War in Heaven, Charles Williams [novels for teenagers .txt] 📗

in our small corner. Little enough, no doubt, just a car”—he looked at Ludding— “or a kitchen”—he looked at Mrs. Lucksparrow—“or—something,” he ended, looking at the stranger, who nodded seriously, but offered no enlightenment for a moment. Then, as if in pity at Mr. Batesby’s slightly obvious disappointment, he said, “I have been a traveller.”

“Ah, yes, to be sure,” the priest answered. “A broadening life, no doubt. Well, well, I venture to think you have seen nothing better than this in all your travels.” He indicated church and garden and fields. “Not, of course, that the serpent isn’t here too. The old serpent. But we crush his head.”

“And your heels?” the stranger asked. Mr. Batesby took a moment to grasp this, and then said, gently smiling. “Yes, yes, not always unstung, I fear. Why, the Archdeacon here was assaulted only a few weeks ago in broad daylight. Scandalous. If it hadn’t been for a good neighbour of ours, I don’t know what might have happened. Why, you were there too, Ludding, weren’t you?”

“Were you?” the stranger asked, looking him in the face. “I was,” Ludding said, almost sullenly, “if it’s any business of yours.”

“I think perhaps it may be,” the stranger said softly. “I have come a long journey because I think it may be.” He turned to Mr. Batesby. “Good day. I am obliged to you,” he said, and turned back to Ludding. “Walk with me,” he went on casually. “I have a question to ask you.”

“Look here,” the chauffeur said, moving after him, “who the hell do you think you are, asking me questions? If you want—”

“It is a very simple question,” the stranger said. “Where does your master live?”

“Anyone will tell you,” Ludding answered reluctantly and almost as if explaining to himself why he spoke. “At Cully over there. But he isn’t there now.”

“He is perhaps in London with the Archdeacon?” the stranger asked. “No, don’t lie; it doesn’t matter. I will go up to the house.”

“He isn’t there, I tell you,” Ludding said, standing still as if he had been dismissed. “What the devil’s the good of going to the house? We don’t want Chinks hanging round up there, or any other kind of nigger. D’ye hear me? Leave it alone, can’t you? Here, I’m talking to you, God blind you! You let Mr. Persimmons alone!” As the stranger drew farther away his voice became louder and his words more ‘violent, so that Inspector Colquhoun, who was allowing himself a few days in the village, partly out of his holiday, partly in a kind of desperate wonder whether Cully would yield any suggestions, came round a turn in the road on his way from the station to see a man standing still and shouting after an already remote figure.

“Anything wrong?” he asked involuntarily.

Ludding turned round furiously. “Yes,” he said, “you’re wrong. Who asked you to blink your fat eyes at me, you flat-nosed, fat-bellied louse?”

The inspector considered the uniform. “You take care, my man,” he said.

“Christ Almighty!” Ludding yelled at him, “if you don’t get off I’ll smash your—”

Colquhoun stepped nearer. “Say another word to me,” he said, “you jumping beer-barrel, and I’ll knock you into the middle of Gehenna!” The prospect of being able to repay someone connected with a Persimmons for all that he had gone through was almost delightful. Nevertheless, he hardly expected the chauffeur to make such an immediate rush for him as he did. He defended himself with strength enough to make aggression an imperceptible sequence, and succeeded in drawing Ludding to one side of the road, until he unexpectedly crashed into the ditch behind him. Colquhoun stepped back a pace. “Come out if you like,” he said, “and let me knock you into it again.”

It was upon the chauffeur scrambling furiously out of the ditch that Mr. Gregory Persimmons looked when he in turn, a little later than the inspector, being a slower walker, came along the road from the station. He had paid his visit to Lord Mayor Street that morning, to find Manasseh almost beside himself with enraged disappointment, and only too anxious to take any steps for recovering the Graal. The Greek had taken little part in their discussion; the effort of the night had left him so exhausted physically that he was lying back in a chair with closed eyes, and only now and then threw a suggestion to the others. Gregory’s chief difficulty was to insist on maintaining the friendly relations with the Rackstraws that were essential to his designs on Adrian, and might, he recognized, already have been endangered by the break with Mornington. This, however, he hoped to arrange; judicious explanations and promises might do much, and Adrian’s own liking for him was a strong card to play. At last he had compelled Manasseh to see his aim, and then a fresh proposal had been made. Manasseh with the Greek would concern themselves with securing the Graal, and Gregory was to get hold of Adrian within the next few days. “Then,” Manasseh said, “we can take the hidden road to the East.”

“The hidden road?” Gregory asked.

Manasseh smiled knowingly. “Ah,” he said, “you’ve a lot to learn yet. Ask your friend Sir Giles; he knows about it, I expect. Ask him if he’s ever been to the furniture shop in Amsterdam or the picture dealer in Zurich. Ask him if he knows the boat-builder in Constantinople and the Armenian ferry. You are only on the edge of things here in London. The vortex of destruction is in the East. I have seen a house fall to fragments before a thought and men die in agony because the Will overcame them. Bring the child and come, and we will go into the high places of our god.”

