Short Stories 1927-1956 (64 page)

‘Keep your silly wig on,’ he expostulated at last. ‘That’s what you always do. You can’t take any joke unless you’ve made it yourself. I’m tired of being here. There’s nothing coming – and there never was. Perhaps if you had been alone …’ Unstable as water, his mood began to revive again.
‘I
know! Let’s go down to the mill-pond, Philip, and look at the fish. The moon’s like glass. You could catch ’em with your hands with that lantern. Let’s try. Come on.’

‘Oh no, you don’t,’ retorted Philip morosely. ‘You needn’t suppose you’re going to wriggle out like that. You dared me to come, and I dare
you
to stay. Anyhow, you shan’t put your nose ever into our house again or into the garden, either, I can promise you, if you’re nothing but a sneak – and afraid. I know something that will soon put a stop to that.’

Dick stood irresolute, eyeing him sharply, his high cheekbones a bright red, his eyes shining, his mouth ajar.

‘I’m not a sneak. And who’ – a doleful quaver jarred his thin clear treble voice – ‘who
wants
to come into your silly old garden. If my mother … Besides, you
know
I’m not afraid!’

‘Oh, do I!’ A crafty stealthy designing look had crept into Philip’s fair face, and a slight haze into his blue eyes. A faint ambiguous smile faded out of his angel features. He glanced covertly about him. ‘What’s more likely is you only want to show off,’ he sneered. ‘Wheedle.’ He half yawned. ‘You know perfectly well that I shouldn’t be here now except for some silly story you told me and couldn’t have understood. Dare for yourself! Why, you haven’t even the pluck to climb up into the belfry and give the least tiny ding on one of the bells. Not all alone.’

‘Oh, wouldn’t I! Yes, I would. Where’s the key? There’s an old owl’s nest in the belfry … “
One
!” – why, even if anybody in the village woke and heard it, they’d think it was nothing but the wind.’

‘Well,
three
dings, then. Anybody can make excuses. And you knew I
haven’t the key! What’s more, you wouldn’t take a single flower, not even a scrap of a green leaf, from one of those vases up there.’

Dick’s gaze angled swiftly over the silver candlesticks upon the altar, the snow-white linen, the rich silk embroidered frontal, with its design in gold thread – I.H.S., the flat hueless shields of hothouse flowers. ‘Yes, I would, if I can reach them.’

‘Oh, would you! And there you are again – “
if
!
” But you shan’t – not while
I’m
here. That would be worse than stealing even, because this is a church, and that’s the altar. And that’s holy. This is not one of your mouldy old chapels.’ Once again he glanced about him. ‘I bet this, then. You wouldn’t go up into the gallery and scratch out the eye in
that
– not even if I lent you my knife to do it with. Why, you’d be scared even of falling off the chair!’

The ‘that’ he was referring to was an ancient painted lozenge-shaped hatchment, fastened by tenpenny nails in its clumsy black frame to the
lime-washed
western wall. It was blazoned with a coat of arms, and above the coat was a crest – the turbaned head of a Saracen in profile; and beneath the coat, in bold Gothic lettering, the one word,
Resurgam.

Dick gazed motionlessly at its darkened green and vermilion and at the titled head. ‘Yes, I would,’ he muttered. ‘What does
Resurgam
mean?’

‘It’s Latin,’ replied Philip, as if he were a little mollified by the modesty of the inquiry. ‘And it means,
I
shall
rise
up
again.
But it
might
be the
subjunctive
. It’s what’s called a motto, and the head’s the crest, and the body’s down in the vault. I expect he was a crusader. Anyhow,
any
body
could do that; because you know very well it mightn’t be noticed for ages. Never, p’raps. Besides, what’s the use? … I’ll give you a last chance. I’ll tell you what you
wouldn’t
do, not if you stayed here for a month of Sundays, and not a single soul came into the church to see you!’

His cheek had crimsoned. He nodded his head violently. ‘You wouldn’t climb up that, and – and blow that trumpet.’

Dick wheeled about, lifting his dark squirrel-bright eyes as he did so towards the Angel, and looked. He continued to look: the angel at this moment of its nightly vigil, though already the hand that clasped the
trumpet
had lost its silver, seemed with an ineffable yearning as if about to leap into a cataract of moonlight, like a siren erecting her green-haired head and shoulders out of a rippleless sea to scan the shore.

‘You
said,
what would be the use?’ he protested at last in a small, scarcely audible voice, and without turning his head. ‘Even if I did, no one would hear … Why do you
want
me to?’

