Part 6

“I was breakfasting at my table, and beyond me, in front and to the right, stood a large basket-chair. I was reading some book or other, and can honestly say that nothing was further from my mind than my experiences in the summer. Remember, during two months nothing had happened--nothing, at least, beyond that intolerable intellectual darkness. Then the basket-chair suddenly clicked in the way in which they do half an hour after one has sat in them. It distracted my attention for an instant--it was just enough for that; no more. I went on with my book.

“Then it clicked again three or four times, and I looked up, rather annoyed.... Well, to be brief, this went on and on. After breakfast, when Bridget came to fetch the tray, I asked whether she had touched the chair that morning. She told me No. All this time, remember, no thought of anything odd had entered my head. I supposed it was the damp and said so.

“Well, she was still in the room. I went out to fetch my breviary from the chapel, and as I set foot on the stairs, leaving the door open behind me, I heard her, as I thought, come out after me with the tray and follow me, three or four steps behind, all down the staircase. I had no more doubt of that than of the fact that I myself was going downstairs. At the turn of the stairs I did not even look behind. By the sounds--not clear footfalls, you understand, but a kind of shuffling and breathing, and still more by the consciousness that there she was--I judged she was in a hurry, as she often was. At the foot of the stairs I turned to say something, and as I began to turn I will swear that I saw a figure out of the corner of my eye; but when I looked it was simply not there. There was nothing there.... Do you understand, gentlemen? Nothing at all.

“I called up to her, and heard her come across the floor. Then she looked over the banister.

“‘Did you come out of the room just now?’ I said.

“‘No, your reverence.’

“Well, I made my theory, of course. It was to the effect that she had moved in the room as I came out; that I therefore thought she was following me, and that the rest was simply self-suggestion.

“I got my breviary and came out. As I came into the little lobby again there occurred to me the impression that some one was there, waiting in the corner. I looked round me; there was nothing, and I went upstairs.

“Gentlemen, do you know that nervous condition when one feels there is some one in the room? It is generally dissipated by ten minutes’ conversation. Well, I was in that condition all the morning. But there was more than that.

“It was not only that sense of some one there; there were sounds now and then, very faint, but absolutely distinct, coming from all quarters--sounds so minute and unimportant in themselves that I might have heard them a hundred times without giving them another thought if they had not been accompanied by that sense of a presence with me. They were of all kinds. Once or twice a piece of woodwork somewhere in the room clicked, as my basket-chair had done--a sharp, minute rap, such as one hears in damp weather. Once the door became unlatched and slid very softly with the sound of a hush over a piece of matting that lay there. I got up and shut the door again, looking, I must confess, for an instant on to the landing, and as I came back to my chair that clicked twice.

“Gentlemen, I know this sounds absurd. You will be saying, as I said, that I was simply in a nervous condition. Very well, perhaps I was; but please wait. Once, as I sat in my chair drawn sideways near the fireplace, a very slight movement caught my eye. I turned sharply; it was no more than the fringe of the mat under the table lifting in the draught. As I looked it ceased.

“Well, my nerves got worse and worse. I stared every now and then round the room. There was nothing to be seen but the boards, the mats, the familiar furniture, the black and white crucifix over the mantleshelf, my few books, and the vestment-chest near the door. There were the curtains, too, hanging at the windows. That was all. It was a cloudy October day, and rained a little about half-past twelve. I remember starting suddenly as a gust came and dashed the drops against the glass.

“At about a quarter to one Bridget came in to lay dinner.... I am ashamed to say it, but I was extraordinarily relieved when I heard her open the downstairs door. She came in, you remember, three or four times a day to see after me; otherwise I was alone in the house.

“When she came into the room I looked up at her.... She smiled at me, and then it seemed to me that her face took on it rather an odd expression. She stopped smiling, and before she set down the tablecloth and knives she looked round the room rather curiously, I thought.

