Chapter I: Part IV: An Evening of the Same Day 299 (1)

_One of these stories, THE MOLE, appeared in ‘The London Mercury.’ To
the editor of this journal I tender thanks._

THE STREET OF THE EYE

THE STREET OF THE EYE

‘Stories of the supernatural,’ said Saunders, ‘serve at least one useful purpose: they test a man’s intellectual capacity. Not a very sure test, you may say; but for purposes of rough classification it is sure enough. Incertitude, a sense of imminent surprise, is after all the very salt of life. Denounce the habit of classification as bitterly as you like--and I know well the intellectual perils that attend it--it is none the less true that we do, when we meet a man, like to be able to place him, roughly, in this category or that. And most men, by the way, submit to the process very meekly. You subtle folk’--here Saunders bowed to me in genial irony--‘in attributing to the mass of mankind your own mental complexity flatter them grossly. I have heard you yourself discourse on the folly of the old religious psychology which divided mankind, arbitrarily, into sheep and goats. As philosophy, of course, it is nonsense, and the fathers of the church must have known that as well as you and I do; but as a formula for rough-and-ready justice, it serves. If you are pulling your weight in the boat you are a good man; if you are not pulling your weight you are a bad man--that is a definite and verifiable verdict based on rational calculation. The fun begins when having made our calculation, and acted on it, new factors begin to appear which knock all our arithmetic silly. But in our dealings with men how rarely, on the whole, that happens! You do not agree? Well, you are permitted to disagree so long as you believe me to be sincere in my opinion. All modern thought, I know, is moving away from my idea as fast as, according to you, it is moving away from my church; but I fancy that, in practice, the world will continue to adhere to it. If I were to say that all men are types, that would be not so much a falsehood as a wanton exaggeration of a truth. I know all that can be urged, and justly urged, against pigeon-hole classification; but what impresses and startles me is how easily the greater number of one’s fellow-creatures fit into the pigeon-holes. Unique souls, no doubt; but the human soul is a mystery which I don’t profess to understand and which you profess not to believe in. It is the ordinary workaday mentality of a man that can be labelled with some approach to accuracy. And the supernatural story, as I say, is something of a test. Tell a group of new acquaintances some fairly well authenticated ghost-story, and they will fall apart and regroup in their special classes like a company of soldiers forming up into platoons. There will be the credulous fools on the one hand, ready to believe anything without question; there will be the materialist fools on the other hand, snorting in angry contempt. Between the two--truth is generally found midway between extremes--between the two, preserving a delicate balance between scepticism and credulity, doubting the story, perhaps, but admitting the possibility, will be the wise men. I need hardly add, my dear fellow, that it is among these wise philosophers that I myself am to be found. There you have three well-defined types, and it is noteworthy that I am a bright specimen of the exemplary type. If you wish to be saved you have only to look at me and do your best.’

There was a gleam of laughter in Saunders’s kindly and humorous eyes, a gleam that seemed to apologize for having read me something in the nature of a lecture. I had just told my clerical friend that queer story of Bailey’s about James Dearth and the white horse. It had interested him, and he was far more disposed to take it seriously than I was. It started him talking about the Unseen, a hypothesis in which he has a more than professional concern, and so led him to the bundle of generalities I have just recorded. They impressed me less than Saunders’s remarks usually do, but I knew better than to interrupt him. Whatever be the truth about his theory of types, he himself is certainly a distinguished exception to the theory. One never knows where his talk will lead, and I for my part always listen in the hope that it will lead to a story. Saunders, with his penetrating vision and his unique opportunities, has seen many a naked soul, many a human creature stripped bare, by triumph or catastrophe, of the coverings that hide it from the public eye--yes, and from the eyes of intimate friends no less. He is as full of good stories as of bad sermons. And so I waited now, like a timid angler afraid even to cast in his line lest the troubling of the waters should scare the fish away.

‘The surface mind is dull enough,’ continued Saunders presently, ‘dull enough to justify a label. It is the mysterious region below consciousness, the rich, dark, infinitely fertile subsoil, that passes the wit of man to understand. For the most part, one can only reach it by vague conjecture. But sometimes, here and there, some beautiful or terrible flower shoots up from that underworld into the light of our conscious existence. As for your friend’s experiences at the farm, I think, frankly, that there was sheer devilry in it, black magic. But it isn’t always so. You remember what I told you about poor Bellingham.’

In the pause that followed, my hopes flourished exceedingly. Then I hastened to assure Saunders that he had told me precisely nothing at all about poor Bellingham, whose name I heard for the first time. And so, with a little coaxing, I got the tale from him.

