Mr Kempe

Mr Kempe1

It was a mild, clammy evening; and the swing-door of the tap-room stood wide open. The brass oil-lamp suspended from the rafter had not yet been lit; a small misty drizzle was drifting between the lime-washed walls and the over-arching trees on the further side of the lane; and from my stool at the counter I could commune, as often as I felt inclined, with the wild white eye of the Blue Boar which fleered in at the window from the hanging sign.

Autumnal scents, failing day, rain so gentle and persistent – such phenomena as these have a slightly soporific effect on the human consciousness. It is as though its busy foreground first becomes blurred, then blotted out; and then – the slow steady sweep of the panorama of dream that never ceases its strange motioning. The experience is brief, I agree. The footlights, headlights, skylights brighten again: the panorama retires!

Excluding the landlady, who occasionally waddled in from her dusky retreat behind the bar, there were only three of us in the tap-room – three chance customers now met together for the first time: myself; a smallish man with an unusually high crown to his head, and something engagingly monkey-like in his face; and a barrel-shaped person who sat humped up on a stool between us in an old shooting-jacket and leather leggings, his small eyes set close together on either side a red nose.

I had been the last to put in an appearance, but had not, it seemed, damped anything in the nature of a conversation. Such weather does not conduce to it. But three may be some sort of company where two is none; and what, at last, set us more or less at our ease was an ‘automatic machine’ that stood in the corner of the tap-room under a coloured lithograph of Shotover, the winner of the Derby in 1882. It was a machine of an unusual kind since it gave its patronizers nothing tangible for their penny – not even their ladylove on a slip of cardboard, or a clinging jet of perfume.

It reminds me now of the old Miracle Plays or Moralities. Behind its glass it showed a sort of grotto, like a whited sepulchre, with two compartments, over which descended the tresses of a weeping willow. You slipped a penny into the slot, and presently a hump-backed mommet in a rusty-black cowl jerked into view from the cell on the left. He stood there a moment in the midst – fixedly looking at you: then decamped into the gloom again.

But this was if your luck was out – or so I assumed. If it was in, then a nymph attired in skirts of pink muslin wheeled out of the flowery bower on the eastern side; and danced a brief but impassioned pas seul.

My three pennies had brought me one fandango from the latter and two prolonged scrutinies from the former – a proportion decided on, no doubt, by the worldly-wise manufacturer of the machine. But this was not all. In intention at least he must have been a practical optimist. For if the nymph responded to your penny, you were invited to slip yet another coin into another slot – but before you could count ten. This galvanized the young lady into a giddy pursuit of the numbskull in the black hood – a pursuit, however, which ended merely in the retirement of them both behind the scenes.

The man in leggings had watched my experiments with eyes almost as motionless as plums in a pudding. It was my third penny that had wooed out the nymph. But the ‘grandfather’s clock’ in the corner had ticked loudly at least five times before I managed to insert a fourth. It was a moment of rapt – of an aching – excitement. What teeming passion showed itself in that wild horseplay behind the glass! And then, alas, the machinery ceased to whirr; the clock ticked on; the faint rustle of the drifting rain sounded once more at the open door; I returned to my stool; and the landlady retired into her den.

‘Bang goes fourpence,’ I remarked a little sheepishly. ‘Still, mine was about the right average, I suppose.’

The man in the leather leggings – as if the problem were not for his solution – at once turned his little eyes towards our companion in the corner, whose face was still wreathed with the friendliest of grimaces at my efforts.

‘Well, now,’ he took me up, ‘I’m not so sure. In my view, that minx there sidles out too often. Most young men and more old ones would be content with once in six. I would myself. It’s our credulity. We live on hopes, however long they may be deferred. We live, as you might say; but how many of us learn? How many of us want to make sure?’ He paused for an answer: his small eyes fixed in his face. ‘Not one in a million,’ he decided.

I stole another look into the narrow darkness of the Young Lady’s Bower.

‘Oh,’ he interrupted, ‘I wasn’t thinking merely of the “eternal feminine”, as they call it. That’s only one of the problems; though even an answer to that might be interesting. There’s Free Will, for example; there’s Moral Responsibility; and such little riddles as where we all come from and where we are going to. Why, we don’t even know what we are – in ourselves, I mean. And how many of us have tried to find out?’

The man in leggings withdrew his stare and groped out a hand towards his pint-pot. ‘Have you?’ he enquired.

The dark-eyed, wizened face lit up once more with its curiously engaging smile. ‘Well, you see, I was once a schoolmaster, and from an official point of view, I suppose, it is part of the job. To find answers, I mean. But, as you’ll agree, we temporize; we compromise. On the other hand, I once met quite by chance, as we call it, a man who had spent I should guess a good many years on that last problem. All by himself, too. You might almost describe it as a kind of pilgrimage – though I’m not anxious to repeat it. It was my turn for a lesson.’

‘And what was his solution?’ I enquired.

‘Have you ever been to Porlock – the Weir?’ the little man enquired.

I shook my head.

‘I mention Porlock,’ he went on, ‘because if you had ever been there, the place I’m thinking of might perhaps call it to mind. Though mine was on a different scale – a decidedly different scale. I doubt, for example, if it will ever become one of those genial spots frequented by week-end tourists and chars-a-banc. In the days I’m speaking of – twenty years or more ago – there wasn’t even the rudiments of an inn in the place. Only a beershop about half the size of this tap-room, with a population to match – just a huddle of fishermen’s cottages tucked in under the cliff.

‘I was walking at the time, covering unfamiliar ground, and had managed to misread my map. My aim had been to strike into a cliff-path that runs more or less parallel with the coast; but I had taken the wrong turn at the cross-roads. Once astray, it seemed better manners to keep on. How can you tell what chance may have secreted in her sleeve, even when you don’t put pennies in slots?

‘I persuaded an old lady to give me tea at one of the cottages, and asked my way. Visitors were rare events, it seemed. At first she advised me to turn back; I couldn’t do better than that. But after further questioning, she told me at last of a lower cliff track or path, some miles apparently this side of the one I had in view. She marked it out for me with her rheumaticky old forefinger on the table-cloth. Follow this path far enough, I gathered, it would lead me into my right road at last.

