Chapter IX: Part 9

An hour later I went to the Oratory to say good-bye to Lady Pawkins. She was there immersed in prayer and it was some time before she noticed me. Rising from her knees, she came slowly towards me and held out her right hand with a quiet smile as though to apologise for all that had happened during my stay. As she raised her arm I caught sight of her skin under the hanging sleeve and my eyes froze to it. It was burnt and charred to the bone! God! I was glad to get out of that house.

* * * * *

Then I was right, and she was in some mystical and appalling way at the source of all that had happened; and the monk knew. Yes! I was sure that he knew, and now I realised why he had fallen to prayer before the burnt picture of the Virgin in the tapestry. Everything began to fit itself together in my mind. The Dowager’s strange words about herself and her daughter-in-law, coupled with those of the monk--what was it that they meant? How was it that the poor drunken Dowager had fought against it with all her might and soul, but that the evil had been too strong for her, and why, since she had given up struggling, had she been at peace? Could it be that though the old lady had collapsed under demoniacal assault and let herself take to drink, there was some mystical and tremendous excuse for her weakness, that in the atmosphere of that house there was a power which would not permit people to live quiet, ordinary, sober lives? That women who married into the family found themselves attacked by an influence which gave them no rest, which actually forced holy people into evil habits? Was I right in guessing that the only chance a woman had in that house was the overwhelming and simple practice of mediæval Sanctity, the gifts of prayer, holiness and atonement carried to an heroic degree? Such a woman was given the chance of becoming saintly or sodden--there was no middle course.

So I guessed, but I never returned to confirm my guess. You can only imagine my feelings a year later when I took up a newspaper and read that the country residence of Sir Petronille Pawkins had been burnt to the ground and that everybody had been saved in the house except Lady Pawkins, who was believed to have returned to the Chapel to save the holy vessels. I suppose she would not yield--more power to her burnt elbows! But she must have gone to Heaven in a fiery chariot.

CANNES

Recently the most extraordinary and unexpected adventure has befallen me, which I am anxious to preserve in the form of a Short Story.

It concerns a railway accident which occurred while I was travelling through France to the Riviera. I ought to have been on the crashing train and for some strange reason I was not. The reason is really strange and remains to this day unexplained. But I have devised a possible clue to the fantastic or psychical forces which were in play and which prevented me being immolated in the catastrophe. There will appear a climax if I tell my story rightly, but I am still waiting for the _dénouement_. Roughly, this is the outline. I was summoned to an aunt’s sick-bed at Cannes and had no time to book a berth in advance. I attempted to travel in the restaurant car of an express. Friends left me at the station. Witnesses in Paris knew that I was leaving that night and, if possible, by that train. They read of the train’s crash in the papers the next morning. My name was not in the casualty list simply because I was not travelling in the train. I had deliberately changed trains for a strange reason.

This is too bad for a start, for I have been very carefully trained in the Pelman school of literature, and have subscribed to an expensive course in the Finsbury School of Practical Journalism, and have had several Short Stories corrected by a doddering ex-member of Parliament, by the writer of social snips in a Methodist weekly, and an utterly futile and yellowish novelist whose very decadence has decayed. I should have remembered that it is necessary to give no hint of a Short Story’s end, if the attention of trained readers is to be kept, and that the catastrophe should be concealed till the practised palate of the epicurean magazine-taster is prepared to assimilate it. But now I have revealed the whole skeleton outline of my Story in one nutshell paragraph. It is too bad, for the whole fact and even the mystery, such as it is, leaks out of those first sentences, and I shall have to continue with Pelmanic padding to the obvious end. However, perhaps I shall get this Story into next year’s “Collection of the Worst Stories of the Twelve-month,” which I believe are industrially collected into an annual by two Chicago professors of belles-lettres and added to that invaluable transatlantic series “What Not To Read.”

But I have a Story to tell, and with the help of a little volume entitled “Short Story Writing for Profit,” by Michael Joseph, which has fallen into my hands, I shall essay to tell it. His entertaining little plan informs me that the theory of the Short Story may be likened to the shape of a triangle--a long base, one long side, and a short drop. I must keep this in mind, especially as my story conveys an illusion of the human triangle. Let me at least preserve that triangular form which is essential to the modern Short Story.

I therefore set out to draw _A--C_, _Base of characters_, as per plan, with _A--B_, _Incidents leading to the Catastrophe_, and _C--B_ the _Climax_, with _B_ for _Catastrophe_. I have a feeling that with such clear indications I cannot fail. My real difficulty is that I have to adapt a true story to the Procrustean bed of fiction. I learn I have got to provide a Title (done), an Opening (I am opening as I write), the Body of the Story, and the Catastrophe upon Climax, and if possible, but this is not essential, a _dénouement_.