1

By one of those fantastic coincidences that make life sometimes seem more artificial than fiction, as well as stranger (said Saunders), it was in a little café in Rue de l’Oeil, Marseilles, that I first noticed Bellingham. Strange that one should have to journey to the south of France to make the acquaintance of a fellow-collegian! For Bellingham, too, was a Jesus man. I had nodded to him a hundred times in the Close, walked with him once or twice for a few hundred yards, and passed him every day in the Chimney going to or from lectures; but I knew next to nothing of him. Once, I remember, we met in the rooms of some other fellow and had coffee. Furnivall was there, who afterwards made something of a hit as an actor; Dodd who got a double first in classics and then, before the results were out, accidentally drowned himself within sight of Trinity Library; Chambers who, under a Greek pseudonym, wrote donnish elderly witticisms for undergraduate journals. Looking back on that inauspicious scene I know that not one of the men I have named possessed half the spiritual force of Bellingham, and yet, had it not been for after-events, I should not now have remembered that he was there at all. He was a tall slackly-built man, rather like a black sackful of uncoordinated bones; he stooped a little, peering out at the world under long bushy eyebrows from behind a large nose. The mouth was large and loose; the cheeks sagged a trifle; the ears stuck out from the head at an angle that, if you looked twice, seemed excessive; and the hands were big and bony with long fingers that moved, sometimes, like a piece of murderous mechanism. It was as if the hands of a strangler had been grafted on to the body of a morose, ungainly saint. I do not describe him as he appeared to me in that college room: that would be impossible, for I simply didn’t observe him. He was no more to me then than an uninteresting ultra-reserved fellow-student drudging at ecclesiastical history and similar stuff. That I failed to single him out is sufficiently amazing to me now. My eyes must have been in my boots. But there it is--he made no impression on my somnolent mind. It was not, as I say, until we met again in that little café in Rue de l’Oeil that I really saw Bellingham. For the thousandth time I looked at him and for the first time I saw him. There was quite a little crowd of us: Hayter of Caius; Mulroyd with his soft voice and Irish cadences; an Oxford man whose name I’ve forgotten; and the Honourable Somebody, a mild-mannered, flaxen-haired boy, a Fabian socialist trying to live down the fact that he was the younger son of a peer. But I’m forgetting myself: these people are merely names to you, and names they must remain. The Oxonian was a chance acquaintance who had encountered our party in Paris and diffidently joined us, a charming fellow who constantly tried--only too successfully, for he remains in my memory as the vaguest phantom--to efface himself. Hayter, whose chief preoccupation, I remember, was the maturing of a new Meerschaum, played the elder brother to the flaxen-haired youngster. Mulroyd was my own particular friend, and it was he who had dragged in Bellingham, the misfit of the party. Bellingham was a curiously solitary man, a ward in Chancery or something of the kind; no one knew anything about his origin or antecedents, and he had no friends. The suspicion that he was lonely, neglected, with nowhere to spend the Long Vacation, made him irresistible to Mulroyd; and that he was conspicuously unsociable Mulroyd regarded as a clarion call of challenge to his own militant kindliness. Well, there’s a rough sketch of the crowd that gathered in that little red-tiled, black-raftered, French hostel. You must imagine us all as sitting or standing about the place, in various negligent attitudes, drinking execrable _vin rouge_, and talking of routes and train-services and the comparative merits of ales. What turned the conversation towards more ultimate matters I cannot begin to remember, but turn it did. I think it was our Oxonian who interpolated some gloomy observation that set us all thinking of a brooding, inscrutable Destiny which for ever watched, with hard unblinking eyes, our trivial conviviality, listened, with infinite indifference, to our plans of to-day and to-morrow. The remark was succeeded by a pause that was almost a collective shudder, a pause in which, as it seemed to me, we all listened fixedly to our own heart-beats ticking away the handful of moments that divided us from an unknown eternity. You know what it is to be recalled suddenly, wantonly, to a sense of the immensities, to be aware that death, an invisible presence, is in your midst, to feel his lethal breath chilling the warmth of your idle joy. Even Madeleine, the daughter of the house, who had watched us hitherto with laughter in her dark eyes, and innocent invitation on her full lips, was conscious of the abrupt change of temperature. She understood not a word of our speech, but out of the corner of my eye I saw her hand make the sign of the cross and her lips move in prayer. Hayter, shockheaded, long and oval of face, ceased fingering his pipe and seemed lost in contemplation of its mellowing colour. A wistful light shone in Mulroyd’s eyes. The Honourable Somebody--I can’t recall his name--smiled and said ‘Um.’ In that pregnant moment during which we all sat peering over the edge of the unfathomable, questioning the unresponsive darkness, that monosyllable sounded like an incantation, a word mystical and potent. As for me, I looked from one face to the other, trying to read what was written there, and so my glance fell upon Bellingham. Fell and was arrested, for the face of Bellingham was a revelation. What it revealed is difficult to describe in cold prose; a musician could better express it in some moaning, unearthly phrase of music. It was as if there shone from that face not light but darkness, and as if over that head hovered a halo of dark fear, a crown of shuddering doom. The eyes flashed darkness, I say, and yet through them, as through sinister windows, I saw for one instant into the infinite distances of the soul behind them, the unimaginable and secret world in which the real Bellingham, the Bellingham whom none of us in that room had ever seen or approached, lived his isolated life. He was leaning forward, elbows on knees, his chin propped up in those gaunt skeleton hands that were several sizes too big for him. To me, who stood facing him, the effect was incredibly bizarre: it was for all the world as though some monster whose face was hidden from me was crouching at my feet offering the truncated head of Bellingham for my acceptance. The red-knuckled fingers formed a fitting cup for the grotesque sacrifice. I put the horrible fancy behind me and sought to regain a human view of that face. Gaunt and pallid, with high cheekbones and burning eyes, it was a battle-ground of conflicting passions. But the natures and names of the passions I could only surmise. An ascetic and a voluptuary, perhaps, had fought in Bellingham, and his face was the neutral ground that their warfare had violated and laid waste. The merest conjecture, this, and it remained so, until it was proved to be false.

