Short Stories 1895-1926 (30 page)

I joined them as amiably as the heat allowed. And my last gliding glimpse of the tranquil little country station – burning sweet-william, rioting rose – descried my old gentleman still on his bench; still in his tall hat; still leaning on his gingham; a kind of King Canute by the sad sea waves of Progress, tapping out his expostulations and anathemas, though now to his own soul alone.

‘Benighted'

‘Benighted'
1

We surveyed one another a little ruefully in the starry air – and it is many years ago now, that quiet evening – then turned once more to the darker fields around us.

‘Yes,' she said; ‘there isn't the least doubt in the world. We are lost. Irretrievably. Before that owl screeched there seemed to be just a remote chance for us … But now: not a house, not a living being in sight.'

‘Not one,' I said.

‘Not even Mrs Grundy,' she said, and sighed. ‘Poor dear – she has sipped her posset, tied on her nightcap, and gone to bed.'

Baa!
cried a faintly lachrymose voice out of the stony pasture beyond the rough flint wall.

‘It's all very well to say “Baa”,' she replied, accepting the challenge. ‘But it makes us all, you see, look a little sheepish.' There was silence: we trudged on.

Nights of summer-time remain warm with day, and are seldom more than veiled with a crystalline shadowiness which is not darkness, but only the withdrawal of light. Even at this midnight there was a radiance as of pale blue glass in the north, though east to west stretched the powdery myriads of the Milky Way. Honeysuckle, bracken, a hint of hay, and the faint, aromatic scent of summer lanes saturated the air. The very darkness was intoxicating.

‘I could walk on like this for ever,' I managed to blurt out at last.

‘Those “for evers”!' mocked a quiet voice.

The lane ran deeper and gloomier here. Beneath heavy boughs thick with leaves gigantic trees were breathing all around us. The vast, taciturn silence of night haunted the ear; yet little furtive stirring sounds kept the eyes wide open. Once more we paused, standing stock still together.

‘Let's just go on up – a little way,' I pleaded. There
might
be a house. You look so sleepy – and so lovely – my dear. A sort of hawk-like look – with that small head in this dim blur; even though your eyes
are
full of dreams.'

She laughed and turned away. ‘Not sleepy, only a little drugged. And oh, if only I could be lovely
enough!

We did go up, and presently, out from under the elms. And we came to many houses, low and squat and dark and still – roofing the soundest of all sleepers. We gazed slowly from stone to stone, from tiny belfry to distant Vega.

‘Well, there they are,' I said. ‘And they appear to have been there for some little time. What a silence!'

‘Why, so!' she answered. ‘And such is life, I suppose – just the breaking of it.'

‘And you forgive me?'

‘I try.'

‘I could have sworn we were on the right road.'

‘“She trusted in him, and there was none to deliver her!” But of course,' she said, ‘the road
is
right. There is no other way than the way once taken. And especially this. Besides, my dear, I don't mind a bit; I don't indeed. It's still, and harmless, and peaceful, and solitary. We are all alone in the world. Let's sit down in there and talk.'

So we entered the old graveyard by its tottering gateway and seated ourselves on a low flat tombstone, ample enough in area for the Sessions of all the Sons of Israel.

The wakefulness of long weariness had overtaken us. The dark air was translucently clear, sprinkling its cold dew on all these stones and their overshadowing boughs. We ravenously devoured the fragments left over after our day's march. And we talked and talked, our voices sounding small and hollow even to ourselves, in this heedful solitude. But at last we too fell silent; for it began to be cold, and that hour of the night was coursing softly by us when a kind of unhumanity seems to settle on the mind, and words lose the meanings they have by day; just as the things of day may be transformed by night – ranging themselves under the moon like phenomena of another world.

‘I wonder,' I said at last, ‘when we – or just you, or I, come to a place like this: I wonder, shall we forget – be forgotten – do you think? Nearly all these must be.'

‘In time,' she answered.

‘Yes, in time; perhaps. Not exactly “forget”, though – but remember; with all the hopelessness, the helpless burning and longing gone. Isn't that it?'

‘I wonder,' she said gravely. ‘Life's an abominably individual thing. We just
live
on our friends.'

‘And what would you say about me – if you had to? On my stone, I mean?
Before
forgetting me?'

But her face gave no sign that she had heard so fatuous a question. I somehow refrained the sigh that offered itself.

‘Let's see – if we can – what
they
did,' I suggesed instead.