The Opening is in the Gare de Lyon, which I reach about half-past seven on a Sunday night on my way to the Riviera. I am not travelling for pleasure, but in response to a summons to fetch my dear and favourite aunt, who has been very fashionably ill at Cannes in company with some of the best-known names in English Provincial Society. This year anybody who counts in Leeds would cease to count in Leeds had they not been numbered on a Riviera hotel register. The _salons_ of Liverpool, the wit of Glasgow, and the beauty of Hull, Halifax and Huddersfield have been emptied along the Garden of the Riviera like a rich manure. Even poor old London, which since the war has been outmonied and outclassed by the manufacturing cities of the North, contributed its little quota of idle poor. My dear aunt went for her health, and I went because I am in her Will. I had got as far as the Gare de Lyon in my Story.

I do not feel like filling out _A--C_ with characterisations of either my aunt or myself, so I will proceed to _A--B_ (Incidents leading to the Catastrophe). The first incident lies in the fact that I can never pass through the Gare de Lyon without a very vivid thought passing through my mind. Thirty years ago (this dislocation of time is against all the Short Story rules, but it is essential), this aunt of mine stood in the Gare de Lyon and suddenly she saw a man running across the platform, followed by another. He had the misfortune to trip and fall, whereupon, to her horror, the other drew a revolver and shot him not once, but many times, until the police removed him and his victim. It was a crime of passion committed by a jealous husband on his wife’s lover. As everything had been done on all sides of the triangle, nobody had anything to say, and the drama was soon forgotten in the thousand and ten more dramatic incidents of the Paris phantasmagoria. But my aunt never forgot, and years later, when I was a small boy in Paris, she showed me the scene of the murder and recounted the details. It was the only murder she had ever seen, and the only one I had heard at first hand, so it remained in my mind as fresh as blood. Every time I crossed the Gare de Lyon, travelling South, it returned to my memory with renewed force. And though I was in a special hurry, and in a state of real agitation owing to the telegrams I had received from Cannes, I halted at the fatal spot and remembered, as it were throwing myself back in time and out of circumstantial focus. I enjoyed the curious feeling that possibly I was the only person alive who knew exactly what had happened there on that tragic day. It was part of my personal tradition.

This murder is an Incident, not the Catastrophe in my story, which I am still labouring to tell with such sanity and sincerity as my reader will allow me. Friends in Paris sent me in their car to catch the 8.10 _Rapide_. I had not reserved a sleeping place because the train accommodation was filled for weeks in advance. I gave a voluble porter ten francs, and explained that it was a case of necessity and that I must reach Cannes the next day, as my aunt was ill; that I was prepared to travel in the restaurant car the whole way, or even in the baggage van. I only carried hand luggage, and while the porter was making my arrangements I walked down the platform to loosen my leg joints before what promised to be a night of cramp. The porter rejoined me beaming, and assured me that he had arranged everything by himself, that my bag was in the restaurant and that I would find a seat in the corridor, when I suddenly noticed a passenger on the platform far more hurried and agitated than I was. She walked up the train, peering with quick movements of her neck into every carriage, but in vain. Then she remained standing at one of the wrought-iron pillars that sustain the roof, looking like the veritable picture of despair. The train was late going out (half an hour of delay, the porter told me), so I felt tempted to walk past her, and to my surprise found her large, glassy eyes fixed full upon mine. I continued ten yards and swung round. She was still there, and her eyes were still riveting mine. I passed her not twice but half a dozen times, and each time her eyes fixed, absorbed, hypnotised and terrified me. They were not the eyes of a woman, who queries and accosts men in streets and railway stations, the glittering and questingly plunderous eyes, nor the brilliantly attractive orbs of the adventuress. Nor were they the eyes of the widow and the mourner, those gushing fountains of violet salts and pathetic brine. Tragic they were and haunting, restless and insatiable, searchful and despairing. I felt quite unable to take my place in the train, and continued walking up and down the platform, and each time I received her eyes full into mine. It was naturally not for me to speak, but I gave her every chance, and emboldened by her piercing glance which shot pity, fear, pain, peril, I bent my head towards her until our eyes cannot have been more than six inches apart. Then I heard her saying simply, “_Changez! il faut changer de train. Dites lui de changer de train._” I was so troubled that I could make no reply. I passed her once again, and she said again, “_Il faut changer de train._” When I looked back she had disappeared, and the signal was being made for the train to start. But her eyes had not gone out of mine, and I could still know them anywhere if ever I saw them again. They were wonderful and wistful eyes, and a little terrible. They never blinked or flinched or flickered. But what struck me most, apart from their undeviating stare of agony and terror, was that they were perfectly dry--the dry stare of the dead. I felt their presence even more after their owner had disappeared into the rush and crush of the station. I no longer felt like a real person, but as though I were watching myself in a dream, and I did the absurd sort of things that one does in dreams. I obeyed her entreaty to change trains without questioning whether it was intended for me. I snatched my bag and threw myself upon my surprised porter. He thought I had decided not to travel at all, and could not understand me when I gave him another ten francs and asked him to find me another train, presumably in the same direction! There was a slow train in the parallel siding already crowded and almost overfilled. Before he had found me a fresh seat, the _Rapide_ was passing out of the station. I turned and watched the slow, soundless egress of the train I should have occupied. I did feel a fool, but again the dream-sense overcame me, and I looked with a curious intense feeling into every face I could sight in the disappearing carriages. One man was looking out of the window. Was he the object of that woman’s wild search and agony? Another was preparing to undress. Groups were settling down for the night. The restaurant car was empty, but the white-capped _chef_ was busy in his tiny kitchen. It all passed through my sense of vision like a phantom. The porter touched me on the shoulder and led me to the slow train. He treated me as one distracted but harmless. He placed me in a tight compartment with six others, and committed me to their charge. I remained sitting bolt upright for eighteen hours, past Dijon and Lyons; past Avignon, where the rose of dawn met us; past Arles to Marseilles, where our engine breasted the breeze of the Mediterranean and snorted with new breath into Toulon and along the Amethyst Coast to Cannes.

