Unknown (55 page)

Pomparles Bridge, although on the road to Street, is much nearer the town on its north than the village on its south, and it is probable that most of the refuse, such as old cans, old pieces of rusty iron, drowned cats and dogs, human abortions, vegetable garbage, tramps" discarded boots, heads and entrails of fishes, brick-shards, empty tobacco tins, broken bottles, and so forth, which are to be seen sticking in the Brue-mud, comes from Glas-tonbury rather than from its smaller neighbor.

An overgrown river-path, on the stream's northern bank, that once may have been a tow-path but now was only used by casual pedestrians, followed the river northeast where it flowed between Cradle Bridge Farm and Beckery Mill, across Glastonbury Heath, under Cold Harbour Bridge, by Pool Reed Farm, till it reached the village of Meare. The same path, on the Brue's north bank, followed the river southeast as it flowed under Cow Bridge and across South Moor, Kennard Moor, Butt Moor, then a mile below Baltonsborough, till it reached the villages of West Lydford and East Lydford.

Out of the midst of a dazed condition of his senses, John stared down at the abominable despair in the hollow eye-sockets of that decomposed cat-head. A whitish-yellowish cabbage stalk lay buried in the mud near it; vegetable decomposition and animal decomposition taking place side by side. The man's senses were so drugged by the sunshine that his mind, as happens to anyone awakening from real sleep, narrowed its awTareness to one single groove. This groove was the suffering that the dead cat must have undergone to stamp such a ghastliness of despair upon its physiognomy.

In all normal suffering there are certain natural laws such as mitigate what the entity in question is enduring. When these laws are broken an element enters that is monstrous, bestial, obscene. John began to feel that what the First Cause had chosen to inflict upon this cat belonged to this Xo-Man's-Land of out: age: and an anger rose up within him against whatever Power it uas that was responsible for the creation cf such sensitive nerves in such a torturing world, an anger that was like a saraband of raving fury.

He felt that the cat-head was exactly sharing his feelings. Its swollen hairless belly ... its paws that resembled the claws of a bird . . . the snarling ecstasy of its curse . . . something at once bestial and eternal in the protest against the Fir^t Cause which it lifted up from the Brue-mud ... all these things made John aware that if, like the Pistoian in the Inferno he should “make the fig” at the Emperor of the Universe, this cat-head would be wholly with him.

It was while the bow-string of his malediction was still quivering that John was struck, there, leaning as he was against the sun-warmed parapet, by a sudden rending and blinding shock. He had been thinking about King Arthur a good deal in the course of his recent advertising but only in a childish and very ignorant way. He had never read the romances. But at this second, in the blaze of Something that afterward seemed to him to resemble what he had heard of the so-called Cosmic Rays, he distinctly saw . . . literally shearing the sun-lit air with a whiteness like milk, like snow, like birch-bark, like maiden's flesh, like chalk, like paper, like a dead fish's eye, like Italian marble, • . . an object, resembling a sword, falling into the mud of the river! When it struck the mud it disappeared. Nor was there any trace . . . when John looked later ... to show where it had disappeared.

Under the stress of the shock, at the moment, John lurched sideways, scraping his hands and knees against the stonework of the parapet. He w^ald certainly have fallen on his side if he had not been clutching tightly the root-handle of his hazel-stick, with which, automatically stabbing the surface of the road as he stumbled, he just saved himself. What he saw at that moment certainly flashed into his brain, in one blinding, deadly shock, as being a supernatural event. Something it was that quivered and gleamed, as it whirled past him, and vanished in the mud of the Brue! To the end of his life he was obstinate in maintaining that he really saw what he felt he saw with his bodily eyes.

When Mary asked him, for he told only Mary and Mr. Evans of this event, how it was that he knew it w7as Arthur's sword, he could only say that the same shock that staggered his bodily senses like a bolt of noon-day lightning, staggered his mental consciousness with a rending and crashing certainty.

He whose life was now occupied with turning the whole Glas-tonbury Legend into a mockery and a popular farce had no reason to offer now as to how he knew what this thing was. But that it was a definite and perhaps a dangerous sign from the supernatural and that it was directed towards himself alone, he never had any doubt. That of all the persons he knew, he never told anyone about it save those two, was itself significant. His choice of Mr. Evans as his confidant was not surprising; for the fact that it was with Mr. Evans that he had visited Stonehenge gave to the quaint figure of the pedantic Welshman a certain disarrning glamour.

