The Recognitions (74 page)

Though Reverend Gwyon, alone again in his study, found time to mutter, —There was a woman's grade in the Mysteries. Porphyry mentions it ... hummn . . . He turned up open books on his desk. —Hyena. That was it. Hyena. 

His gaze fell upon the Bible. —Near Christmas! Christmas! he said almost viciously, as his eye followed lines on the open page. —Then the moon shall be confounded and the sun ashamed . . . His hand flung over the pages of Isaiah. —The sun shall be no more thy light by day; neither for brightness shall the moon give light unto thee: but the Lord shall be unto thee an everlasting light, and thy God thy glory. Thy sun shall no more go down; neither shall the moon withdraw itself: for the Lord shall be ... 

Suddenly Gwyon's hand swept the Bible to the floor. He stood there quivering the length of his frame. Then he crumpled the newspaper clipping from
Osservatore Romano
; and after it, one by one, the books went to the floor, Tertullian's
De Prœscripúone Hœreticorum
, Arnobius'
Adversus Nationes, De Errore Profanarum Religionum
of Firmicus Maternus . . . He did not stop until came to Saint John of the Cross, which he opened, removed the contents, and dropped the hollow
Dark Night of the Soul
after the rest of them. Then he straightened the gold bull figure to its feet on his desk, and stood with his hands on its horns looking out at the darkening sky. 

—Cannot they see, it is exhausted? he whispered. Thunder sounded, beyond Mount Lamentation, and it sounded again. 

Then he broke out, 

—Herakles star-adorned, king of fire, ruler of the universe, thou sun, who with thy far-flung rays art the guardian of mortal life, with thy gleaming car revolving the wide circuit of thy course . . . Belus thou art named on the Euphrates, Ammon in Libya, Apis of the Nile art thou by birth, Arabian Kronos, Assyrian Zeus . . . but whether thou art Serapis, or the cloudless Zeus of Egypt, or Kronos, or Phaëthon, many-titled Mithra, Sun of Babylon, or in Greece Apollo of Delphi, or Wedlock, whom Love begat in the shadowy land of dreams . . . whether thou art known as Paieon, healer of pain, or Æther with its varied garb, or star-bespangled Night—for the starry robes of night illuminate the heaven—lend a propitious ear to my prayer. He paused, then went on more loudly, 

—O king, greatest of the gods, thou sun, the lord of heaven and earth, god of gods, thy breath is potent, if it seem good to thee, forward me on my way to the supreme deity who begat thee and formed thee, for I am the man Gwyon. 

—I invoke thee, O Zeus the Sun-god Mithra Serapis, invincible, giver of mead, Melikertes, lord of the mead, abraalbabachae-bechi . . . 

He stood, his hand on the bull's horns, and the expression on his face of a man waiting for something which has happened long before. 

Each time Janet's eyes reached the foot of the page, she returned them to the top, to verse eight of chapter twenty-four of the Gospel according to Saint Matthew, —All these are the beginning of sorrows, and read the column down again. She stood and bore this repetition silent for some time, until at last, after hanging for a moment on verse twenty-four, her gaze shortened to her bare hands clasped before her, and under the care of her eyes they opened, sustaining the shock of her pupils in two dark scars on the palms. The palms were clean, but the rest of her hands as she turned them, from the nails down along the ridges and jointures of the fingers, were not. Suddenly her left hand closed, and she dug the firm flesh on the back of it with her forefinger. 

Through the window the snow fell fast and heavily, the leisured dignity of perfect flakes lost in bitter water-soaked streaks to earth, each moment passing in more frantic declivity until the artifice of its identity had entirely disappeared, and it was rain. 

The sound of thunder drew her to the glass. She stood looking out. Then she raised her hands and tried to rub away the two blots on the windowpanes she had left earlier, but she could not, and her hands moved more and more slowly until they stopped, and left her staring down at the carriage barn, barely discernible below. As she looked, a hand came back to her face and commenced moving over it, not in caress along its surface, nor excitedly, but deliberately resting on her features in one position after another; until that hand stopped, the thumb along the ridge of her nose and the palm over her mouth, and she drew her left hand back to grasp the empty folds at her breast. 

