Chapter XII — The Great Passing
I
Jack soon got better. Soon he was sitting in the old armchair by the parlour fire. There was a little fire, against the damp. This was Gran’s place. But Gran did not leave her bed.
He had been in to see her, and she frightened him. The grey, dusky skin round the sunken mouth and sharpened nose, the eyes that were mostly shut, and never really open, the harsh breathing, the hands lying like old translucent stone on the bed-cover: it frightened him, and gave him a horror of dissolution and decay. He wanted terribly to be out again with the healthy Tom, among the horses. But not yet—he must wait yet awhile. So he took his turn sitting by Gran, to relieve Mary, who got little rest. And he became nervous, fanciful, frightened as he had never been before in his life. The family seemed to abandon him as they abandoned Gran. The cold isolation and horror of death.
The first rains had set in. All night the water had thundered down on the slab roof of the cubby, as if the bottom had fallen out of some well above. Outside was cloudy still, and a little chill. A wind was hush-sh-shing round the house. Mary was sitting with Gran, and he was in the parlour, listening to that clock—Tick-tock! Tick-tock! He sat in the armchair with a shawl over his shoulders, trying to read. Curiously enough, in Australia he could not read. The words somehow meant nothing to him.
It was Sunday afternoon, and the smell of roast beef, Yorkshire pudding, cabbage, apple pie and cinnamon custard still seemed to taint the house. Jack had come to loathe Sunday dinners. They seemed to him degrading. They hung so heavy afterwards. And now he was sick, it seemed to him particularly repulsive. The peculiar Sundayness of it. The one thing that took him in revulsion back to England: Sunday dinner. The England he didn’t want to be taken back to. But it had been a quiet meal. Monica and Grace and the little boy twins had all been invited to York, by Alec Rice’s parents, and they had gone away from the shadowed house, leaving a great emptiness. It seemed to Jack they should all have stayed, so that their young life could have united against this slow dissolution.
Everything felt very strange. Tom and Lennie were out, Mrs. Ellis and the children were upstairs, Mr. Ellis had gone to look at some sheep that had got into trouble in the rain. There seemed a darkness, a chill, a deathliness in the air. It is like that in Australia: usually so sunny and absolutely forgetful. Then comes a dark day, and the place seems like an immemorial grave. More gruesome than ever England was, on her dark days. Mankind forever entombed in dissolution, in an endless grave.
“Who shall ascend into the hill of the Lord; or who shall stand
in His holy place?
He that hath clean hands and a pure heart,
Who hath not yielded up himself unto vanity, nor sworn deceitfully.”
Jack was thinking over the words Mr. Ellis had read in the morning, as near as he remembered them. He looked at his own hands: already they seemed pale and soft and very clean. What had the Lord intended hands for? So many things hands must do, and still they remain clean. Clean hands! His left was still discoloured and out of shape. Was it unclean?
No, it was not unclean. Not unclean like the great paw of Easu’s hiking Monica out of the saddle.
Clean hands and a pure heart! A pure heart! Jack thought of his own, with two heavy new desires in it: the sudden, shattering desire for Monica, that would rip through him sometimes like a flame. And the slow, smouldering desire to kill Easu. He had to be responsible for them both.
And he was not going to try to pluck them out. They both belonged to his heart, they were sacred even while they were shocking in his blood. Only, driven back on himself, he gave the old pledge: Lord, if you don’t want me to have Monica and kill Easu, I won’t. But if you want me to, I will. Somewhere he was inclined to cry out to be delivered from the cup. But that would be cowardice towards his own blood. It would be yielding himself up to vanity, if he pretended he hadn’t got the desires. And if he swore to eradicate them, it would be swearing deceitfully. Sometimes the hands must move in the darkest acts, if they are to remain really clean, not deathly like Gran’s now. And the heart must beat hard in the storm of darkest desires, if it is to keep pure, and not go pale-corrupt.
But always subject to the will of the Lord.