‘Not that she suggested my making the attempt. By no means. It was a matter of seven miles or more. And neither the natives of the village nor even chance visitors, it seemed, were tempted to make much use of this particular route.’

‘Why not?’ enquired the man in leggings, and immediately coughed, as if he had thought better of it.

‘That’s what I am coming to,’ replied the schoolmaster – as though he had been lying in wait for the question. ‘You see my old lady had volunteered her last piece of information with a queerish look in her eyes – like some shy animal slipping into cover. She was telling me the truth, but not, I fancied, the whole truth.

‘Naturally I asked what was wrong with the path; and was there anything of interest on the way or at the end of it – worth such a journey? Once more she took a long slow look at me, as if my catechism were rather more pressing than the occasion warranted. There was a something marked on the map, she had been given to understand – “just an old, ancient building, like”.

‘Sure enough there was: though unfortunately long wear of the one I carried had not only left indecipherable more than an Old English letter or two of any record of it, but had rubbed off a square half-mile or so of the country round about it.

‘It was proving a little irksome to draw Truth out of her well, and when innocently enough I asked if there was any one in charge of the place, the old lady was obviously disconcerted. She didn’t seem to think it needed being taken charge of; though she confessed at last that a house “not nearly so old, sir, you will understand”, stood nearby, in which lived a gentleman of the name of Kempe.

‘It was easier sailing now that we had come to Mr Kempe. The land, it appeared, including the foreshore – but apart from the chapel – had been in his family since the beginning of time. Mr Kempe himself had formerly been in the church – Conformist or otherwise – and had been something of a traveller, but had returned home with an invalid wife many years before.

‘Mrs Kempe was dead now; and there had been no children, “none, at least, as you would say grew up to what might be called living”. And Mr Kempe himself had not only been ailing for some little time, but might, for all my informant knew apparently, be dead himself. Nevertheless, there was still a secretive look in the faded eyes – almost as if she believed Mr Kempe had discovered little methods of his own against the onsets of mortality! Anyhow, she couldn’t tell; nobody ever went that way now, so far as she was aware. There was the new road up above. What’s more, tidings of Mr Kempe’s end, I gathered, however solitary, would not exactly put the village into mourning.

‘It was already latish afternoon; and in that windless summer weather walking had been a rather arduous form of amusement. I was tired. A snowy low-pitched upper-room overlooking the sea was at my disposal if I wanted it for a night or two. And yet, even while I was following this good soul up her narrow staircase, I had already decided to push on in the direction of Mr Kempe. If need be, I would come back that evening. Country people are apt to be discreet with strangers – however open in appearance. Those shrewd old eyes – when at least they showed themselves – had hinted that even with an inch to the mile a map-maker cannot exhaust a countryside. The contours, I had noticed, were unusual. Besides, Mr Kempe was not less likely to be interesting company because he was a recluse!

‘I put down five shillings on account for my room, and the kindly old creature laid them aside in an ornament on her mantelpiece. There they lie still. for all I know. I have never reclaimed them.’

The man in leggings once more turned his large, shapeless face towards the schoolmaster, but this time he made no audible comment.

‘And did you find Mr Kempe?’ I enquired.

The schoolmaster smiled, looking more like a philanthropic monkey than ever. ‘I set out at once: watched by the old lady from her porch, until, with a wave of my hand for adieu, I turned out of the village street, and she was hidden from sight. There was no mistaking the path – even though it led off over a stile into a patch of stinging-nettles, and then past a boggy goose-pond.

‘After a few hundred yards it began to dip towards the shore, keeping more or less level with the sea for a mile or so until it entered a narrow and sandy cove – the refuge even in summer of all sorts of flotsam and searubbish; and a positive maelstrom, I should imagine, when the winter gales sweep in. Towards the neck of this cove the wheel-marks in the thin turf faded out, and the path meandered on for a while beside a brook and under some fine ash trees, then turned abruptly to the right, and almost due north. The bleached bows of a tarred derelict boat set up on end and full of stones – The Orion – was my last touch with civilization.

‘It was a quiet evening; the leaves and grasses shone green and motionless, the flowers standing erect on their stalks under the blue sky, as if carved out of wax. The air was uncommonly sweet, with its tang of the sea. Taking things easy like this, it was well worth while to be alive. I sat down and rested, chewing a grass-stalk and watching the friendly lapping sea. Then up and on.

‘After about an hour’s steady walking, the path began once more to ascend. It had by now led shorewards again, though I was softly plodding on out of sight and all but out of sound of the tide. Dense neglected woods rose on either side of me, and though wherever the sun could pierce in there were coverts in plenty, hardly a cry of insect or bird stirred the air. To all intents I might have been exploring virgin country. Now and again indeed the fallen bole of a tree or matted clumps of bramble, briony, and traveller’s joy compelled me to make a widish detour. But I was still steadily ascending, and the view tended at length to become more and more open; with here and there a patch of bright green turf and a few scrub bushes of juniper or sprouting tamarisk.

‘Shut in as I had been, until this moment it had been difficult to guess how far above me the actual plateau lay, or precisely how far below, the sea – though I had caught distant glimpses now and again of its spreading silver and the far horizon. Even at this point it would have been flattery to call the track a path. The steeper its incline, the more stony and precarious became one’s footing. And then at last I rounded the first of a series of bluffs or headlands, commanding a spectacular view of the coast behind me, though nothing of what lay in front.

‘The tiny village had vanished. About a hundred and fifty feet beneath the steep on whose margin I was standing – with a flaming bush of gorse here and there, and an occasional dwarf oak as grey as silk in the evening light – the incoming tide gently mumbled its rocks, rocks of a peculiar patchy green and black.

‘I took another look at my map, enjoyed a prolonged “breather”, and went on. Steadily up and inward now and almost due north-west. And once more untended thickets rose dense on either side, and the air was oppressed with a fragrance sickly as chloroform. Some infernal winter tempest or equinoctial gale must have lately played havoc here. Again and again I had to clamber over the bole or through the head-twigs of monster trees felled by the wind, and still studded with a few sprouting post-mortem pale-green buds. It was like edging between this world and the next.

