The Great Fog (20 page)

It was while I had become absorbed in this little, and literally out-of-the-way, riddle, that I became aware that I was—not being followed, but accompanied. The thought, “It's the verger, wanting to close and yet afraid to speak,” was about as faint as the visual impression from the corner of my binocular-visored eye. I shifted a little, toward the west end and the great tower arch which terminated the nave—I suppose it was a kind of involuntary retreat, a giving of ground, so as to gain a moment's more gaze. Then I should have to attend to the “Excuse me, Sir, closing time.” I can't say why I wanted to have that last glance. Stained glass is not my specialty, of course, and my whole interest in St. Aidans, or, for that matter, in any Gothic building, had long lain on and in the ground plan. My start, disproportionate in any case, was double when the voice I was already expecting with an irrational tension, spoke at my shoulder not a command, but a question.

“It is a puzzle, isn't it?”

The voice, too, was not a verger's. I was startled, but my chief surprise was at myself—I felt strangely irritated. (I see now, that I should have understood what underlay this irritation, unprovoked, and, I think I may also say, uncharacteristic: irritation in the nonirritable is almost always a sympton of an unconscious malaise.) I tried to conceal my discomposure by the simple but crude device of refusing to lower my glasses. Then, as the best nonoffensive defense that I could muster, I replied, “The pattern
qua
pattern is clear enough.”

I hoped the questioner might only be walking by, on his way out. If so, he could be merely a talkative casual who felt he must say something apposite to anyone he passed. My tone was deliberately flat, for I hoped he would take it to confirm my stance and construe both rightly: that I had no need for a gossip or a guide. “That's the puzzle” showed, however, that I had been mistaken; he had taken my attempt to disengage as a query-invitation. I still remained steadily gazing up at the patterned trefoiling. It should have discouraged him, but actually the effect proved contrary.

“One can have no doubt,” went on the voice at my left shoulder, “that there is an unmistakable design up there. The actual way to follow it is the difficulty. Of that final trefoil, the topmost aperture contains, you see, some en-wrought pattern in medallion pot metal.”

I could not prevent my idle irrationally irritated curiosity from wondering whether my self-appointed companion also had a pair of strong binoculars? Otherwise, how could he detect the tiny ensconced fragment of involved glass fragments seventy feet from the floor on which we stood? Involuntarily, behind the mask of my field glasses, I swiveled my eye. He had none. But my surprise at his native vision, or acquired knowledge of the cathedral was swallowed up by a stronger surprise—surely, the man who was accosting me was the same man who had already surprised me by turning from an apparently casual sight-seer into the organist? At his first appearance he had seemed to shun me as much as I had given him a wide berth. Then he had seemed to be casually pacing the stones; next, he was master of that very odd, very moving organ, and now he was offering me his company and perhaps his problematical knowledge. Meanwhile he continued gazing at the summit of the clerestory window. My ill-controlled attention felt it had leave to wander—surely here was a puzzle odder than that high-water-mark flotsam of glazing.

I watched him now, deliberately though still obliquely. Yes, his interest seemed really to be in the glass—an interest evidently greater than mine. And certainly, now that I saw him close at hand, his face—turned up toward and lit by the late light from the high window—looked scholarly. Forehead, cheekbones, nose bridge, all high; eyes, cheek furrows, chin notch, all deep. Yes, I said to myself, the scholar's mask, right enough; though, perhaps, worn a trifle self-consciously—for example, that brush of white hair, its fringe making contact with the upsweep of hawk's-winged eyebrows. Eyebrows, I remember thinking to myself in my defensiveness, are to the scholarly make-up what mustachios used to be to the military's. However, by that time, I need hardly say, my interest in my would-be informant had swiveled me wholly around. He, however, though he continued talking, did not turn to me but continued looking aloft.

“The two other trefoils, the right and left, are more difficult to decipher, being in the nature of accompaniments. If the theme given in the center is mastered, then the others will fall into place, not otherwise.”

I lowered my binoculars. As a mask, I owned with a smile at my exclusiveness, they would serve no more and, as an aid to decipherment, they had failed no less.

