have been among the worshipers; he owed his salvation to his wife, for it was precisely the irreconcilability of his wife with Simon which had preserved him—and he most unworthy, given up to the social virtues, needing rebirth.

He did not know how great the multitudes were who followed those unreal Two; nor how unreal the Two were. He knew only the reports in the papers, and Simon. He seemed to feel again the light antennae-like touch on his cheek; he saw again the strange painting of the prophet preaching to insects: what insects? His colleague's voice went on. “Furnival, are you still there? You'd better know that Bodge”—Bodge was the Foreign Secretary—“is giving it his personal attention. He isn't here today, but he will be tomorrow. Couldn't you just sound this Father Simon by then?”

Bodge—the Cabinet room—the swaying shoulders and the lifted faces, the backs of the English ministers rising in the air, the corridor down which the nations could go, the window through which the dead had come. He said abruptly, “I don't know; I can't say. I'll be in tomorrow to report.… Yes; all right, I'll see.… Oh yes, I understand how urgent it is.… No; I don't promise anything. I'll come tomorrow. Unless,” he added with a sudden absurd lightening of heart, “unless my wife interferes.”

The magical shape walked slowly along the Embankment. Hours had passed since it had emerged from the hidden place of its making into the streets of London; it had come out not by its own wish, for it could have no wish of its own, but under the compulsion of its lord in his last word, merely going, and anywhere. A poorly dressed, somewhat deformed woman went along the pavement. At first, following its maker's preoccupation, it had gone northward towards the Highgate house. But as that preoccupation grew distant and was slowly lost, since he gave it no further guidance, it presently faltered and stood still and then began to turn westward. It could not return, for that would be to disobey him; it could not go directly on, for that would be to stress his influence too far. It swung therefore in a wide arc, going always against the sun and passing so down street after street and alley after alley. Sometimes, but not often, it faulted by taking a blind turning and had to retrace its steps, but in general, as if it sniffed its way through the lower air, it was wonderfully accurate. But when, in its southward course, it came to the river, it hesitated and did not cross and abruptly turned off towards the east along its own side, and so on, until somewhere by Blackfriars it could see (could it indeed have seen anything at all) the still-lifted cross of St. Paul's. And there, a little way along Victoria Street, it ceased again and stood still.