Unknown (93 page)

Meanwhile a burly Taunton policeman, under Cordelia's direction, was pouring brandy down Mr. Evans5 throat. Other policemen were pushing the crowd back, so that the prostrate man might have more air and space round him. Megan Geard, supported by Mr. Bishop, the town clerk, and by Bob Sheperd, the old Glastonbury policeman, was now standing near-by, out of breath and very much concerned.

“He'll come round now, Marm. Don't 'ee take on. He'll come round now. Miss Cordy'll bring 'un to's senses, quick enough, you'll see, Marm!” Thus did old Bob comfort his Worship's lady while the equally infirm town clerk made feeble efforts to get down on his knees by the side of the ghastly figure on the ground. But the aged public servant was so “fat and scant of breath” that this gesture remained unfulfilled.

“Oh, Mother, Mother, what shall we do, what shall we do?” moaned Cordelia, losing her nerve at the familiar sound of her mother's panting breath. “I've poured a lot of this stuff down his throat but he doesn't-------”

“Doctor be here! Doctor be come!” This welcome cry arose among a group of Roman soldiers, the smell of whose bare legs, hot and grass-stained, had become a part of that day that lodged itself in Cordelia's memory. The Taunton policemen now cleared a path for Dr. Fell.

“His heart's beating, Doctor!” cried Cordelia. “I've got my hand on it. It's beating funnily, but it's beating still.'”

The doctor placed his hat on the grass and knelt down over the prostrate man who lay with his mouth grimly open. There was a great streak of blood on his chest and another on his shirt and his lips were caked with blood. “He's burst a blood-vessel . . . of some kind,” murmured Dr. Fell. “The question is ivhat kind. Did he faint away as soon as he had shouted those words?*”

It was to Persephone, who had been sitting all this while upon the fallen cross as it lay on the ground, that the doctor addressed this remark. She leaned forward to answer him, re-arranging as she did so the folds of her sky-blue robe. “Yes, Doctor,” she said in a low, rather guttural voice. “It was the strain of that shout. But I think he was uncomfortable before. I think he was in distress before. I believe he was in considerable pain, for quite a long time before!” There was a queer hysterical ring in the girl's voice as her words mounted up. When she came to the word “pain” she shouted it with a vibration of anger.

The doctor mechanically wiped off some blood from Mr. Evans* bare chest with the tips of his fingers. “We'll have to get him to the hospital,” he said, “and, what's more, get him there as quickly as we can!” He rose on one knee still keeping the tips of his fingers on the unconscious man's chest. “Who's got a car' on the field?” he said.

Persephone rose to her feet and came forward, catching up her trailing blue garment round one bare arm, and hitching another fold of it into her belt as she moved. “My car is just over that ridge, Doctor,” she said. “It's by itself there, and there are no others nearer than the road. If you don't mind my being like this” and she spread out her long bare arms and gave a toss to her head from which her curls hung in a loose mass, “I'll drive him there in a jiffy! Only he must be carried to my car. I can't get it over that bank!”

Dr. Fell stood up. “Will you carry him, officers?” he said, addressing the nearest policemen.

Three of the men in uniform stepped forward and under the doctor's directions lifted up the unconscious Mr. Evans.

Cordelia turned to Persephone. The last time she had spoken to this girl was in the reception room of Mother Legge and as their eyes met now they both recalled this encounter. It was Cordelia then who had been dressed in blue! “Thank you, thank you, Mrs. Spear/' she murmured with intense emphasis. ”You may be saving his life by this."

The three policemen with Cordelia walking behind them carried their burden where Persephone led. She and Dr. Fell moved on fast in front, talking earnestly. The doctor was explaining to Persephone, in as unprofessional language as he could, just what he feared, just what he hoped, as to the injured man's chances. ¦-.

“You'd better go home, Mother!” cried Cordelia stopping for a moment to turn her troubled face to Mrs. Geard.

“But you're coming back, aren't you, darling?” cried the descendant of the House of Rhys, extricating her arm from that of old Bob Sheperd. “They'll never have room for you in her little car!”

Cordelia waved her hand impatiently at her mother, as much as to say—“You look after yourself, dear!”—but she turned then, and running after the slowly moving bearers joined the melancholy cortege without another word.

Megan Geard sighed deeply. “I wish the Mayor were here,” she remarked to the old Glastonbury policeman.

Bob Sheperd cordially endorsed her wish. “If his Worship had been here that poor man would never have died,” he said.

Megan Geard gave a start and a sudden shiver ran through her. “You don't think he is dead, Mr. Sheperd, do you?” she groaned.