At Cannes I felt as though I were awaking from a dream. I struggled towards the hotel, where my convalescent aunt had been hanging irresolute between life and death, and was now sufficiently well to decide between two exquisite hats--one from Paris and another bought in Cannes. Fortunately a friend in need had nursed her through the crisis of pneumonia, and recovery was now a question of days. It was Martha MacArthur, one of the world’s delectables. At my aunt’s bedside I apologised for missing the _Rapide_ and arriving so late. Martha started. “Missed it? Why, the _Rapide_ crashed last night, with great loss of life!” As my aunt had just escaped from the jaws of germigerous death, it was perhaps not the moment to acquaint her with my even more astounding survival, but I felt an overwhelming desire to ask Martha why I was alive. Mr. Joseph, in his “Short Story Writing for Profit” remarks on page 118 that “certain names have a strong suggestion of character about them. Martha suggests the dutiful housewife; Dolly, Betty or Kitty the rather frivolous young lady.” According to the rules I should have never introduced the name of Martha into this Story, especially as Martha presented the very opposite of the dutiful housewife as she slung me in her Rolls-Royce through the narrow streets of Cannes, leaving perilously minute margins between her wheels and trembling human obstacles. But Martha is one of the protected. Her golf is Paradisal, her card play diabolical--I can speak from experience. On our way to the Casino at Cannes--which is the great caravanserai of the loose, losing and lost, I ventured at last to ask her why I was alive. She took it as a reflection on her driving! Before I could tell her my Story, we had entered the great Casino--which seems built of dissected strata of coloured ice-cream; with great plate-windows framing pictures of the Mediterranean, and electric chandeliers hanging over potted palm trees like bunches of horrible glassy dates--and under an enormous Chinese black and white lantern I unfolded my tale. It was so strange, telling a ghostly yarn in that heated atmosphere to Martha, who sat like a frond of Swiss edelweiss, cool and white and natural in that huge orchidaceous hot-house, where monstrous flowers of the Venus Fly Trap variety swayed to and fro in the scented air, seeking whom they might conveniently suck--those flowers to whom champagne and shampoo mean more than the daily dews and brushing breeze of heaven. For a moment I imbibed my surroundings. I felt brought down to the real earth; and a drink-soaked and perfumed earth. There was nothing ghostly or dreamy within those walls. I told my weird yarn against a strongly contrasting background.

Martha said nothing beyond tossing her multiwaved head of newly-hatched canary fluff into the air. I asked her again, at the end as at the beginning of my Story, why I was alive. Martha accepted and considered my story. Then she said that I must have been attuned to see what was probably invisible to others in the station. Had I ever seen the face in the vision before? she asked. No! Did it seek to attract any beside myself? I could not say. Possibly, in spite of the individual fascination it concentrated on myself. Did I look for the face on the train I took? Yes, I searched the train at Marseilles and again at Cannes, but I had seen nothing. Martha’s little oval face became Buddhistic with wisdom, and she said: “There must be a reason. There must be a hidden law. Rhythm is the secret law of life. My golf is rhythm. My dancing is rhythm. That’s why I won’t dance with you. My card play is rhythm. That’s why you can’t play with me. My Rolls-Royce is rhythm.” I shivered at this particular memory. “You must have been in spirit-rhythm with some soul trying to communicate with another passenger, perhaps the wife of one of those killed or injured, or the mother. A psychological communication cord was pulled. That was all.”

I felt that I had been very lucky in noticing that cord being pulled. I grew calmer and less exalted. The tables in the Casino were filling with visitors. All the unmentionable and all the most-mentioned people were crowding and jostling together. An Indian Prince entered with his white wife, followed by her white lover, which looked like one of Buchanan’s artistic “Black and White” Whisky advertisements. A lady suddenly became lit with the vapours of wine, and began clapping a broad-backed English Peer between his startled shoulders. Almost at the next table to Martha was Monsieur Lazarus (of Paris). It was almost a Scriptural touch. All the lights of Leeds and the bloods of Birmingham were marshalling in that delightful atmosphere where baccarat is not a sin and Sin itself is but a baccarat. English people had thrown off their national hypocrisy for once. The doors revolved, and I noticed Mrs. Grundy herself enter in company with a courtesan to whom she had kindly given a lift, and who was gracefully lighting a cigarette for her in return. They were all there--the _demi-mondaines_, the half-world watching for gentlemen half-seas over to rifle. They were of all sizes, from the Brighton flapper to the Double Dutch. But they gave Leeds and Birmingham something appreciable to see and speak about and even to handle.

