The Recognitions (70 page)

Zephaniah gets his business done quickly. Three chapters suffice; and he makes way for Haggai, whose nose is just as out of joint. In spite of her absorption, Janet read with the assurance of the Old Testament reader who knows that the New will follow, is, in fact, in hand with its more temperate prospects; just as she could read the New Testament without trepidation, knowing that any insinuations of wavering charity on the part of its engineers were bolstered by a Figure Who brooked no nonsense, lurking, "ravin in tooth and claw," at the ready, among the unalterable jots and tittles of His seventy-two-letter masquerade in the Old. Haggai anticipates Him shaking the earth, the heavens, the sea, the dry land, the nations, phenomenal antics still dignified as acts of God set forth with such strenuous diligence that the tenth minor prophet is drained in two chapters; but Janet had for the moment enough of a good thing with —when I turn back your captivity before your eyes, saith the Lord. Her blue lips finished, they repeated while she stood and gazed through that glass, a window tucked high on the house looking down to the carriage barn. 

The wind had reached a height of delusion. Now, right before her eyes, it was given something to do: particles of snow appeared, conjured by the wind's own madness. Janet drew closer to the window. Standing with both palms flattened against the glass, her upper lip rose slowly as she stared below, to see the figure between the carriage barn and the bull's enclosure reel as though attacked on both sides, gain his balance and pause, steadying himself, and set out with what at first appeared extreme difficulty walking, until he broke into a run, up toward the house and out of her sight. —He is come, her blue lips made out; but the upper one was drawn down to the line of her bite, giving her a slightly perplexed look, as she turned to emerge, leaving two irregular near-translucent blots on the glass behind her. 

Down on the porch, Reverend Gwyon stood staring at the sky, reflecting in his attitude and expression the bull's disdain for what was going on up there. In Gwyon's case, however, the simple grandeur of the bull's impersonal contempt for the storm was impaired by lines of fierce indignation, as though to indicate that this celestial turmoil had been got up as a personal affront to him, or one for whose honor he was jealous. Gwyon did not lower his eyes to the figure approaching up the lawn until the porch steps clattered immediately beneath him; at that, he broke off his engagement, muttering, and turned hastily to open the front door. 

—There! ... I mean, here! sounded behind him, teeth a-clatter. 

—Whoo . . . what is it? Gwyon got out, looking wide-eyed over his shoulder, with the door open. 

—Terror coming both ways . . . like being a child again. Yes, there, get the door closed . . . 

Reverend Gwyon got the front door closed with a bang, rattling the bell in it. Then he started to turn down the hall, but his way was blocked. Though neither of them moved, a regular creaking had been set up in the hallway and sounded all around them. 

—Why, it's . . . this whole house is saturated with priesthood, with . . . 

—Priesthood? Gwyon repeated, looking for an opening. 

—Ministry, the ministry then, eh? Yes, here we are, no exception, except I'm late. Late coming. Here, every creak, do you hear them? Every creak one of doubt, generations of it, so I'm no exception, except I'm late. But I ... that's what I was trained for, after all, isn't it. Here, it's so familiar, all so familiar here . . . 

Reverend Gwyon found an opening and got through it. Immediately he started to talk, striding down the hall. —Familiar, yes, he commenced, gauging his words to the distance ahead of him. —Science, science has a fool theory about recognition. Half the forepart of the brain receives an impression, they say, an instant before the other half. When it reaches the second half the brain recognizes it! A lot of bosh, of course, he paused a step to confide, —but it gives these fool scientists something to do, keeps them from meddling in important matters that don't concern them. 

