War in Heaven (Chap. 6: The Sabbath)

"I met Mr. Persimmons in the village to-day," Mr. Batesby said to the
Archdeacon. "He asked after you very pleasantly, although he's sent
every day to inquire. It was he that saw you lying in the road, you
know, and brought you here in his car. It must be a great thing for you
to have a sympathetic neighbour at the big house; there's so often
friction in these small parishes."

"Yes," the Archdeacon said.

"We had quite a long chat," the other went on. "He isn't exactly a
Christian, unfortunately, but he has a great admiration for the Church.
He thinks it's doing a wonderful work--especially in education. He
takes a great interest in education; he calls it the star of the future.
He thinks morals are more important than dogma, and of course I agree
with him."

"Did you say 'of course I agree' or 'of course I agreed'?" the
Archdeacon asked. "Or both?"

"I mean I thought the same thing," Mr. Batesby explained. He had noticed
a certain denseness in the Archdeacon on other occasions. "Conduct is
much the biggest thing in life, I feel. 'He can't be wrong whose life is
for the best; we needs must love the higher when we see Him.' And he
gave me five pounds towards the Sunday School Fund."

"There isn't," the Archdeacon said, slightly roused, "a Sunday School
Fund at Fardles."

"Oh, well!" Mr. Batesby considered. "I daresay he'd be willing for it to
go to almost anything _active_. He was very keen, and I agree--thought just
the same, on getting things _done_. He thinks that the Church ought to be
a means of progress. He quoted something about not going to sleep till
we found a pleasant Jerusalem in the green land of England. I was
greatly struck. An idealist, that's what I should call him. England
needs idealists to-day."

"I think we had better return the money," the Archdeacon said, "If he
isn't a Christian--"

"Oh, but he is," Mr. Batesby protested. "In effect, that is. He thinks
Christ was the second greatest man the earth has produced."

"Who was the first?" the Archdeacon asked.

Mr. Batesby paused again for a moment. "Do you know, I forgot to ask?"
he said. "But it shows a sympathetic spirit, doesn't it? After all, the
second greatest! That goes a long way. Little children, love one another
--if five pounds helps us to teach them that in the schools. I'm sure
mine want a complete new set of Bible pictures."

There was a pause. The two priests were sitting after dinner in the
garden of the Rectory. The Archdeacon, with inner thoughts for
meditation, was devoting a superficial mind to Mr. Batesby, who on his
side was devoting his energies to providing his host with cheerful
conversation. The Archdeacon knew this, and knew too that his guest and
substitute would rather have been talking about his own views on the
ornaments rubric than about the parishioners. He wished he would. He was
feeling rather tired, and it was an effort to pay attention to anything
which he did not know by heart. Mr. Batesby's ecclesiastical views he
did--and thought them incredibly silly--but he thought his own were
probably that too. One had views for convenience' sake, but how anyone
could think they mattered. Except, of course, that even silly views...

A car went by on the road and a hand was waved from it. To Gregory
Persimmons the sight of the two priests was infinitely pleasurable. He
had met them both and summed them up. He could, he felt, knock the
Archdeacon on the head whenever he chose, and the other hadn't got a
head to be knocked. It was all very pleasant and satisfactory. There had
been a moment, a few days ago, in that little shop when he couldn't get
out, and there seemed suddenly no reason why he should get out, as if he
had been utterly and finally betrayed into being there for ever--he had
felt almost in a panic. He had known that feeling once or twice before,
at odd times; but there was no need to recall it now. To-night, to-night,
something else was to happen. To-night he would know what it all
was of which he had read in his books, and heard--heard from people who
had funnily come into his life and then disappeared. Long ago, as a boy,
he remembered reading about the Sabbath, but he had been told that it
wasn't true. His father had been a Victorian Rationalist. The
Archdeacon, he thought, was exceedingly Victorian too. His heart beating
in an exalted anticipation, he drove on to Cully.