‘Apart, too, from the gulls with their saturnine gabbling, and flights of clanging oyster-catchers on the rocks below, what birds I saw were birds of prey: buzzards and kestrels chiefly, suspended as if by a thread from space, their small heads stooping between their quivering wings. And once I overheard what I took to be the cough of a raven to its mate. About twenty minutes afterwards, my second bluff hove into sight. And I paused for a while, staring at it.

‘For ordinary purposes I have a fairly good head. And yet I confess that before venturing further I took a prolonged look at this monster and at the faint patternings of the path that lay before me, curving first in, then out, along and across the face of the cliff, and just faintly etching its precipitous surface as it edged out of sight. It’s a foolish thing perhaps to imagine oneself picked out clean against the sky on a precipitous slope – if, that is, you mean to put the fancy into action. You get a sort of double-barrelled view of your mortal body crouching there semi-erect, little better than a framework of bones.

‘Not that there was as yet any positive risk or danger. The adventure would have been child’s play, no doubt, even for an amateur mountaineer. You had only to pick your way, keeping a sharp eye on the loose stones, and – to avoid megrims – skirting round the final curve without pausing to look up or to look down. A modest man might possibly try all fours. Still, after that, it did not surprise me to remember that visitors to these parts had usually preferred some other method of reaching the road and country up above. Pleasure may be a little over-spiced with excitement.’

‘Steep, eh?’ ejaculated the man in leggings.

‘Yes, steep,’ replied the schoolmaster; ‘though taken as mere scenery,’ he continued, ‘there was nothing to find fault with. Leagues and leagues of sea stretched out to the vague line of the horizon like an immense plate, mottled green and blue. A deep pinkish glow, too, had begun to spread over the eastern skies, mantling up into heights of space made the more abysmal in appearance by wisps of silver cirrus.

‘Now and again I lay back with my heels planted on what was left of the path, and rested a moment, staring up into that infinity. Now and again I all but decided to go back. But sheer curiosity to see the mysterious hermitage of which I had heard, and possibly the shame of proving myself yet another discredited visitor, lured me on. Solitude, too, is like deepening water to a swimmer: that also lures you on. Except for an occasional bloated, fork-tailed, shrimp-like insect that showed itself when a flake of dislodged stone went scuttering down into the abyss below, I was the only living creature abroad. Once more I pushed cautiously forward. But it was an evil-looking prospect, and the intense silence of the evening produced at last a peculiar sense of unreality and isolation. My universe seemed to have become a mere picture – and I out of place in it. It was as if I had been mislaid and forgotten.

‘I hung by now, I suppose, about two or three hundred feet above the sea; and maybe a hundred or so beneath the summit of the wall which brushed my left elbow. Wind-worn boulders, gently whispered over by saplings of ash or birch, jutted shallowly here and there above and below me. Marine plants lifted their wind-bitten flowers from inch-wide ledges on which their seeds had somehow found a lodging. The colours mirrored in sky and water increased in brilliance and variety as the sunset advanced, though here was only its reflection; and the flat ocean beneath lapped soundlessly on; its cream-like surf fringing here and there the very base of the cliff, beneath which, like antediluvian monsters, vast rocks lay drowsing. I refrained from examining them too closely.

‘But even if – minute intrusive mote that I was, creeping across that steep of wall – even if I had been so inclined, there was little opportunity. Though for centuries wind, frost and rain had been gnawing and fretting at the face of the cliff, sure foothold and finger-hold became ever more precarious. An occasional ringing reverberation from far below suggested, too, that even the massive bulk of rock itself might be honeycombed to its foundations. What once had been a path was now the negation of one. And the third prodigious bluff towards which I presently found myself slowly, almost mechanically, advancing, projected into space at a knife-like angle; cut sharp in gigantic silhouette against the skies.

‘I made a bewildering attempt to pretend to be casual and cheerful – even to whistle. But my lips were dry, and breath or courage failed me. None the less I had contrived to approach within twenty yards or so of that last appalling precipice, when, as if a warning voice had whispered the news in my ear, I suddenly realized the predicament I was in. To turn back now was impossible. Nor had I a notion of what lay on the further side of the headland. For a few instants my bones and sinews rebelled against me, refusing to commit themselves to the least movement. I could do no more than cling spasmodically with my face to the rock.

‘But to hang there on and on and wither like an autumnal fly was out of the question. One single hour of darkness, one spinning puff of wind, would inevitably dislodge me. But darkness was some hours distant; the evening was of a dead calm; and I thanked my stars there was no sun to roast and confuse me with his blaze and heat. I thanked my stars – but where would my carcase be when those stars began to show themselves in the coming night? All this swept through my mind in an instant. Complete self-possession was the one thing needful. I realized that too. And then a frightful cold came over me; sweat began to pour off my body; the very soul within me became sick with fear.

‘I use the word soul because this renewed nausea was something worse than physical. I was a younger man then, and could still in the long run rely on nerve and muscle, but fear turns one’s blood to water – that terror of the spirit, and not merely of the mind or instinct. It bides its moment until the natural edges off into – into the unknown.

‘Not that Nature, as we call her, even in the most congenial surroundings, is the sort of old family nurse that makes one’s bed every morning, and tucks one up with a “God bless you” overnight. Like the ants and the aphides and the elvers and the tadpoles, she produces us humans in millions; leaving us otherwise to our own devices. We can’t even guess what little stratagems for the future she may be hiding up her sleeve. We can’t even guess. But that’s a mere commonplace. After all, so far as we can prove, she deserves only a small “n” to her name.

‘What I’m suggesting is merely that though she appeared to have decoyed me into this rat-trap with all her usual artlessness, she remained a passive enemy, and what now swathed me in like a breath of poison – as, with face, palms, knees and belly pressed close against the rock, I began once more working softly on from inch-wide ledge and inch-deep weed, my tongue like tinder, my eyes seeming to magnify every glittering atom they tried to focus – was the consciousness of some power or influence beyond Nature’s. It was not so much of death – and I actually with my own eyes saw my body inertly hurtling to its doom beneath – that I was afraid. What terrified me beyond words to express was some positive presence here in a more desperate condition even than I. I was being waylaid.

