Supper came, and still she said little, still waiting for that simple statement from him, when there was nothing simple to say. And he sat dark with his thoughts.
They went to bed; and all Anwrel’s despairs and failures rocked his mind to sleep almost at once; so that, lulled by this kindness of the mercy of Nature, he never heard the pipes, some while after midnight, when a waning moon rose. Strange steps had entered his dreams, leading him over the Wold in a walk back through the centuries, enriching his dreams with wonders far beyond the learning of Hetley; but nothing had awoken the weary man. And it was not till an hour later that he awoke, and found Augusta was gone. He called her loudly, he impulsively pulled the bell; but the echoes of his own voice and the bell’s tinkle only gave emphasis to the hush of the house.
Again he was all alone.
He felt he must think. His mind was all fresh from sleep. But thinking told him nothing but that he had been thinking for weeks, and it had brought him no help yet. Then he must try action, a thing often vaguely praised. But what was he to do?
An uneasy feeling of darkness, solitariness and magic was hurrying him: but whither?
Well, first of all he must dress. So he dressed, still not knowing what he was going to do.
Then he went downstairs carrying a bedroom candle, and found his broad-brimmed hat hanging up in the hall. But perhaps he could think better in his study.
So he went in there with his candle.
He walked round the little room anxiously, as though any material thing he could find there could possibly help his thoughts.
Something about the freedom with which echoes of creaks of boards went soaring away triumphantly through the house seemed to tell him that the whole vicarage was empty.
Ornaments, furniture, pictures, one by one, came into his earnest gaze as the candle-flame passed them. And suddenly the old palæolith.
It almost looked up at the candle. If two inanimate things could greet each other, then that streaming flame bringing sudden colour and shape to the formless things huddled up in the dark of the night greeted the grim old axe that smiled back at once, with shadows shifting among its flinty hollows.
If the old stone grinned at the vicar with those shadows astir in its hollows, he was in just the state to see it and to interpret its meaning, for anxiety had so sharpened his nerves that they did not miss things like that. He looked at the stone once more, bending slightly towards it. And the movement of his head moved his hand and the candle, and the little shadows that lay on the stone all flickered and changed again. This time he felt it had winked at him.
Towards this moment everything had been trending. He saw that now. The Bishop’s refusal of help; his sending of Hetley to Wolding, the one man who must for certain be utterly useless, because he could not hear; the desertion of him by all that were sane and practical, till only Perkin was left to him: all, all these things had conspired to leave him helpless at last, amongst primitive things as far from civilization as little things lost by the sea at the height of its tide are far from their home at the ebb. Yes, he seemed back with all Wolding in the days of such weapons as this; and it felt to him as if thousands of years must roll over the world again before anything could return of the faith he had tried to preach. His hand shook at the thought, and the moving shadows made the smile of the flint seem grim at this sign of his weakening.
What should he do? What did the great flint want? Perhaps the Old Stones knew. He must go to the Old Stones.
He would take the palæolith. How carry it? Queer memories came to the tired mind from the flint, that a mind not frayed now by anxieties would never have felt at all, queer memories of how the old axe liked to be carried.
He had a great thick stick that he used to take when he went his walks over the hills. He went and found it now. Next he needed strips of hide, and remembered an old pair of leggings. With a good sharp knife that he had he cut a strip from the legging, carefully turning when he got to the end, and going back again and again, till it was all in one long strip. And with this he bound the grim old axe to the wood. When he had done this he extinguished his candle and slipped quietly out of the house.
The night outside was wonderfully blackened by the old trees that clustered about the vicarage and leaned over all its paths. And for a while the vicar had nothing to guide him but the pale surface of the drive. When this reached the road trees were fewer, and there were stars to be seen; and already the vicar’s eyes, finding their master roaming the open night, were beginning to fit themselves for their new guidance. The cold of the hour, that was about him when he started, increased with the chill of the valley; for though it was only a tiny stream that sparkled through Wolding, and seemed to add by its brightness to the warmth of the sun-drenched slopes, yet at night a power seemed to arise from the stream and to grip the whole valley. Through the chill of this grip the vicar went down the road, and through the long hush of the village, and came to the bridge that went over the stream at a shallow.
By this very way the old flint that he carried must often have come before; for the ford by the little bridge where the carts drove through today would have been the ford always; and the street by which the vicar had come through the village and the track that joined it, going up Wold Hill and straight for the Old Stones, must have been a pathway from hill to hill far back in the days that shaped us, in the days none knew, and that very few thought mattered.
The vicar crossed the bridge and went up the slope by the way that led over the hill to the Old Stones, the night seeming friendlier to him than ever it had before, for the sake, as it almost seemed, of the primitive thing that he carried.
And, had any watched in the empty village then, he had seen an English parson at the close of the nineteenth century, going furtively through the night, and carrying with a certain primeval dignity an axehead that no doubt had played its part while the victory of Man over other creatures trembled still in the balance and none knew yet who would rule the world in the end.