“‘Well, Bridget,’ I said, ‘what is it?’

“There was just a moment before she answered.

“‘It is nothing, your reverence,’ she said.

“Then she laid dinner. I dined, reading all the while, and she brought in the dishes one by one. I am afraid I hurried rather over dinner. I made up my mind to go out for a long walk; there was something else in my mind, too--well, I may as well tell you; it seemed to me that I should rather like to be out of the house before she was. Yes; it was cowardly; but remember that all this while I was telling myself that I had an attack of the nerves, and that I had better not be alone except in the fresh air.

“Well, nothing at all happened that afternoon. It seemed to me as I went over the moors that all sense of haunting had ceased; I noticed first consciously that it had gone soon after leaving the outskirts of the village; I was entirely happy and serene.

“As I came back into sight of the village at dusk and saw the lights shining over the hill the uneasiness came on me again. It struck me vividly for the first time that a night spent alone in that house would be slightly uncomfortable. By this time, of course, too, the possibility of a connection between my present state and my previous experiences had occurred to my mind; but I had striven to resist this idea as merely one more nervous suggestion.

“My uneasiness grew greater still as I came up the street. I am ashamed to say that I stopped to talk three or four times to my parishioners simply out of that unaccountably strong terror of my own house. I noticed, too, across the street that a face peeped from Bridget’s window and drew back on seeing me. A moment later her door opened and she came out.

“I did not turn or wait for her, but as I reached my door I was conscious of a very distinct relief that she was behind me, and as I went in she came immediately after me.

“‘I am very sorry, Father,’ she said, ‘I haven’t your tea ready yet.’

“I told her to bring it as soon as she could, and went slowly upstairs with the horror deepening at every step. I knew perfectly well now why she had waited; it was that she did not like to enter the empty house alone.... Yet I did not feel that I could ask her what it was she feared. That would be a kind of surrender on my part--an allowing to myself that there was something to fear, and you must remember that I still was trying to tell myself that it was all nerves.”

The Rector leaned forward.

“I am very sorry, Father Girdlestone,” he said softly, “but it is past time for night-prayers.” He paused. “But may we make an exception to-night and hear the rest afterward?”

The old man stood up and motioned with a little smile toward the chapel gallery.

III

“As I went forward into the room,” began the old man again as soon as we had taken our seats in silence, “I knew beyond doubt that I was accompanied. I heard Bridget moving about downstairs, but it was as sound heard through the roar of a train. There went with me something resembling a loud noise--interior, you understand, yet on the brink of manifestation in the world of sense; or you may call it a blackness, or a vast weight, as heavy as heaven and earth, and it was all centred round a personality. It was of such a nature that I should have been surprised at nothing. It appeared to me that all that I looked upon--the serge curtains, my table, my chair, the glow of the fire on the hearth, and the glimmer on the bare boards--all these were but as melting shreds and rays hanging upon some monstrous reality. They were there, they were just in existence, but they were as accidents without substance.

“I do not know if there were definite sounds or not, or even definite appearances, beyond the normal, material sounds and sights. There may have been, but I do not think so.

“I went across the room, walking, it seemed to me, on nothingness. My body was still in sensible relations with matter, but it seemed to me that I was not. I found my chair and sat down in it to wait. I was nerveless now, sunk in a kind of despair that I cannot hope to make plain to you. I imagine that a lost soul on the edge of death must be in that state.

“I looked almost vacantly round the room once or twice; but there was nothing. I understood without consideration what was happening, and the general course of events. It was all one, I perceived now. That which had started up at the rock, which had invaded first the innermost chamber of my soul, and then the intellectual plane, and had established itself there, had now taken its final step forward, and was claiming the world of sense as well. I felt entirely powerless. You will wonder why I did not go downstairs to the Blessed Sacrament. I do not know, but it was impossible. Here was the battlefield, I knew very well.