“Who shall ascend into the hill of the Lord; or who shall stand in His holy place.”
The Seraphim and the Cherubim knew strange, awful secrets of the Lord. That was why they covered their faces with their wings, for the wings of glory also had a dark side.
The fire was burning low. Jack stooped to put on more wood. Then he blew the red coals to make the wood catch. A yellow flame came, and he was glad.
“Forsake me not, Oh God, in mine old age; when I am grey-headed; until I have sown my strength to this generation, and Thy power to all them that are yet to come.”
Jack was always afraid of those times when the mysterious sayings of the Bible invaded him. He seemed to have no power against them. And his soul was always a little afraid, as if the walls of life grew thin, and he could hear the great everlasting wind of the mysterious going of the Lord, on the other side.
“Forsake me not, Oh, God, in mine old age; when I am grey-headed.”
Jack wished Gran would say this, so that the Lord would stay with her, and she would not look so awful. How could Mary stand it, sitting with her day after day.
“Until I have shown my strength to this generation, and Thy power to all them that are yet to come.”
And again his stubborn strength of life arose. What was he for, but to show his strength to the generation, and a sign of the power of the Lord for all them that were yet to come.
The clock was ticking steadily in the room. But the yellow flames were bunching up in the grate. He wondered where Gran’s “stocking” really was? But the thought of stockings, of concealed money, of people hankering for money, always made him feel sick.
“There is one glory of the sun, and another glory of the moon and another glory of the stars.... There is a natural body and a spiritual body....”
“There is one glory of the sun——”
But men don’t all realise the same glory. In England the sun had seemed to him to move with a domestic familiarity. It wasn’t till he was out here that he had been struck to the soul with the immense assertive vigour and sacred handsomeness of the sun. He knew it now: the wild, immense, fierce, untamed sun, fiercer than a glowing-eyed lion with a vast mane of fire, crouching on the western horizon, staring at the earth as if to pounce on it, the mouse-like earth. He had seen this immense sun, fierce and powerful beyond all human considerations, glaring across the southern sea, as all men may see it if they go there.
“There is one glory of the sun——”
And it is a glory vast and fierce, of a Lord who is more than our small lives.
“And another glory of the moon——”
That too he knew. And he had not known, till the full moon had followed him through the empty bush, in Australia, in the night. The immense, liquid gleam of the far-south moon, following, following with a great, miraculous, liquid smile. That vast, white, liquid smile, so vindictive! And himself, hurrying back to camp on Lucy, had known a terrible fear. The fear that the broad, liquid fire of the cold moon would capture him, capture him and destroy him, like some white demon that slowly and coldly tastes and devours its prey. The moon had that power, he knew, to dissolve him, tissue, heart, body and soul, dissolve him away. The immense, gleaming, liquid, lusting white moon, following inexorably, and the bush like white charred moon-embers.
“There is another glory of the moon——”
And he was afraid of it. “The sun is thy right hand, and the moon is thy left hand.” The two gleaming, immense living orbs, moving like weapons in the two hands of the Lord.
“And there is another glory of the stars——”
The strange stars of the southern night, all in unfamiliar crowds and tufts and drooping clusters, with strange black wells in the sky. He never got used to the southern stars. Whenever he stood and looked up at them, he felt as if his soul were leaving him, as if he belonged to another species of life, not to man as he knew man. As if there were a metamorphosis, a terrible metamorphosis to take place.
“There is a natural body, and there is a spiritual body.” This phrase had haunted his mind from the earliest days. And he had always had a sort of hatred of the thing his Aunts, and the parson, and the poets, called The Spirit, with a capital S. It had always, with him, been connected with his Sunday clothes, and best behaviour, and a certain exalted falseness. Part of his natural naughtiness had arisen from his vindictive dislike and contempt of The Spirit, and things of The Spirit.
Now it began to seem different to him. He knew, he always had known, that the Bible really meant something absolutely different from what the Aunts, and the parson, and even the poets meant by the Spirit, or the spiritual body.
