Philip turned a tired, sleep-deprived face towards him.
‘Did you have a good night, Alfred?’
‘Oh yes, sir, pretty good. A few noises, you know.’
‘You didn’t hear a terrific hammering on my door’ (Alfred’s bedroom door was only an arm’s length from Philip’s) ‘about five o’clock this morning?’
‘Oh no, sir, nothing like that. A few scurrying noises, could have been rats.’
Philip, with lack-lustre eyes, sipped his tea. Could he have imagined the knocking? No, it was much too loud. But could it have been a sound heard in a dream—the tail-end of a dream? Philip hadn’t had many dreams of late years. Sleeping-pills inhibited them; that was one of their side-effects, and a bad one, for dreams were an outlet for the subconscious mind, and if denied this outlet, it took its revenge in other ways. In madness, perhaps? One saw things in dreams of course and one was aware of conversations; but were these conversations conveyed by sound, or by the illusion of the dream? As far as his recollections went, communication in dreams went by sight, and by some telepathic process, and not by sound—certainly not by such sounds as the four tremendous thumps which had awakened him.
So convinced was he of their material reality that while he was dressing he opened his bedroom door, and examined its other side, fully expecting to see marks on it which might have been made by a sledgehammer. There were none; the off-white paint was as smooth and undented as it had always been. To make assurance doubly sure, he held the door open, where the light could catch it at different angles; and then he saw something which in all his twenty-odd years of opening the door, he had never seen.
Beneath its coating of thick paint, something was written, printed rather. White over white, very hard to decipher, but at last he made it out:
PRIVATE
LIEUT.-COLONEL ALEXANDER McCREETH
Well, that explained itself. Lieut.-Col. McCreeth had occupied Philip’s bedroom.
Sometime during the war years he may have used it as an orderly-room, a sitting-room, or a bedroom, but when using it he didn’t want to be disturbed. Was the repeated rat-tat-tat meant to disturb his privacy, perhaps for military reasons? The previous owners of the house, who had occupied it for a year or two after the Army left, had redecorated it, and tried to wipe out all trace of their military predecessors. They must have spent a lot of money on it, and then gone away, quite ready to go, apparently, for they had sold it to Philip at a reasonable price. No haggling. Why?
It was years since he had seen the vendors and he didn’t even know their whereabouts. And if he had, what could he ask them?
He began to entertain absurd fancies, such as that it was he who had been ordered to fall in at the double and the mysterious knocking was meant to awaken him to the urgency of some military exercise, for which he would otherwise be late. Perhaps the safety of the country depended on it. Perhaps an invasion was imminent?
Not now, of course, but then.
Gradually these fancies began to wear off, and only showed themselves in an almost invincible reluctance, on Philip’s part, to ask Alfred if he had had any more psychic experience. At last, when all seemed set fair, he put the question.
‘Oh yes, sir, often. But I didn’t want to tell you, because I thought it might bother you.’
Philip’s heart sank.
‘What sort of things?’
‘Well, nothing that I’ve heard myself, except those noises I’ve told you about, and the voice saying “Fall in at the double!” But anything may happen in an old house like this.’
‘But you haven’t heard anything else?’
‘As a matter of fact I have, sir, but it’s only gossip, things they natter about at the local. Places like this, so far from civilization, they haven’t much to talk about.’
‘Tell me what it was.’
‘May I sit down, sir?’
Alfred sat down, bent forward to get his shirt-cuffs into the correct position, leaned back and said:
‘Well, it was about this Colonel.’
‘You mean Colonel McCreeth?’
‘Yes, Colonel McCreeth. They couldn’t pronounce his name properly—they’re uneducated here. But they said he was unpopular with the other men who were living here, in this house I mean, at the time. He was a dictatorial type, like some of them are, and they had it in for him. He used to get them up from bed when it wasn’t a bit necessary, just to look at the moon, so to say, pretending there was an air raid, when there wasn’t. And so they got fed up.’
‘I don’t wonder. And then?’