A minute later and she'd pulled the frame of type from the flatbed hand press in the corner, unlocked it and spilled the letters all over the floor, banged the Bible closed, hesitated a moment over it and then pushed it off into the pile of metal spellingless letters and come out her door. Her steps creaked in the hallway, but the Town Carpenter's voice came on from behind his door as she passed, evenly absorbed in reading aloud to the dog, —"While we go now to bring the Wanderer up, it should not be forgotten that the house, completely furnished, is awaiting him, and he has only to knock at the door, enter, and be at home" . . . (They were in volume I of Lew Wallace's
The Prince of India, or, Why Constantinople Fell
.) 

At the other end of the hall Janet reached the empty sewing room and went straight in among the roses upside-down, the green-capped pink-faced dogs faded on the west wall behind the chaise longue where she suddenly saw him sitting rigidly erect, his drawn fist plunged into his neck so that his arm stood out like a wing, and his brows noticeable for being contracted so forcefully that they seemed to have seized the face and held it in this stifling grasp. Apparently he was asleep. Janet bent close, studying the thin face, the slightly crooked nose, the rough chin and bare throat. The left hand lay in his lap as rigid as the rest of him, the fingers doubled in upon themselves and the veins standing out around the clotted blood, where Janet reached and prodded the torn place with her forefinger. Not a muscle moved in his face, nor anywhere else about him; and Janet turned and ran out, down the hall, and the stairs, and out of the house, leaving him there in the darkening room, where he slept in this same tense numb position until the roses had faded to stripes, and the walls themselves had lost their boundaries. 

He waked staring straight ahead to that full consciousness which only sheer horror attains: his blood stopped. For a prolonged instant everything stopped and the blood, without motion, was cast as a solid of unbearable weight and impenetrable density. 

—
No one knows who I am. 

It was a full minute before he moved; and when he did he burst to his feet, as though to shatter this irregular surface of space enclosed by merciless solids. —No one in this house knows me, he brought out; but his mouth was so dry that the words came to pieces before he got them out where his own ear could resolve them, and he stood sucking the inside of his mouth in upon itself, plying the barren, abruptly unfamiliar hollow with his insensible tongue until its features dissolved, and he could repeat, —None of them knows who I am. 

But even before these words were out, something else had assailed him. He began looking wildly round the room, where shapes refused to identify themselves, and endured only in terms of the others, each a presence made possible only by what everything else was not, each suffering the space it filled to bear it only as a part of a whole which, with a part standing forth to identify itself, would perish. 

—Who was here? he whispered. Already the inside of his mouth was afloat with saliva, so that he swallowed, raised the pool on his tongue and exhausted its surface on the roof of his mouth and swallowed again. —She was here, he said, gripping his chin in his hand. 

Starting again, the blood on its course had set every interior surface of his body stingingly aflame with the thrill of its own existence; and he stamped his feet, and shook his hands in the air. —This . . . this ... he whispered hoarsely. Then he grabbed one hand with the other and gripped it tight as he could, until the balance of that was out and he exchanged them, gripping the second with the first, and finally got out of the room with his hands interlocked before him, the fingertips of each one straining in upon the bones of the other. 

There had been a good deal of noise in this last hour or so, books thrown and dropped, the type-metal words smashed into their meaningless components, doors banging, and all these fragments were recapitulated now in the thunder, as he broke out into the hall and down the stairs repeating, —Don't you know me? Don't you know who I am? You know who I am. Don't you know who I am? . . . , words which broke the surface, and followed one another as discordant articulations of his heavy breathing. 

Reverend Gwyon had gone out a minute before, hatless, across the bare boards of the porch so heavily that they seemed not yet to have recovered silence, when he reached them and made out Gwyon's great figure striding down the slope toward the carriage barn. He followed precipitously, sliding and slipping on the soaked pores of the snow as though it were the headlong incline of twenty-five years past; and before he'd reached the bottom he did fall, headlong, so that the crust of the snow gashed his cheekbone and, for the moment he lay there, smothered his rehearsal, —You know who I am. Don't you know who I am? Don't you know me? . . . The rain was coming down the more heavily for the saturated surface which awaited it; and he was drenched when he gained his feet. Just then there was a crash of thunder.  