Reverend Gwyon had timed this observation perfectly; for as he reached the last phrases he had turned the corner to his study. The still surfaces of the mirrors in the cruz-con-espejos were alerted by his passage, but too late to hinder it, for with the last word he was inside, leaving them empty but vigilant now. Alone among books and papers in precarious piles, Reverend Gwyon sat down. There were books open and closed, some with twenty bits of paper between their pages; passages underlined, written in, crossed out. There were periodicals, and ribbons of newspaper littered everywhere. Near one knee a headline said,
Science Shows There's a God, Pope Declares
. Gwyon rested an elbow on
Osservatore Romano
. ("Who is capable of fixing his eyes on the shining sun?" It was that issue in which Cardinal Tedeschini testified to the Papal vision: "But he was able to do so, and during those days could witness the life of the sun under the hand of Mary.") Gwyon reached Saint John of the Cross down from a shelf. ("The agitated sun was convulsed and transformed in a picture of life, in a spectacle of heavenly movements, and it transmitted silent but eloquent messages to the Vicar of Christ.") This caught the corner of Gwyon's eye, which narrowed, and he grunted impatiently and covered it with another paper, the
Scientific American
for 11 April 1891. There, for a moment, he stared at a picture of Doctor Variot and a colleague consulting beside a baby skewered on an electrode in an electro-metallurgic bath. ". . . Rather than to rescue our cadavers from the worms of the grave," he read half aloud, with idle satisfaction, and sat back, staring at the door. 

The gold figure of the bull lay on its side among some papers on his desk. Beyond, through the windows, the wind whipped the branches of yew with snow. But Reverend Gwyon's was not an empty stare, arrested by that blank surface. He looked as though he saw straight through the door, and was fully aware of the two eyes which, at that instant, were looking square on a line with his own from the dark hallway, where the clear mirrors of the cruz-con- espejos on the wall behind had seized, and held, dim fragments of the arm raised to knock. 

Gwyon waited for a moment; then he opened the book in his lap, and thrust his hand into the cavity cut ruthlessly out of The Dark Night of the Soul. 

sang the Town Carpenter into the white teeth of violation. He left off, for an anxious moment, as he approached the Civil War monument, which he never passed in bad weather without a look of uneasy solicitude, though near half a century had passed since his mother's last obstinate bivouac there. 

The wind was pursuing its career with extravagant glee, now it had one. The snow was driven to places which only this paranoid force could care to oppress so; though, to be striding forth in it was to assume the delusions of the storm itself, becoming the object of its hostility, and thus abruptly render a validifying dimension to this manic phase of a reality which would, left to itself, blow itself out in senselessness. Therefore, to redeem these absurd extravaganzas, which is after all the way of a hero, requires a worthy goal; then the gratuitous violence threatens only that path, and as the wind rises, the more worthy the goal then, and the more heroic the journey. 

The Depot Tavern was presided over by the head of a twelve-point buck, whose look of resignation implied understanding of the fact that his antlers would never again be shed and renewed, a fate tempered by a festoon of Christmas tree bulbs which were, momentarily, seasonal, though he wore them with great forbearance whatever the solstice. Otium cum dignitate, the chipped lips posed up there, and with great dignity, considering his circumstances, the buck gazed down through dust-filmed eyeballs upon the present. 

Just now this present was being cajoled toward a disfigurated future by a man with a woman tattooed on his left arm. She reposed there so long as he talked or listened; but when he interrupted to raise his glass, she was strangled. Though she had been suffering this treatment for many years, she bore it with the same surprise contorting her blue face whenever it was repeated; and when it was done, she returned to the same pose of unsuspecting tranquillity. (True, she was not entirely innocent: turned at another angle, and a portion of her covered up, she was capable of a pose which none who did not know her might have suspected from her placid countenance.) 

—The Resurrectionists! said he; and she was strangled. —The Resurrectionists? What would it have to do with grave-robbers? It was the sermon on medicine made from mummies. Mummies ground up in a powder tor medicine, said a man as far from the weather as possible, at the far end of the bar. 

—Not that any of you have ever heard one of his sermons, said a small man in the middle. —Relying on what your wives repeat to you. 

—And you was there, I suppose, imperson? 

—I was. It was the sermon in which the Swiss rooster is condemned to burn to death for laying an egg. 

—Fourteen seventy-four. I know that one myself. 

There was an air of grudging conspiracy over all this; and if voices rose in argument the overtones were slightly quelled, suggesting, as in any totalitarian society, walls with ears, the ubiquitous dictator long in residence hie, et ubique, disputing no passage, for He was going nowhere. —But that little man selling brushes . . . 

—A manic . . . 

—Manichee ... 