We rose and wandered into the inner gambling hall, where the tables were arranged according to prices. At the high table, roped and guarded by attendants, some of the great intellects of Europe played baccarat for huge stakes--thousands and tens of thousands of francs. The shoe of cards was passing. There was an English Marchioness looking like the last rose of last summer as the French bank-notes dropped like faded pink petals from her fingers. There was a gorgeously-dressed pickpocket, who still spied sentimentally for international service and patriotically relieved stray Englishmen of their francs. There was an exiled King playing for his hotel bill. There was a Bond Street jeweller fleecing the clients he overcharged at home. There was a green Egyptian Prince trying furtively to pick up a little cash with one hand and royal honours with the other. He was financed by an American Lady who liked sharing in the pseudo-curtsies he extracted from the gullible. There was a transatlantic widow in hooded black, whose face of suppressed fury when she lost money made the humanitarian glad that there were no husbands left to her reproach. And there was a beautiful Italian Countess, whose favours inclined to the most substantial winner at the tables. She at least must have had a human heart. But it takes women with hearts and men with intellect to play baccarat. One felt sorry that the love and council-chambers of the world were even temporarily deprived of so much. The shoe of cards was passing, and the notes were passing into the maw of the Casino, the little insatiable slit, which takes a tithe on all gains and on all losses. I was fascinated watching the croupiers, men like dead, dissected fish, whisk the cards and bank-notes about with their long, thin shovels of pearwood, which moved as quickly as the dorsal fins of sharks basking on a sea of green baize. And the evening was passing into night, and night into dawn.

Martha continued to explain her Gospel of Rhythm. Luck at the tables was rhythm, she said, and when one was out of luck, it meant that one was simply out of tune or accord with some subtlety of rhythm. My escape from the doomed train had been due to some rhythm into which I had strayed with the receptive note uppermost. Luck and rhythm were the same things. Then she asked me what I had been thinking of when I came to the Gare de Lyon. And I suddenly remembered the murder that always crossed my mind there and there only. I told her the story of the murder that my aunt had once seen, and had passed so vividly into my mind. “Exactly,” said Martha. “That accounts for it all. You must have seen the wife trying to warn her lover that her husband was on his tracks, and the astral reflection of her agony to get him to change trains was projected into your mind rhythmically.”

It sounded a good solution. I could imagine it all: the secret visit and departure; the discovery by the husband of the hour of the lover’s train; his pursuit with a revolver, while the agonised wife made an equally desperate attempt to warn the other first; her failure to warn her lover; the husband’s successful search and then the drama of blood. I suppose I had put myself into the mood to see her unhappy and disembodied soul, which is for ever doomed to scour that platform on a vain quest. Her words had accorded miraculously with my fate. Luck and rhythm, then, were the same. And that’s my Story, though I have not kept the rules of short story telling. What I have written down is true in the essentials. If you want to know how true it is exactly, ask Martha MacArthur!

THE NECROPHILE

The most extraordinary story I ever heard in my life came from the mouth of a priest. It came quite unsought, for I was making a silent retreat in a Carthusian monastery. It was likewise unexpected, for I had gone to rest, not to rack, my mind. The rule of Saint Bruno enforces a cessation of sound. And the Great Silence from vespers to midday had rolled over the wearied souls in the guest house twice: silence unbroken save by the solemn and rugged chant of the monks; real chant and real monks. The surreptitious aid of organ pipes was unknown in the Carthusian service. The roaring and wheezing of compressed air through leaden guts and wooden tripery, however harmonious and tuneful, had never been thought necessary in the Carthusian scheme for bringing Multiplicity back to Unity, Created to their Creator and contemplatives into that glowing orb of essential Contemplation which is God. Supremely and serenely God contemplates, and the holy contemplatives on earth enter His thoughts and His contemplation. And they contemplate Him in return. If it were not so, how else could they endure that appalling life of solitude, mewed in little prisons, toiling in lonely workshops and solitary gardens, or, after rising to chant the sublime office at midnight, returning to snatch a few hours of slumber, before dawn recalls them to the choir and the Carthusian Mass. For, steeped in the thirteenth century, they keep the ceremonies and liturgy of their religion before it was demediævalised and emasculated by the Renaissance. So delightfully do the Carthusians remain in their own century that they still prostrate themselves flat at the Confiteor, and wear stockings cut out of two pieces of linen and spliced together! Knitting-needles would be heresy, and a sewing-machine modernism! It is so throughout their rules and customs, which leave them with the proud boast shared by no other Order. Never reformed because never deformed. _Numquam reformata quia numquam deformata!_