‘Who
“wants” you to!’ came the mocking challenge. ‘You asked me to give you a dare. And now – what did I say! Shouldn’t
I
hear? I don’t
believe
you’ve ever even looked at it, not even
seen
it before!’

‘Oh, haven’t I!’ Dick faltered. ‘You say that only because on Sundays I don’t sit on your side. And what’s the use? Staring up gives you a crick in the neck. But it’s not because I am afraid … Besides, she’s only made of stone.’ In spite of this disparagement he continued to gaze at the angel.

‘Is
she then! Stone! That’s all you know about it. She’s made of wood, silly. How could she be that colour if it were marble or even
any
stone?
Anybody
could see that! And even if she
is
only wood, there are people all over the world who worship idols and – and images. I don’t mean just savages either. If she’ – for an instant his eyes shut and revolved beneath their pale rounded lids – ‘if she or anybody else was to blow through that trumpet, it would be the Last Day. I say it, and I
know.
Even if your father has ever heard of angels, I bet he doesn’t believe in them. I’m
sure
he doesn’t. My father does believe in them, though. And if you had ever really listened to what he reads out about them in the Lessons you’d know too.
I
–
have.’

He sat for a moment, torpid as a spider engaged in digesting or
contemplating
a visitor to its nets. Dick’s small, alert, yet guileless face was still turned away from him, upwards and sidelong. As one may put one’s ear to a minute device in clockwork and listen to the wheels within going round, the very thoughts in his cropped, compact head seemed audible. And then, as if after a sudden decision to dismiss the subject from his mind, Philip casually picked up his bull’s-eye lantern, idly twisted its penthouse top, and directed first a greenish, then a thin red beam of light towards the lustrous monument. But the moon made mock of this trivial rivalry.

‘What,’ was Dick’s husky inquiry at last, ‘what
does
the Bible say about angels? It must be a lovely place where they are, Philip.’

Philip ignored the sentimental comment. ‘Oh, heaps of things. I couldn’t tell you; not half of them, not a quarter.’ A mild, absent-minded, almost hypnotic expression now veiled his pale cold features. He began again as though he were repeating a lesson, in tones low yet so confident that the whole church could easily play eavesdropper to his every word.
Nevertheless
the sentences followed one another tardily and piecemeal, as if, like a writer of books, he could not wholly trust his faculties, as though words and ideas were stubborn things to set in order and be made even so much as to hint at what was pent up in his mind.

‘Well, first there was St Paul; he went to a man’s house who had
seen
an angel. Then there was the angel who came to tell his mother about Samuel, when she was sitting alone sewing in her bedroom … And there was the angel that spoke to a man called Lot before he came out of a place called Sodom that was burned in the desert and his wife was turned into a pillar of salt. Because she turned back. Oh, heaps!
You
seem to suppose that because people can’t see them now, there never were angels. What about
the sea-serpent, then; and what about witches? And what about the stars millions and billions of miles out in space, and mites and germs and all that, so teeny-tiny
no
body ever saw them until microscopes and telescopes were invented? I’ve looked through a microscope, so I know.’

Dick nodded vacantly. ‘If people can
see
them,’ he admitted, ‘there must be sea-serpents. And I
have
seen a witch. There’s one lives in Colney
Bottom
, and everybody says she’s a witch. She’s humpty-backed, with straggly grey hair all over her shoulders. I crept in through the trees once and she was in her garden digging potatoes. At least I
think
it was potatoes. She was talking; but there was nobody there and it wasn’t to
me.
But you were telling me about the angels, Philip. Won’t you go on?’

‘“Go on”!’ echoed Philip in derision, and began again fumbling with his lantern. ‘Good heavens, you don’t expect me to tell you half the Bible, do you? Why don’t you listen? I don’t believe you’ve any more brains than a parrot. “Go on”! Why,
everybody
has heard of the angel that when Moses was with his sheep called to him out of the middle of the burning bramble bush on the mountains. Its leaves and branches were all crackling with flames. That’s another. And when Elijah was once lying asleep in the desert under a juniper tree an angel came in the morning and touched him to wake him because he had brought him some cake, and some fresh water to drink. That,’ he pondered a moment or two, ‘that was before the ravens. And I suppose you’ve never even heard of Joshua either? He was a captain of Israel. And when he was standing dressed in his armour on the sand, with his naked sword in his hand, and looking at the enormous walls of Jericho, he saw an angel there beside him, in armour too, just as you might see a man in a wood at night. They stood there together looking at the
enormous
walls of Jericho. But you couldn’t see them very plainly because it was
getting
dark, and there weren’t any lamps or lights in the houses. So nobody inside knew that they were there, not even the woman who had talked to the two spies who had stolen the bunches of grapes.’