‘It doesn’t bear thinking of,’ remarked Hayter, ‘so it’s best to avoid the thought. The animals are better off than we, by a long chalk.’

‘There’s religion,’ said the flaxen-haired Fabian tentatively.

‘Soothing syrup,’ Hayter murmured. ‘Religion doesn’t face death: it only pretends it isn’t there. Gateway to the larger life, and all that cant.’ Hayter was a very positive young man in his way.

Mulroyd tried to banter us back into a more comfortable humour. ‘Material for a first-rate shindy there. Now then, Saunders, speak up for your cloth, my boy!’

‘I shall, when I’ve got it,’ said I. A theological student does not care to talk shop in mixed company. I was shy of posing as a preacher, and not to be drawn.

‘Well, if Saunders won’t, I will.’

The voice was harsh, and tense with emotion. It seemed to come out of the grave itself. We all stared at Bellingham, whom we had become accustomed to regard as almost incapable of contributing to a conversation. We waited. Hayter even forgot that work of chromatic art, his pipe.

‘Death waits for every man,’ said Bellingham. ‘At any moment it may engulf us.’ The triteness of the sermon was redeemed by the personality that blazed in the speaker. ‘And then....’ His voice trailed off into silence.

‘And then?’ enquired Hayter, with a politeness that I fancied covered a sneer.

‘And then,’ said the man of doom, ‘we shall find ourselves in the terrible presence of God.’

For once even the genial Mulroyd was stung to sarcasm. ‘I must say, judging from your tone, you don’t seem to relish the prospect much.’

‘Never mind what I relish,’ answered Bellingham sternly. ‘In that hour you and I will be judged. We shall be forced to look into the eye that at this moment, and always, is looking upon us.’ There was an uncomfortable silence, as well there might be. We had not reckoned upon such an explosion of evangelical fervour, and it embarrassed us as some flagrant breach of manners would have done. Perhaps, heaven help us, we regarded it as a flagrant breach of manners. Bellingham was committing the cardinal sin: he was taking something too seriously.

‘When I was a child,’ went on Bellingham, without ruth, ‘I was told the story of a prisoner condemned to solitary confinement. To this punishment was added the further horror of perpetual watching. A small hole was drilled in the cell-door through which an eye never ceased to peer at the prisoner. That was an allegory, and I have never forgotten it. Even now, you fellows, we are being watched.’

Some of us, I swear, looked round nervously, half expecting to catch sight of that vigilant eye. I, for my part, was angry. ‘That’s not an allegory, Bellingham,’ I said. ‘It’s a damned travesty. You conceive God to be a kind of Peeping Tom, with omnipotence added. I would rather be an atheist than believe that.’

‘Perhaps you would rather be an atheist,’ retorted Bellingham. ‘Perhaps I would rather be an atheist. But I can’t be. Nor can you. Did any of you notice the name of the street?’

‘Name of the street?’ echoed some one. ‘What street?’

‘This street,’ said Bellingham.

‘We’re not in a street. We’re in a café,’ said Hayter truculently. ‘At least I thought so a moment ago. I begin to fancy we must be in a mission-hall.’

At the moment no one could remember having noticed the name. ‘Well, I did notice it,’ said Bellingham. ‘It is the Street of the Eye.’

Mulroyd shrugged his shoulders, a gesture plainly disdainful of this touch of melodrama.

‘Well,’ said I, ‘what of it?’ For the fellow’s morbidity had spoiled my temper. I expected a night of bad dreams.

‘The Street of the Eye,’ repeated Bellingham. ‘We’re all in that street; every man born is in that street. And we shall never get out of it.’

I believe some of us half-suspected that the wine had gone to his head, though how such stuff could make any man tipsy was beyond understanding. He continued to irradiate gloom upon us from under his shaggy brows. Mulroyd, to create a diversion, held out his hands to Madeleine in mock appeal.

‘Du vin, mademoiselle! Nous sommes bien chagrinés.’

The girl’s eyes brightened again. At the merest hint of a renewal of gaiety she rose, radiantly, as if from the dead.

‘Let’s have some champagne,’ Mulroyd suggested, ‘to take the taste of death out of our mouths.’

‘_Carpe diem_,’ murmured Hayter. ‘Trite. But the first and last word of wisdom.’

‘You can’t escape that way,’ remarked Bellingham, sourly insistent.

But we could stand no more of Bellingham just then. Flinging courtesy to the winds we laughed and sang and shouted him down. ‘Death be damned!’ cried Mulroyd, as we clinked glasses. Never was a toast drunk with more fervour.