‘When you come to such a pass as this, you lose count of time. I had become an automaton – little better than a beetle obeying the secret dictates of what I believe they call the Life-Urge; and how precisely I contrived to face and to circumnavigate that last bit of precipice, I cannot recall. But this once done, in a few minutes I was in comparative safety. I found myself sluggishly creeping again along a path which had presently widened enough to allow me to turn my face outwards from the rock, and even to rest. And even though the precipice beneath me was hardly less abrupt and enormous, and the cliff-face above actually overhung my niche, for the time being I was out of physical danger. I was, as they say, my own man again; had come back.

‘It was high time. My skull seemed to have turned to ice; I was wet through; my finger-nails were split; my hands covered with blood; and my clothes would have disgraced a tramp.

‘But all trace of fear had left me, and what now swept my very wits away in this almost unendurable reaction was the sheer beauty of the scene that hung before my eyes. Half reclining, not daring yet to stir, my outstretched hands clasping two knobs of rocks, my eyeballs gently moving to and fro, I sat there and feasted on the amazing panorama spread out before me; realizing none the less that I was in the presence of something – how can I express it? – of something a little different from, stranger and less human than – well, our old friend Nature.

‘The whole face of this precipice was alight with colour – dazzling green and orange, drifts of snow and purple – campion, sea-pink, may-weed, samphire, camomile, lichen, stonecrop, with fleshy and aromatic plants that I knew not even the names of, sweeping down drift beyond drift into a narrow rock-bound tranquil bay of the darkest emerald and azure, and then sweeping up once more drift beyond drift into the vault of the sky, its blue fretted over as if by some master architect with silvery interlacings, a scattered feather-like fleece of vapour.

‘The steady cry too, possibly amplified by echo, of the incoming tide reached me here once more; a whisper and yet not toneless. And on and on into the distance swept the gigantic coast line, crowned summit to base with its emerald springtide woods.

‘Still slightly intoxicated as I was by the terror and danger in which I had been, and which were now for the moment past and gone, I gave myself ample opportunity to rest and to drink in this prodigious spectacle. And yet, as I lay there, still at a dizzy altitude, midway between sea and sky but in perfect safety, the odd conviction persisted, that though safe, I was not yet secure. It was as if I were still facing some peril of the mind, and absurd and irrational though it may sound there was a vague disquieting hint within me of disappointment – as if I had lost without realizing it a unique opportunity. And yet, all this medley of hints and intuitions was wholly subsidiary to the conviction that from some one point in all this vacancy around me a steady devouring gaze was fixed on me – that I was being watched.’

Once more our hard-headed friend fidgeted uneasily on his stool.

‘It sounds absurd, I agree,’ the schoolmaster caught him up. ‘Simply because, apart from the seabirds and the clouds, I had been and was still the only moving object within view. The sudden apparition of me crawling around that huge nose of rock must have been as conspicuous as it was absurd. Besides, myriads of concealed eyes in the dense forest towering conically up on the other side of the narrow bay beneath me, and looming ever more mistily from headland to headland towards the north and west, could have watched my every movement. A thousand arrows from unseen archers concealed on the opposing heights might at any instant have transfixed me where I lay. One becomes conscious, too, of the sort of empty settled stare which fixes an intruder into such solitudes. It is at the same time vacant, enormous and hostile.

‘But I don’t mean that. I still mean something far more definite – and more dangerous, too, than that; and I keep to it even if this precise memory may have been affected by what came after. For I was soon to learn that in actual fact I was being watched; and by as acute and unhuman a pair of eyes as I have ever seen in mortal head.

‘With infinite caution I rose to my feet again at last, and continued my journey. The path grew steadily easier; soil succeeded to bare rock, and this must not very long before, I discovered, have been trodden by other human feet than mine. There were marks of hobnails between its tussocks of grass and moss and thrift.

‘It presently descended a little, and then in a while, from out of the glare of the evening, I found myself entering a broader and heavily-shaded track leading straight onwards and tunnelling inland into the woods. It was, to my amazement, close on eight o’clock, and too late to dream of turning back, even if I could have persuaded myself to face again the experience of the last half-hour. Yet whatever curiosity might say for itself, I felt a peculiar disinclination to forge ahead. The bait had ceased to be enticing.

‘I paused once more under the dismal funnel of greenery in which I found myself staring at the face of my watch, and then had another look at the map. A minute or two’s scrutiny assured me that straight ahead was my only possible course. And why not? There was company ahead. In this damp soil the impressions of the hob-nailed shoes showed more clearly. Quite recently those shoes must have come and gone along this path on three separate occasions at least. Mine had been a rather acutely solitary excursion, and yet for the life of me I had not the smallest desire to meet the maker of those footprints.

‘In less than half an hour, however, I came to a standstill beneath “the old, ancient building, like” that had once been marked on my map. And an uncompanionable sight it was. Its walls lay a little back from the green track in what appeared to be a natural clearing, or amphitheatre, though at a few yards’ distance huge pines, in shallow rising semi-circles, hemmed it in. In shape it was all but circular; and must once no doubt have been a wayside hermitage or cell. It was of stone and was surmounted by a conical roof of thick and heavy slabs, at the south side of which rose a minute bell-cote, and towards the east a stunted stone cross, with one of its arms broken away.

‘The round arched door – its chevron edging all but defaced – refused to open. Nothing was to be seen in the gloom beyond its gaping keyhole. There was but one narrow slit of window, and this was beyond my reach. I could not even guess the age of this forbidding yet beautiful thing, and the gentleman – as I found afterwards – who had compiled the local guidebook had omitted to mention it altogether. Here and there in its fabric decay had begun to show itself, but clumsy efforts had been made at repair.

‘In that deep dark verdurous silence, unbroken even by drone or twitter, the effect of those walls in their cold minute simplicity was peculiarly impressive. They seemed to strike a solemn chill into the air around them – those rain-stained senseless stones. And what looked like a kind of derelict burial-ground to the south side of it only intensified its sinister aspect. No place surely for when the slow dark hours begin.

‘The graves were very few in number, and only one name was decipherable on any of the uncouth and half-buried headstones. Two were mere mounds in the nibbled turf. I had drawn back to survey once more from this new aspect the walls beyond, when – from one instant to the next, so to speak – I became aware of the presence of Mr Kempe. He was standing a few paces distant, his gaze in my direction – as unexpected an apparition as that of Banquo in Macbeth. Not even a robin could have appeared with less disturbance of its surroundings. Not a twig had snapped, not a leaf had rustled.