In the subtle companionship that existed between them Gregory felt the. hope in his heart expand. “In three days from now I will be with you,” he said. “By Friday night I will bring the child here.”

With this purpose and a plan formed in his mind, he had returned to Fardles, to find his chauffeur struggling out of the ditch in the face of a contemptuous enemy.

When Ludding saw his employer he came to the road with a final effort and paused rather ridiculously. The inspector saw the hesitation, and looked round at Gregory, realizing that the odds were in favour of its being Gregory. He took the initiative.

“Mr. Persimmons?” he asked.

“I am Mr. Persimmons,” Gregory answered mildly.

“I suspect this man is your chauffeur,” the inspector said, and, as Gregory nodded, went on, “I’m sorry to have been obliged to knock him down. I found him shouting out in the roadway, and when I asked if anything was wrong he was first grossly rude and then attacked me. But I don’t think he’s hurt.”

“Hurt,” Ludding broke out, and was checked by Gregory’s lifted hand. “I’m sorry,” Persimmons said. “If by any chance it should happen again, pray knock him down again.”

“No offence intended to you, sir,” the inspector said. He thought for a moment whether he would make an attempt to enter into conversation with the other, but decided against it; he wanted, so far as he had a clear wish, to pick up opinion in the village first. So, with a casual inclination of the head, he started off down the road.

Persimmons looked at Ludding. “And now perhaps you will explain,” he said. “Dear me, Ludding, you are letting this temper grow on you. You must try and control it. Why, you might be attacking me next; mightn’t you?” He moved a little nearer. “Answer me, you swine, mightn’t you?”

“I don’t know why I hit him, sir,” Ludding said unhappily. “It was the other man who irritated me.”

“The other man: what other man?” Persimmons asked. “Are you blind or drunk, you fool?”

Ludding made an effort to pull himself together. “It was a young man, sir, in a grey suit. Asked after you and where you lived, and went off up to Cully. He made me see red, sir, and I was shouting after him when this fellow came up.”

“A young man,” Gregory said, “wanting to see me? This is very curious. And you didn’t know him, Ludding?”

“Never seen him before, sir,” Ludding answered. “He looked rather like an Indian, I thought.”

Gregory’s mind flew to what Manasseh had said of the hidden way to the East; was this anything to do with it? What possibilities, what vistas, might be opened! Whatever throne existed there, an end to that path he had followed so long and so painfully, would it not welcome him, coming with the Graal in one hand and the child for initiation in the other? He quickened his steps. “Let us see this young man,” he said, and hastened on to Cully.

Followed by Ludding, he came to the gates and up the drive, down which he had rushed twenty-four hours before. As he rounded the turn from which Colonel Conyers had shouted at the constable, he met the stranger face to face, and all three of them stood still.

Gregory’s first impression was that Ludding had been merely romancing when he spoke of the stranger being an Indian; the face that confronted him was surely as European as his own. There was something strange about it, but it was a strangeness rather of expression than of race, a high, contained glance that observed an unimportant world. The eyes took him in and neglected him at once, and together with him took in the whole of the surroundings and dismissed them also as of small worth. One hand carried gloves and walking-stick; the other, raised to the level of the face, moved lazily forward now and then as if to wave away some sort of slight unpleasantness, and every now and then also nostrils were wrinkled a little as if at some remote but objectionable smell that floated in the air. He had the appearance of being engaged upon a tiresome but necessary business, and this was enhanced as he paused on the drive and allowed his glance to dwell on Gregory.

“You want me?” Persimmons said, and the instant that he spoke became conscious that he actively disliked the stranger, with a hostility that surprised him with its own virulence. It stood out in his inner world as distinctly as the stranger himself in the full sunlight of the outer; and he knew for almost the first time what Manasseh felt in his rage for utter destruction.

His fingers twitched to tear the clothes off his enemy and to break and pound him into a mass of flesh and bone, but he knew nothing of that external sign, for his being was absorbed in a more profound lust. It aimed itself in a thrust of passion which should wholly blot the other out of existence, and again its young opponent’s upraised and open hand moved gently forward and downward, as if, like the Angel by the walls of Dis, he put aside the thick and noisome atmosphere of his surroundings.

“No,” he said coldly, “I do not think I want you.”

“What are you doing here, then?” Gregory asked thickly. “Why are you wandering about my house?”

“I am studying the map,” the stranger said, “and I find this a centre marked on it.”

“My servants shall throw you out,” Gregory cried. “I do not allow trespassers.”

“You have no servants,” the other said; “you have only slaves and shadows. And only slaves can trespass, and they only among shadows.”

“You are mad,” Gregory cried again. “Why have you come to my house?”

“I have not entered your house,” the stranger answered, “for the time is not yet. But it is not that which you should fear—it is the day when you