2

You’ll be surprised when I say that after this incident I got to know Bellingham better and to like him more. Strange as it may seem, he was not entirely without humour; and I fancied that he was the least bit ashamed of his outburst. The next day he went about like a dog in disgrace, feeling perhaps that every one disliked him. Back he went into that shell of silence from which he had only once, and with such dramatic effect, emerged. He would never, I know, have gone back on the substance of his discourse; but, as he admitted to me afterwards, he very quickly began to doubt the wisdom of his method. Fellow-undergraduates were not to be frightened into conversion by the kind of revivalist rant he had treated us to. He began to feel woefully out of place in our company. Mulroyd, good fellow though he was, could not bring himself to make any warm overtures to one whom he now regarded as a religious maniac; on the surface he was breezy and friendly enough, but in his heart he knew that Bellingham must be reckoned among his failures, one who had failed to justify his ardent faith in the latent social value of every man. The others ignored him, though not pointedly, much as they had always done. My own attitude was different. I have, as you know, an insatiable curiosity about human nature--especially freaks of human nature, I’m afraid--and Bellingham had piqued that curiosity. I had repudiated his particular version of God as being nothing but an almighty Peeping Tom, and yet a weakness for peeping is my own besetting sin. All my life I have been a kind of amateur detective of the human soul. Moreover--though I don’t stress this--I had more than a sneaking sympathy for the man. After all we had something in common, something that none of the others of our party shared with us. We were both hoping to be ordained. In spite of myself I had to admire the colossal courage of his intervention in that argument, even while I disparaged its tone. In fine, for this reason and for that, I made rather a point of cultivating Bellingham’s acquaintance from that day forth. And I had my reward. I really believe that to me he revealed a more human side of himself than anybody else ever caught sight of. Next term, back at college, he made a habit of strolling into my rooms at five minutes to ten, and very often we talked till the early hours of the morning about this and that. Sometimes he became reminiscent about his childhood. His earliest memories were of a grey suburban villa, with a black square patch in front and a black oblong patch behind, both called gardens. The square one was marked off from the road by hideous iron railings and an iron gate. Bellingham assured me that the pattern of those railings was branded on his retina; and in an unwonted lapse from literalism he declared that it was a pattern designed in hell and executed in Bedlam. ‘Wherever I see it,’ he said passionately, under the influence of nothing more potent than black coffee, ‘wherever I see it--and it is all over southeast London--I recognize the mark of the beast, the signature of an incorrigible stupidity. The very smell of those railings is noisome.’ He was like that: ever ready to see material things as symbols of the unseen, and very prone--like many religionists--to confuse the symbol with the thing symbolized. In the sheer exuberance of his passion, whether of joy or disgust, he would make some wild exaggerated statement that no one was expected to take literally; and the next moment he himself would be taking it literally. If, for example, I had suggested to him that to talk of the smell of railings was a trifle fanciful, he would have been genuinely astonished. Whenever he loved or hated, rationality went to the winds. And he seems to have hated the home of his childhood pretty completely. The back garden, where he spent a good deal of his time, figured in his talk as if it were a plague spot, an evil blot upon the earth. If one is to believe his tale, this garden was always, in season and out, full of wet flapping underclothes hanging on a line. They used to lie in wait for him, he said, and smack him in the face: it was like being embraced by a slimy fish. He was glad, however, of the clothes-line posts; he used to climb them and swing from the cross-bars, and once or twice he pulled one of these posts out of its wooden socket in the ground and stared down at the minute wriggling monsters that scuttled about in that little twilit world. Another thing that gave him pleasure was the sight of a neighbouring church, aspiring towards the sky, the throne of God. These memories may well have derived much of their colour from imagination, for both his parents died before he was ten, and he then left the suburban villa to become the ward of his uncle Joseph. Joseph Bellingham appears to have been conspicuously unfitted for the delicate task of bringing up a sensitive, solitary, and already morbid child, although not a word against him would his nephew have admitted. Justly or unjustly I was disposed to believe that this Uncle Joseph had completed the dark work begun in Bellingham by his childish solitude and loveless home. For his parents, I should have told you, were lifeless, disillusioned people. I suspect they had never been happy or passionate lovers, and that they regarded their son’s birth as one more penalty rather than as the desired fruit of their marriage. In some preposterous way (naturally Bellingham was reticent here) the man had sacrificed himself in marrying his wife--some fetish of ‘honour’ perhaps--and of course he spent the rest of his life hating her for it. This may or may not account for the fact that when I first got to know Bellingham he seemed extraordinarily insensitive, for a man of his temperament, to beauty. Not totally deficient--because even his hatred of a certain kind of iron railings implies some standard, however subconscious--but what sense of beauty he possessed had never been wakened: it manifested itself only in a series of dislikes. He had quite a devilish flair for seeing the most repulsive aspect of things. This was all in tune with his miserable theology. To the spiritual loveliness that radiates from the central figure of the New Testament--to that beacon he was as blind as he was deaf to the many golden promises of the religion of Christ. I do not mean that he swerved by a hair’s breadth from orthodoxy; I mean that there was some subtle twist in his temperament that made him accept ‘the love of God’ as a euphemism and ‘the wrath of God’ as a terrible reality. He thought more about hell than about heaven, because he had only seen beauty whereas he had _felt_ ugliness. The one was an intellectual apprehension: the other was a perpetual experience. It was evident to me, from what he did not say, that he had never known love, and I wondered what was in store for him.