‘Well, he picked on a certain bloke who had said or done something out of turn and gave him C.B.—this house counted as a barracks, I believe—and this bloke, and three or four others, slept in my room—you may remember how it was in the Army, sir, they didn’t always pay much attention to the comfort of the men.’
‘Yes, I do remember,’ Philip said.
‘Well, this fellow was a sort of trouble-maker, and he had it in for the Colonel, who wasn’t liked by any of them, and he got their sergeant, who didn’t like him either, to make a sort of plot. Very wrong of them, of course, and against discipline, but you can’t try people, even soldiers, beyond a certain point.’
‘Of course not.’
‘So, as I was saying, they put their heads together, and ran downstairs, saying “Fall in at the double”, and the sergeant knocked at the Colonel’s door—your door, sir—and he came out in his pyjamas—and said, “What the hell is this?” And the Sergeant said, “It’s someone down by the river, sir. He’s acting very suspicious. We think he may be a German spy.” The Colonel cursed, but he got into his coat and trousers—it was a cold night—and went with them—about three dozen of them—down to the river bank. And what happened afterwards no one seemed to know. You know what men are like when they get angry and excited. It spreads from one to another—a dozen men would do what one man wouldn’t—and the Colonel was a heavy drinker—but anyhow the upshot was he fell into the river, and was found drowned at the weir below your house. The river was low, so he wasn’t carried over it.’
‘Dear me,’ said Philip, though a stronger expression would have suited his feelings better. ‘Do you think any of this is true?’
Alfred smiled and shrugged his shoulders. ‘They’re that uneducated in these parts.’
*
A few nights later at the same hour as before, five o’clock, Philip was awakened by a knocking at his door. ‘Come in!’ he shouted, still fuddled with sleep, and still unaware if he was awake or dreaming, ‘Come in!’ he repeated, and it was then he heard the thrice-given order, ‘Fall in at the double, fall in at the double, fall in at the double,’ followed by the clatter of heavy footsteps on the bare boards of the staircase.
So intent was he on listening to this that he didn’t see his bedroom door open—it may have opened of itself as it sometimes did when not securely latched—but at any rate it was open, as he could tell from the moonlight from the hall window, above the staircase, struggling into the densely curtained room. Faint as it was, the moonlight showed him that someone had come in when the door opened, for he could dimly descry the head and the back of a tall man, edging his way round Philip’s bed, apparently looking for something. It was more like a presence than a person, a movement than a man, the footsteps made no sound on the thick carpet, but it seemed to stop in front of the wardrobe, and fumble there.
A burglar? If it was a burglar, and if all he wanted was a few clothes, well and good; he might be armed, and Philip was in no state to resist an armed man. Some said—the police even said—that in certain cases, in this age of violence, it was safer not to ‘have a go’ at a man who might be desperate.
The telephone was at his left hand, the switch of the bedside lamp at his right: yet he dared not use either, he dared not even stir, lest the intruder should realize he was awake.
After what seemed an unconscionable time, he heard or thought he heard, sounds of groping in the recesses of t
he wardrobe. This activity, whatever it was, ceased and a silence followed which Philip took to mean that the burglar (for who else could he be?) had finished his search and was taking himself off. Philip pressed the back of his head against the pillow and shut his eyes, for the man was now coming towards him, face forwards. But Philip’s pretence of sleep hadn’t deceived him; he stopped and peered down at him. Philip’s eyes opened: they couldn’t help themselves, and he saw the stranger’s face. Mask-like, the indistinct features kept their own secret, but their colour was the colour of the moonlight on them. Drawing nearer, stooping closer, outside the moonlight’s ray, they were invisible; but a voice which must have come through the unseen lips, though the whole body seemed to utter it, said:
‘Fall in and follow me. At the double, mind you, at the double,’ and a shadow, momentarily blotting out the moonbeams, slid through the doorway.
Seized by an irresistible inner compulsion, Philip jumped out of bed and without waiting to put a coat over his pyjamas, or slippers on his feet, followed the visitant downstairs in a direction he knew as well as if it had been directed to him by a radar beam.