We were a little wearied, for we had been listening to the great Office of Matins chanted from midnight until two in the morning. Ensconced in the hanging gallery, buried behind the huge printed prayer books of the Carthusian rite, we had sat, letting the rival delights of slumber and plain-chant dispute for our senses. At times it was like being carried out to sea upon successive waves that choked one’s ear-drums. At another time one felt sinking, sinking into the dull, matted vibrations that eternally reach the ocean depths from above. Then the sound had died down, and each holy father, wearing the ghostly white shroud in which he will one day be buried, picked up his lantern and made his way back through unending cloister to the cell in which he circumvents death with pious irony. Death and the devil are put to considerable mock in a Carthusian house. Death causes no alarm, no terror. All his tricks, all his stage-effects have been put into daily practice by the Religious. The utter loneliness that cuts off the soul from the whole human family, the secretion behind narrow stone walls, the white funeral clothes, the silence that forbids all the hum and humours and humdrum of noisy, gossipy human life, reduce Death himself to parody. And then? And then they see intellectually, that is to say they contemplate while yet alive what the dead see to their exquisite joy or lingering loss.

The guests were the usual habitants of monastery guest-houses. A poet, who had failed of attaining perfect sonnet-form first on cocoa at Oxford, and on cocaine subsequently in Paris. He was thinking, in some despair, of joining the Holy Church. An architect successful enough in his line, and with a rare knowledge of Gothic, but superficially and glitteringly, for he was an atheist, and none can have real knowledge of the Gothic grandeur without acknowledging the true religion and the true God. God, shall we say? built the vault of Heaven, and strewed the gargoyles of the constellations across its symmetry. Mediæval man built the Gothic Cathedral in reply, and God saw that it was good. God poised the planets in space to show what could be done without actually breaking eggs, and man riposted with the flying buttress, that marvellous hanging miracle of thrust and strain riveted into immobility, and man showed God that he, too, could suspend stone in the void. And again God perceived, almost to His delighted embarrassment, that it was good.

None of us could understand how a Gothic architect could remain an atheist. Once the Divine in man, that is to say his art, is realised, it is only a step to the Divinity. There was also a Monsignor, an Austrian and a mild-faced mystery. It was not until the end of the retreat that we learnt a little of his identity. We were committed on our honour to silence except during the hour of recreation, when we moved round a high-walled garden, wondering desperately what things were happening on the highway the other side--that is to say in the world.

There were monks in the Monastery who had not seen a newspaper for thirty years, and even happy ones to whom woman was an extinct animal. A silent laybrother served our meals with shaven head and untrimmed beard, looking like the shrouded figure of Time himself. After each meal I expected him to leave a running hour glass on the table instead of the cheese, and point toward it with bony fingers as though to suggest that the course of our life was also finished. The strain of silence was having its effect, and on the last day of the retreat we became more and more communicative during the hour of recreation.

I told some very dull and uninspiring tale. I suffer from normality, and my life is inclined to convention. The architect, while redoubling his artistic appreciation of the Carthusian life, repeated his atheistic ultimates toward life. He gave the rather absurd reason for his attitude that he had been always disappointed by women. Who hasn’t, including the Saints? I could not help retailing him a newspaper poster I had once read in America which ran: “MAN TWICE DIVORCED REFUSES TO BELIEVE IN GOD!” We all laughed, and the Monsignor began disclosing his past. As we had expected, he had incurred some kind of disgrace in his own country. He was not a fallen priest, but a Prelate on the shelf. It was not owing to any scandal, he explained, and we believed him, but owing to his intellectual backsliding that he had missed his ecclesiastical career. Modernism had fired him with its bright Will-o’-the-wisp, and he had not remained unsinged. However, he had been permitted to retain priestly rank and dress, and to travel on his own means. He was visiting the English cathedrals (an American rather than a Christian form of pilgrimage) and had been so shocked by their ghastly and sepulchral interiors that he had fled to the Carthusians as he said to seek a little oil for his creaking soul. The actual services he had seen had filled him with depression. As he expressed it himself they reminded him of the facetiousness of undertakers! Better he thought that the cathedrals had been destroyed than made ridiculous. His was the true Catholic spirit.

He never forgot the holy office which was his, and made a serious attempt to supplement the silent efforts of the Carthusians in converting the architect. On our last evening of recreation we agreed to make a concerted assault on our companion. We found that his atheism was not based on any pose of disbelief, but on a total inability to understand how a human body could rise formally and substantially from the dead. “I don’t see why spirits shouldn’t survive like sheets of luminous paint, but as for atoms rearranging their constituency in a human body it is impossible,” he argued. “Annihilation seems far more logical and probable, and proper after death.”

“Nevertheless,” said the Monsignor, “we believe in the resurrection of the body from the dead.” And he proceeded to the theories of scholastics. “You must understand that the body like the soul is created not generated by the Creator. Creation is a more perfect and sublimer act than generation. Soul and body are both called out of the misty void, out of space, out of nothing, and therefore both are capable of passing into complete abeyance again. The Creator can uncreate and then recreate. The resurrection of the body is a form of recreation. But He Himself will not annihilate an atom of His own work.”

The architect returned to the charge: “The atoms of a dead human body pass into other bodies. Whose body shall they be on the Day of Resurrection?” The reply was that Unity could bring about Multiplicity, and just as the multiplication of the loaves was a scriptural miracle, and the multiplication of the Host a constant occurrence in missionary history, it was possible that atoms could be multiplied to serve their different turns so to speak.