‘He looked to be a man of about sixty or more, in his old greenish-black half-clerical garb, his trousers lapping concertina-like over immense ungainly boots. An antiquated black straw hat was on his head. From beneath it grey hair flowed out a little on either side the long colourless face with its straggling beard. His eyes were clear as water – the lids unusually wide apart – and they had the peculiarity, perceptible even at this distance, of not appearing to focus what their attention was fixed upon. That attention was fixed upon me as a matter of fact, and, standing as I was, with head turned in his direction, we so remained, closely regarding one another for what seemed to be a matter of hours rather than of moments.

‘It was I who broke the silence with some affectedly-casual remark about the weather and the interestingness of the relic that stood, something like a huge mushroom of stone, nearby. The voice that sounded in answer was even more astonishing than Mr Kempe himself. It seemed to proceed from a throat rusty from want of use, and carried a kind of vibrant glassy note in it, like the clash of fine glass slightly cracked. At first I could not understand what he said. The sound of it reminds me now of Alexander Selkirk when his rescuers found him in Juan Fernandez. They said he spoke his words by halves, you’ll remember. So did Mr Kempe. They sounded like relics of a tongue as ancient as the unknown hermit’s chapel beside which we had met.

‘Still, I was myself as nervous as a cat. With all his oddities – those wide, colourless eyes, those gestures, that over-loud voice, there was nothing hostile, nothing even discourteous in his manner, and he did not appear to be warning me off as a trespasser. Indeed the finger wagging at me in the air was clearly beckoning me on. Not that I had any keen inclination to follow. I preferred to go on watching him, and attempted to mark time by once more referring to the age and architecture of the chapel – asked him at last pointblank if it were now too late to beg the courtesy of a glance inside.

‘The evening light momentarily brightened above the dark spreading tops of the pines and struck down full on this queer shape with its engrossed yet vacant face. His eyes never faltered, their pin-prick pupils fixed in their almost hueless irises. Reflected thus, I seemed to be an object of an extremely limited significance – a mere speck floating in their intense inane. The eyes of the larger cats and the hawk tribe have a similar effect; and yet one could hardly assert that their prey has no significance for them!

‘He made no attempt to answer my questions, but appeared to be enquiring, in turn, how I had contrived to invade his solitude; what I wanted, in short. I was convinced none the less that he was deceiving me. He knew well how I had come: for, of course, meeting as we had, only one way had been possible – that from the sea.

‘It might be impolitic to press the matter. I merely suggested that my journey had not been “roses all the way”, that I must get back to the world above before nightfall; and once more gave him to understand my innocent purpose – the desire to examine this curious relic. His gaze wandered off to the stone hermitage, returned, and then as if in stealth, rested an instant intently on my hands. Otherwise he remained perfectly motionless: his long knotted fingers hanging down out of the sleeves of a jacket too short for his gaunt body – and those ineffable clumsy, rusty boots.

‘The air in this green niche of the bay was stagnant with the scent of foliage and flowers; and so magically dark and clear it was as though you were in the presence of a dream. Or of a dreamer indeed – responsible not only for its beauty, but also for its menacing influence on the mind. All this, however, only convinced me the more of the necessity to keep my attention steadily fixed on the figure beside me. There was a something, an aura, about him difficult to describe. It was as if he himself were a long way off from his body – though that’s pure nonsense, of course. As the phrase goes – he was not all there. Once more his eyes met mine, and the next thing that occurred to me was that I had never seen a human countenance that betrayed so desperate a hunger. But for what? It was impossible to tell.

‘He was pressing me to follow him. I caught the word “key”; and he at once led the way. With a prolonged reluctant look behind me – that antiquated cell of stone; those gigantic pines; the few sinking mounds clad in their fresh green turf – I turned in my tracks; and the glance he cast at me over his shoulder was intended, I gathered, as a smile of encouragement.

‘The straggling gabled house to which he conducted me, with its low tower and smokeless chimneys now touched with the last cold red of sunset, was almost more windows than wall. The dark glass of their casements showed like water in its discoloured sides. Beyond it the ravine ascended ever more narrowly, and the house rested here in this green gap like a mummy long since deserted by its ghost.

‘We crossed a cobbled courtyard, and Mr Kempe preceded me up a wooden flight of stairs into a low-ceiled room with one all but ivy-blinded window, and, oddly enough, a stone floor. Except for the space where hung the faded portrait of what appeared to be a youngish woman, her hair dressed in ringlets, bookshelves covered the walls. Books lay hugger-mugger everywhere, indeed: on the table, on the chairs, on the floor, and even piled into the chimney of the rusty grate. The place was fusty with their leather bindings, and with damp.

‘They had evidently been both well used and neglected. There was little opportunity to get the general range of their titles – though a complete row of them I noticed were in Latin – because some vague intuition compelled me to keep my attention fixed upon my host. He had motioned me to a chair, and had seated himself on another that was already topped with two or three folios. It must have been even at midday a gloomy room; and owing to its situation it was a dark house. The door having admitted us, stood open; beyond it yawned the silent staircase.’

At this the schoolmaster paused; the landlady of the Blue Boar had once more emerged, and, like one man, we shamefacedly pushed our three glasses across the counter.

‘And what happened then?’ I enquired.

At this the man in leggings slightly turned his tortoise-like head in my direction, as if its usual resort was beneath a shell.

The schoolmaster watched the shape of the landlady till it had vanished into the dusk beyond. ‘Mr Kempe began talking to me,’ he said. ‘Rapidly and almost incoherently at first, but gradually slowing down till I could understand more or less what he was saying. He was explaining, a little unnecessarily as I fancied, that he was a recluse; that the chapel was not intended for public worship; that he had few visitors; that he was a scholar and therefore was in need of little company but his books. He swept his long arm towards these companions of his leisure. The little light that silted through the window struck down across his tousled head, just touching his brow and cheekbones as he talked. And then in the midst of this harangue he suddenly came to an end, and asked me if I had been sent there. I assured him that I had come of my own free will, and would he oblige me before we returned to the chapel, with a glass of water. He hesitated.