“WTiat wras it like, John?” Mary kept asking him when, for the fiftieth time, he described the occurrence; but all he could tell her was that what he saw was milk-w7hite and that it had a dusky handle. That the handle was dark instead of bright and glittering was certainly a peculiarity of the appearance that did not fit in with the atmosphere of the old stories. All the authorities who spoke of that sword indicated that its handle was shining gold. But then these famosi fabulatores were poetical romancers; and it was possible that a real weapon with something queer and dark about its handle was thrown into the Brue at this spot by the person who subsequently became known as Arthur, quite independently of what the romancers said.

The object which John saw thrown into the Brue from Pom-paries Bridge was undoubtedly thrown from some point in space that lay behind his back; but it wTas from the appearance of the thing itself that he staggered away and came near falling; not from any consciousness of a supernatural presence behind him. The first thing he did, when he saved himself from falling by stabbing at the ground with his stick and leaning upon it till he got his balance, was to clamber through some railings by the roadside, climb down the road-bank and standing on the northern tow-path of the Brue, search the river with an intense, disturbed, bewildered curiosity. But nothing could he see except the accustomed rubbish! From this position he could not even see the face of the dead cat. There was one large shiny-lea\ed marigold growing down there; but its round golden flowers were all gone. They must have been picked long ago by someone or other. He grasped his stock tightly by its curiously moulded handle, that handle wThich had grown into its shape by the mysterious chances of underground life, and set out w7ith rapid steps northeast following the course of the Brue in the direction of Meare.

Preoccupied with what had happened to him, he rejected totally as he walked along such explanations of this startling occurrence as would have dispensed with the supernatural. The first and the easiest of these explanations was that he had been the solitary witness of the descent of a meteorite or thunderbolt. Another was that his protracted mental playing with all these legends had resulted in some sort of nervous hallucination. But without laying any stress upon Arthur or his Sword, John felt that something had touched him from beyond the limits of the known.

As his footpath along the bank wound its way through the low water-meadows, with the red-tiled roof of the workmen's houses of Northover on its right, John's mind began to be invaded by doubts and worries about his whole life. It was as if he had been living for the last five weeks in an enchanted dream. The heady opiate fumes of the Glastonbury legends, even while he misused them and abused them with deliberate irony, had obsessed him to such a point that in all the other affairs of his life he had just drifted. It was this mood of drifting that had been the cause of one sharp quarrel after another that he had had with Mary.

“I'll tell Mary everything at our tea, today,” he said to himself, as he stiffened his back and ran the end of his stick up and down through his fingers, to make sure it wras clean, “I'll tell her that it won't make any real difference our having to wait to be married till after Midsummer. The truth is we must wait till then. Surely Mary will see we must! But oh, dear! Girls are so funny in these things.”

Ke set himself to walk faster now-, following the Brue across water-meadows that not many centuries ago must have been submerged every spring—and are still submerged in floodtime—by brackish waters from the Bristol Channel. He had crossed the Somerset-and-Dorset railway track and had found himself approaching Lake Village Field, when he came suddenly upon a group of children who apparently were engaged in some extremely violent quarrel. One of these children, a passionate, dark little girl, with bare head and dirty clothes, was balancing herself on a small landing-stage which jutted out into the river, while, on the muddy bank beneath this wTooden erection, three other children—a boy, a girl and a much smaller child—were shouting insults at her, and even throwing various missiles, such as dried horses' droppings and handfuls of loose earth, picked up from the shelving bank, which, if they missed her thin little legs, hit very often, as John could see as he drew near, her faded and ragged skirt.

The children on the bank had their backs turned to him and the little girl, though her face was directed towards him seemed too intent in defying her enemies to take any notice of his approach. Thus John, leaning on his stick and taking breath—for he had been walking fast—had time to listen for a minute or two very closely to what was going on before his presence made any difference at all.

“Thee baint got no proper father, thee baint!” cried the virtuous Jackie, throwing the muddy root of a last year's bulrush at his former lieutenant. “This here robbers' band, of which I be chief, don't want any gals in it what have no proper fathers!”