“Can God unmake? Can He annihilate the dust He has created?” asked the architect. “No!” said the Monsignor, for they had settled down to a duel, “but God is the cause of energy as the sun is of colour, and as the sun can equally cause colour to rise or fade, so God can cause energy and existence to come or collapse out of the atoms. That is death! But the sun can one day recolour those identical atoms in other leaves. The atoms can be the same, so that you really get a resurrection of the body of the leaf. The human body can be similarly restored.” Somehow it did not convince.

“What age will our bodies be when they rise again?” asked the architect. “We shall be outside of Time and therefore quite ageless. God is not a source or a sequence, but the primal power. He is the Motor causing all motion. Our bodies are emanations from Him, and He can cause or uncause them voluntarily.”

The conversation was only prevented from becoming quarrelsome by the difficulty both combatants felt in wielding metaphysical terms. They disagreed as to what atoms were, as to whether the divine power showed itself in a materialistic manipulation of things or in a kind of cosmic mania. The architect was at one time willing to admit the personality of God, but only on the corollary that God was mad. It explained so much, the crinks in the universe, the genius of man, the brilliance of the stars, the comets tearing out of place. The madness of God was of course a divine madness. “Yes,” said the Monsignor very solemnly. “Bethlehem was madness, Nazareth was paranoia, and Calvary delirium.”

From the metaphysical the discussion became biological. The architect admitted that fresh bouts of the life-spirit could reanimate dead matter, but not the same set of atoms. Once dead, nothing could revive a dead anatomy. Could the Monsignor record a single instance except the legendary tale of Lazarus, who was probably in a state of coma, and whose personal experiences by some extraordinary oversight on the part of the Evangelists had been withheld from the human race?

The Monsignor became angry and took his challenge. “I believe it is quite possible,” he said, “for the life-spirit to be restored to a dead body long after physical death has occurred. I will tell you a story for which I have the evidence. I shall make a series of positive statements and leave it as such. The circumstances are morbid in the extreme, but you will excuse my narration of them. I have never breathed this story before, but I consider that I am justified if I can at least refute your statement that the dead rise up never. I say they do. I can give an instance which was not coma. Life can go, and life can be reinfused.

“When I was a young priest in Vienna, before my rise to favour at Court, I was, in addition to my parish duties, detailed for work at the Morgue. I waited there three nights every week to receive the unknown dead, and to give them the benefit of a religious reception. Some of the dead were recognised, and a few were claimed. Relatives were grateful for such Catholic rites as I could give to those, who had generally died without Absolution or Sacrament. I loved saying Mass for the Unknown dead lying in the Morgue, not knowing their names or their lives. The Church is the Mother not only of the living, but also of the dead, and her arms are strong to stretch down even into the pit. How surprised some of these stray souls must have been to find the Church, which they had forgotten on earth, following them with charitable hands into the other world. I was stationed for two years at the Morgue.

“One day the police brought an unclaimed body and left it upon a marble slab. It was that of a woman still in her beauty, and not more than thirty years of age. I could see that she had been a woman of pleasure, though, as is often the case, the extreme sadness of her face counteracted the dis-sanctification of her body. Poor child! The Morgue was seldom without one of her unclassed class. I could say Mass for her which I could not for the suicides. The suicides the Church leaves to God. He alone can say the Office of the Dead for those who have destroyed the life which He gave to them, and which He alone has the right to take.

“It happened that evening that the Commissioner of Police brought an anonymous party apparently of relations to view the tragic human relics in the Morgue. One of them appeared to be of rank, for the Commissioner saluted him at every opportunity. They remained some time in front of the woman’s body admiring the great beauty of her features and inquiring her name. Though the records were examined, nothing definite could be learned except that she was a courtesan, who had had the misfortune to die during an evening party in the house of a gentleman, who preferred to remain unnamed. His doctor had brought the body and filled the necessary certificates, and the great gentleman, at whose expenses she had perished, had sent a hundred kronen to provide her funeral. It was understood that she had no family. In his anxiety to learn her history the distinguished stranger asked for me to be presented to him, and I found myself shaking the hand of a Duke, connected with one of the German Royal Houses. When I was unable to add to his information, he turned from me with wandering eyes and an expression which to me seemed bordering on dementia. Curiously enough he congratulated me on my good fortune in being chaplain at the Morgue, but this I took for an excess of politeness on his part. It was not considered a very high ecclesiastical position. He was closeted for some time with the Commissioner and drove away.

“Later that night I was summoned to attend a dying man, who died before I could do more than hear his confession. He was friendless, and his body was taken to the Morgue. I followed. It was a late hour, and I decided to finish reading my Breviary in the Secretary’s room. While seated there, I was astonished to hear footsteps in the inner hall, where the unclaimed dead were thrown on marble slabs. A shadow was cast against the frosted-glass partition, and it was followed by another. I stood involuntarily in the doorway. To my amazement it was the Commissioner, who was again taking the Duke round the grim contents of the room. I could not help overhearing them, and what I did not overhear my horrified senses supplied. There are things that one has read in books about sick souls or demented bodies, that I had never dreamed of meeting. How can I explain?