So, no moon yet shining, I took out my matchbox and counted out its contents into her left hand.

‘Twenty-one,' I said dubiously. ‘Not
too
many for so much to do!'

‘Riches!' she replied. ‘You see, even if we have to use two for a tombstone, that would be ten altogether, and a little stone over. And surely there should be, say,
three
epitaphs among them. I mean, apart from mere texts. It's a little odd you know,' she added, peering across the huddled graves.

‘What's odd?'

‘Why, that there are likely to be so few worth reading – with such lots to say.'

‘Not so very odd,' I said. ‘Your Mrs Grundy hates the sight of them. They frighten her.'

‘Well, I don't somehow think,' she answered, peering through the shadowiness at me, ‘I don't somehow think anybody else ever was here but you and me. It's between real and dream – like Mrs Grundy herself.'

I held out my hand; but she smiled and would give me no proof. So we began our scrutiny, first stooping together over the great stone that had seated us to supper. And all that it surrendered for our reward was the one vast straddling word – ‘M. O.R. S.'

The dark, flat surface was quite unbroken else. The flame (screened between the shell of my hands) scarcely illumined its margins. The match languished and fell from my fingers.

‘“MORS”, she spelt it out. ‘And what does MORS mean?' inquired that oddly indolent voice in the quiet. ‘Was it his name, or his initials, or is it a charm?'

‘It means – well, sleep,' I said. ‘Or nightmare, or dawn, or nothing, or – it might mean everything.' I confess, though, that to my ear it had the sound at that moment of an enormous breaker, bursting on the shore of some unspeakably remote island; and we two marooned.

‘Well, that's one,' she said.' “MORS”: how dull a word to have so many meanings! You men are rather heavy-handed, you know. You think thinking helps things on. I like that Mors. He was a gentleman.'

I stared blankly into the darkness; and my next match flared in vain on mouldering illegibility. The third lasted us out, however, stooping side by side, and reading together:

We hastened to do as we were bid, confronted by phantom eyes so dark and piercing, and groped our way over a few markless grassy mounds to the toppling stone of ‘Susannah Fry, who after a life grievous and disjointed, fell asleep in a swoon':

Under the rose Susannah lay indeed – a great canopy of leaves and sweetness looming up palely in the night darkness. That's six,' I said, turning away from a tomb inscribed with that prosaic rendering of ‘Gather ye rosebuds' – ‘Take care lest ye also be called early'; and the victim a Jeremiah of seventy-two! The tiny flame spluttered and hissed in the dewy grass.

But our seventh rewarded us:

‘If it would not in the least prejudice matters, might I, do you think, be Thomas?' I said. The unsuspecting?'

She laughed out of the darkness. ‘The pioneer!' she said. ‘Hope on.'

Our next two matches burned over a stone which only the twisted roots of a rusty yew tree had for a little while saved from extinction. The characters were nearly extinct on its blackened lichenous surface:

With grateful voice I counted out yet another six of the little store left into a hand cold and dim. And we took it in turn to choose from among the grassy mounds and stones. Two matches were incontinently sacrificed: one to a little wind from over the countryside, smelling of Paradise; and one to a bramble that all but sent me crashing on to the small headstone of the ‘Shepherd', whose mound was a positive mat of fast-shut bindweed flowers. Oddly enough, their almond-like smell became more perceptible in the vague light we shed on them.

Our next two matches gleamed on a tomb raised a little from the ground, with a damp-greened eyeless head on each panel that must once have been cherubim:

And we spent two more on a little old worn stone couched all askew, and nearly hidden in moss:

It was obviously a sacred duty to clear at least of sow-thistles and nettles the grave of one once loved so kindly. There! Sam Lover,' exclaimed a rather breathless voice at last,' “nettles shall not sting this year”.'

And at that moment the first greenish pallor of the fast-waning and newly-risen moon peered out on us from between the yews.

Distant and companionable, cock answered cock across the drowsy acres. But even when it had ascended a little into its brightness the moon shone but wanly, casting the greyest of faint shadows from the fretted spire over the tombs of a Frenchman, Jules Raoul Dubois, and the Virgin on his left hand.

Thick English grasses waved softly over him beyond the faint moonlight, and covered as deeply the grave of one left nameless:

Just a message out of nothingness, for the words summoned no picture, scarcely even the shadow of a human being, into the imagination. Not so those over which the last of our twenty-one battled feebly against the moon: