Читать книгу The Man Who Went Back - Warwick Deeping - Страница 4

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She gathered up the folds of her robe, came down from the podium, and took to the road. It ran diagonally across the temple enclosure, and seemed to head in the direction of Guildford and the crossing of the Wey. I followed her, limping a little, for now that the first excitement had passed, I realized that I was very footsore. She had taken the lead, as though born to it, and I followed her half a pace behind, feeling that, I know not how or why, I was neither quite her equal nor her servant. Dear God, who and what was Pellias, this other I? What manner of man was I supposed to be? My gaze and my thought went to the place I knew as Guildford, that steep street with the confusion of its cars, its shops and shoppers. Was it over there as I knew it?

She was walking fast yet with an easy glide, a young stateliness that seemed part of her young splendour. How she might despise a man who was weak, a man who had thrown away his harness! And I, the child of democracy, deeming myself an intellectual, a Leftish person, dared to draw level with her and to walk at her side. I was aware of the quick turn of her head, and the look she gave me. It put me in my place, and yet there was a kind of compassionate comprehension in it. Almost it said: “You have forgotten other things, what you are and what I am; but, poor creature, that sword-blow must be remembered.” The sense of humiliation was quick and hot in me, but I fell back and followed on her left, half a pace behind.

Then a gradual and new curiosity stirred in me. Whither were we going? What was I to see down yonder in the valley that held what were for me Shere, Albury and Chilworth? I remembered that Martin Tupper lay buried in the new Albury churchyard, the Martin Tupper of flowery poetical platitudes who had dug trenches through and round that very temple, and had caused later explorers to curse him as an interfering busybody. If I had been shot by some trick of time back into Romano-British England, where was the soul of Martin Tupper? Where were the things he had found on the site of that Roman temple. In museums? But had a bronze urn or an unguent bottle souls that could manifest both here and there, then and now? This fantastic drama left me dizzy.

We were going down hill now, and we left the road for a path or pack-trail that plunged down into the woods. Here were birches, firs, an occasional oak, and this sandy track seemed to me very familiar. I was sure that I had passed along it before. It was one of those timeless tracks whose only evidence of age may lie in the hollow ways they trench where the ground slopes up and down from a valley. I saw a great ants-nest at the foot of a Scotch fir, just such a nest as I once had stirred up with my stick. There were stretches of heather, pools where the crooked bracken was showing through the blackish peaty crust. A couple of jays scolded at us, and in one green glade a yaffle flew away, uttering its laughing, mocking cry. The girl had not spoken to me since we had left the road, but when the woodpecker laughed at us, she turned and looked into my face.

“Has the bird no voice for you?”

I think I smiled at her.

“What name would you give it?”

She frowned.

“Do you not remember even that?”

There was a flick of scorn in her voice. What a poor, limping sloven was this Pellias! I flashed back at her.

“No more than I remember your name.”

That seemed to startle her. She paused, looked at me steadily as though to challenge some lie.

“What is my name?”

“I have forgotten.”

“You might be a fool or a newly-born babe.”

“I am that.”

“I wonder! It may be wise to forget some things.”

Irony! What was she suggesting? That I was playing a part, which God knows I was. She moved on again and I followed her along the track that swung up and down through the woods and heather. I felt that we must be nearing the great valley, the valley which has seemed to me the most beautiful in England, and suddenly the trees thinned and we came out on to the shoulder of a hill, and I saw ewes grazing, their lambs with them. But even they were not like the sheep I knew, though I cannot claim much knowledge of sheep. These animals looked smaller, rougher, longer in the leg. The ewes nearest to us set up a maternal bleating, and their lambs ran to their mothers.

I felt that I wanted to break the silence that this haughty young woman had imposed upon me.

“A good season for lambs, I gather?”

She answered me curtly over her shoulder.

“You should remember that. You and your father numbered them.”

Good God had I a father in this world, another ghost to be confronted!

“My father! I have forgotten his name.”

She answered me again over her shoulder.

“Almost, it seems to me, that you have forgotten to be man.”

That was a devastating snub, and it galled me more than my tired feet. I heard a sudden piping, and saw the shepherd, a mere lad, sitting under a thorn tree and playing upon his pipe. He was looking towards the Downs, and he had neither seen nor heard us, nor had he been disturbed by the bleating of the ewes. The girl called to him, and her voice was the voice of young authority.

“Alban.”

The lad took the pipe from his lips, turned, stared and started to his feet. He had fair hair and very blue eyes, and was dressed in a woollen smock that reached below his knees. His feet were bare.

“Is that how you guard your sheep?”

He flushed up, gave her a kind of bob or curtsey, and then he stared at me. His eyes grew rounder and rounder, and seemed to bulge like blue pebbles. Obviously my sudden manifestation in his world was as startling and as tragic to him as it had been to the girl. His mouth hung open. I might have been a figure of fate, terrifying and ominous. I did not know then that his father and my father had marched to fight those invading Saxons, and that both his father and my father were dead.