On the wall that separated the garden from the river he saw first of all a line of heads, he couldn’t tell how many, wearing Army caps, turning this way and that, bobbing and nudging, and heard an angry buzz of talk, as of bees, whose hive is threatened. At the sign of his precursor, only a few yards ahead of him, silence fell, and they drew apart, leaving a gap between them in the shallow river-wall. But they were still leaning towards each other, some of their faces and silhouettes moonstruck, the rest in darkness.
‘Now, boys, what is all this?’ asked their Colonel, for he it must have been, in a cheerful, would-be rallying tone. ‘Why have you got me up at this time of night? There isn’t an air raid.’ And his moonlit face, revolving slowly in its lunar circuit, scanned the night sky.
‘No sir, you know what it is,’ said a voice, a low, level voice charged with menace. ‘We’re fed up with you, that what it is.’
They were beginning to close in on him, their hands were already round his legs, when he called out, ‘You’ve done this before. Take him, he’s my double!’ And he pointed to Philip, shivering behind him on the lawn.
‘Shall we, Jack? Shall we, Bill? He’s one of them, we might as well.’
Their strong hands were round him and Philip, hardly struggling, felt himself being hoisted over the garden wall, to where, a few feet below, he could see his own face mirrored in the water.
‘Let’s get rid of the bastard!’
*
The next thing Philip knew was a hand on his shoulder, and he heard another voice, saying:
‘Good God, sir, what are you doing here? You might catch your death of cold.’
He couldn’t speak while Alfred was helping him over the wall.
‘Thank you, thank you,’ he gasped, when he had got his breath back. ‘I might have been drowned if it hadn’t been for you. But where are the others?’
He looked back at the depopulated garden wall, no dark heads bobbing and whispering, neck to neck, no limbs bracing themselves for violence; only the moon shining as innocently as that de-virginated satellite can shine.
‘But how did you know?’
‘I have my ways of finding out’, said Alfred darkly. ‘A hot bath, a hot bottle, a whisky perhaps, and then bed for you, sir. And don’t pay any attention to that lot, they’re up to no good.’
THE PRAYER
Anthony Easterfield was not really religious, unless the word ‘religious’ is capable of the widest and vaguest interpretation, but he was religious to the extent of not being a materialist. He was sure he was not a materialist, and if the word was mentioned in his presence, or if he came across it in a book, or if it occurred to his mind unbidden (as words will), he at once chased it away. Materialist indeed! Perish the thought! The human race was dying of materialism. Better a drunkard’s death which did at any rate result from some form of spirit.
At the same time he was aware that many of the phenomena of which he specially disapproved, ‘the worship of the motor-car’, for instance, had a relish of spirit, if not of salvation in it, besides the petrol to which motorists were addicted, for in one sense they were alcoholics all.
He himself had a car, and a man to drive it—for Anthony couldn’t drive, and he knew, from mortifying efforts to pass the driving test, that it was much better for himself and everybody else that he shouldn’t try to.
The car was a convenience to him, but to his driver it was much more than a convenience, it was an emblem of religion. His driver was not satisfied with it, or with its performance in many, if not in all, directions—as many people are dissatisfied with their religions (if any), feeling that their religions have let them down. Anthony’s car had often let Copperthwaite down, and it was anything but the status-symbol that he coveted; at the same time the creed of automobilism was in his blood, and nothing could eradicate it.
‘What you really want, sir,’ (on a special occasion he would deign to call Anthony ‘Sir’ though he would more willingly have addressed the car as such) ‘is a car with a prestige value.’
(The fact that Anthony did not and never would ‘want’ such a car never penetrated Copperthwaite’s car-intoxicated consciousness.)
‘Now the Roland-Rex 1967,’ he went on, trying to make the arcana of automobilism clear to Anthony’s non-mechanical mind, ‘with overdrive, under-drive, self-drive, automatic gears, et cetera, is just the car for you. It is a splendid car. I could tell you more about its performance, only you wouldn’t be interested, but its prestige value is enormous. I doubt if even a Rolls-Royce—’
Anthony Easterfield was indifferent, or nearly indifferent, to the prestige value of a Roland-Rex, but he knew that Copperthwaite’s interest in it, besides being mechanical, was also snobbish, and snobbism implies a sense of values that is not simply materialistic, even if it could scarcely be called spiritual.