But though with me he became more and more unreserved, from all other fellows of his class and education he drew farther away. There was a spiritual uncouthness in him which prevented his taking kindly to the harmless social artificialities of academic life. As I told him--and he admitted it good-humouredly--he would have been more at home as chief medicine-man to a tribe of barbarians. In some remote and savage bush his niche awaited him. Even the traditions of politeness he grew to despise. I shocked him by admitting that I myself had more than once got out of accepting an invitation to breakfast or to coffee by feigning to be engaged elsewhere. Bellingham would have said bluntly, ‘No, thanks,’ and have left it at that. Courageous, no doubt, but it did not make for easy social relations. He became more and more dissatisfied, too, with the mild fashionable Anglicanism of our dean. Of his own religion sensationalism was the life-breath; and the worship of good form, the religion of all undergraduates, was in his eyes the most dangerous idolatry. No one was surprised when, having taken his degree with the rest of us, he abruptly left the University. Instead of being ordained he became just what I had chaffingly suggested, a medicine-man to a tribe of barbarians. To be more exact, he set up as a lay-missioner near the Euston Road. He had a meagre but sufficient private income which permitted him to go his own solitary gait. And there he busied himself wrestling with the Devil for the souls of all the miscellaneous street-scum he could lay hands on. God forgive me if I have ever in my heart derided Bellingham! He had the heroism as well as the mania of a one-idea’d man. I find it hard to suppose that his converts were any the happier for having been injected with his particular virus of fear; but, as Bellingham would say, where happiness cannot be reconciled to salvation happiness must go. Go it did, I have no doubt. Fear of the policeman was displaced by a scarcely less ignoble fear of God, conceived to be another policeman on a much larger scale. If I speak bitterly, it is not in spite of my religion but because of it. Before I have finished the story you will understand that I have cause for bitterness.

We exchanged a few letters, he and I; but it was not until eighteen months later that, at his own invitation, I went to see him. ‘Saunders, I need your help,’ he said in his letter, and added something about my being his only real friend and so on. He had dismal little lodgings in a dismal little side-street the name of which I have forgotten. Bellingham himself opened the door to me. I had told him when to expect me and he must have been waiting at the window. He greeted me in a shamefaced eager fashion that touched my heart. I was astonished at the change in him: the more astonished because it was at once subtle and impossible to miss. There was a gentleness in his eyes that I had never seen there before. He was more human. He led me to his own rooms--they were at the top of a four-storied house, and looked out on a prospect of smoking chimneys--and forced me into the only comfortable chair he possessed.

I began smoking, but he denied himself that nerve-soothing indulgence. His eyes, alight with an unwonted shyness that was only half shame, avoided meeting mine. We fenced for a while, talking over our Jesus days; and all the while my mind, involuntarily, was seeking a name for something in that room that I had not expected to find. Presently Bellingham rose from his chair. It was an abrupt and surprising movement. ‘Like to see the rest of my quarters?’ he said, in a tone desperately casual. I followed him into the next room, and there, in one glance, the mystery was made clear. The bedroom was the answer to the problem of the sitting-room. What I had detected while we sat talking was domesticity, a subtle but decided fragrance of home: a certain precision in the arrangement of books and furniture. In the bedroom, with its two spotlessly white-sheeted beds and its vase of flowers standing in the centre of a miniature dressing-table, the same story was told more eloquently; there was, accentuated, aggressive, the same neatness and daintiness of effect which a contented woman instinctively imposes on her surroundings. No bachelor, however fastidious, could have achieved it. ‘Quite a jolly little place,’ I remarked, to hide my own surprise and his embarrassment. ‘Very,’ said Bellingham, and we went back to our seats by the fire.

Bellingham tried to take up the thread of our conversation where we had dropped it five minutes before. But for his own sake I cut off that line of retreat.

‘Look here, my dear fellow! You didn’t ask me over here in order to discuss our esteemed Dr. Morgan. Tell me all about it.’

Bellingham faced me squarely at last. ‘You mean my marriage?’ I nodded. ‘Well, to start with, I’m not married.’

I think he expected me to flinch at that; and perhaps my failure to do so disconcerted as well as encouraged him. I said nothing. I felt that I could do more good by listening than by talking.

‘She has been in these rooms for two months,’ said Bellingham. ‘And what you saw in there--that has existed for ten days, just ten days.’ I divined that this was his way of indicating to me the duration of his married life. ‘You see I didn’t fall at once, or easily. The Devil is always insidious, isn’t he? Saunders, that girl is a magician. Joan, her name is. She transformed this place. It’s not bad now, is it? You should have seen it before she came. And me, too--you should have seen me before she came. It’s a new life to me. I’m translated. And yet....’

‘How and where did you meet her?’

‘In the street, at the beginning of November. Her husband kicked her out. A swine he is; thank God I’ve never set eyes on him. Told her to go and sell herself, and come back with her earnings.’

There was a pause. ‘And she?’ I asked.