Mr. Batesby was asleep that night, and the Archdeacon was, in a
Victorian way, engaged in his prayers, when Gregory Persimmons stood up
alone in his room. It was a little after midnight, and, as he glanced
out of the window, he saw a clear sky with a few stars and the full moon
contemplating him. Slowly, very slowly, he undressed, looking forward to
he knew not what, and then--being entirely naked--he took from a table
the small greasy box of ointment and opened it. It was a pinkish
ointment, very much the colour of the skin, and at first he thought it
had no smell. But in a few minutes, as it lay exposed to the air, there
arose from it a faint odour which grew stronger, and presently filled
the whole room, not overpoweringly, but with a convenient and
irresistible assurance. He paused for a moment, inhaling it, and finding
in it the promise of some complete decay. It brought to him an assurance
of his own temporal achievement of his power to enter into those lives
which he touched and twist them out of their security into a sliding
destruction. Five pounds here, a clever jeer there--it was all easy.
Everyone had some security, and he had only to be patient to find and
destroy it. His father, when he had grown old and had had a good deal of
trouble, had been inclined to wonder whether there was anything in
religion. And they had talked of it; he remembered those talks. He had--
it had been his first real experiment--he had suggested very carefully
and delicately, to that senile and uneasy mind, that there probably was
a God, but a God of terrible jealousy; God had driven Judas, who
betrayed Him, to hang himself; and driven the Jews who denied Him to
exile in all lands. And Peter, his father had said, Peter was forgiven.
He had stood thinking of that, and then had hesitated that, yes, no
doubt Peter was forgiven, unless God had taken a terrible revenge and
used Peter to set up all that mystery of evil which was Antichrist and
Torquemada and Smithfield and the Roman See. Before the carefully
sketched picture of an infinite, absorbing, and mocking vengeance, his
father had shivered and grown silent. And had thereafter died, trying
not to believe in God lest he should know himself damned.

Gregory smiled, and touched the ointment with his fingers. It seemed
almost to suck itself upward round them as he did so. He disengaged his
fingers and began the anointing. From the feet upwards in prolonged and
rhythmic movements his hands moved backward and forward over his skin,
he bowed and rose again, and again. The inclinations gradually ceased as
the anointing hands grew higher--around the knees, the hips, the
breast. Against his body the pink smears showed brightly for a moment,
and then were mingled with and lost in the natural colour of the flesh.
All the while his voice kept up a slow crooning, to the sound of which
he moved, pronouncing as in an incantation of rounded and liquid
syllables what seemed hierarchic titles. He touched his temples and his
forehead with both hands, and so for a moment stayed.

His voice grew deeper and charged with more intensity, though the sound
was not noticeably quicker, as he began the second anointing. But now it
was only the chosen parts that he touched--the soles of the feet, the
palms of the hands, the inner side of the fingers, the ears and eyelids,
the environs of nose and mouth, the secret organs. Over all these again
and again he moved his hands, and again ceased and paused, and the
intensity died from his voice.

For the third anointing was purely ritual. He marked various figures
upon his body--a cross upon either sole, a cross inverted from brow to
foot, and over all his form the pentagon reversed of magic. While he did
so his voice rose in a solemn chant which entered with a strange power
through those anointed ears, and flowed through his body as did the new
faint light that seemed to shine through his closed eyelids. Light and
sound were married in premonitions of approaching experience; his voice
quivered upon the air and stopped. Then with an effort he moved
uncertainly towards his bed, and stretched himself on it, his face
towards the closed window and the enlarging moon. Silent and grotesque
he lay, and the secret processes of the night began.

If it had been possible for any stranger to enter that locked room in
the middle of his journeying they would have found his body lying there
still. By no broomstick flight over the lanes of England did Gregory
Persimmons attend the Witches' Sabbath, nor did he dance with other
sorcerers upon some blasted heath before a goat-headed manifestation of
the Accursed. But scattered far over the face of the earth, though not
so far in the swiftness of interior passage, those abandoned spirits
answered one another that night; and That beyond them (which some have
held to be but the precipitation and tendency of their own natures, and
others for the equal and perpetual co-inheritor of power and immortality
with Good)--That beyond them felt them and shook and replied, sustained
and nourished and controlled.

After Gregory had laid himself upon the bed he made the usual attempt at
excluding from the attention all his surroundings. But to-night the
powerful ointment worked so swiftly upon him, stealing through all his
flesh with a delicious venom and writhing itself into his blood and
heart, that he had scarcely come to rest before the world was shut out.
He was being made one with something beyond his consciousness; he
accepted the union in a deep sigh of pleasure.