But my lady was not for lingering or for explaining my presence and my wild look to this shepherd lad. She swept on, and I followed behind her, only to find the shepherd lad at my elbow.

“Master, speak to me. What of my father?”

His beardless, boyish face, with its frightened eyes, bothered me. How was I to tell him anything? And he had called me “master,” which made me assume that my unknown father and I were men of some weight in the valley.

I pointed to my head.

“Alban, forgive me; I do not remember.”

I can recall being surprised by this peasant lad speaking to me in the Latin tongue, for I, like most people, had given little thought to the realities of the Roman life in Britain. And here was I speaking Latin like a native! I left the poor shepherd wringing his hands, and hurried on after my Mistress, for that was how I had begun to visualize her. Also, I was pricked by curiosity; I wanted to look down into that valley, and compare it with the valley that I knew.

We had come to the shoulder of the hill where the ground began to fall steeply, and now I could see into the valley. I judged that we were just above the village I knew as Albury, and at the first glance the valley did not appear to be very different from the valley that I knew. I saw woods of beech and of oak on the upper hill-sides, groves of thorn and of yew, poplars rising in the bottom. There were little meadows, very green in the spring of the year, and yellowing up with buttercups. I could see the glitter of water, the Tillingbourne flashing here and there, and a great mere with water-flags abloom about it. This was no wild valley, but rich, and ordered, and cared-for. Then I saw the buildings, a great, long, low, white house roofed with pantiles, a courtyard before it, and its pebble-glass lattices catching the light. It seemed to be surrounded by gardens and orchards. I saw a great yew hedge, clipped like an English hedge, a flint wall, a gate-house. There were other buildings scattered along the valley, barns, granaries, stables, the cottages of the peasant folk, and a smaller white house that also had its garden. A Roman manor! It was all very beautiful, and rich and serene, lying peacefully there in the May sunshine, yet somehow filling me with a kind of anguish.

Nothing that I knew or yearned to see was there!

So, I followed her down the steep green slope into the valley, feeling that Time had played a fantastic and paralysing trick upon me, and bundled me into this dream-box without a key or a password. How would the people down yonder receive me? What was I to do and say? Still cling to the pretence that my wits had been scattered by a blow on the head? And which self was I to parade before this other world, John Hallard the engineer, or Pellias the—I knew not what? What a hell of a problem! Were I to try and talk to these people like twentieth-century man they would think me madder than I seemed. No, a nice cunning was the thing; silence, mere blank stupidity. I had to get my bearings, play for time, keep my wits about me, yet at the back of my bewilderment was the thought that all this would pass. I had to play up to this dream-world, walk delicately, conceal that other secret self. Somehow, I would escape from it back into my own world. This fantastic dream-state could not last. The thing was ridiculous, ridiculous yet enthralling.

A grass path between hedges and orchards brought us down to the manor road which followed the stream much as the Albury-Chilworth road followed it. I saw some children playing in the road. They stood, stared, ran, screaming as English children might have screamed. The news was out, news of the ominous thing that must have been hanging over the village. I could feel fear in this valley. This little world had been waiting upon rumour, listening, watching, and here was I a beaten man and a fugitive, with death and disaster in my wounded silence.

The thatched, white-walled cottages were strung along the lane much as in an English village. They had their hedges and their gardens, and were part of the peaceful scene in a land that had grown up under the shield of the Pax Romana. These tragic days were like strange, raw wounds in the green silence. People came running, women and old men; they seemed to appear from nowhere. I saw a man in a leather apron come out of the village smithy, a gnarled, swarthy fierce old man, hairy as to chest and arms. The little crowd waited for us by the mill where a water-wheel was going round and round and making a moist rumble. All those faces seemed to wait for us, beholding me as a messenger of woe and of disaster.

I saw a woman rush forward.

“Mistress, what news?”

The girl stood still, head up, looking steadily into the woman’s face.

“What you see, you see, Fanta.”

She turned and pointed a finger at me, and the gesture said: “Behold the man, the man without sword or harness, the poor, hunted sloven. Look at him and understand.”

There was a murmur from the crowd. I felt all those eyes fixed on me, a kind of breathlessness, fear. They were waiting for me to speak, and I was mute. I understood that old phrase, one’s tongue clinging to the roof of one’s mouth. The mill-wheel rumbled round and round; the water splashed. I was aware of that grim old smith glaring at me like a red-eyed dog.

“Has he lost his tongue?”

“Yes, like his sword!” screeched a woman.

The girl raised her arm in a gesture that made me think of the Fascist salute.

“Listen, my children. Pellias has been wounded. He has lost his memory. He says that he cannot remember.”