‘“Water?” he repeated. “Oh, water?” And then with a peculiar gesture he crossed the room and shut the door after him. His boots beat as hollowly on the stairs as sticks on a tom-tom. I heard the creaking of a pump-handle, and in a moment he reappeared carrying a blue-lined cup without a handle. With a glance at the portrait over my head, I drank its ice-cold contents at a gulp, and pushed the cup in between two dogs-eared books.

‘“I want to get back to the road up above,” I explained.

‘This seemed to reassure him. He shut his mouth and sat gazing at me. “Ah! The road up above!”

‘Then, “Why?” he suddenly almost bawled at me, as if I were sitting a long way off. His great hands were clasped on his angled knees, his body bolt upright.

‘“Why what?”

‘“Why have you come here? What is there to spy out? This is private property. What do you do – for a living? What’s the use of it all?” ‘It was an unusual catechism – from stranger to stranger. But I had just escaped an unpleasant death, and could afford to be indulgent. Besides, he was years and years older than I. I told him that I was a schoolmaster, on vacation, not thinking it necessary to add that owing to a small legacy I was out of a job at the time. I said I was merely enjoying myself.

‘“Enjoying yourself! And you teach!” he cried with a snap of his jaw. “And what do you teach? Silly, suffocating lies, I suppose; or facts, as you prefer to call them.” He drew his hand down his long colourless face, and I stole a glance towards the door. “If human beings are mere machines, well and good,” he went on. “But supposing, my young friend, they are not mere machines? Supposing they have souls in their bodies; what then? Supposing you have a soul in your body: what then? Ay, and the proof; the proof!”’

The schoolmaster’s face puckered up once more into a genial smile.

‘I won’t attempt,’ he went on, ‘to repeat word for word the talk I had that evening. I can give only the gist of it. But I had stumbled pretty abruptly, you’ll notice, on Mr Kempe’s King Charles’s head. And he presented me with it on a charger. He was possessed, I gathered, by one single aim, thought and desire. All these years of his “retirement” had apparently been spent in this one quest – to prove man’s possession of a “Soul”. Certain doubts in my mind sprang up a little later in the evening, but it was clear from the beginning that in pursuit of this he had spared neither himself nor the wife that was gone. It was no less clear that he was entirely incapable of what better brains, no doubt, would have considered a scientific treatment of his theme.

‘He thrust into my hand a few chapters of a foolscap manuscript that lay on the table – a fly-blown murky pile of paper at least eighteen inches high. Never have I seen anything to which the term “reading-matter” seemed more appropriate. The ink was faded on the top page; it was stained as if with tea. This work was entitled briefly, “The Soul” – though the sub-title that followed it would not have disgraced the author of the “Anatomy”.

‘I could follow no more than a line or two at a time of the crazy handwriting. The pages were heavily interscored, annotated and revised, not only in pencil but in violet and in red ink. A good part of it appeared to be in Latin and Hebrew, and other inactive tongues. But turning them over at haphazard I caught such page-headings as “Contemplation”; “Dreams”; “Flagellation”; “Cadaver”; “Infancy”. I replaced the sheets a little gingerly on the table, though one mustn’t, of course, judge of the merits of a work by the appearance of it in MS.

‘The desolation of its author’s looks and his abruptness of manner thinned away awhile as he warmed to his subject. But it was not so much his own sufferings in the cause as the thought of what Mrs Kempe’s last few years on earth must have been to her, that made me an attentive listener. Hers must indeed have proved a lingering death. He had never left her side, I gathered, for weeks at a time, except to tend his patch of garden, and to prepare their niggardly meals. And as her body had wasted, poor soul, his daily inquisition, his daily probings had become ever more urgent and desperate.

‘There was no doubt in the world that this afflicted old man had loved his wife. The softening of the vacant inhuman eyes as he told me of that last deathbed colloquy was enough to prove that. Maybe it was in part because of this affection that mere speculation had sharpened into what they call an idée fixe. Still, I hardly think so. More probably the insidious germ had shared his cradle. And after all, some degree of conviction on the subject is not out of place in men of his cloth. He had abandoned his calling indeed, he was assuring me, solely as a proof of his zeal!

‘He showed me also one or two late photographs of Mrs Kempe – taken with his own antiquated camera, and “developed” maybe in this very room. Soul indeed! There was little else. The face murkily represented in them wore a peculiar remote smile. The eyes had been hollowly directed towards the round leather cap of the machine. And so fallen were the features, now fading away on the discoloured paper, they might as well have been the presentment of a ghost.

‘What precise proofs he had actually demanded of this companion of his hermitage I cannot even guess. And what proofs might he still be pleading for, pursuing? Evidently none as yet had satisfied his craving. But it was at least to his credit that his own personal experiments – experiments on himself, I mean – had been as drastic. In one of them I had unwittingly shared. For the cliff path, I discovered, had long been his constant penance. A catlike foot was concealed beneath those Brobdingnagian boots. His had been the hand that had not only helped Nature protect her fastnesses, but had kept off all but one or two occasional stragglers as fatuous as myself.

‘It had been his haunt, this path – day and night. He questioned the idle heavens there. In the face of a peril so extreme the spirit wins almost to the point of severance from its earthly clay. Night and a half-moon and the northern constellations – I could at least in fancy share his vigils there. Only an occasional ship ventures into sight of that coast, but almost any day, it seemed, during these last few years a good spyglass might have discerned from its decks a human shape facing the Infinite from that appalling eyrie.

‘Both delusions and illusions, too, are rapid breeders. Which of the two, I wondered – still wonder – was this old man’s conviction – the conviction, I mean, that one is likely to be more acutely conscious of the spirit within when the body is suspended, as it were, from the lintel of death’s door. What dreams may come in such circumstances every practical psychologist no doubt would merely pooh-pooh. Still, after all, Mr Kempe had been something of a pioneer in this inquest. He had not spared himself. He could not live by faith, it seemed. He must indeed again and again have come uncommonly near dying in the pursuit of it.

‘He had fasted moreover, and was now little more than a mere frame of bones within his outlandish clothes. Those boots of his – they kept forcing themselves on my attention – a worse fit than any worn by some homesick desperate soldier clambering “over the top” in the Great War. They stuck in my mind.