CHAPTER XXXIV
THE BLOOD ON THE LONG FLAT STONE
THE pipes that had summoned Mrs. Anwrel that night had summoned all the village, and they were all sitting there a dark circle about the Old Stones. This was to be the night, they had been told that afternoon by Tommy Duffin. It ought really to have been on midsummer’s eve, he said, but it was to be tonight instead. And they all came: they felt that they knew now, since they had forsaken the ways of the 19th century finally that afternoon (and, for that matter, the ways of the last 2000 years), that it was wrong to resist the call of those pipes of reed. They had all gone over the hill to the Old Stones a little while after midnight. They were all there: Lily crowned with a wreath of moss roses, that seemed to have come from Mrs. Airland’s garden, from an old red wall looking South; and, respectfully further away from the long flat stone, Mrs. Airland herself; and Mrs. Anwrel, seated quietly on the ground, as though she rested from wondering; and Mrs. Duffin, resting from telling stories of the seventeen years of the life of her son Tommy, because this was not the occasion for talk; and Mr. Duffin holding tight to his attitude that he would never have been surprised at Tommy doing something of the sort, on account of the aptitude he had often shown for one thing and another; and Willie Latten with his band of young men standing, armed each with a stick, in a circle in front of the seated villagers, as though they were an escort to the Old Stones of Wolding; and Skegland, utterly forgetting his groceries; and Marion, the maid from the vicarage, forgetting her young man in Yorkshire; and Mrs. Tweedy, forgetting everything; and Latten the carpenter and Mrs. Latten, and Hibbuts and Spelkins, and Blegg, and Mrs. Datchery and Mrs. Tichener: in fact all except four young men who had gone away to a farm in a valley beyond the one of the Old Stones, and for whose return all were waiting, while Tommy Duffin stood silent by the flat stone. And near him, but outside the circle of stones, waited Mudden, the butcher, with his great killing hammer.
A small flame burned airily in the midst of th
e central stone.
In a hush that a whisper stirred, or an owl’s hoot rent like a scream, they heard a scuffle in the valley of the Old Stones, below them, further from Wolding; and they turned their heads all together, with the sound of one rustling. It was the four young men bringing up the bull from the farm.
The grey circle of villagers sitting in the dark never moved, except where a few rose up to make way for the roped bull. He was brought through the circle, and through the circle of stones, reluctant but not alarmed, but then he suddenly snorted: when he saw the long flat stone it seemed that the bull knew.
As they dragged the bull gradually forward Tommy Duffin lifted the pipes with the suddenness of a strange thought, and played a tune he had never played before. The whites of the bull’s eyes showed in the dark at the sound of it, as though that music had carried him some clear message. All the villagers rose at the music.
Mudden, with his great hammer, stepped into the circle of stones.
“No, it must be at dawn,” said Tommy Duffin. Then he resumed his piping.
The principal marvel of that music seemed to be that it could enchant old memories, long, long since dead you had fancied, and bring them out of a time you thought utterly buried, and set them living in minds that had known them never, and had barely guessed them in dreams. This music held the people of Wolding tranced by the Old Stones; the carpenter, the sexton, the grocer, Mrs. Airland and all the rest; and not only them it seemed, for there were more than one or two that were there that night who fancied a stir in the wood, a sound like the moving of something gigantic but stealthy, as though some mystery had scented the blood of the bull and been lured through space and through time by a greed for sacrifice. Such thoughts are only guesses: too little was seen for anyone to be sure. But certainly the echoes of Tommy’s music grew stronger not weaker, going from hill to hill; and increased, and did not lose, their beauty and wonder, beating against the wood; and swelled to a melody that never yet had come from Tommy’s pipes, leaving him gasping, while the echoes rang on and on. And tears welled up in them all, salt and hot, but they saw through the gold of them that they and the distant stars, and the little lives near in the wood, and the Earth and its rocks and its flowers, were not separate as they had thought; and how this was they all knew well while that music played, but they have all forgotten it now. And some say they saw a dark shape larger than man’s, in the wood a little above them, playing this music of which the hills and the woods seemed made, and some could not pick it out from the dusk and the branches of trees. But Mrs. Tichener, whose eyes had got queer of late, but who could see better and better the further away things were, called out “It’s that there Reverend Davidson.”
And in that moment some wandering ray, the first of the gleams of dawn, slipped from under the rim of the world and defeated the stars. They all paled, and darkness paled as well as the light, and the mysteries of night were over. All looked for that shape in the dusk to which the old woman had pointed, and at first they all saw nothing; and then, coming down through the wood, empty now of immortal shapes, whom should they see but the vicar with his stone axe!
Nobody spoke. It seemed to them so right that the vicar should come just now, with that flint axe, just before dawn, that they merely made way for him in silence where their ring was nearest the wood; and he walked on through the circle of them and came near to the Old Stones. Augusta just looked up at him and smiled.
The impulse that had driven the vicar with his axe across the valley to that grey circle of stones, had brought him there and had done its work. He had some leisure at last for reason. In one swift glance he saw all, from the axe in his hand to the bull, and the flame on the altar, going paler and paler with every hint of the dawn. He saw now for what he had come. And, as clearly as he saw his old congregation in the pale but growing light, he saw his own motive in coming. Many thoughts band together to drive a perplexed man, and not all in the same way; but that great flint axe that he carried to that ancient circle of stones was clearer to see than any thought to remember; this alone was clear and conclusive, and stood up amongst the vague thoughts of many days, revealing his own course to him, as the rocky head of a cliff may rise above mist, showing the way to land. Yes, he had come for this. To sacrifice unto heathen gods, in the midst of these heathen stones, before all his congregation.