‘She was on the streets for five days. Yes, a prostitute for five days.’ I saw Bellingham’s face contract with pain, and I knew that something deeper than pity had been stirred in him. And so the recital went on. Bit by bit I got his story and pieced it together. He did not spare himself; but even his passion for repentance, his ingrained conviction of sin, could not persuade me that he had been guilty of a very heinous crime. He had rescued the girl, at first in sheer compassion, and cherished her as he would have cherished any other fragment of human salvage. And her presence, her pathetic prettiness and her childish need of affection, had been too much for him. In a passion of gratitude, I surmise, she had offered him, with a full heart, what she had so reluctantly sold to casual men during her five days purgatory. The appeal to his manhood was too sudden, too overwhelming, to be resisted. Beauty, seen for the first time in dazzling glory, had invaded his heart and beaten down his defences. For the first time in my experience of him there was inconsistency in Bellingham. He spoke, one minute, of his ‘fall,’ like any sour moralist; and in his very next sentence he would become almost lyrical about this ‘new life,’ this shattering apocalypse of beauty. It was as if the man had been cloven in twain and spoke with two voices. And that, I believe, is the real key to the baffling terror that was to follow.

Later in the afternoon, in time to prepare tea for us, came Joan herself, a big-eyed child in her early ’twenties, with very fair hair, like a little lost angel with a Cockney accent. The sudden fear that leaped into her eyes as she timidly greeted me would have stabbed any man’s heart. She was absurdly fragile, and I saw at once that those five evil days had been no more than a gruesome physical accident which had left her courage shaken but her innocence unimpaired. She guessed, no doubt, that we had been discussing her; and both Bellingham and I felt caddish, I dare say, when we remembered having done so. But I succeeded in winning her confidence by displaying a keen interest in her market-basket, which she carried on her arm, and in a very few moments she became garrulous about her shopping experiences, displaying a pretty pride in her purchases. They included, I remember, three dried herrings and a pound of pig’s-fry. The herrings we had for our tea, and I have never enjoyed a meal more.

In the evening, during a long walk through mean streets, Bellingham came to the point. He had said, you will remember, that he needed my help. What he wanted was no less than that I should play the part of conscience to him. I was to be instated, apparently, as his spiritual pastor. For the sake of that poor child happily darning his socks at home, I could not refuse the embarrassing honour thrust upon me. And when I learned that repentance was actually beginning to gain the upper hand of him I was glad indeed to exert any influence I possessed on the side of humanity. He had had a vile dream, he told me, and it was evident that he regarded it as a warning sent by that vigilant deity of his. In the dream his landlady, who believed him to be a legally married man, came and smiled at him over the bedrail, and wagged her head till it detached itself from the body and multiplied. The air was full of these grinning heads, poised like dragonflies, all their evil eyes on Bellingham. Terror, he told me, took concrete form inside his own head: he could hear it simmering, sizzling, gurgling, boiling, splitting; it drove him out of bed, away from Joan, and across the arid plains of hell under a sky monotonously grey except where the sun, a bloody red, like a huge socket from which the eye had been torn, stared sightlessly at him. Even as he gazed at it it filled and became menacing with the eye of God.

‘It was a vision of hell,’ Bellingham said, wiping the moisture from his brow. ‘And the eye of God was even there. O Lord, how can I escape from Thy presence!’

It did not seem to me a moment propitious for argument, so I held my peace. He talked on about his doubts and his difficulties, his sin and his repentance; and at last I gathered that I was being invited to tell him whether he should stay with Joan or leave her.

‘Oh, fling her into the streets,’ I advised him, with furious irony, ‘as her husband did.’

‘Yes,’ he said, mildly enough. ‘You’re right. Against all my religious convictions I feel you to be right. I have made her my wife, and I must be faithful to my choice, right or wrong.’

‘It’s as plain as day,’ I assured him. ‘Love and duty are pointing in the same direction for once. Why should you doubt it?’

‘You see, Saunders,’ said Bellingham, with sudden fire, ‘it’s all or nothing. She must remain my wife, or we must separate. There’s no third way. I can’t spend the rest of my life in the waters of Tantalus. I’m only a man, God help me!’

For a while we left it at that.

3

Saunders has an exasperating habit of stopping in the middle of a story, and behaving as though it were finished. He did this now. I reminded him that I was still listening.... No, I haven’t done yet, he admitted. I thought that was the end, but it was only the beginning of poor Bellingham’s troubles. You must imagine me now as popping in and out of his home pretty often. Those two remote rooms, like a fantastic nest built among London chimney-pots, attracted me by the romance they symbolized, by their air of being an idyllic peasant cottage, exquisitely clean, stuck away in the heart of the metropolis. Bellingham sent another urgent summons to me. It was the first of a series of alarms. The haunting began. The dreams that, every few nights, made Bellingham’s sleep a thing of terror began now to invade his waking life. The Watching Eye was upon him, the eye of God, he declared it to be, trying to subdue him to submission. He heard a voice that said to him, ‘Put the woman from you.’ In short, he exhibited all the signs of incipient madness. At the time I thought it was indeed madness which threatened him. With one of his frantic telegrams in my hand--‘I have seen God’ or ‘He is come again in judgment’--what else could I think? Yet I still believed that together he and I, with the courageous co-operation of Joan herself, might fend off the danger. She, poor girl, was tearful but invincibly staunch. She would have sacrificed herself utterly for him, whom she loved with an unshakable devotion; but I persuaded her that her going away, as she suggested, would not ease the situation. You will think me fanciful, no doubt, but sometimes I felt that Bellingham was fighting for his soul against some usurping demon, and that anything--death or damnation--was better than base surrender. And Bellingham, though he took a very different view of the nature of the contest, came to agree with my conclusion. He rejected my proposition but embraced the corollary. He conceived himself fighting against impossible odds, with no less than God, the Might and Majesty of the universe, as his implacable antagonist. ‘I tell you, Saunders,’ he said to me, ‘I saw Him plainly. He stood over there by my desk. He has incarnated Himself once more in order to crush my revolt.’ I passed over the almost maniacal egoism of the conception, and asked for a description of the Divine Visitor. ‘His body was all in strong shadow,’ Bellingham answered, shuddering at the recollection. ‘Only His terrible eyes were visible, and His accusing finger that pointed at me.’