“I perceived something else, too. It was the reason of the assaults. I did not fully understand it, but I knew that the object was to drive me from the place--to make the village and the neighborhood detestable to me. I knew that I could escape by going away, yet it was not exactly a temptation. I had no interior desire to escape. It was merely a question as to which force would prevail in my soul--that which impelled me away and grace which held me there. I was as a passive dummy between them....

“I do not know how long it was before Bridget pushed open the door. I saw her with the tray come across the room and set it down upon my table. Then I saw her looking at me.

“‘Bridget,’ I said, ‘I shall want no supper to-night. And tell the people that I am unwell and that there will be no night-prayers. There will be mass, I hope, as usual in the morning.’

“I said those words, I believe; but the voice was not as my own. It was as if another spoke. I saw her looking at me across the dusk with an extraordinary terror in her face.

“‘Come away, Father,’ she whispered.

“I shook my head.

“‘Come away,’ she whispered again. ‘This is not a good house to be in.’

“I said nothing.

“‘Shall I fetch Father Donovan to you, Father,’ she whispered, ‘or the doctor?’

“‘Fetch no one,’ I said to her. ‘Tell no one. Ask for prayers, if you will. Go and leave me to myself, Bridget.’

“I think I understood even then what the struggle was she was going through. I do not know if she perceived all that I perceived, but even from her face, without her words, I knew that she was conscious of something. Yet she did not like to leave me alone. She stood perfectly still, looking first at me, then slowly round the room, then back at me again. And as she looked the dusk fell veil on veil.

“Then something happened, I do not know what; I never questioned her afterward, but she was gone. I heard her stumbling and moaning down the stairs. An instant later the street door opened and banged, and I was left alone.

“I cannot tell you what I felt. I knew only that the crisis was come, and that the result was out of my hands. I closed my eyes, I think, and lay right back in my chair. It was as if I were submitting myself to an operation; I wondered vaguely as to what shape it would take.

“All about the room I felt the force gathering. There was no oscillation, no vibration, but a steady, continuous stream concentrating itself within the four walls. With this the sense of the central personality grew every moment more and more intense and vivid. It seemed to me as if I were some tiny, conscious speck of matter in the midst of a life whose vastness and malignance was beyond conception. At times it was this; at other times it was as if I looked within and saw a space full of some indescribable blackness--a space of such a nature that I could not tell whether it was as tiny as a pinhole or as vast as infinity. It was spaceless space, sheer emptiness, but with an emptiness that was a horror, and it was within me.

“Yet it was not simple spirit--it was not the correlative of matter. It was rather spirit in the very throes of manifestation in matter....

“Sometimes then I attended to this; sometimes I lay with every sense at full stretch--at a tenseness that seemed impossible, directed outward. I cannot tell even now whether the room was poised in deathly silence or in an indescribable clamor and roar of tongues. It was one or the other, or it was both at once.

“Or, to take the sense of sight.... Although my eyes were closed, every detail of the room was before me. Sometimes I saw it as rigid as a man at grips with death, in a kind of pallor--the table, the dying fire, the uncurtained windows--all in the pallor--the very names of the books visible--all, as it were, striving to hold themselves in material being under the stress of some enormous destructive force with which they were charged--as rigid and as silent and as significant as an electric wire--and as full of power. Or at times all seemed to me to have gone, simply to have dissolved into nothingness, as a breath fades on a window--to retain but a phantom of themselves....

“Well, well ... words are very useless, gentlemen; ... they are poor things----”

The old priest paused a moment, leaning forward in his chair with his thin, veined hands together. For myself I cannot say what I felt. I seemed to be in somewhat of the same state as that which he was describing; all my senses, too, were stretched to the full by the intensity of my attention. Yet the narrator seemed little affected; he leaned and looked peacefully into the fire, and I caught the glint of light on his deep eyes.

Then he leaned back and went on.

