The Wish House and Other Stories (69 page)

‘Melting snow-flakes as seen through a glass? By art optical?’ the friar asked.

‘Art optical? I have never heard!’ Roger of Salerno cried.

‘John,’ said the Abbot of St Mod’s commandingly, ‘was it – is it so?’

‘In some sort,’ John replied, ‘Thomas has the right of it. Those shapes in the bordure were my workshop-patterns for the devils above. In
my
craft, Salerno, we dare not drug. It kills hand and eye. My shapes are to be seen honestly, in nature.’

The abbot drew a bowl of rose-water towards him. ‘When I was
prisoner with – with the Saracens after Mansura,’ he began, turning up the fold of his long sleeve, ‘there were certain magicians-physicians – who could show-’ he dipped his third finger delicately in the water – ‘all the firmament of Hell, as it were, in – ’ he shook off one drop from his polished nail on to the polished table – ‘even such a supernaculum as this.’

‘But it must be foul water – not clean,’ said John.

‘Show us then – all – all,’ said Stephen. ‘I would make sure – once more.’ The abbot’s voice was official.

John drew from his bosom a stamped leather box, some six or eight inches long, wherein, bedded on faded velvet, lay what looked like silver-bound compasses of old box-wood, with a screw at the head which opened or closed the legs to minute fractions. The legs terminated, not in points, but spoon-shapedly, one spatula pierced with a metal-lined hole less than a quarter of an inch across, the other with a half-inch hole. Into this latter John, after carefully wiping with a silk rag, slipped a metal cylinder that carried glass or crystal, it seemed, at each end.

‘Ah! Art optic!’ said the friar. ‘But what is that beneath it?’

It was a small swivelling sheet of polished silver no bigger than a florin, which caught the light and concentrated it on the lesser hole. John adjusted it without the friar’s proffered help.

‘And now to find a drop of water,’ said he, picking up a small brush.

‘Come to my upper cloister. The sun is on the leads still,’ said the abbot, rising.

They followed him there. Half-way along, a drip from a gutter had made a greenish puddle in a worn stone. Very carefully, John dropped a drop of it into the smaller hole of the compass-leg, and, steadying the apparatus on a coping, worked the screw in the compass-joint, screwed the cylinder, and swung the swivel of the mirror till he was satisfied.

‘Good!’ He peered through the thing. ‘My shapes are all here. Now look, Father! If they do not meet your eye at first, turn this nicked edge here, left-or right-handed.’

‘I have not forgotten,’ said the abbot, taking his place. ‘Yes! They are here – as they were in my time – my time past. There is no end to them, I was told…There
is
no end!’

‘The light will go. Oh, let me look! Suffer me to see, also!’ the friar pleaded, almost shouldering Stephen from the eyepiece. The abbot gave way. His eyes were on time past. But the friar, instead of looking, turned the apparatus in his capable hands.

‘Nay, nay,’ John interrupted, for the man was already fiddling at the screws. ‘Let the doctor see.’

Roger of Salerno looked, minute after minute. John saw his blue-veined cheek-bones turn white. He stepped back at last, as though stricken.

‘It is a new world – a new world, and – Oh, God Unjust! – I am old!’

‘And now Thomas,’ Stephen ordered.

John manipulated the tube for the infirmarían, whose hands shook, and he too looked long. ‘It is Life,’ he said presently in a breaking voice. ‘No Hell! Life created and rejoicing – the work of the Creator. They live, even as I have dreamed. Then it was no sin for me to dream. No sin – O God – no sin!’

He flung himself on his knees and began hysterically the
Benedicite omnia Opera.

‘And now I will see how it is actuated,’ said the friar from Oxford, thrusting forward again.

‘Bring it within. The place is all eyes and ears,’ said Stephen.

They walked quietly back along the leads, three English counties laid out in evening sunshine around them; church upon church, monastery upon monastery, cell after cell, and the bulk of a vast cathedral moored on the edge of the banked shoals of sunset.

