All Hallows' Eve (22 page)

“It's nice to provoke you a little,” Betty murmured. “You're so much more
everything
than me that you oughtn't to mind. I might tempt you a little, on and off.” Neither of them took the word seriously enough, nor needed to, to feel that this was what all temptations were—matter for dancing mockery and high exchange of laughter, things so impossible that they could be enjoyed as an added delight of love. But Betty swung round and went on seriously. “We
had
forgotten Evelyn. What shall we do?”

“I suppose I could go and look for her,” Lester answered. “If she's still in those streets she'll be frightfully miserable.… She
will
be frightfully miserable. I must go.” There rose in her the vague idea of giving Evelyn a drink, a cup of tea or a sherry or a glass of water—something of that material and liquid joy. And perhaps she ought to let Evelyn talk a little, and perhaps she herself ought to pay more serious attention to Evelyn's talk. Talk would not have checked the death-light, but if she could be a kind of frame for Evelyn, like the frame to which she had held or by which she had been held—perhaps Evelyn could rest there a little. Or perhaps—but Evelyn had first to be found. The finding of Betty had been like nothing she could ever have dreamed; might not the finding of Evelyn be too? There was a word, if she could only remember it for what she wanted—what she was thinking—now. Richard would know; she would ask Richard—after the million years. Compensation? no; recovery? no; salvation—something of all that sort of thing, for her and Betty and Evelyn, and all. She had better get on with it first and think about it afterwards.

They were silent—so to call it—while Betty finished dressing. Then Betty said, “Well now, shall I come with you?”

“Certainly not,” said Lester. “You go down to your Jonathan. And if, by any chance, you should see Richard, give him my love.” The commonplace phrase was weighted with meaning as it left her lips; in that air, it signified no mere message but an actual deed—a rich gift of another's love to another, a third party transaction in which all parties were blessed even now in the foretaste.

Betty said, “I wish you could come. Are you sure you wouldn't like
me
to? I shouldn't mind Evelyn a bit now, if she wanted to talk to me.”

“No,” said Lester, “I don't suppose you would. But I don't think it would be a terrifically good idea for Evelyn—yet, anyhow. No; you go on. And don't forget me, if you can help it.”

Betty opened her eyes. She said, as Lester had said earlier, the sweet reminders interchanging joy: “Here?”

“No,” Lester said. “I know, but it's all a little new still. And …
Oh!
”

The cry was startled out of her. Before Betty had begun dressing, she had pulled the curtains and put out the light. Lester had so turned that she was now facing the window, and there, within or without, looking at her, was Evelyn—an Evelyn whom Lester hardly recognized. She knew rather than saw that it was the girl she had once called her friend. The staring eyes that met hers communicated that, but in those eyes was the same death-light that had crept about her own feet. It was indeed so; the torment of twisted space was but the sign and result of a soul that was driven to obey because it had no energy within itself, nor any choice of obedience. Lester was by her at once; the speed of her movement depended now chiefly on her will. She disappeared in that second from Betty's sight. She threw out her hands and caught Evelyn's arms; the dead and living could not touch, but the dead could still seem to touch the dead. She cried out, “Oh Evelyn, my dear!”

Evelyn was mouthing something, but Lester could not hear what she was saying. That however was because Evelyn was not talking to her at all, but to the Clerk. She was saying, “I can see Lester; she's got hold of me. I can't see Betty.”

The Clerk said, “Speak to her. Ask her what she's doing. Ask her to come away with you.”

“Evelyn!” Lester exclaimed. “Evelyn! What's happening? Come with me.” She spoke without any clear intention; she had no idea what she could do, but the sense of belonging to some great whole was upon her, and she trusted to its direction. It could save this tortured form as it had saved her.

Evelyn answered, as she had been told, “Lester, what have you been doing?” But these words, instead of gaining significance, had lost it; they emerged almost imbecilely.

“I?” said Lester, astonished. “I've been——” She stopped. She could not possibly explain, if indeed she knew. She went on “—putting things straight with Betty. But I was coming to you, indeed I was. Come and speak to Betty.” She was aware, by her sharpened sight, that Betty was no longer in the room, and added, “She'll be back soon.”