‘“You don’t seem to realize – you folk out there don’t seem to realize” he suddenly began shouting at me, “that nothing in this world is of the slightest importance compared with a Yes or No to what I ask. If we are nothing more than the brutes that perish – and no sign ever comes from them, I may tell you – then let us perish, I say. Let fire descend from Heaven and shrivel us up. I care not in what cataclysm of horror. I have passed them all. I am suggesting no blasphemy. I make no challenge; no denial – merely a humble plodder, my dear sir. But no! Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Not a word.” He lifted himself out of his chair, opened the door, looked out and came back again.

‘“I disapprove” – he brandished his outspread fingers at me – “I disapprove absolutely of peering and prying. Your vile pernicious interferences with the natural mysteries which we as humanity inherited from the old Adam – away with them! I declare I am a visitor here. I declare that this” – he swept his hand down his meagre carcase, – “this is my mere tenancy. All that I seek is the simplest proof. A proof, that would not so much as stay a pulse-beat in the vile sceptics that give their wretched lives to what they call Science.

‘“I am not even a philosopher,” he ejaculated. “I am here alone, a wayfaring man and a fool. Alone – in the face of this one supreme mystery. And I need aid!” His voice ceased; he threw out his hands and sat there emptily gazing at me.

‘And so he continued. Now he would lift himself out of his chair and prowling from shelf to shelf, scanning at but an inch or two distant the titles of their contents, would thrust volume after volume into my hands for evidence, accompanying his clumsy motions with peevish and broken comments impossible to follow. I was presently surrounded with these things as with a surf.

‘Then he would once more seat himself, and embark on a protracted harangue with that cracked disused voice rising steadily until it broke in a discordant screech of argument.

‘“Almighty God,” he yelled at me, “you sit there, living, breathing, a human being; and the one justification of this hideous masquerade left uncertain.” He flung his hand into the air. “What right has he even to share the earth with me!” he shouted into the quiet.

‘Then once more there followed as swift a return to silence, to self-possession – that intent devouring stare. One at least knows oneself to be something objective in any chance-encountered pair of human eyes. In his, as I have said already, I appeared to have no material existence whatsoever. Mr Kempe might have been surveying, talking to, his own shadow. It was peculiarly disconcerting.

‘After yet another such outburst he had for a moment lain back in his chair as if exhausted. And I was so intent in my scrutiny of him that a second or two went by before I sprang forward to pick up the few dingy photographs that had fallen out of his hand on to the grimy patch of carpet beneath. But he himself had stooped even more abruptly, and our skulls collided together with a crack that for the moment all but dazed me.

‘But the eye moves almost as swiftly as the mind, and the collision had not been hasty enough to prevent my snatching a glimpse of one or two of them, photographs of which neither this widower nor his wife had been the original. I drew back appalled – their details fixed in my mind as if etched there by a flash of lightning. And, leaving him to gather up his further evidences as best he could, I instantly found myself edging towards the door. Those squalid oblongs of cardboard were easily concealed in his immense palm. He pawed them together as clumsily as a bear might combs of honey; then slowly raised his grey dishevelled head, and met my eyes.

‘I paused. “You have had other visitors at times?” I queried as mildly as my tongue would allow.

‘“What visitors, young man, do you mean, may I ask?” An extraordinary change had come into his voice – a flatness, an obsequiousness. The ingratiating tones were muffled, as if he could hardly trust himself to speak. For a while I could only gape in reply.

‘“Like myself,” I blurted out at last. “Visitors who come to – well, out of sheer curiosity. There’s the other route, I suppose?”

‘My one desire just then was to keep my thoughts about Mr Kempe rational and within bounds. To make a monster of him would be merely to lose my head once more as I had already lost it on that afternoon’s journey. None the less I was now looking at him through the after-image of those chance-seen photographs. They were a disturbing medium. The body of a human being who has fallen from a great height is not pleasing and pacifying to look at even though for a while its owner may have survived the fatality. There were others, too; and yet, it was less his photographs than the amateur photographer that had set my teeth on edge. He looked so old and so helpless – like an animal, as I say, enslaved by – and yet incapable of obeying – some heaven-sent instinct. That terrifying, doglike despair!

‘But then, open your newspaper any fine morning of your life, and which is the more likely to greet you on the news-page: the innocent young lady in the pink gauze petticoats over there, or that old figure of fun in the monk’s cowl?’

The tortoiselike shape of the man in leggings once more stirred on its stool. But this time his little eyes were turned in my direction.

‘How did you manage to get out at last?’ I enquired of the schoolmaster.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘all this time Mr Kempe had been watching me as circumspectly as I had been watching him, but as if, too, he were uncertain how many paces distant from him I stood. Then once more voice and manner changed. He feigned to be reassured. “It has been a wonderful day,” he remarked, with the dignity of an old retired scholar whose dubious fortune it has been to entertain a foreign prince; “a wonderful day. And my only regret is that I was unprepared for the occasion; that I have so poor a hospitality to offer. You may have had an exceedingly painful experience this afternoon. Why, my dear sir, in the absence of mind that comes over me once I embark on this hobby of mine, I haven’t even asked you to wash your hands.”

‘Almost involuntarily I glanced down at them. Like Macbeth’s they needed the invitation. But I must confess I preferred this old minister when he was not talking to me as if I were an imbecile child in a Sunday School. Besides, I knew perfectly well that – whether from that tumbling watch-tower of his, or from some hiding-place in the woods – there had been one intent witness of that experience. I thrust my hands into my pockets out of his sight.

‘“If you will await me here a moment,’ he went on – and his utterance began to thicken again, “I will get the key to the chapel – a remarkable, even unique example of its order. There was a well, too, in former times, and even archeologists have failed to agree about its date. They used to come; they used to come: and would argue, too. Why I can prove it is in parts at least not later than the ninth century. And the interior … but, dear me, it will soon be dark; and – no – you mustn’t think of leaving the house to-night. I need company; I need it.” He poked forward at me again, while yet furtively and rapidly edging towards the door.

‘With a peculiar disinclination to come into the very slightest contact with his person, I had to dodge out of his way to allow him to pass, and attempted to do so without appearing to show like a visitor who has strayed by mischance into the cage of a dangerous animal in some zoological garden. The old grey tousled head turned not an inch upon its heavy angular shoulders as he passed me; but in the dimming light of the window I caught a glimpse of the wide sea-like eyes intently fixed on me – like lifeless planets in the waste of space.

