i
nan rose upright, crying aloud; the wind of terror had blown violently in upon the stillness of the gallery. silas towered amongst the vats; he wore an air of unearthly triumph and exaltation. “nan! nan!” he said, stretching up both arms with the gesture of the fanatic over the blood-offering. “what have you done? what have you done?” she cried. “saved you,—bought you free,” he answered loudly, still lit up by his triumph, but she hid her face in her hands, and moaned, shuddering.
morgan stirred, and lay gazing without comprehension. he whispered nan’s name; she started, and turned to him, but seeing his eyes opened she wildly laid her hand across them. “you mustn’t look,—you mustn’t look,” she said, distraught, in the effort to preserve him although she understood nothing herself.
in that absence of understanding she saw only 278silas erect there with his arms still stretched out, as a sinner might stare into heaven, or a martyr into hell, accepting either, because enlightened as to both.
“silas!” she called, unbearably alarmed.
“builders and destroyers,” he replied from afar, and in the tone of one giving utterance to a quotation of secret familiarity.
“what am i to do?” she cried, in a lost whisper. she felt immeasurably removed from the succour of mankind, forced into the kindred of the denes, amongst grotesque surroundings, and grotesque and terrible events, high above the comings and goings of the temperate world. there was no room in her mind for the thought that the body of gregory was pitched sinking through the morass of that deadly cauldron. then the word “gregory!” came to her, and, wonderingly, she pronounced it aloud, “gregory,” thereby bringing realisation upon herself, and the first conscious dismay.
she went to silas and seized him by the arm.
“silas, speak to me....”
he turned his eyes full upon her face.
“o god, can you see me?” she murmured, shrinking away.
“there was nothing else to be done,” he said.
279“oh, yes, yes!” she protested, inarticulate in her extreme distress and bewilderment.
“there was nothing else,” he repeated.
ii
she perceived then that, according to the temper of his mind, there was indeed nothing else. she ceased to protest, overtaken by the actual consequence of his uncompromising creed.
“you have killed gregory,” she said.
a change came over him; his look of flaming justification died down.
“hannah. martin. christine. gregory,” he said sorrowfully.
nan was crying; she was frightened by the monstrous, fantastic extravagance of the scene. silas must have decoyed her to the heart of some distorted maze, where death was not solemn, nor grief venerable; and therein she was lost. crying, her arm crooked across her eyes, she made her way over to linnet, who had risen to his feet. “it’s soap,—soap,” she stammered, taking refuge against him.
he held her, since no words could help, and she made herself as small as possible within his arm. silas called out to him across the gallery, “i have 280thrown gregory into the vat,” pointing to the wrong vat, and forcing himself to laugh very loudly.
“but what is to become of you? madman!” linnet exclaimed.
this was a new idea to silas.
“yes, i must think of getting away, it’s true,” he replied, suddenly busy; and he moved excitably in what he thought to be the direction of the door. but he had lost his bearings, and struck himself against the corner of a vat. “what’s that?” he called out. “i’ll have no nonsense,” he added, speaking in a tone of incipient panic which he tried to cover up by menace. “there is no time to be lost; i can’t be kept hanging about here, or i shall be taken. i must get away, and hide somewhere. i must hide in a barn. you will have to bring me food. the first thing to be done is to get away.” all the while he was speaking he moved about, groping amongst the vats, trying to find his way out, but amongst that number, where nothing helped him to distinguish one from the other, with each step he became more confusedly lost. “i’m blind!” he cried, at last standing stock-still, and from the anguish in his voice it might have been believed that he had never made the discovery before.
281then he started to stride about, up and down, in and out of the gangways left between the vats, taking any opening that offered itself. linnet tried to speak to him; he was interrupted, reasonable words fluttered vainly amongst the vibrant emotions with which silas’s soul was strung. neither linnet nor nan could have any cognisance of such a diapason. “you shall not come near me,” silas shouted; “how am i to know you wouldn’t give me up? although i killed gregory for you; and i loved gregory.—we’ve destroyed one another. it’s right,—people like us ought to go. there’s no place for us. i can’t save myself,” he said, “i’m blind; every one can take advantage of me. how could i live hidden for weeks in the country? but i’ll give them trouble first....”
he was full of a crazy, hopeless defiance; he turned upon them the wild flash of his sightless eyes. “it must end in defeat,” he said, “what match is a blind man for clear-seeing men? you had me at a disadvantage, all my life,—all of you! you were orderly, while i struggled. gone under! but not as tamely as you think.” as he spoke he found the door that gave access to the outside stairs, and dragged it open, blundering out into the air on the 282iron landing. they saw him there, against the sky, silhouetted for a moment, before he disappeared on his reckless descent of the hazardous stair.
iii
evening was rapidly falling, but the coming of night would befriend him, since it could not hinder. as he reached the foot of the stair he stood for a moment in hesitation. he listened. the tessellated square was silent, but for a drip of water off a gutter into one of the great butts; no footsteps rang across the cobbles; no voice exclaimed “why, dene!”; no call from nan or linnet echoed down to him from above. he felt himself more utterly alone than ever in his life before, more finally at bay. never for an instant did the idea of giving himself up cross his mind. he was calmer now than he had been up in the gallery, where he had bruised himself so cruelly against these serried vats. here, at least, he had space around him; and out there, where he meant to go, would be still wider space, the flat freedom of the fens, the sky above his head, and night, the only ally that could begin to equalise his chances with other men.