Evelyn, her eyes wandering round the room, said gasping, “I don't want to stop. Come with me.”

Lester hesitated. She was willing to do anything she could, but she never had trusted Evelyn's judgment on earth, and she did not feel any more inclined to trust it now. Nor, especially since she had seen Evelyn's face turned on her at the bottom of the hill and heard Evelyn's voice outside the house, did she altogether care to think into what holes and corners of the City Evelyn's taste might lead them. There was, she knew, in those streets someone who looked like a god and yet had loosed that death-light which had crept round her feet and now shone in Evelyn's eyes. She was not afraid, but she did not wish, unless she must, to be mixed up with obscenity. Her natural pride had lost itself, but a certain heavenly fastidiousness still characterized her. Even in paradise she preserved one note of goodness rather than another. Yet when she looked at that distressed face, her fastidiousness vanished. If she could be to Evelyn something of what Betty had been to her——? She said, “Do you want me?”

“Oh yes, yes!” the gasping voice said. “Only you. Do come.”

Lester released her hold, but as she did so, two grasping hands went up and fastened on hers. They gave a feeble jerk, which Lester easily resisted, or indeed hardly had to resist. She had once disliked coming into this house; now, at the moment of new choice, she disliked leaving it. Her only friend in the new life was in it. But she could not refuse the courtesies of this London to her acquaintance in an early London. She gave a small sigh and relaxed her will. She moved.

Her relaxed will took her where Evelyn would, but at her own speed and in her own manner. She was aware of the space she covered but not of the time, for she took no more time than Evelyn did to turn herself back on the steps of the Clerk's chair. Not only space but time spread out around her as she went. She saw a glowing and glimmering City, of which the life was visible as a roseal wonder within. The streets of it were first the streets of today, full of business of today—shops, transport, men and women, for she was now confirmed that not alone in the house she had left did that rich human life go on. It was truly there, even if (except through that house) she had no present concern with it. The dreadful silence she had known after death was no longer there; the faint sound of traffic, so common but oh so uncommon, came to her. It was London known again and anew. Then, gently opening, she saw among those streets other streets. She had seen them in pictures, but now she did not think of pictures, for these were certainly the streets themselves—another London, say—other Londons, into which her own London opened or with which it was intermingled. No thought of confusion crossed her mind; it was all very greatly ordered, and when down a long street she saw, beyond the affairs of today, the movement of sedan chairs and ancient dresses, and beyond them again, right in the distance and yet very close to her, the sun shining on armor, and sometimes a high battlemented gate, it was no phantasmagoria of a dream but precise actuality. She was (though she did not find the phrase) looking along time. Once or twice she thought she saw other streets, unrecognizable, with odd buildings and men and women in strange clothes. But these were rare glimpses and less clear, as if the future of that City only occasionally showed. Beyond all these streets, or sometimes for a moment seen in their midst, was forest and the gleam of marshland, and here and there a river, and once across one such river a rude bridge, and once again a village of huts and men in skins. As she came down towards what was to her day the center of the City, there was indeed a moment when all houses and streets vanished, and the forests rose all round her, and she was going down a rough causeway among the trees, for this was the place of London before London had begun to be, or perhaps after its long and noble history had ceased to be, and the trees grew over it, and a few late tribes still trod what remained of the old roads. That great town in this spiritual exposition of its glory did not omit any circumstances of its building in time and space—not even the very site upon which its blessed tale was sufficiently reared.