Since he had seen the Great God in the roaring of the yellow sun, and the frightening vast smile in the gleaming full-moon following him, the new moon like a delicate weapon-thrust in the western sky, and the stars in disarray, like a scattered flock of sheep bunching and communing together in a strange bush, in the vast heavens, he had gradually come to know the difference between the natural body and the spiritual body. The natural body was like in England, where the sun rises naturally to make day, and passes naturally at sunset, owing to the earth’s revolving; where the moon “raises her lamp above,” on a dear night, and the stars are “candles” in heaven. That is the natural body: all the cosmos just a natural fact. And a man loves a woman so that they can propagate their species. The natural body.
And the spiritual body is supposed to be something thin and immaterial, that can float through a brick wall and subsist on mere thought. Jack had always hated this thin, wafting object. He preferred his body solid. He loved the beautiful weight and transfigured solidity of living limbs. He had no use whatsoever for the gossamer stuff of the supposed “ethereal,” or “pure,” spirit: like evaporated alcohol. He had a natural dislike of Shelley, and vegetarians, and socialists, and all advocates of “spirit.” He hated Blake’s pictures, with people waving like the wrong kind of sea-weed, in the sky, instead of under water.
Hated it all. Till hating it had almost made him wicked.
Now he had a new understanding. He had always known that the Old Testament never meant any of this Shelley stuff, this Hindu Nirvana business. “There is a natural body, and there is a spiritual body.” And his natural body got up in the morning to eat food, and tend sheep, and earn money, and prepare for having a family; to see the sun usefully making day and setting, owing to the earth’s revolution: the new moon so shapen because the earth’s shadow fell on her; the stars being other worlds, other lumps in space, shining according to their various distances, coloured according to their chemical composition. Well and good.
That is man very cleverly finding out all about it, like a little boy pulling his toy to pieces.
But, willy-nilly, in this country he had another sun and another moon. He had seen the glory of the sun and the glory of the moon, and both these glories had had a powerful sensual effect on him. There had been a great passional reaction in himself, in his own body. And as the strange new passion of fear, and the sense of gloriousness burned through him, like a new intoxication, he knew that this was his real spiritual body. This glowing, intoxicated body, drunk with the sun and the moon, drunk from the cup in the hand of the Lord, this was his spiritual body.
And when the flame came up in him, tearing from his bowels, in the sudden new desire for Monica, this was his spiritual body, the body transfigured with fire. And that steady dark vibration which made him want to kill Easu—Easu seemed to him like the Antichrist—that was his own spiritual body. And when he had hit Easu with his broken left hand, and the white sheet of flame going through him had made him scream aloud, leaving him strange and distant, but super-conscious and powerful, this too was his spiritual body. The sun in his right hand and the moon in his left hand. When he drank from the burning right hand of the Lord, and wanted Monica in the same fire, it was his body spiritual burning from the right hand of the Lord. And when he knew he must destroy Easu, in the sheet of white pain, it was his body spiritual transfigured from the left hand of the Lord. And when he ate and drank, and the food tasted good, it was the dark cup of life he was drinking, drinking the life of the dead ox from the meat. And this was the body spiritual communing with the sacrificed body of natural life: like a tiger glowing at evening and lapping blood. And when he rode after the sheep through the bush, and the horse between his knees went quick and delicate, it was the Lord tossing him in his spiritual body down the maze of living.
But when Easu ground down his horse and shoved it after the sheep, it was the natural body fiendishly subjugating the spiritual body. For the horse too is a spiritual body and a natural body, and may be ridden as the one or as the other. And when Easu wanted Monica, it was the natural body malignantly degrading the spiritual body. Monica also half wanted it.
For Easu knew the spiritual body. And like a fallen angel, he hated it, he wanted always to overthrow it more, in this day when it is so abjectly overthrown. Monica too knew the spiritual body: the body of straight fire. And she too seemed to have a grudge against it. It thwarted her “natural” will; which “natural” will is the barren devil of to-day.