To make people stare! To watch them gather round the Roland-Rex, wide-eyed with admiration, exclaiming to each other, patting and stroking it if they dared—venerating it as an object of excellence. To surpass, to excel! Not to keep up with the Joneses but to leave them behind, scattering and gaping. The deus ex machina! The God in the car!
Copperthwaite spent hours, literally hours, on Anthony’s commonplace little car, making it shine so that you could see your face in it; and when its lower quarters went wrong, as they often did, he would be under it with outstretched legs, and his face, if it were visible, which it seldom was, wearing a beatific expression, as if at last he had found true happiness. And if Anthony called him to come out of his dark grimy, oily hiding-place into the light of day, he would look disappointed, and almost cross, as if his orisons had been interrupted.
Laborare est orare. Copperthwaite’s happy (although to Anthony), his unenviable labours, were a form of prayer to the deus ex machina, the god in the car. If only he could save up enough to buy a Roland-Rex! Then Copperthwaite’s dream would come true, and if his labours were doubled, so would his prayers be. To be prostrate under the chassis of a Roland-Rex! To feel its oil dripping gently on his face! To be in close touch with its genitals (excuse the phrase) what bliss! What more could a man want? To labour for, and by so doing, to pray to the embodied principle of mechanical engineering! To communicate with it (no levity intended) by the oil dripping from it—to be at one with it! Anthony envied Copperthwaite his instinctive identification with the object of his devotion, his conviction that it was more important than he was, and that in its service was perfect freedom.
Anthony had learned to recognize a Roland-Rex, for when they passed, or, as seldom happened, overtook one, Copperthwaite would draw his attention to it. ‘Now that’s what we ought to have, sir.’
Anthony, who wanted Copperthwaite to be happy, would groan inwardly and think about his bank-balance.
He realized that Copperthwaite’s passion for cars was of a religious nature, and respecte
d him for it, for he too, was religious after a fashion, although it was a different fashion from Copperthwaite’s.
Laborare est orare. To work is to pray. Yes; but is the converse true? Orare est laborare?—to pray is to work? It may be; many people besides the Saints had wrestled in prayer. Sweat had poured off their foreheads, tears had run down their cheeks; they had thrown their bodies this way and that; they had been taken up unconscious for dead. All this due to the physical effort of prayer. Labour! Could anyone labour more than that? Copperthwaite certainly laboured in his unuttered prayer to Anthony’s car; he withdrew himself from the light of day, he put himself into the most uncomfortable positions the body could assume, while studying and communing with the object of his adoration—albeit with its baser parts. His communication with it was immediate and instinctive, and needed no effort on his part; he required no confirmation from the car to assure him that he was completely en rapport with it, and it with him. Labour thrown away! No fear; even if he couldn’t find out what was wrong, the attempt to do so was its own reward. Another time, another hour or two, with his back on the cement and his eyes on a jungle of pipes (what he actually saw that so captivated him, Anthony, who was totally devoid of mechanical sense, never knew), he would find out, and his loving identification with the car would be closer than ever.
As for being brought out unconscious! Copperthwaite never looked more alive and kicking (for he had more or less to kick himself out) than when he emerged from under the car, patted its bonnet and gave it a grateful and a loving look.
Anthony’s orisons were physically much less laborious, for they only involved kneeling and sometimes wriggling and pressing his forehead against the bed, or the chair, or the pew, or wherever he happened to find convenient for his devotions. He didn’t go to church much; he knew, or had known, the order of the service so well that he listened to it with only half an ear; he preferred private to public worship. Following its majestic sequence did not give him time to slip in his own petitions. These needed an effort of memory which he could not compass while the clergyman, the choir, or the congregation, were all shouting or muttering against it. His prayers needed constant modification; this or that person had to be left out, this or that person put in. The task of selection and discrimination was difficult; and to perform it, Anthony felt he must be alone with God, undisturbed by the traffic noises, and the traffic signals, red, yellow, and green, on the Road to Heaven.