It was not for her yet to know the greater mystery. That waited her growth in grace, and the enlargement of her proper faculties in due time. Yet all she saw, and did not quite wonder at seeing, was but a small part of the whole. There around her lay not only London, but all cities—coincident yet each distinct; or else, in another mode, lying by each other as the districts of one city lie. She could, had the time and her occasions permitted, have gone to any she chose—any time and place that men had occupied or would occupy. There was no huge metropolis in which she would have been lost, and no single village which would itself have been lost in all that contemporaneous mass. In this City lay all—London and New York, Athens and Chicago, Paris and Rome and Jerusalem; it was that to which they led in the lives of their citizens. When her time came, she would know what lay behind the high empty façades of her early experience of death; it was necessary that she should first have been compelled to linger among those façades, for till she had waited there and till she had known the first grace of a past redeemed into love, she could not bear even a passing glimpse of that civil vitality. For here citizenship meant relationship and knew it; its citizens lived new acts or lived the old at will. What on earth is only in the happiest moments of friendship or love was now normal. Lester's new friendship with Betty was but the merest flicker, but it was that flicker which now carried her soul.

The passage ended. Lester, exhilarated by the swiftness and the spectacle of the journey, stood in the yard, outside the hall. And Evelyn, on the steps of the chair, had been able to turn and felt the agonized rigor relax. The cramps of her spirit were eased. She stood up; she ran very fast, under the eyes of her master and under the shadow of his lifted hand, and came to Lester who, coming by an easier and longer way, became again aware of her, as she had not been on the way. Evelyn's face was still a little set, but the hard glaring misery was gone. Evelyn smiled at her; at least her face jerked; she, like the other inhabitants of that house, bore Simon's mark in her body. Lester looked away; it seemed to her more courteous not to meet what she privately regarded as an unspeakable grimace. But then Lester's standard for smiles had been, that day, considerably raised.

She said, looking round her at the yard and then through the window, and speaking more pleasantly than ever in this world she had spoken to Evelyn, but firmly: “What do you want me to do here? If,” she added, still pleasantly, “you do want me to do anything.”

Evelyn said, “
He
does. Come in.” Her voice was stronger and more urgent; she tried again to pull Lester on. She had no power on the other; her pull was no more than a poor indication of what she wanted. Lester, having come so far, consented. She moved forward with Evelyn through the wall. She saw Simon and recognized him at once. He was no more a portent to her; the falling away of the death-light had taken from him something of his apparent majesty, and a kind of need and even peevishness showed in his face. He himself did not see her now—not even her eyes as he had done in the hall of the house. But Evelyn's manner told him that she was there. The link between them was Evelyn; on her depended the abolition of that obstacle.

But there was only one way of action. Had the Clerk himself been able to enter that other world of pattern and equipoise, of swift principles as of tender means, he might conceivably have been able to use better means. But he never had done, and there remained now the necessity of setting up a permanent earthly and magical link which he could control. He supposed, since he thought in those terms, that the coming of this Lester with Evelyn meant that Evelyn had some sort of hold on Lester, and not at all that Lester had merely come. He who babbled of love knew nothing of love. It was why he had never known anything of the Betty who had sprung from the lake, if lake it was, that lay in the midst of that great City, as if in the picture which Jonathan had painted the shadow of the cathedral had looked rather like water than mass, and yet (as always) light rather than water. It lay there, mysterious and hidden; only, as if from sources in that world as in this, the Thames and all rivers rose and flowed and fell to the sea, and the sea itself spread and on it vessels passed, and the traffic of continents carried news of mightier hidden continents; no ship laden in foreign ports or carrying merchandise to foreign ports but exhibited passage and the principle of passage, since passage was first decreed to the creation. Simon to turn that passage back upon itself? to turn back speech which was another form of that passage? let him first master the words of three girls and drive them as he would.

He heard Evelyn say, as she came into the hall, “Here she is.” He knew what had to be done and set himself to do it—to erect the material trap and magical link between himself and one dead girl that she might drag the other in. Let both be caught! The destroying anti-Tetragrammaton was not to be used for that, but there were lesser spells which deflected primeval currents. He stood upright; he set his deep fierce eyes on Evelyn; he began almost inaudibly to hum. The unseen motes in the air—and lesser points of matter than they—responded. After he had hummed awhile, he ceased and spat. The spittle lay on the floor at Evelyn's apparent feet and was immediately covered by a film of almost invisible dust The motes were drawn to it. Faint but real, a small cloud gathered against the floor.