Gran, that old witch, she also knew the spiritual body. But she loved spiting it. And she was dying like clay.
Mary, who was so spiritual and so self-sacrificing, she didn’t know the body of straight fire at all. Her spirit was all natural. She was so “good,” and so heavily “natural,” she would put out any fire of the glory of the burning Lord. She was more “natural” even than Easu.
And Jack’s father was the same. So good! So nice! So kind! So absolutely well-meaning! And he would bank out the fire of the burning Lord with shovelfuls of kindness.
They would, none of them, none of them, let the fire bum straight. None of them. There were no people at all who dared have the fire of the Lord, and drink from the cup of the fierce glory of the Lord, the sun in one hand and the moon in the other.
Only this strange, wild, ash-coloured country with its undiminished sun and its unblemished moon, would allow it. There was a great death between the two hands of the Lord; between the sun and the moon. But let there be a great death. Jack gave himself to it.
He was almost asleep, in the half-trance of inner consciousness, when Dad came in. Jack opened his eyes and made to rise, but Dad waved him to sit still, while he took the chair on the other side of the fire, and sat down inert. He seemed queer. Dad seemed queer. The same dusky look over his face as over Gran’s. And a queer, pinched, far-away look. Jack wondered over it. And he could see Dad didn’t want to be spoken to. The clock tick-tocked. Jack went into a kind of sleep.
He opened his eyes. Dad was very slowly, very slowly fingering the bowl of his pipe. How quiet it was!
Jack dozed again, and wakened to a queer noise. It was Dad’s breathing: and perhaps the falling of his pipe. He had dropped his pipe. And his body had dropped over sideways, very heavy and uncomfortable, and he was breathing hoarsely, unnaturally in his sleep. Save for the breathing, it was dreadfully quiet. Jack picked up the pipe and sat down again. He felt tired: awfully tired, for no reason at all.
He woke with a start. The afternoon was passing, there was a shower, the room seemed dark. The firelight flickered on Mr. Ellis’ watchguard. He wore his unbuttoned waistcoat as ever, with the gold watchchain showing. He was very stout, and very still. Terribly still and sagging sideways, the hoarse breathing had ceased. Jack would have liked to wake him from that queer position.
How quiet it was. Upstairs someone had dragged a chair, and that had made him realise! Far away, very far away, he could hear Harry and Ellie and Baby, playing. “There’s a quiet of the sun, and another quiet of the moon, and another quiet of the stars; for one star differs from another in quiet. So also is the resurrection of the dead. It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body.”
Was that Scripture? or wasn’t it? There is a quiet of the sun. This was the quiet of the sun. He was sitting in the cold, dead quiet of the sun. For one star differs from another in quiet. The sun had abstained from radiating, this was the quiet of the sun, and the strange, shadowy crowding of the stars’ differing quietness seemed to infest the weak daylight.
It is sown a natural body! Oh, bother the words! He didn’t want them. He wanted the sun to shine, and everything to be normal. If he didn’t feel so weak, and if it weren’t raining, he’d go out to the stable to the horses. To the hotblooded animals.
Mr. Ellis’ head hung sagging on his chest. Jack wished he would wake up and change his position, it looked horrible.
The inner door suddenly opened, and Mary came swiftly out. She started, seeing Mr. Ellis asleep in the chair. Then she went to Jack’s side and took his arm, and leaned whispering in his ear.
“Jack! She’s gone! I think she’s gone. I think she passed in her sleep. We shall have to wake uncle.”
Jack stood up trembling. There was a queer smell in the room. He walked across and touched the sleeping man on the sleeve.
“Dad!” he said. “Dad! Mr. Ellis.”
There was no response. They both waited. Then Jack shook the arm more vigorously. It felt very inert. Mary came across, and put her hand on her uncle’s sunken forehead, to lift his head. She gave a little scream.
“Something’s the matter with him,” she said, whimpering.