I had respected Bellingham ever since I had come to know him; and now, if I respected his intelligence less, I felt something more than admiration for the indomitable spirit of the man. His unshaken belief that he was defying his Creator made fidelity to Joan a piece of titanic courage. Beset by horrors unspeakable, conscious that the citadel of his very reason was being stormed, he yet held doggedly to his determination. Doggedly at first, and afterwards with a sublime pride that I could not witness without an answering pride, a flaming exultation in the splendour of the human soul. Maniac or not, he extorted willing homage from me. You may say what you like about hallucination and the rest of it, but I tell you that to me, an eye-witness, the battle was lifted into the realm of cosmic drama where everything takes on a significance past mortal understanding but not past mortal apprehension. I thought of Job; I thought of Prometheus; and I thought of Bellingham as no mean third, championing life against death, championing youth, beauty, and all frail humanity, against the cruel bogey of the mind that menaced them. It goes without saying that his terrors derived all their power from his belief in their reality. He was blind to the plain facts of real religion, deaf to my rationalizing explanations of the horror that haunted him, obstinate in his conviction that God, and none other, was the author and agent of his persecution. Equally convinced was he that he had but to cast Joan out and he would save his soul alive. Every week saw a change in his physical condition. That brief period of his second blooming, fostered by the sweet presence and the maternal care of Joan, seemed over for ever; it was as if the seven years of spiritual famine were now to follow. He grew more gaunt, more haggard; vitality shrunk into him like a pent prisoner and peered out through those fiery orbs, his eyes, as through the mean windows of a condemned cell. He was locked fast in an impregnable isolation, from which no one could rescue him, it seemed, certainly not I, either by force or guile. He distrusted his food; he distrusted the men and women who passed him in the street. There were only two human souls he did not distrust: Joan herself was one, and I, by the mercy of heaven, was the other. He began to see a vast and sinister significance in all sorts of trivial events, all sorts of minor disasters that did not in the least concern any one of us, seeing in them the beginning of a cosmic disintegration that should engulf him in perdition. He was afraid yet defiant of these fatalities. He was both egomaniacal and illogical in his conviction that God, his implacable adversary, would behave like the veriest villain of melodrama rather than let him escape: tear the universe to tatters in order to compass the death or the dishonour of this one rebellious spirit, like a man who should pull his own house about his ears in the pursuit of a solitary rat. I myself began to scan the papers anxiously for wars and rumours of wars. Different as were our intellectual convictions, there was the stark comradeship between us of those who face death together. He watched for signs of God; Joan and I, with equal vigilance, watched him. And the stronger grew my affection for Bellingham, the shakier my own nerves became. Finally, with a kind of exultation, I threw up all my work--I was a curate at the time--and flung myself body and soul into this holy war. I found lodgings near Bellingham’s, and visited him every day without fail. I felt that this fretting, this piling of horror upon horror, could not go on much longer. Sooner or later there would be a crisis; the increasing tension would snap. Mingled with my fear for Bellingham’s sanity was a fear for the safety of Joan, caged up with a maniac. For a week or more we worried and waited.

4

The end came with a sudden and sickening rush. And yet it was an end worth waiting and working for. In the street just outside his home, Bellingham was knocked down by a passing cab. Joan saw the accident from the window. By the sheerest chance he escaped with nothing worse than bruises and flesh wounds, but his excitement and terror reached their climax as he was helped back, limp and bleeding, to his rooms. The policeman, with a kindly word, handed him over to Joan’s care. She was all for summoning a doctor, but Bellingham would not hear of it. White-faced, hiding his rising tumult behind a mask of steely calm, he told her curtly to fetch me. She obeyed, poor child, in terror of her life and his own. I was with them ten minutes later.

‘Saunders,’ he greeted me, without preamble. ‘God has flung down His last challenge.’

‘You mean this accident!’ said I, scoffing gently.

‘Accident!’ retorted Bellingham. ‘Do you, a priest of God, talk to me of accident! Not a sparrow falls without God. No, it was no accident. It was the last warning. I feel in my bones that this is the end. At any moment now He will strike, and I shall burn in hell for ever more, where their worm dieth not and the fire is not quenched.’ He had the true missioner’s flow of quotations, mostly misapplied; but I knew better than to cross him then. Something of his own passion infected me.