“Well, what is your interpretation?” I asked, with a distinct flavor of challenge rather than request in my tone. The fact that I had suspected him of being a common sight-seer and had found myself mistaken when he revealed himself as a remarkable if unique organist, had, I must own, not reassured me at all. Unfortunately, all scholars are now specialists, and the fact that a man shows himself an authority in one field causes him to be treated as a worse trespasser than a general ignoramus if he strays into another. His answer, I own further, confirmed my suspicion. He swung around. Any fine physical movement is for us men of the detached surface mind startling, unwelcome, ostentatious. I could not help feeling then that the gesture was a trifle theatrical. He pointed to the tower floor.

“As above, so below.”

The archaic quotation suited too well the stately action.

“This is not a Hermetic Temple,” I countered. I felt I had a right to warn him I could recognize the pattern of pretension.

“Well, when reformers capture a stronghold of an ancient faith they seldom trouble to do more than change the flag.”

This neat reversal of a famous Dean's famous epigram startled me, I own, into a less suspicious attention. He took his advantage at once but not at all figuratively, indeed actually in his stride. For with a swift movement he was now standing right under the bell hoist vault between the four tower arches. He wasn't looking to me for a further reply; he was looking at his feet.

As I followed, he swung his hand around. “You see the maze here. The flagstones are set in an interwound pattern.”

I was, of course, familiar with these and knew the accepted archaeological theories—the tracks of the fertility spring dances and the Sun-gates magic of the so-called “Trojan Game.”

“That's common enough,” I said. “Ely and several others are finer, and in East Anglia you can still find the earth-balk originals outside a number of villages.” I dreaded that he was going to launch out into some “esoteric” fantasy.

He only answered, however, “They are frequent enough to be dismissed without an explanation. Why should a pagan fertility pattern be brought in, and be wrought into a church dedicated to sex repression and sex sublimation?”

I was not at all inclined to enter upon that kind of argument, and evidently he did not expect a reply.

“But the trefoils are the question, and have the first word of the answer.” He did not, however, on saying this, return to our original viewpoint. I thought he was going to take up his old position, but, stepping back into the nave, he turned again to the right. I saw him dip through the little southwest postern. I followed—why I did, when I could have escaped, I am not sure. Probably what really moved me to go after him was that in the opposite direction I caught sight of the verger shuffling down the nave, obviously on his way to clear us out and lock the western doors. I certainly was not sure that this organist could give me any information I should have accepted as information, but perhaps I felt a vague intuition that if he were keen enough on his subject, and indifferent enough to his audience to follow the one and leave the other, the other might as well follow. By the time I had put myself through the double swing doors, he was going right once more, and so had reached the big western porch and the outer side of the main door.

“The sun is just right,” he remarked, hardly turning, as though he was sure I would be at his heels. “You cannot actually see it at any other hour of the day.”

“It,” I presumed, from the line of his attention, was something on what looked like a bare slab of stone on the porch's north side, one of a series which made a plain surface between two belts of decoration. The stone, naturally, was considerably weathered, which may excuse me for missing any clue for a moment. Then, sure enough, under the sharp contrast of light and shade made by the level sun's ray cast obliquely on the stone, I could see that he was pointing out something—some sort of scrawl, perhaps a rude design, perhaps graffiti.

“All three,” he remarked, “are ultimately needed, as three notes are required to make a chord. But, nevertheless, each will work of itself, though only together can they give the full clue.”

I pulled myself together. “This, too, you can find at Ely, Peterborough.… Very interesting, I own, and I did not know of this one. But, of course, they are only line drawings, made by the medieval masons when working out an ‘elevation' such as a West front.”

“‘“Nothing but is never true,” came the dominie's reply.' “Probably they did help the master builders to rear the West front, but what is the West front itself for? The pattern is the clue.”

I can plead that any authority doesn't like being treated as a pupil—wrong, I own, but almost as invariable as a natural law. I can also plead, particularly, that I, being an authority who had advanced a number of advanced and hotly contested views on Gothic, was the type of man who, again wrongly and most commonly, is apt to be acutely suspicious of speculation which goes beyond even that shadow of proof which foreruns discovery.