“To forestall my story, the Duke I could realise was deeply afflicted mentally, I do not say morally, for he was not responsible. It was not hereditary but accidental. I learnt all this some time after. I must explain that he had had a terrible experience at marriage. After a passionate and romantic courtship his young wife had died of heart failure in his arms a few hours after the ceremony. The marriage night had become a watch night of the dead, during which he had passed a ghastly vigil instead of enjoying an efflorescence of happiness. In answer to his entreaties he had been left alone with the body of his wife that night. His groans and prayers were heard until a late hour....

“The effect on the unhappy Duke was serious. His character, hitherto, had been irreproachable, and his experiences in love matters exceeding slight, considering the opportunities possible to his rank and fortune. It was a stroke of incredibly bitter irony, which I should hesitate to lay at the door of a benevolent Providence, that his marriage night should have been of such horror. His bride was buried, but the effect on the white tablets of his mind was lasting. To a large extent he became a recluse, avoiding society, and more especially all the gay world of women and wives and half-women and half-wives, who present such an alarming phase of modern civilisation. Unfortunately his loneliness was obsessed by one very gruesome but innocent form of sentiment. He only fell in love with the dead, in whom he ocularly memorised the last vision of his wife. There was no carnal wickedness on his part, for he showed signs of a diabolical possession, that is of not being his own possessor, and of indulging in uncanny and fantastic wishes, which in his saner moments he would never have tolerated. His friends proposed that he should be solemnly exorcised by the Church, but his Confessor was nervous, and the modern Cardinal Archbishop would never give his consent to anything so mediæval. In the Middle Ages of course the most solemn and terrifying of rites would have been performed, and I have no doubt that the poor Duke was actually possessed by an unhappy demon--explain his malady how you will. He was unable to resist this terrible instinct, this love of watching women who were newly dead. I suppose it could be explained. The supreme anguish and the supreme joy of his life had come to him on the same day, and he had mingled them in the one night until agony and ecstasy, delight and grief, life and death must have become indistinguishable. But the result had been distressing in the extreme, and from time to time the mad Duke emerged from gloomy solitude to satisfy his widowed eyes. The police had orders, certainly not to facilitate his sepulchral amours, but not to prevent him, for the doctors when consulted agreed that if he were thwarted he would become dangerous. As it was, he was studiously observant of the natural rights and feelings of the living, and though when his secret agents heard of the death of a beautiful woman they instantly visited the next of kin, he never pressed his suit except with the most pathetic delicacy. In the cases when through poverty or even through a curious form of snobbery (for with some folk snobbery is stronger than reverence or death) he was permitted to see the corpse, he always insisted on defraying the eventual expenses of the funeral and, when the relatives allowed, of appearing at the grave side of the object of his momentary affection. There is no human law which forbids a man to love a corpse, provided the dead body is not desecrated, and receives proper burial within the number of ordained days. And the Duke was careful almost to the verge of scruple on this point. However morbid this habit might be considered, it was overlooked under two heads. There was the fact that the Duke’s aberration caused no unhappiness to anyone except himself, and secondly that he suffered the most agonising remorse and shame between each outbreak of his singular passion for still life. The leading pathologists declared that it was a very exceptional case.

“In any case the Duke was not interrupted in his Platonic love affairs with Hades, though, poor man, I remember his pathetic grief, which could be charitably construed into a madman’s ideas of being faithful to a dead woman.