—He was sent here, but Reverend saved us from that. If good and evil was absolutes, we would all of us be Manichean heretics, says the Reverend. I was there, you see. If it wasn't for evil being a depraved qualification of good, says the Reverend, we should all be Manicheans like the little brush salesman. 

—Selling unchristian brushes to honest people . . . 

—Ha! there you're wrong, for Manichees was Christian. For them, says the Reverend, the sun itself was the visible symbol of Christ. 

—They was not. 

—It was so. How could you have the sun . . . 

—They was not, and what's more . . . 

—Here is the sexton coming now, he was there. 

—They was not, and what if he was, he goes to church and makes up his own sermon, and afterward he'll tell you such and such was the Reverend's sermon which nobody heard but himself. Like the sermon on the American Legion . . . him, he's as deaf as that coconut. 

Every head but the buck turned to see the door thrown open, shaking the plate of glass and the configuration NREVAT TOPED between the men and the storm. The Town Carpenter entered, pursued by a distant peal of thunder. —That damned racket, he said, shutting it out. 

—It's rare, that you have thunder with snow, said the small man in the middle, appeasing.

—May it roll away and take my curse with it, the Town Carpenter growled, arrived at the bar. He squared his shoulders, reared his head, and looked round him. —Now do you know, after the Great Deluge there was no God? Well, there was not. With the world wet for a hundred years, there was no thunder, and men went around with their heads up, alone and unafraid they went, like heroes should, you know. Then it all dried off and the atmosphere up there recovered. He paused to kick the snow from his feet against the bar; and the dog waited till that was done to lie at his feet. —And then that damned thunder started, and scared them all so much, looking up to see nothing, that they took the images of terror right out of their own minds and hung them up there in the empty space above their empty heads. He drank down his glass. —There now, he said, putting it empty on the bar, and he reared his head, as though the buck's were the only face he would countenance. —I have a very important visitor, finally he brought out. 

—Tom Swift, it must be, the strangler muttered, watching the Town Carpenter narrowly. 

—To see him, you might not guess at the hero he is. Of course I recognized him immediately. 

—A strange fellow got off the morning train, said the man in the middle. —Neither hat nor coat. Oh, you never know, you never know. Drunk perhaps. You never know. 

Stealthily, the Town Carpenter looked at these two, his expression one of cunning. It was a look with which they were all familiar; and for its astute divining quality (that and the subsequent logical parallel of his conversation) he was often accused of perfect hearing. —There now, he said, pulling a filled glass to him, —you'd be surprised to see him perhaps, a man waited on by seven kings at a time, sixty dukes and a count for every day in the year, so modest and quiet as him. 

—That train come in from the city, said the small man with beer. 

—I've seen them, city people in the country, said the strangler. —I know them, terrified when they see things move without ticking or smoking. 

—A man who sits with twelve archbishops on his right hand and twenty bishops on his left. 

—They live in cities where nothing grows. Did you know that? Nothing grows in the city. Even their minds they keep steam-heated. Their horizons are dirty windowsills. 

—Drunk, perhaps. You never know. 

—Whose chamberlain is a bishop and king, and his chief cook a king and an abbot, he couldn't stoop to taking such titles as those. 

—Do you know what happens to people in cities? I'll tell you what happens to people in cities. They lose the seasons, that's what happens. They lose the extremes, the winter and summer. They lose the means, the spring and the fall. They lose the beginning and end of the day, and nothing grows but their bank accounts. Life in the city is just all middle, nothing is born and nothing dies. Things appear, and things are killed, but nothing begins and nothing ends. 

—His domains lay from the three Indies to the ruins of Babylon, from Farther India to the tower of Babel. That's the voyage we're going to make. Waited on hand and foot by kings, from his humble looks you wouldn't believe it, from his quiet ways you'd never know. Of course I knew him immediately. 

—You don't get heroes out of the cities. A city man is spread out too much. 

—If you've ever watched the ground for a mole, tried to follow the silent movement of the course of his burrow and nothing moves, nothing but separate blades of grass, each of them moving for no good reason, and then the ground moves, and moves again, why that's the kind of a face he has.