We were standing in the bedroom, where he was at last submitting, with the most complete indifference, to the medical ministrations of Joan. ‘Let’s go into the other room,’ I suggested, ‘and discuss this quietly and in comfort.’ I led the way, and they followed. The living-room, as I fancy they called it, was more cheerful by a long way. There was a fire in the grate, and a lamp like a great harvest moon glowed yellow on the table.

‘Listen to me, Saunders,’ cried Bellingham, refusing to sit down. ‘You are my best friend, my only friend; and Joan is my wife, the finest wife that any man had. The All-Seeing Eye is watching me now, as always; that street-accident, as you call it, was the plain speech of God telling me to desert this woman. I’m a doomed man, Saunders, and I can speak my mind now. I believe in God as firmly as ever I believed in Him, but I have learned something. He is not worth serving. I tell you, Saunders, that the God we have both worshipped is as evil as He is powerful. Almighty Evil sits upon the throne of the universe, and I will curse Him and die.’ Poor fellow, he could not believe me when I told him that it was the God in himself that was speaking those wild words, the God in himself that was fighting a heroic battle against the demon of fear that Joan by her woman’s tenderness had cast out.

There came, suddenly, a crash of something falling in one of the lower rooms of the house. It jarred our tense nerves horribly. And then, for the last time, the terror came to Bellingham, as if in answer to his taunt. He alone saw it, and you will quickly interpose that it was his mind alone that created it. And in a sense I believe you are right, but you’ll find it hard before I finish to maintain that the apparition was a purely subjective thing. Can an hallucination cause windows to rattle and doors to move? I believe for my part that in some unfathomable way the old Bellingham, or rather the riot of evil fancies about God that had victimized the old Bellingham, had woven for itself some external form. Language is crude and clumsy, crushing the truth at which it grasps; but it seems to me that in some sense--and a sense not too metaphorical--the man was, as I said before, cloven in twain, divided against himself. But your face warns me that I’m boring you.

‘There it is,’ shouted Bellingham, pointing towards a corner of the room. Joan, afraid of her lover, rushed to me, and my arms closed round her instinctively. We stared and saw nothing. ‘The same evil eyes,’ said Bellingham, more quietly, ‘the same accusing finger.’ And then began an uncanny one-sided colloquy. Bellingham conversed with his invisible mentor. ‘I will not leave her, God,’ said Bellingham. ‘I despise your dirty counsels. Kill me, damn me, burn me. Send me to hell, where I may see your hateful staring face no more.’

The windows began unaccountably to rattle. Joan clung to me, sobbing, on the verge of hysteria. Bellingham strode towards the table and with one swift gesture put out the light. ‘I am not afraid of your darkness,’ he flung out.

For a moment, silence; and a darkness made ghastly by bright moonlight. Then the windows rattled again, and then, quite without warning, Bellingham collapsed and fell against me. My body had broken his fall, and I now released Joan in order to turn my attention to her lover. The sight of him prostrate restored her to courage. She was always ready when needed. I left Bellingham to her care for a moment and turned again to that haunted corner. I have never known fear such as I knew at that moment, and yet I felt infinitely braced by the dramatic significance of this conflict with an unknown terror. It was as if hell had invaded earth, and that God had left me as His sole witness. At such crises a man with religion turns to it. Your old-fashioned agnosticism will be shocked by my method of exorcising evil.

‘In the Name of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost, I charge you to leave this man in peace!’ I made the sign of the cross.

And still I stared, and still I saw nothing. Joan was busy with Bellingham, who was beginning to shew signs of returning consciousness. I could not move my eyes away from the corner by the door. And while I stared, something at last happened. Thank Heaven that I alone saw it! The door leading to the bedroom, which had been left half-open, began closing. It closed, pulled to from the other side, and the knob moved and the catch clicked, as though released from the hand of the Unseen. I ran to it, opened it, and looked out. And saw--nothing at all.

SLEEPING BEAUTY

SLEEPING BEAUTY

1

Harriet leaned across the scullery sink, where dirty plates were soaking, in order to get a better view of the moon. Her sleeves were turned up to the elbow. Her right hand grasped a ball of dishcloth from which slimy water oozed between her red fingers to float, in black spots, upon the surface of the water. Upon that water, through which projected a tureen, like the bows of a wrecked ship, the moonlight fell. The three and elevenpenny alarum clock in the kitchen began striking nine.

All Harriet’s spiritual crises had had for their _mise-en-scène_ this scullery, or so it seemed to Harriet herself. Seven years earlier she had stood where she was now standing and had wrestled with overmastering fear, to the accompaniment of that same ticking clock and to the drip-drip from the plate-rack upon already washed spoons. She had leaned then across the sink, as she was leaning now, and stared in terror at an unearthly glow in the sky that could scarcely fail to mean the end of the world and the coming of God in judgment. She shuddered to picture the dead bodies, putty-coloured, rising in their shrouds to confront--with her and Mamma and Alice and Maud--an implacable Creator. ‘O God, don’t come yet!’ It had been the most spontaneous of all her prayers. She had heard too much of this God to trust herself readily to His mercy; and she, the most wicked of girls, had little enough to hope from mere justice. She had too often deceived her teacher and been unsympathetic with her poor mother; and far too often had she resented having to drudge in the house--sweep and dust, make beds, empty slops, and wash dirty dinner-things--while still at school, and to the neglect of her home-lessons.