When they were at the after-table once more they sat down, all except the friar, who went to the window and huddled bat-like over the thing. ‘I see! I see!’ he was repeating to himself.

‘He’ll not hurt it,’ said John. But the abbot, staring in front of him, like Roger of Salerno, did not hear. The infirmarian’s head was on the table between his shaking arms.

John reached for a cup of wine.

‘It was shown to me,’ the abbot was speaking to himself, ‘in Cairo, that man stands ever between two Infinities – of greatness and littleness. Therefore, there is no end – either to life – or—‘

‘And I stand on the edge of the grave,’ snarled Roger of Salerno. ‘Who pities me?’

‘Hush!’ said Thomas the Infirmarian. ‘The little creatures shall be sanctified – sanctified to the service of His sick.’

‘What need?’ John of Burgos wiped his lips. ‘It shows no more than the shapes of things. It gives good pictures. I had it at Granada. It was brought from the East, they told me.’

Roger of Salerno laughed with an old man’s malice. ‘What of Mother Church? Most Holy Mother Church? If it comes to Her ears that we have spied into Her Hell without Her leave, where do we stand?’

‘At the stake,’ said the Abbot of St Mod’s, and, raising his voice a trifle, ‘You hear that? Roger Bacon, heard you that?’

The friar turned from the window, clutching the compasses tighter.

‘No, no!’ he appealed. ‘Not with Falcodi – not with our English-hearted Foulkes made Pope. He’s wise – he’s learned. He reads what I have put forth. Foulkes would never suffer it.’

‘“Holy Pope is one thing, Holy Church another,’” Roger quoted.

‘But I – I can bear witness it is no art magic,’ the friar went on. ‘Nothing is it, except art optical – wisdom after trial and experiment, mark you. I can prove it, and – my name weighs with men who dare think.’

‘Find them!’ croaked Roger of Salerno. ‘Five or six in all the world. That makes less than fifty pounds by weight of ashes at the stake. I have watched such men – reduced.’

‘I will not give this up!’ The friar’s voice cracked in passion and despair. ‘It would be to sin against the Light.’

‘No, no! Let us – let us sanctify the little animals of Varro,’ said Thomas.

Stephen leaned forward, fished his ring out of the cup, and slipped it on his finger. ‘My sons,’ said he, ‘we have seen what we have seen.’

‘That it is no magic but simple art,’ the friar persisted.

‘Avails nothing. In the eyes of Mother Church we have seen more than is permitted to man.’

‘But it was Life – created and rejoicing,’ said Thomas.

‘To look into Hell as we shall be judged – as we shall be proved – to have looked, is for priests only.’

‘Or green-sick virgins on the road to sainthood who, for cause any midwife could give you—‘

The abbot’s half-lifted hand checked Roger of Salerno’s outpouring.

‘Nor may even priests see more in Hell than Church knows to be there. John, there is respect due to Church as well as to devils.’

‘My trade’s the outside of things,’ said John quietly. ‘I have my patterns.’

‘But you may need to look again for more,’ the friar said. ‘In my craft, a thing done is done with. We go on to new shapes after that.’

‘And if we trespass beyond bounds, even in thought, we lie open to the judgment of the Church,’ the abbot continued.

‘But thou knowest –
knowest
!’ Roger of Salerno had returned to the
attack. ‘Here’s all the world in darkness concerning the causes of things – from the fever across the lane to thy Lady’s – thine own Lady’s – eating malady. Think!’

‘I have thought upon it, Salerno! I have thought indeed.’

Thomas the Infirmarian lifted his head again; and this time he did not stammer at all. ‘As in the water, so in the blood must they rage and war with each other! I have dreamed these ten years – I thought it was a sin – but my dreams and Varro’s are true! Think on it again! Here’s the Light under our very hand!’

‘Quench it! You’d no more stand to roasting than – any other. I’ll give you the case as Church – as I myself – would frame it. Our John here returns from the Moors, and shows us a hell of devils contending in the compass of one drop of water. Magic past clearance! You can hear the faggots crackle.’