Philip, unperceived, had quickly and suddenly glanced at his friend, who, his face wholly at peace, had meanwhile been emptily watching the coloured lights succeeding one another in the round, glass, owl-like eye of the toy lantern.

‘I should like to see an angel,’ he said.

‘Oh, would you? Then that’s all you know about it. There are thousands upon thousands of them, most of them miles taller than any giant there ever was and others no bigger than – than ordinary. Not all of them have only two wings either; some of them have six – here, and here, and here; with two they fly and with two they cover their faces when they are asleep. And they have names too; else God wouldn’t be able to call them. But don’t you go and think they are like
us
;
because they aren’t. They are more like
demons or ghosts – real ghosts, I mean, not the kind
you
were talking about. And I don’t believe either that just because anything is made of wood or stone, it hasn’t any life at all – not at
all.
Even savages couldn’t be as stupid as all that. You only
think
you could touch angels. But you couldn’t. And some angels, though I don’t know even myself if they are most like women or men’ – his voice ebbed away almost into a whisper, like that of a child murmuring in its sleep, as if he were not only nearing the end of his resources, but was losing himself in the rapture of some ineffable vision in his mind – ‘some angels are far far more beautiful to look at than any woman, even the most beautiful woman there ever was. And even than –
that
!’

Yet again Dick lifted his intense small eyes towards the image. It had, it seemed, as if in an instant, returned to an appearance of mute immobility; but only in the nick of time, to elude his silent questioning.

‘I shouldn’t mind any angel,’ he said, ‘if it were only like that. Not
mind,
I mean. If she
looked
at me, perhaps I might. She’s like Rebecca, the girl that lives up at the farm. My mother taught me a hymn once to say when I am in bed. I can’t remember the beginning now, but some of it I can:

If you are not afraid, she says, not anywhere, ever,
nothing
can do anything against you.’

‘Oh, they can’t, can’t they! That just shows all
you
know about it. Besides, what you’ve been saying is only a rhyme for children. It’s only a rhyme. My nurse told me that ages ago. Those angels are only one kind. Why, there are angels so enormously strong that if one of them no more than touched even the roof of this church with the tip of his finger it would crumble away into dust. Like that’ – he firmly placed his own small forefinger on the dried-up corpse of a tiny money-spider that had long since expired in the corner of the pew – ‘absolutely into dust. And their voices are as loud as thunder, so that when one speaks to another, the sound of their shouting sweeps clean across the sky. And some fly up out of the sea, out of the East, when the sun rises; and some come up out of a huge
frightful
pit. And some come up out of the water, deep dangerous lakes and great rivers, and they stand on the water, and can
fly
–
straight across, as if it was lightning, from one edge of the world to the other – like tremendous birds. I should jolly well like to see what a pilot of an aeroplane would do at the edge of the night if he met one. They can’ – he bent forward a little, his pale
face now faintly greened with his own lantern – ‘they can see without
looking
; and they stay still, like great carved stones, in a light – why, this moon wouldn’t be even a candle to it!

‘And some day they will pour awful things out of vials down on the earth and reap with gigantic sickles not just ordinary corn, but men and women. Men and women. And besides the sea,’ his rather colourless eyes had
brightened
, his cheeks had taken on a gentle flush, his nervous fingers were
clasping
and unclasping themselves over the warm metal of his lantern, ‘and besides the sea, they can stand and live exulting in the sun. But on earth here they are invisible, at least
now,
except when they come in dreams. Besides, everybody has two angels; though they never get married, and so there are never any children angels. They are called cherubs. And I know this too – you can tell they are there even when you cannot see them. You can hear them listening. If
they
have charge of you, nothing can hurt you, not the rocks – nor the ice – not even of the highest mountains. And that was why the angel spoke to Balaam’s donkey when they were on the
mountain
pass, because he wished not to frighten him; and the donkey answered. But if you were cursed by one for wickedness, then you would wither up and die like a gnat, or have awful pains, and everything inside of you would melt away like water. And don’t forget either that the devil has crowds of angels under his command who were thrown out of heaven millions of years ago, long before Adam and Eve. They are as proud as he is, and they live in hell … They are awful.’