Gwyon had already made the carriage barn and thrown the door open. There was electricity there, and Gwyon stood just inside, his great hand on the switch and his thumb jamming it back and forth, back and forth, with no consequence but a snap. —Damnation, Gwyon muttered; and then, aware of someone behind him, said, —The bull. I came down to make sure of the bull . . . But Gwyon had hardly got the words out of his mouth before his upraised arm was grasped in the dark so heavily that it almost pulled him over; and the lightning followed so fast on the words that fol-lowed, that both were gone, and the transformation was complete, when Gwyon heard,  

—Father . . .
Am I the man for whom Christ died?
 

Louder than laughter, the crash raised and sundered them in a blinding agony of light in which nothing existed until it was done, and the tablet of darkness betrayed the vivid, motionless, extinct and enduring image of the bull in his stall and Janet bent open beneath him.  

Then it seemed full minutes before the cry, pursuing them with its lashing end, flailed through darkness and stung them to earth. Water fell between them, from a hole in the roof. The smell of smoke reached them in the dark.  

With no warning uncertain flicker, the light came on. Before them, a metal wash-tub lay on the floor with a square hole riven through its bottom. The door was charred and smoking around the hinges and the lock.  

Then the shadows round the walls were set dancing in duplication, each steady dark shape mocked by a distorted image leaping round it, as the Town Carpenter appeared with a lantern and stood swinging it in the door. —There now! he said; and though his voice was not loud it rang with confirmation, as he entered and walked over toward the bull's stall. —There! he said, swinging round, and the lantern with him, —There's a masterful pizzle for you! 

The bull shifted on its feet, sounding its weight on the board floor, and turned its head from them and withdrew. 

Gwyon was gone. They both turned to the door at the same moment to look; and by the time they reached the door together, Gwyon's figure showed halfway up the slope toward the house. 

—There now, said the Town Carpenter, nodding and swinging the lantern out. His coat had come open to show long-underwear buttons to the waist. He'd pulled on his trousers and galoshes to come out, and the trousers were on backwards. —It's that I came down to look at, he said, swinging the lantern toward the balloon stand, which was as good as he'd left it. Then he held the lantern aloft, over the figure poised in the doorway of the carriage barn. 

—There, he's fallen! 

The Town Carpenter reached out and seized his arm. They could both see Gwyon on the ground up near the house. 

—He's fallen. Will you let me go help him?! 

—And would you humble him, the Town Carpenter answered without relaxing his grip, —by helping him back to his feet? 

He hung there in the Town Carpenter's hand until Gwyon had recovered and mounted the porch steps. Then the Town Carpenter opened his hand slowly, eyes fixed on him, until he suddenly wrenched away and ran up the hill laughing. 

The Town Carpenter lowered the lantern and looked into the barn again, murmuring. Then he snapped off the electric light, pulled the door closed, and trudged up the slope hitching the binding front of his pants as he went. At the kitchen door he raised the glass chimney, blew out the lantern and went in, pulling a light cord as he passed, straight over to his pot on the cold stove. There were voices, or a voice, in the dining room, or down the hall, he did not know and did not listen. 

—"Away, to hell, to hell!" Do you remember that? 

The Town Carpenter rolled up his sleeves, took a piece of yellow soap from the metal sink, and dipped his hands into the pot. 

—"Oh, might I see hell, and return again, How happy were I then!" Yes, yes, that's it! Back there! 

The Town Carpenter found the soap among folds in the bottom of the pot, lifted it out, and dried his hands. —Something amiss, he murmured as he pulled out the light, —we must simplify, as he tramped toward the back stairs. 

Janet came from behind the door of the butler's pantry. She stopped when she heard the voice down the hall, or in the din- ing room, she could not tell, but stood for a moment listening, thoroughly wet, her skirt torn, her hair matted down. Then she came on. 

—Yes, back there, that's the place! They're waiting! Yes, the harrowing of hell. That's it. Then wood splintered, in the dining room. 

Janet found him alone there. He had just split the top of the low table under the window down the middle. —What is it? Janet asked calmly, coming closer. 

—Damnation, he answered, backing round the table.