‘But thou knowest! Thou hast seen it all before! For man’s poor sake! For old friendship’s sake – Stephen!’ The friar was trying to stuff the compasses into his bosom as he appealed.

‘What Stephen de Sautré knows, you his friends know also. I would have you, now, obey the Abbot of St Illod’s. Give to me!’ He held out his ringed hand.

‘May I – may John here – not even make a drawing of one – one screw?’ said the broken friar, in spite of himself.

‘Nowise!’ Stephen took it over. ‘Your dagger, John. Sheathed will serve.’

He unscrewed the metal cylinder, laid it on the table, and with the dagger’s hilt smashed some crystal to sparkling dust which he swept into a scooped hand and cast behind the hearth.

‘It would seem,’ said he, ‘the choice lies between two sins. To deny the world a Light which is under our hand, or to enlighten the world before her time. What you have seen, I saw long since among the physicians at Cairo. And I know what doctrine they drew from it. Hast
thou
dreamed, Thomas? I also – with fuller knowledge. But this birth, my sons, is untimely. It will be but the mother of more death, more torture, more division, and greater darkness in this dark age. Therefore I, who know both my world and the Church, take this choice on my conscience. Go! It is finished.’

He thrust the wooden part of the compasses deep among the beech logs till all was burned.

E
VERYONE
in the village knew that Helen Turrell did her duty by all her world, and by none more honourably than by her only brother’s unfortunate child. The village knew, too, that George Turrell had tried his family severely since early youth, and were not surprised to be told that, after many fresh starts given and thrown away, he, an inspector of Indian Police, had entangled himself with the daughter of a retired non-commissioned officer, and had died of a fall from a horse a few weeks before his child was born. Mercifully, George’s father and mother were both dead, and though Helen, thirty-five and independent, might well have washed her hands of the whole disgraceful affair, she most nobly took charge, though she was, at the time, under threat of lung trouble which had driven her to the South of France. She arranged for the passage of the child and a nurse from Bombay, met them at Marseilles, nursed the baby through an attack of infantile dysentery due to the carelessness of the nurse, whom she had had to dismiss, and at last, thin and worn but triumphant, brought the boy late in the autumn, wholly restored, to her Hampshire home.

All these details were public property, for Helen was as open as the day, and held that scandals are only increased by hushing them up. She admitted that George had always been rather a black sheep, but things might have been much worse if the mother had insisted on her right to keep the boy. Luckily, it seemed that people of that class would do almost anything for money, and, as George had always turned to her in his scrapes, she felt herself justified – her friends agreed with her – in cutting the whole non-commissioned officer connection, and giving the child every advantage. A christening, by the rector, under the name of Michael, was the first
step. So far as she knew herself, she was not, she said, a child-lover, but, for all his faults, she had been very fond of George, and she pointed out that little Michael had his father’s mouth to a line; which made something to build upon.

As a matter of fact, it was the Turrell forehead, broad, low, and well-shaped, with the widely spaced eyes beneath it, that Michael had most faithfully reproduced. His mouth was somewhat better cut than the family type. But Helen, who would concede nothing good to his mother’s side, vowed he was a Turrell all over, and, there being no one to contradict, the likeness was established.

In a few years Michael took his place, as accepted as Helen had always been – fearless, philosophical, and fairly good-looking. At six, he wished to know why he could not call her ‘Mummy’, as other boys called their mothers. She explained that she was only his auntie, and that aunties were not quite the same as mummies, but that, if it gave him pleasure, he might call her ‘Mummy’ at bedtime, for a pet-name between themselves.

Michael kept his secret most loyally, but Helen, as usual, explained the fact to her friends; which when Michael heard, he raged.

‘Why did you tell?
Why
did you tell?’ came at the end of the storm.

‘Because it’s always best to tell the truth,’ Helen answered, her arm round him as he shook in his cot.