I could see no pity on those faces. The suspense had been too sharp for them. They had been waiting, waiting, and here was I, the symbol of disaster, a poor dumb idiot, soiled, unshaven and bruised. These people were provoked by a passionate impatience. They wanted news, and I had nothing to give them but a silly, oafish silence.

It was the smith who came up and clutched me by the arm.

“Speak, man, speak.”

I just stared at him and mumbled. His impatience seemed to become a fury.

“Where is Mabon my son?”

I shook my head, and he let out a savage snarl, and struck me with his open hand. He struck me twice in the face.

“Will that make you remember? Speak, you fool.”

Those smacks hurt and angered me, but he was an old man, and beside himself, and then I heard the girl’s voice fly at him like some fierce bird. “Niger!” I saw the rage go out of his eyes, and suddenly he became a whimpering old man.

“Pardon, Lady Meona. It was love that got the better of me.”

That was the first time I heard her name. Meona! Moreover, Niger the Smith’s words might have been prophetic. Love and Time may get the better of us all.

The crowd followed us up the village to the manor-house, as though hoping that my memory might recover itself, or because these women, children and old men looked to the great house for succour and guidance. The courtyard gates were open, and in the porter’s lodge sat a very old man with a head that shook like a pea on a wire thread. A big brown hound lay at his feet. The dog was up and nosing against Meona’s knees, and licking her hands; she spoke to him more gently than I had heard her speak to any living thing. The porter stood up and bobbed his bald head to her, and squinted at me as though I were some horrid apparition.

“Hail, Master Pellias.”

The dog looked up at me with great, solemn eyes, sniffed at my tunic, and seemed suspicious. Had he alone divined the fact that the man whom he knew and the man wearing the body of that Pellias who had been dead in Time for fifteen hundred years or more, were not the same creatures?

We crossed the courtyard to the house. The courtyard was paved with local stone, much like the crazy-paving in my garden, and between the stones dwarf herbs had been planted, so that when a foot crushed them a sweet scent rose up. There were clipped yews and box-trees, and great earthen vases in which green things were growing, a water-cistern in the centre stocked with fish. The great house, built in two storeys, had a loggia between its two outjutting wings, and up the pillars climbed vines and roses. It was a rich and lovely house, stately and serene, its windows looking south across the valley at the uplands and the woods.

Three steps led to the loggia, and I saw two women in white smocks standing in the doorway. Meona paused on the second step, and turned to speak to me.

“You will stay here.”

It was an order and I bent my head to her, but my spirit was beginning to resent her serene young arrogance. Forlorn and desolate I might be, but I was man and young, and in my own world thinking no small beer of myself. She waved to the women, and they disappeared like mutes. I sat down on the steps, and saw the crowd grouped outside the gate, watching me with a kind of ominous, silent curiosity. The old porter had joined them, and was bobbing his head and shuffling about among them as though trying to pick up crumbs of comfort. The dog came and sat at my feet, and stared at me with huge brown eyes. A disconcerting beast! I spoke to him, but he showed no sign of friendliness.

What a situation! I felt both angry and bewildered. My courage was down in my boots, or rather, in those damned sandal-like shoes. I was a ghost in a live body, a spirit embalmed in the carcase of another man long since dead. Good God, when should I wake up, escape from this dream that was so horribly actual and vivid? Should I wake up? Had I been pitched back to the lower curve of some Time Spiral? Was I dead? Had I to climb that spiral all over again, find myself forking muck on some medieval farm, or washing dishes in an Elizabethan kitchen? I felt like cutting my throat.

I had heard voices in the house, and a woman came out to me. She was a youngish wench, like a dark pansy, and she looked at me as though I had the evil eye.

“You are to come before my lord.”

I rose and followed her into the house, and I noticed that she kept glancing back at me, and that every time she looked she made some sort of gesture that might be meant to repel an evil spirit. The vestibule had a mosaic floor in blue and white and red, and from the floor a huge Bacchic face leered at me. The vestibule opened into a corridor that ran the whole length of the house on its northern side, and it was lit by narrow windows high up in the wall. Its floor was of plain red tesseræ. I had no doubt but that I was walking in a Roman villa, a museum piece that had become alive to harass the soul of a poor mortal who was dead or dreaming. I stared at the nape of the girl’s neck. It was real enough, with her dark hair hanging down in two plaits, and a comb tucked into the crown of it. She shuffled along in slippers, waggling broad hips.

I saw a gold-coloured curtain closing the end of the corridor. The girl drew it aside, and shrinking against the wall, spread her first and little finger at me. Yes, I was evil, something sinister and under a curse, a bearer of bad news, a ghost wrapped in blood and horror.