but there would be uncertainty. always the uncertainty 283whether he had or had not been seen. he might be ringed about by pursuers closing in upon him, and not know it. he must make up his mind to that; he must make up his mind to the knowledge that defeat would overtake him in the end. this knowledge came to him with a strangely familiar quietness; it was as though it had been with him all his life, although he might not have given it a name.
in the silence of the evening he passed beyond the factory and gained the road on the top of the great dyke stretching across the fens. upon its eminence he paused, forlorn, uncertain, and derelict. that illumination which had sustained him before, seemed now to have deserted him; he no longer trod with the same assurance, but cautiously, afraid of making a false step and of slipping down the sides of the dyke, afraid of being seen, upright upon the skyline, yet not venturing to leave the road and to make his way across the flooded country. yet as he stumbled on, he realised that therein lay his wisest course: the floods would reveal no footmarks, and he would be less conspicuous than erect on the height of the dyke. in so far as his hopelessness could devise a plan, that was the plan to follow. he struck across the road, and, crouching 284on his heels, allowed himself to slither down the escarpment. at the bottom he found the water, icy about his ankles, and shivered at its sinister touch. nevertheless, he plunged forward into it, his hands outstretched before him, determined to put all possible distance between himself and abbot’s etchery. behind him the three chimneys of the factory vomited their black plumes of noiseless smoke that trailed across the sky, but of this he did not reckon; he was aware only of the cry of the curlew circling above him, and of the marshy ground that sucked back his steps beneath the water. he fought his way, each foot held down and his progress hampered as in a nightmare, and with an effort he dragged one foot after the other stickily out, ploughing onwards into the unknown breadth of the marshes, ignorant of his surroundings, of whether night had fallen, concealing him, or whether the last bars of day still made of him a distinguishable mark. and, for his greater misery and discomfort, as he advanced across the submerged fields, he came periodically to the ditches that were their boundaries, and knew them because his footing suddenly failed him and threw him forward into the water, pitching down upon hands and knees, so that 285presently he was drenched, and the touch of the water which at first had been only about his ankles now conquered his body also, little by little, penetrating to his skin, glacial as the presaged touch of death. still he advanced, striving towards no known prospective refuge, but merely, irrationally, to increase the distance, without considering the paltriness of the help those few poor miles could afford him.
by now, although he could not be certain of it, night had fully come. a huge, low moon stole up above the horizon, and sailed slowly higher into the heavens over the flooded country. in its light the few bare trees stood up like twigs, black and stark; and still across the now shining expanse of water the blind man held on his laborious, hindered way the splash of his steps breaking the placid surface into a ripple of jet and silver. he had no notion how far he might have gone; he was uncertain even whether he had succeeded in keeping straight in the same direction. every now and then he came to a hillock of higher ground, which lifted him for the moment out of the floods, and every now and then he stumbled into a ditch, from which he extricated himself, his teeth chattering; and all the time he walked with his hands groping before him, but 286they could not save him from the ditches that seemed to lie in wait for him and to take pleasure in trapping him unawares. he thought that he must have been walking half the night. even the curlews had ceased to cry long since, and no owl hooted across the waste of waters. his extreme weariness deadened him; but fever reanimated him; and it was a conflict as to which would gain the advantage. at one moment he thought that he must sink down from exhaustion, even into the floods; the next moment, a bout of fear and determination spurred him on, and he splashed forward, behind his groping hands, while obscure mutterings came in the immense silence of the night from his moving lips.
morning found him crouching beside some meagre trees upon one of the hillocks out of reach of the water. his hair was matted, his eyes bloodshot, his clothes wet and dankly clinging to his limbs. he crouched as closely as possible to the ground, feeling about for the shelter of the trees, which, leafless as they were, offered no shelter at all. he crept about amongst them,—they might be half a dozen in number, a small clump;—he crept over the twenty square feet or so of the little island on which he was marooned, and once or twice he 287seemed tempted to renew his passage through the water, for he cautiously adventured down to its edge, and stretched out his foot towards it, but, although he essayed this on different sides of the mound, he always took his foot back shuddering as soon as he encountered the water, and withdrew himself in the same shambling, furtive fashion to the shelter of the trees.
it was here that in the afternoon he was found by the men who were out for his capture. they came beating across the flooded fields in extended order, as men beating for game. when they first descried him from a little way off, he still was stealing about his patch of refuge, rambling uneasily and without purpose, now coming down to the water’s edge, now out of sight over the curve of the hillock, now reappearing to slink between the trees. uncouth, haggard, his clothes torn and soiled, his hands always at their unhappy groping, his useless eyes turning hither and thither, he resembled some half-crazy castaway that might have subsisted there for days on berries and foul water, too bemused now for further endeavour; too broken in spirit for any frenzy of despair; merely acquiescent in his climax of the long premonitory years; waiting for the end 288which, after all the riot and the burden, could not be otherwise than welcome.
iv
after that day clean april poured sunlight over the marshes. flocks of plover settled on the emerging pasture; and the sea, whose presence was divined rather than seen over the edge of the fens, ceased to be a threat, and became a promise, for the peculiar void of the sky above it, where land stopped short, grew luminous with the transparency of shower-washed spaces. the very roads, the very railway line with its straight, shining metals, streamed away, avenues of promise and escape.
like a great bowl opened to the gold-moted emptiness of heaven the country lay, recipient of the benediction.
january-september, 1920.