“Prove it,” was, then, a natural if somewhat curt challenge.

“Thank you.” He did not seem daunted; on the contrary, pleased. “I can and will, if you'll comply,” he added.

“How?” seemed sufficiently noncommital. But he took it to give him leave literally to take hold of me. He swung me, too surprised to hold my ground, until I was squarely before the face of the etched ashlar.

“Look at it closely,” came the voice over my shoulder. “Start at the upper left hand corner.”

It was an obvious place. If the drawing was a scratched outline of what the West front might have been intended to be, then here was the northwest gable.

“Now, follow the design, right, carefully.” And, to make me comply, I felt a thumb and finger press gently against the base of my skull, with just that point of pressure which the dentist's headrest applies.

The surprise at being so handled and the queer association with dental submission, I think, accounted for my yielding. I own I am not fond of being touched by strangers. There may, too, have been something in the contact that prevented what would otherwise have been my normal reaction. Whatever the reason, I did not shrug myself free and so found, under this delicate but compelling guidance, my head being gently swung up and down, while my neck was swiveled so that my eye might follow the etched design.

When I reached the end of the top of the design, my eye was led, in the same way, down its right side, across the base, up the left side, and then, once again, but on a lower tier of lines, across the front. My compulsory director had ceased to talk, of that I was aware faintly, but only faintly, because I was much more aware of something positive but, in spite of that, far harder to define, even to myself. The nearest I can get to it is to say that I was becoming giddy. And yet the word giddiness is very far from
le mot juste
for my state of mind. For, firstly, I felt uncommonly firm—the very opposite of vertigo. I felt the vibrant firmness of sure momentum which one feels in a yacht, when it goes cleanly over onto a full tack and has plenty of “way,” or the firmness one experiences in large high-powered cars when the top gear slips in smoothly and one forges ahead on a wide-open road.

I think I can go a step further in trying to describe this strange, but strangely pleasant, state of consciousness which was spreading through me, spreading along my body and limbs from my head, as quiet ripples spread down from the mouth of a fiord and run up to the shore of every branching inlet. In ordinary states of consciousness we are always aware of making some sort of effort (how much, how often, I have realized since that experience!) to keep steady, to preserve a tiring rigidity. The bellows of the lungs are swelling and drawing at ribs and thorax; packed against them the heart is thrusting and pulling. The coil of the intestines turns, shifts, and sags like a large snake in a sack. The engine of the body, on its frail pelvic bedplate, throbs and drums against its casing. Poised on this casing, with an insecure foothold by the funnel, we try to keep a steady lookout.

Now I had begun to become aware, since I had been looking attentively at the design etched on the wall, and increasingly, as I had been tracing it out, following it serially with my eye, that the quiver of the body had not stopped, but somehow had ceased to require counterbalancing, counterchecking. I don't know how long this—if I may so call it—exercise lasted. I think I must have gone over and around that pattern several times—perhaps quite a number. One thing, however, I was able to reckon; each time a “round” was completed, the tension in myself (how high it had been I had never suspected) was lowered. Finally I could perceive I had reached a certain sea level or datum line, for I no longer felt the slightest wish in either direction—either to stop this curious behavior and get away or to continue it for its very strange but very distinct pleasurableness.

At that moment I heard the voice again at my ear and at the same time became aware that the touch on my neck had been lifted.

“That is part of the meaning—at least as much of it as can be made out, using only this part of the rendering.”

The remark is, of course, far from self-evident; I can see that, as I put it down. Indeed, listening through the rational mind, I realized the outward senselessness of the words which I was hearing. But a deep pervading part of my mind, some profound understanding which was not confined to the reason, or even the brain, but which suffused and possessed the whole body, this larger consciousness had experienced under the speaker's guidance and so knew what he meant. The experience which I had had while swinging my head to follow those scratched lines on the stone, though not an experience I had ever had before (and so I had no words to describe it), was so complete, so massive, that I needed no more argument. Instead, I swung slowly around and, turning my back to the drawing, sat on a low stone ramp which, some two feet off the ground, terminated the great western alcove's bands of concentric arches.