I found myself in what was the summer-room, a stately chamber that occupied the whole west wing. It had windows looking both north and south, and a little apsidal cell recessed in its west wall, and in this recess a lamp was burning. The walls were frescoed, the floor a fine mosaic, depicting the four seasons of the year, but all this was vague background to me for the moment. The human figures alone mattered. I saw a very old man seated in a curule chair, his hands resting upon a white stick set like a sword between his knees. Meona stood behind him, leaning upon the back of the chair. Here was my Roman master, and never in my life had I looked upon any creature so fine and masterful as this old man. He had a great head, and a mane like a snow-white lion, a clear, fine, sanguine skin, black eyes of peculiar brightness. They were eyes that held you and fascinated you, jocund, wise, and somehow all-seeing. I got the feeling that this old autocrat was what we should have called a super-man, and that he was more than a mere tyrant. There was humour, a touch of mischief in that long-lipped, mobile mouth. He sat and looked at me, and through me, and over me, until I felt like a boy in the presence of some Olympian and spell-binding “Head.”

“Well, my lad, you have been in the wars, I see.”

Magnificent he might be, but there was something about him that succoured my soul. This old gentleman was human, infinitely so. Almost, I felt that I could blurt things out to him, and that even if he thought me mad, he would tolerate and comprehend such madness.

“Yes, sir.”

He looked at me steadily as a physician might look at a case, sitting very still, with the light playing upon his fine white mane. Then he raised one of his hands, and spoke to his daughter.

“Leave us. Pellias and I have matters to talk of.”

She passed round his chair, and I, daring to look at her, saw her somehow differently. She seemed to have become more gentle, more compassionate, more like her name, which had a dark loveliness. She smiled at me, and something happened to me when she smiled in that way. Her dark, swift loveliness became a spell.

The old man sat and looked at me, almost as though he understood my secret, though the thing he suspected was not the thing I was concealing.

“Sometimes, my son, it is wise to forget.”

I echoed that one word.

“Sometimes.”

“When fools and babes are filled with fear. Tell me, Pellias, how much do you remember?”

This was not a man to whom you could lie, and I found myself calling him lord.

“I can remember nothing, lord.”

“What do you remember?”

“Waking up in the heather on Farley Heath.”

The words slipped out before I could smother them, an English tail to the dog-Latin I was talking. I saw him frown. Farley Heath must have sounded gibberish to him.

“No more?”

“I felt dazed, lord, and my head ached.”

His eyes were keen but kind.

“Come hither, my son. Kneel down.”

I knelt at his feet, close to his knees, and putting his stick aside he examined my head, passing his hands over it. His hands were cool and soft, and not like an old man’s hands. Then, he took me by the chin, raised my face, and looked into my eyes, as though examining their pupils. He felt my forehead, and my pulse. I might have been in Harley Street.

“A scalp wound. You bled. That cut must have sliced through your helmet. And your father, Gerontius, my steward?”

He may have intended to surprise me, but I looked him straight in the face.

“What of my father, lord?”

“Do you not remember?”

I shook my head. He was very patient with me.

“My son, when the savage terror flamed, the levies of these many manors marched into Kent. Twenty men went from this valley, and your father led them. There were men from the White Ford, men even from Venta. There should have been men from Londinium also, though they are a cowardly, self-seeking people. You remember nothing of all this?”

“Nothing.”

He gazed at me intently, and then, putting his hands on the arms of his chair, rose to his feet.

“Stand up, my son.”

I rose and standing, found him, old though he was, taller than I was, though I am six feet.

“Come.”

He walked to the recess or alcove, and then, I realized its nature. It was the house’s lararium, and in its niches were the busts of three gods. The lamp burned steadily on a shelf above the little altar. I remember feeling astonished, for I had believed that Britain in those days had become Christian, and here were the old gods of Rome, not the rustic British deities, but Jupiter, the Sacred Mother, the Genius of Imperial Augustus. Or, so, I took them to be.

The old man placed himself in front of the altar, and facing his gods, raised his right arm.

“O Mysterious Ones, be merciful and strong for our sakes. Let that which has been be.”

He turned to me, and moving to one side, bade me kneel in front of the gods.

“Behold, my son, the faces of the Great Ones. Before the gods one does not lie. One may remember.”

I knelt down as he bade me, feeling a desperate fool. I shut my eyes, and remembering that favourite play of mine, Berkeley Square, I realized that were I to confess to this old man the knowledge that was in me, I might appear as some disturbing spirit of evil, a creature of fantastic and ominous malice. New wine was not for old bottles. I must dream my dream to the end.

“My lord, I cannot remember.”

I opened my eyes again and looked at the lamp, and not at those serene, stone faces. How was I to convince him that I could not remember the things that Pellias the son of Gerontius should know?

“My lord, believe me, even your name has gone from me.”

He was silent, so silent, that I turned my head and looked at him. He smiled at me as he might have smiled at a sick child.

“That, indeed, is forgetting. You will have to go to school again, my son.”