“Now you must picture to yourselves, gentlemen, that this state grew steadily in its energy. I did not know before--and I can scarcely believe it now--that human nature could bear so much. Yet I seemed to myself to be observing my strained faculties from a plane apart from them. It was as the owner of a besieged castle might stand on a keep and watch the figures of his men staring out over the battlements at a sight he could not see. There were my eyes looking, my ears listening, even the touch of my fingers on the chair-arms questioning what it was that they held; and there was I--my very self--far within waiting for communications.

“I suppose that I knew there was no escape. I could not descend into the sphere of reason, for another Power held the keys; I could not sink again to the inner Presence of God, for that chamber, too, was occupied; there was this last stand to be made--the world of sense. If that was lost, all was lost; and I could not lift a finger to help. And, as I said, the strain grew greater each instant, as the opening swell of an organ waxes with a long, steady crescendo to its final roar....

“I do not know at exactly what point I understood the assault, but it became known to me presently that what was intended was to merge the world of sense, so far as I was concerned, into this mighty essence of evil--to burst through, or, rather, to transcend the material. Then I knew I should be wholly lost. I remember, too, that I perceived soon after this that this was what the world calls madness ... and I understood at this moment as never before how that process consummates itself. It begins, as mine did, with the carrying of the inner life by storm; that may come about by deliberate acquiescence in sin. I should suppose that it always does in some degree. Then the intellect is attacked--it may only be in one point--a ‘delusion’ it is called, and with many persons regarded only as eccentric--the process goes no further. But when the triumph is complete the world of sense, too, is lost, and the man raves. I knew at that time for absolute fact that this is the process. The ‘delusions’ of the mad are not non-existent--they are glimpses, horrible or foul or fantastic, of that strange world that we take so quietly for granted, that at this moment and at every moment is perpetually about us, foaming out its waters in lust or violence or mad irresponsible blasphemy against the Most High.

“Well, I saw that this was what threatened, yet I could not move a finger. No thought of flight entered my mind. All had gone too far by now....

“Then, gentlemen, the climax came.”

Again the old priest was silent.

I heard Monsignor’s pipe drop with a clatter, and my nerves thrilled like a struck harp. He made no movement to pick it up. He stared only at the old man.

Then the quiet voice went on.

“This was the climax, gentlemen.... The intensity swelled and swelled;... each moment I thought must be the last--the utmost effort of hell. Then with a crash the full close sounded; and through the rending tear, through the veil of matter that whirled away and was gone, I caught one swift glimpse of all that lay beneath. It was not through one sense that I perceived it; it was through perception pure and simple.... Well, how can I say it? It was this....

“I perceived two vast forces pressed one against the other, as silent and as rigid as ... as the glass of a diver’s helmet against the huge, incumbent, glittering water. It is a wretched simile.... Let us say that the appearance was as the meeting of fire and water without mist or tumult. The forces were absolutely opposed, absolutely alien, yet absolutely one in the plane of being. They could meet as the created and uncreated could not--as flesh and spirit cannot. They met, level, coincident, each rigid to breaking point--each full of an energy to which there is no parallel in this world.

“It seemed to me that all had waited for this. The enemy had been permitted to enter the gate; and at the instant of his triumph the fire of God was upon him, locked in the embrace of utter repulsion....

“And it was given to me to watch that, gentlemen.... On the edge of what the world labels as madness, at the very instant that I hung balanced on that line, I saw that endless war of spirit and spirit, which has been waging since Michael drove Satan from heaven--that ceaseless, writhing conflict in which all that is not for God is against Him, seeking to dethrone and annihilate Him who gave it being. Ah, words ... words ... but I saw it...!”

There was a dead silence in the room. The priest drew one breath.

“Then I saw no more. I was in my chair as before, holding the arms; and the room round me stole back into being--through the pallor of a phantom to the dusk of earthly twilight; and I perceived that my eyes were closed and not open.