‘Even a young man may have intimations of the fool he is about to prove himself. Intimations, I mean, that come too late. Before the cumbrous door had closed behind him, I was listening for the sound of the key being turned in the lock. I didn’t even wait to try the handle, but tiptoed as rapidly as possible over the heaped-up books on the floor towards the window. It was one of dingy oblong panes, and the hasp was broken. The drop beneath its sill – to any one at least who had reached the house by the less easy way of the two roads – was almost as easy as getting into bed. It would land me some ten feet below on a heap of vegetable rubbish. But the hinges of the window had been allowed to rust, and the wood to shrink and swell with the changing seasons.

‘Not a sound had followed the locking of the door, and unless Mr Kempe had disencumbered his feet of their boots, he was at that moment collecting his wits immediately outside of it. I tiptoed across once more. “Please don’t let me be any trouble,” I bawled. “I could come again another time.”

‘The next instant I was back at the window, listening. The answer boomed down at me at last from some room above. But I could distinguish no words – merely a senseless babble. It would be indiscreet, it seemed, to hesitate any longer. I seized a frowsy cushion and with all my force thrust it against the rotten frame of the window. It flew open with but one explosive crack. I was prepared for it. Once more I paused. Then after a last hasty glance round that dismal laboratory, its scattered books, fusty papers, blackened ceiling, broken lamp – and that one half-obliterated portrait of the gentle apologetic faded young woman on the wall, I clambered soundlessly on to the sill, and dropped. The refuse below was thoroughly rotten; not a twig snapped.

‘The moment I touched ground I regretted this ignominious exit. There was I, a young man – thirty to forty years at least the junior of Mr Kempe – a young man who, whether or not possessed of a soul, was at least fairly capable in body. Surely I might have ventured! – life has more riddles than one. But I did not pursue these thoughts far. The very look and appearance of the house as I glanced up at the window out of which I had descended so abruptly, its overhanging gable, its piebald darkened walls rising towards the first stars under the last of twilight – it was hardly less unhappy and unpleasing company than its tenant.

‘I groped my way beyond its purlieus as quickly and silently as I could, mounted a low wall and was already in the woods. By luck I had caught a glimpse of the Plough straddling above the chimneys, so I knew my north, and edged off upwards and westwards for some little distance under the motionless trees before I came to a halt.

‘The house was now out of sight, its owner once more abandoned to his own resources, and researches. And I was conscious of no particular desire to return to examine the interior of the small stone chapel nor the inscriptions on the few headstones which memoralized those who had been longest slumbering in the ground nearby.

‘Possibly I was not the only visitor who had bidden the recluse in this valley so unmannerly a farewell. I cannot at any rate imagine anyone simpleton enough to venture back even in response to the sound of hysterical weeping that came edging across the silence of the woods.’

‘D’ye mean that old man was crying?’ queried our friend in leggings.

The drizzle in the lane outside the Inn had plucked up courage as daylight ebbed, and had increased to a steady downpour. He had to repeat his question.

‘I mean,’ said the schoolmaster a little acidly, ‘exactly what I say. I am nothing much of a traveller, or perhaps I could tell you what resemblance the noise of it had to the cajolings of a crocodile.’

‘My God!’ coughed the other derisively. With this he seemed to have finally made up his mind, and lurched heavily off his stool. And without even so much as a ‘good-night’ to our landlady, he betook himself out of the bar.

Except for the noise of the rain a complete silence followed his departure.

‘And you never went back?’ I ventured presently. ‘Or – or spoke about the matter?’

‘I mean, do you see,’ said the schoolmaster, ‘I acted like a fool. I should have taken Mr Kempe simply on his face value. There was nothing to complain about. He hadn’t invited me to come and see him. And it was hardly his fault, I suppose, if an occasional visitor failed to complete so precarious a journey. I wouldn’t go so far as that. He was merely one of those would-be benefactors to the human race who go astray; get lost, ramble on down the wrong turning. Qua pioneer, I ask,’ he rapped his fingers on the pewter of the counter, ‘was he exceptional?’ He was arguing with himself, not with me.

I nodded. ‘But what was your impression – was he sure – Mr Kempe? Either way?’

‘The Soul?’

‘Yes,’ I echoed, ‘the Soul.’

But I repeated the word under my breath, for something in the sound of our voices seemed to have attracted the attention of the landlady. And, alas, she had decided to light up.

The solemnity of man’s remotest ancestors lay over the schoolmaster’s features. ‘I can’t say,’ he replied. ‘I am not certain even if he was aware how densely populated his valley appeared to be – to a chance visitor, I mean. What’s more, to judge from the tones of his voice, he had scarcely the effect of a single personality. There were at least three Mr Kempes present that evening. And I haven’t the faintest wish in the world to meet any one of them again.’

‘And afterwards? Was it comparatively easy finding your way – on to the new cliff road?’

‘Comparatively,’ said the schoolmaster. ‘Though it took time. But nights are fairly short in May, even in country as thickly wooded as that.’

I continued to look at him without speaking; yet another unuttered question on my lips.

To judge from the remote friendly smile he just blinked at me, he appeared to have divined it, though it produced no direct answer. He got down from his stool, looked at his empty glass – and for the first time I noticed he was wearing mittens over his small bluish hands. ‘It’s getting late,’ he said, with an eye fixed vacantly once more on the automatic machine in the corner of the tap-room. There was no denying it; nor that even the musty interior of the Blue Boar looked more hospitable than the torrential darkness of the night outside.

How strange is man. The spectacle depressed me beyond words – as if it had any more significance than that for its passing hour a dense yet not inbeneficent cloud was spread betwixt this earth of ours and the faithful shining of the stars.

But I did not mention this to the schoolmaster. He seemed to be lost in a dark melancholy, his face a maze of wrinkles. And beyond him – in a cracked looking-glass – I could see his double, sitting there upon its stool. I was conscious that in some way I had bitterly disappointed him. I looked at him – my hand on the door-handle – waiting to go out …

1 First published in London Mercury and Harper’s Magazine, November 1925.