“What about thee own father, Jackie?” retorted the flushed outlaw from her point of vantage on the shaky wooden promontory. “What about having a father what went to prison all along of his making a nuisince of 'isself ?”

The sedate Sis joined in at this point. “Thee's mother never had no weddin' ring, and thee's father have, never said, CI thee wed.'”

“You can't say nothin', Sis,” flung back Nelly Morgan fiercely* “when you and Bert have got neither the one nor 'tother . . * only Grandmother Cole with a girt wart on her nose! Why, Bert, I be 'shamed of 'ee. Oh, yer little fat scrub, what do 'ee mean by mud at me who's carried *ee so often on me back? What do 'ee mean by't, yer little staring owl? Yes! You may well run to Sis to save 'ee. yer little cry-baby! Tis to thee I be talkin, you Baby Bunting! Aren't 'ee 'shamed of yerself?”

Bert did indeed showT signs of discomfort when this fusillade of fiery words, from so high above his head, came rattling down like grape-shot upon him. His philosophic gusto at the contemplation of the Visible World had evidently not yet allowed, in its cosmic repertoire, for female wrath when directed quite so bitterly at himself. Like many another male philosopher he now hid both his astonishment and his chagrin in the nearest folds of a kindlier feminine lap. And from this refuge, it must alas! be confessed, there shortly arose the sound of sobs.

But while the mischievous Jackie hunted about for a lump of horses' dung that would be a better missile than any he had yet found, the sedate Sis, over the head of the weeping Bert, flung out the most dangerous and deadly word yet uttered. “Thee's mother be a wrhore, Nelly Morgan, and thee can't deny it! Thee's mother let Mr. Crow do it. Yes, she did! She did let Mr. Crow do it, and all the town knows how thee be a Bastie!”

“Oh, you great coward!” cried the little Valkyrie from her plank above their heads. She was addressing Jackie now, wrho had just missed hitting one of her thin shoulders with his fragment of weather-dried manure. “Oh, you great, lumping, common coward! Ye be a pretty robber captain, ye be, to join three to one, and against a girl too! Ill tell yer Sister Sally on ye. That's who I'll tell! And she'll larn 'ee to throw shit at anyone, she will, and quickly too! Jackie Jones did run away, run away, from Number One's dog”—in her genius for invective Nelly was inspired to utter this biting reproach in the form of an impersonal chant—“run away, run away, when there weren't no dog at all!” The infuriated child, as she chanted her war-song, pointed her fingers at her former leader with such wild and witchlike ferocity that her words sounded to John's ears like an incantation. He began to feel almost sorry for this young Boadicea's three enemies, all of whom were now apparently heading for something like complete collapse.

Jackie was indeed spluttering with indignant denials and had grown red in the face, as, with his hands on the edge of her platform, he proceeded to try to shake her down. The daughter of Philip Crow finished his discomfiture, in a very summary manner! With the electric rapidity of a born dancer she advanced one of her little untidy feet and trod viciously upon the boy's exposed knuckles. Jackie, tumbling on the grass and licking his injured hand, howled now like the Homeric Ares wounded by Diomed. Bert's sobs and Jackie's howls were at once punctuaLed by a quick interchange of feminine artillery between Nelly and Sis.

“FlI tell your mother on 'ee, ye nasty, ugly, dirty little bitch!” cried the protective maternal heart of the sturdy sister. It was at this point that Nelly began consciously to be aware of John's presence and she glanced at him almost coquettishly, while she proceeded to chant triumphantly, shooting out her tongue, between the strophe and anti-strophe of her triumph-song, at the fallen Jackie,

“Sissie Jones at Sunday School, Answered Teacher like a Fool; Teacher said, 'you little silly, Shut your mouth and dilly dilly!'”

As she uttered this dithyramb over her defeated rival, the exultant little girl began to dance up and down upon the shaky plank. It was at this moment that John came forward. He came forward with the same sort of blush upon his twitching cheek that Dante displayed when Virgil caught him taking a wicked pleasure in an obscene and venomous quarrel. But he held out his arms to lift Nelly the Conqueror down from her perch, with a surprised sense that if these children's accusations were true, he and she were blood-relations, both of them drawing their devilish Norman spirit from William Crow's wife, the proud Devereux woman.