“There then I stayed, knowing that the war still waged beneath, yet fainter every moment as the tide crawled back, contesting inch by inch, rolled back by that remorseless power. Twice or three times I heard the murmur of sound in the room; the serge curtains swayed. I could hear them. I heard the door vibrating softly; then once more the quiet silence was there, and I heard the ashes slip by their weight from grate to fender. Nature at least was itself again. Then once more, as into my intellect the light stole back, and I knew that God reigned and that His Son was Incarnate, crucified and risen by many irrefragable proofs, round the house I could hear the murmuring of voices, and saw through closed eyelids of utter repose the glimmer of lanterns on the ceiling.

“Within myself, too, I watched the roar of evil; I drew breath after breath, deep and life-giving, as far down within the secret chambers of my soul the foul filth ebbed and sank, and that spring rising into life everlasting, of which our Saviour spoke, welled up in its stead, filling every cranny and corner of my soul with that strange sweetness, so sweet and so dear that we forget it as the very air we breathe.

“The murmur of conflict was infinitely far away; and it seemed to me that once more I went down, down, in that introversion of which I spoke just now, seeing all clean and sweet about me, down into the Presence of the Lord who rules heaven and earth at His will. Then a door closed, deep, deep below, and I knew that the enemy was gone....

“Well, gentlemen,” said the priest after a pause, leaning back, “that is really the story. But there are a few details to add.

“When the men that Bridget had fetched came upstairs they found me asleep, but they told me afterward there were streaks of foam at the corners of my mouth. Yet she was not gone three minutes.

“I never spoke a word to them of what happened. They knew quite enough for laymen.... We had night-prayers as usual that evening. I said the _Visita quæsumus Domine_ at the end....

“I slept like a child, and I said a mass of thanksgiving next day.”

Father Brent broke the silence that followed. His voice seemed strange.

“And the church, Father?”

The old priest smiled at him full.

“You have guessed it,” he said. “Yes, the church was built thirty years later. It is a basilica, as I said; it presents Our Lord in glory in an apse. It stands, curiously enough, on the rock; but it is in the middle of a huge colliery town, and--well, I may as well say it--there is a grated tribune above the high altar at one side through which a convent of Poor Clares can assist at the holy sacrifice. Poor Clares!

“I ceased to wonder at the assault as soon as the convent was built.”

He stood up, smiling.

VI

_Father Bianchi’s Tale_

Father Bianchi, as the days went on, seemed a little less dogmatic on the theory that miracles (except, of course, those of the saints) did not happen. He was warned by Monsignor Maxwell that his turn was approaching to contribute a story, and suddenly at supper announced that he would prefer to get it over at once that evening.

“But I have nothing to tell,” he cried, expostulating with hands and shoulders, “nothing to tell but the nonsense of an old peasant-woman.”

* * * * *

When we had taken our places upstairs, and the Italian had again apologized and remonstrated with raised eyebrows, he began at last, and I noticed that he spoke with a seriousness that I should not have expected.

“When I was first a priest,” he said, “I was in the south of Italy, and said my first mass in a church in the hills. The village was called Arripezza.”

“Is that true?” said Monsignor suddenly, smiling.

The Italian grinned brilliantly. “Well, no,” he said, “but it is near enough, and I swear to you that the rest is true. It was a village in the hills, ten miles from Naples. They have many strange beliefs there; it is like Father Brent’s Cornwall. All along the coast, as you know, they set lights in the windows on one night of the year, because they relate that our Lady once came walking on the water with her divine Child, and found none to give her shelter. Well, this village that we will call Arripezza was not on the coast. It was inland, but it had its own superstitions to compensate it--superstitions cursed by the Church.

“I knew little of all this when I went there. I had been in the seminary until then.

“The _parrocho_ was an old man, but old! He could say mass sometimes on Sundays and feasts, but that was all, and I went to help him. There were many at my first mass as the custom is, and they all came up to kiss my hands when it was done.