The old policeman wagged his head. “I've 'a seen many a corpse in me time, Mann, and not a one o' them but had blood o' just that colour, dry-like and sticky-like, on they's poor lips.”

When they reached the little car it became only too plain that if one of the policemen sat by Persephone's side to help carry him in when they got to the hospital there was only just room for Dr. Fell and his unconscious patient.

“Take care! Go gently! Oh, go gently!” Cordelia cried, clutching the sun-warmed door-frame of the machine as it swung open, while they were lifting Mr. Evans in.

But an intruder now appeared upon the scene whose strange appearance startled and shocked the girl even in her desperate concern. It was none other than Mad Bet, who had persuaded her good friend Solly Lew to conduct her to “this particular spot, from which she could observe and not be observed. The kind-hearted taxi-driver had remained here with the woman for quite a long while. Then, watching with the eye of a hungry man the rush of the Dye-Works people into Dickery Cantle's tent, he had gone off, ”to get a bite of summat for five minutes." The madwoman had left her hat, trimmed with forget-me-nots, under the hornbeam bush where she had been sitting, and her egg-white cranium was a disturbing object even to Dr. Fell who had known her from his youth up.

To the Taunton policemen, as panting and perspiring, they withdrew from the car's door, this new apparition was still more startling. They thought for a moment that she was one of the players and that this shocking baldness was a mask.

“Only to touch the hem of his garment! Only to touch his coat-ies or trowsies!” gabbled Mad Bet, pushing Cordelia out of her way and struggling to stretch her arm into the car. “He told I, at Mother Legge's,” the woman went on, “to come Midsummer Day, and see he cast out his Devil and I've seed he do it! I've seed that girt Devil flyin' over Tor-top with wings of dragon! He be Jesus, his wone self now, the poor man be. Don't 'ee drop 'un in grave, Doctor! Don't 'ee let them put stones on his poor bleeding heart. Where be going to lay him then, gents, where be? Where be? Mad Bet'11 come and watch over he. Night and day she will, till he rolls they stones away!”

“Don't do that I? cried Dr. Fell sharply, when one of the Taunton policemen began unceremoniously pulling the woman back. ”Let her just touch him once. There! There! That's enough now. Look . . . here's a friend of yours coming!"

The doctor's words were justified, for hatless as herself and very much the worse for drink, Solly Lew could be observed staggering up the hill and frantically waving his arms. “He thinks the police are taking her,” remarked the doctor laconically, clambering in beside the unconscious man, who was lying limp and heavy across the seat.

Mad Bet caught the word “police” and the word “take”; but her whole soul was so stirred by what she had seen that no fear for her own skin could touch her. She had been allowed to do what she had set her heart on doing, and she drew back now quite quietly and stood immobile, looking like a ghastly waxwork at Madame Tussaud's.

Dr. Fell's attention, the moment he had settled himself on the edge of the seat, against the patient's bare rope-bruised ankles, was attracted by the sight of a little bird deliberately alighting upon the topmost twig of the stunted hornbeam. “It's a Lesser Whitethroat,” he thought to himself.

Cordelia's distracted face was thrust into the window of the car. “He won't die, Doctor, will he?” He could do nothing but shake his head and murmur, “Careful now, careful now!” as the unhappy girl snatched at one of the injured man's hands and, careless of who saw her, pressed upon it a feverish kiss. "He won't

die, Doctor, will he? He won't die, Doctor? I couldn't------" But

Persephone had already got her machine in motion.

“He's in good hands, Miss, in very good hands,” murmured one of the Taunton policemen who had been left behind, as they watched the car descend the rough cattle-track that led round the eastern side of the Tor.

“That clever actress be a first-class driver, Miss,” remarked the other man, “and everybody knows Dr. Fell. I've 'a seed 'un meself many a time, in Tarnton 'Firmary, when he were younger than he be now. There aint such a man as old Fell, :io! not this side o' Bristol.”