At such a moment, or, if that be impossible, on the threshold of much lesser errors, a clergyman thinks of his bishop. Anwrel thought of his bishop now. And he thought of him almost with fury. A fight, as he looked back now over all these weeks, had been fought by himself alone, a fight utterly vital to the Church, and one such as she had not had to contend in since the very earliest centuries. With any support he could have won. Had the whole bench of bishops come to Wolding, the poor man thought, it would not have been undue force to have employed in such a crisis. And what had happened? His own bishop by kindness, by tact and by superior ability had merely avoided a scandal. Upon that alone he had concentrated.
Then learning had failed him in Hetley. Then all that was busy and practical, in Porton. Then Heaven and Earth. He knew not which of these last had been the bitterer blow, Heaven, when Ethelbruda failed him, or Earth, when all the simple folk that he loved had gone out of his church and over the hill to the enemy. He thought of Ethelbruda the more bitterly: only a woman after all, he thought; piqued because the enemy had re-appeared, and with some success, in the land wherein she had been hitherto so victorious. But the heavier blow he had suffered had been the blow from Earth.
Well, he was all alone now. Towards this all things had drifted him. None had held him back. He had resisted against everything. And now?
Only the martyrs would have held out longer.
Tommy played again softly by the long flat stone. The bull was restless. The flame on the altar grew paler and paler, till it gave rather colour than light. And colour was coming back everywhere. A blackbird began to sing; and everybody was waiting.
At this last moment when he was throwing over everything, and all the meaning of the work of his life, a compassion for the bull held him back. He went up to Tommy Duffin by the long stone.
“Couldn’t we, perhaps,...” he began diffidently, looking towards the bull.
But Mudden came up to him, seeing what he would say.
“It’s an old bull, sir,” said Mudden. “He’s been kept back for this.”
And when nothing whatever seemed to hold him back any longer from sacrificing to gods against whom he had fought, the vicar went up to the stone and stood there waiting for dawn. And they brought the bull nearer.
All the congregation looked at his axe as the vicar stood there waiting, and all knew that it was right it should be of flint, and that Mudden’s iron weapon would never do. Anwrel felt their approval of it.
He knew that the sacrifice should be at dawn. He knew this from something that Tommy’s pipes seemed to be saying. There should be blood on the long flat stone for the sun to see. And it should be new at sunrise, so that Those who cared for blood should snuff its savour, going up from the freshness of Earth with the first of the odours of morning.
There was a dip in the downs through which the rising sun might have shone on the stones, and indeed did shine on them on midsummer’s day some thousands of years ago, but a wood had grown up there since those days. In any case there is a certain slow wobble about our old Earth as she spins, and it had shifted the dip in the downs a little away from the East. Also it was now long past midsummer’s day.
So the vicar, seeing there would be no sun on the stone at the exact moment of dawn, waited instead until he felt the expectancy of his congregation well up to a certain height. Then he signed and the bull was brought forward. (In later years they cut the trees, and held that ceremony at the proper hour and on the correct day. This was only their first sacrifice.)
There slept along Anwrel’s arms, and were not yet withered, muscles with which he had rowed when thirty years younger. Wit
h these he swung the axe as the bull came up to the stone. He aimed at a large white patch on the bull’s forehead, below the thickness of horn; and struck the patch where he aimed; and the stick and the leather thong held, and the grim edge of the flint, that it had been given so many ages ago, and the great skull crumpled in and the bull jumped forward, and fell twitching over the stone. They cut its throat, and the long flat stone had blood again, if only the blood of a bull. And an exhilaration seemed to thrill through the palæolith after a thirst of ages. Tommy Duffin’s pipes played on, telling the dawn what they had done in Wolding; and faint and from far off hills came echoes again, beyond words or imagination: if words can hint, at all, those echoes’ elusive meaning they told of triumph or taunt; perhaps taunting, if they dared to fare so far as the fields of Heaven, perhaps taunting St. Ethelbruda. But of what rivalries there may be among immortal powers we may never know anything, and of what music hints we can never do more than guess; only on the firmer ground of mortal sorrows, and of mortal disappointments and of their fading at last, can we even hope to speak surely. No one in Wolding had had so much to bear, as the vicar during the months of his lonely fight: disappointments succeeding each other had made the fight harder and harder, until there were no more disappointments left to come, and he still fought on alone. Now the fight was over for him. Great dignitaries of the Church might take it up, and St. Ethelbruda might succour them. But it was over for him. And with his rest from that long struggle against his parishioners the great weight of his loneliness lifted. And a cheery voice came chuckling out of the crowd:
“All right now, sir. Aren’t you?”
And Perkin came forward with a hand held out, to congratulate him on having found an illusion.
CHAPTER XXXV
THE RETURN OF THE WILD