“However, I learnt all this long after that evening which was to have such a curious effect on my subsequent life, the evening of the Duke’s visit to the Morgue, a visit as I then imagined out of ordinary curiosity. As I previously mentioned, I had returned late that night to dispose of the friendless man, whose soul I had previously guided as well as I could into the shadows of the other world. I was reading the last words of my Breviary by the flickering gaslight, when suddenly shadows passed the frosted glass, and to my horror I heard the Duke making arrangements for the temporary watching of the beautiful woman I had already seen him cover with piteous eyes. I gathered that it was not considered discreet, and would entail a licence from the police, to remove the body from the Morgue to his private house. So saying, they both entered where I was standing. It was one of the most embarrassing moments of my life. The Duke turned as pale as one of the marble mortuary slabs, and the Commissioner actually seized me as though to prevent my escape. When they realised that I was a priest, they seemed relieved, for a priest becomes so used to the seal imposed upon the confessional that even secrets which come to him in other ways join that silence of the grave. They both read what came in my face, and without a word nodded to each other, and passed on their way. I finished writing the formularies descriptive of my unknown client, and left him lying with the others. I noticed that he was on the next slab to the mysterious woman. It was beyond human nature for me to refrain from glancing a second time at her features. They were beautiful with the pallid unreality of the sculptor’s art. I have observed that if the sculptor attains the slightest line of beauty or personality in his art, it is far more wonderful than the painter’s. It is more difficult to raise life out of the marble depths than upon the surface of canvas or paint. But to leave by brush or chisel any idea of the life that has recently left the countenance is the most difficult. And this lovely model from the Divine sculptor conveyed that haunting expression which sometimes the mediæval tombs possessed, as though life lingered in death. How can I describe it? If you have ever seen a fort or town which has been surrendered to the enemy, there is a moment of tremendous pathos after the flag has been lowered and the garrison withdrawn, before the enemy have taken possession. The prize lies like the body of Patroclus between contending rivals. So, I may say, lay the body of this beautiful woman, over whom life and death had contended, and now that the colours of life had been lowered she lay awaiting the legions of death and corruption. I turned away, making the Sign of the Cross, and said the _De Profundis_ for the absent soul. It was well that it had passed from its hostel’s desecration. The next morning the body was gone. And then the weeks and the months passed.... I was agreeably surprised that winter to be summoned by my Bishop, and told that the moment of my promotion had arrived. I was to be sent to a fashionable parish, where I would find more leisure to continue my taste for historical studies, which the Bishop was gracious enough to say had met his attention when inspecting the Seminary. He wished me to leave my curacy, and with it those unhealthy but rather fascinating duties at the Morgue, while another priest took my place. I bowed to the Bishop’s decision, and kissed his ring. As I rose to leave his anticamera he mentioned without a trace of inner meaning, as though he were saying the most natural thing in the world, ‘You owe your promotion to the kind offices of the Duke.’ To my amazement he mentioned the name of the Duke I had reason to remember under ineffaceable circumstances. The Bishop looked at me with the gentle wondering look as though to say: ‘Go in peace, my son, your career is made. You know how to keep secrets. To those who can keep the secrets of humanity or of the Church all things will come.’ At least this came into a mind, alert to guess the reasons of the Duke’s action in my favour.

“I found my new position delightful--new interests, new ecclesiastical visions, new friends. My confessional was thronged, which is always pleasing to a young priest. When one becomes older, one’s professional vanity can be adequately satisfied by shriving one old washerwoman _per diem_. One day the confessional bell rang out of my usual hours. I descended into the Church and a woman heavily veiled began telling me the history of her life. As a good confessor, I forget all she said. It is a blank, but I can say that the sweat poured down my face before I left my seat. She joined me in the sacristy as she wished to speak to me of other matters, and once outside the sacred seal my memory of course returns. I recall that she was anxious for me to arrange her private wedding. She wished to be married at the dead of night, and my name had been mentioned as the only one fit and willing to perform the ceremony. I replied that I could do nothing without my Bishop’s consent, but that I would take him the particulars immediately, if she would leave me her name and address. She replied that that she could not, but a carriage would come to fetch me that night to perform the ceremony, which would take place in a private house. So saying she laid the marriage fees on the table, and without letting me look through her veil handed me a letter from her bosom, which she requested me to give the Bishop. Then she withdrew.

“That afternoon I called on the Bishop without giving notice, and to my surprise was admitted immediately. He listened quietly to my request, which I never dreamed for a moment he would permit, but I gave him the lady’s letter. He glanced at the contents as though he knew it all in advance. Without a trace of surprise or reflection in his eyes he nodded and told me to perform the ceremony that night if I was sent for. I gasped something about papers and ecclesiastical authorisation. He forestalled me with a packet of papers, bidding me fill all the particulars except the names of those about to be married. He ordered me under severe penalties to bring back the papers without attempting to read the signatures. He himself would fill in the names in the body of the document. I respectfully withdrew, and waited in my rooms that evening with some of the trepidation that I can imagine a girl feeling while waiting for her first romance.

“After a solitary dinner I waited and waited. I finished reading my Office for the day, and still sat waiting. I was too excited to pray, too curious to meditate, too tired to read any book of piety. I waited from nine to eleven, and from eleven to half-past eleven. A bell rang and to my amazement my friend the Duke was introduced. He explained that he had come because he was not sure if I would come on such a wild goose chase, and also because it was necessary for me to come blindfolded. Under his guarantee I naturally lent myself to the adventure, and left the clergy house in a two-horsed carriage with a tight bandage round my eyes. The Duke never spoke to me, but he helped me very graciously out of the carriage, and through a courtyard, and up what seemed a very fine flight of stairs, for I quickly felt that I was treading marble, not wood.

“Then my eyes were released and I found myself standing in a long and richly curtained apartment. There were two witnesses blindfolded like myself, standing in front of an altar brought apparently out of a private chapel. Others there were none except the Duke and the lady whose confession I had heard that afternoon. The Duke then asked me to perform the marriage ceremony between them. I bowed and took up my place before the altar beside which were laid the necessary vestments. As in a dream I proceeded to recite the prayers and perform the gestures which should symbolise and solderise the mystical union of two human beings. I had reached the moment for the Duke to place the ring on the finger of the bride, when she let slip her veil, and for a minute I could neither speak nor move. I should have been prepared, but it had never crossed my mind, not even as the wildest and maddest possibility. My friends, the bride whom I was uniting in marriage with the Duke was the woman whose body I had seen laid on a marble slab at the Morgue a year previously!