The policemen were so terrifying to Solly Lew that he had not dared to advance. Mad Bet, however, walked slowly towards him, keeping her eyes on the disappearing car;^

As Persephone drove into town with her heavy load that eventful afternoon her nature was undergoing the strangest upheaval. Since her quarrel with Philip she had spoken to him only once. There had been indeed nothing to be said between them. She had ^turned,“ as people say, ”against him." His particular kind of passion had come to be revolting to her. Her deep riddle now was how she had ever been attracted to him, or let him touch her at all! In her husband's case she had only arrived at a point of departure towards which she had been steadily moving for months. With him she had no overt rupture, but for the last week or two she had ceased to share his bed. But the sight of this man Evans hanging on that cross had hit something in her that went very deep. A nerve, perhaps it was, rather than anything else, in her weary heart; but it was a dark, strange pull, a rending tug at this queer nerve, an inexplicable feeling, and one to which she yielded now in an abandoned mood of delicious languor. This sudden, melting tender sensation—utterly unexpected and mysterious to herself—did not seem to afEect her recognition of Mr. Evans as a queer, impossible person. He might be the most ridiculous person in the world; he might be a madman. It remained that something wild, dark, desperate, in the man, as he hung there, something in his sombre contorted face, with his great Roman nose and massive forehead, something in his lean, extended arms, something in his exposed shoulder-blades, something even in the black hairs on his chest, now caked with crimson blood, had touched a nerve in her being, an organic nerve, that went down to the dark deep knot of erotic mystery in the centre of her woman's nature. She had divined in a way no other soul had done—certainly not Cordelia— the vein of thrilling exultation in Mr. Evans' mood, that had supported him in that atrocious endurance.

There always was in Cordelia's attitude to Mr. Evans—there had been from the start—something at once “old-maidish” and maternal, something of the passion which frustrated, love-starved women feel for cats and dogs and parrots—especially the cantankerous and eccentric among such creatures. To Cordelia this whole business of the Pageant had been a vexation and an annoyance. She regarded it as a mere characteristic whimsy of her father, while Mr. Evans' mania for playing the Crucified she looked upon as an arbitrary madness, a sort of wilful mental indulgence, that she had feared all the time might lead to disaster.

Persephone, on the other hand, had so many neurotic manias in herself that she responded like touchwood to the quiver of Mr. Evans5 perverted heroism. As she had embraced that wooden beam beneath his feet she had felt, vibrating through its dense oaken veins the wild triumph of his tense tormented nerves, the savage rapture of his self-immolation. And she had fancied too, in a passionate delusion that had sent an electric wave of reckless confederacy through her woman's flesh, that Mr. Evans was not indifferent to her presence there, was not unaware of the reciprocity of her mood. A strange Virgin-Mother had she been to a singular Saviour of a wounded world! Pressing her flat boy's breasts against that oaken post and straining upward towards her imaginary God-Man and Divine Son, she had allowed herself to yield to the uttermost to this new unexpected tenderness for a man she knew nothing of!

Such and not otherwise had been the feelings of Persephone Spear as she had lifted up her voice and wailed aloud—“My Son and my God! My God and my Son!”—as the Middlezoy young man had instructed her. Little had Ned Athling known, little had those Dubliners known, the wild maenad-like feelings that their gothic dumb-show had evoked in this morbid girl h Had she been aware, as she crouched and moaned at the feet of her madman, of the psychic waves of swooning adoration, flung towards her figure, from the white-cheeked girl seated there by the yawning Mr. Beere? Not consciously aware, of a surety; but such waves of electric passion seldom, like lightning-bolts, lose themselves in the unrestoring earth. Some tremour, some vibrant residue, however faint, reaches, as a rule, the object towards which such feelings are directed, and it may well have been that this shivering, yearning idolatry for her—reckless as some young nun's worship of the real blue-robed Maid of Heaven—had quickened the pulse-beats of her own passion, as she poured forth her spirit in this strange new tenderness, never felt before.

Such were the feelings of Persephone. But the girl was wrong, wrong as so many other worshippers of gods and men and beasts and demons are wrong. Mr. Evans was totally and entirely unconscious of her presence at the foot of his cross. That oaken beam that had carried the trembling of his emotion to her, and had made it shiver through every channel of her frame till it reached the centre of her organic life, had, for some occult reason, absorbed and not transferred the emotion which she felt. All that wild, dark, lovely sense of being isolated with this hooknosed, contorted-mouthed victim of his own strange mania, isolated with him on an austere promontory of confederate fate, was in reality a groundless illusion. In this particular case—quite otherwise than in Angela's—there had been a break of contact. Perhaps a girl's nerves respond to the nerves of another girl and send out magnetic currents that can be caught from far off; whereas something in the masculine constitution, something dense, thick, opaque, obtuse, stupid, has the power of rejecting such contacts. Or it may be that the erotic emotions, when they brim over from the masculine spirit, extricate themselves, as women's feelings never do, from the bitter-sweet honeycomb of Nature, and shoot off, up, out, and away, into dimensions of non-natural existence, where the nerve-rays of women cannot follow.