When it had approached a climax it ceased suddenly. There passed through
him a sense of lightness and airy motion; his body seemed to float
upwards, so unconscious had it become of the bed on which it rested. He
knew now that he must begin to exercise his own intention, and in a
depth beyond thought he did so. He commanded and directed himself
towards the central power which awaited him. Images floated past him;
for his mind, rising as it were out of the faintness which had overcome
it, now began to change his experiences into such sounds and shapes as
it knew; so that he at once experienced and expressed experience to
himself intellectually, and could not generally separate the two. At
this beginning, for example, as he lay given up to that sensation of
swift and easy motion towards some still hidden moment of exquisite and
destructive delight, it seemed to him that at a great distance he heard
faint and lovely voices, speaking to him or to each other, and that out
of him in turn went a single note of answering glee.

And now he was descending; lower and lower, into a darker and more heavy
atmosphere. His intention checked his flight, and it declined almost
into stillness; night was about him, and more than night, a heaviness
which was like that felt in a crowd, a pressure and intent expectation
of relief. As to the mind of a man in prayer might come sudden reminders
of great sanctities in other places and other periods, so now to him
came the consciousness, not in detail, but as achievements, of far-off
masteries of things, multitudinous dedications consummating themselves
in That which was already on its way. But that his body was held in a
trance by the effect of the ointment, the smell of which had long since
become part of his apprehension, he would have turned his head one way
or the other to see or speak to those unseen companions.

Suddenly, as in an excited crowd a man may one minute be speaking and
shouting to those near him, and the next, part of the general movement
directed and controlled by that to which he contributes, there rose
within him the sense of a vast and rapid flow, of which he was part,
rushing and palpitating with desire. He desired--the heat about his
heart grew stronger--to give himself out, to be one with something that
should submit to him and from which he should yet draw nourishment; but
something beyond imagination, stupendous. He was hungry--but not for
food; he was thirsty--but not for drink; he was filled with passion--
but not for flesh. He expanded in the rush of an ancient desire; he
longed to be married to the whole universe for a bride. His father
appeared before him, senile and shivering; his wife, bewildered and
broken; his sop, harassed and distressed. These were his marriages,
these his bridals. The bridal dance was beginning; they and he and
innumerable others were moving to the wild rhythm of that aboriginal
longing. Beneath all the little cares and whims of mankind the tides of
that ocean swung, and those who had harnessed them and those who had
been destroyed by them were mingled in one victorious catastrophe. His
spirit was dancing with his peers, and yet still something in his being
held back and was not melted.

There was something--from his depths he cried to his mortal mind to
recall it and pass on the message--some final thing that was needed
still; some offering by which he might pierce beyond this black
drunkenness and achieve a higher reward. What was the sacrifice, what
the oblation that was greater than the wandering and unhappy souls whose
ruin he had achieved? Heat as from an immense pyre beat upon him, beat
upon him with a demand for something more; he absorbed it, and yet, his
ignorance striking him with fear, shrunk from its ardent passions. It
was not heat only, it was sound also, a rising tumult, acclamation of
shrieking voices, thunder of terrible approach. It came, it came,
ecstasy of perfect mastery, marriage in hell, he who was Satan wedded to
that beside which was Satan. And yet one little thing was needed and he
had it not--he was an outcast for want of that one thing. He forced his
interior mind to stillness for a moment only, and in that moment
recollection came.

From the shadowy and forgotten world the memory of the child Adrian
floated into him, and he knew that this was what was needed. All gods
had their missionaries, and this god also who was himself and not
himself demanded neophytes. Deeply into himself he drew that memory; he
gathered up its freshness and offered it to the secret and infernal
powers. Adrian was the desirable sacrifice, an unknowing initiate, a
fated candidate. To this purpose the man lying still and silent on the
bed, or caught up before some vast interior throne where the masters and
husbands and possessors of the universe danced and saw immortal life
decay before their subtle power, dedicated himself. The wraith of the
child drifted into the midst of the dance, and at the moment when Adrian
far away in London stirred in his sleep with a moan a like moan broke
out in another chamber. For the last experience was upon the accepted
devotee; there passed through him a wave of intense cold, and in every
chosen spot where the ointment had been twice applied the cold
concentrated and increased. Nailed, as it were, through feet and hands
and head and genitals, he passed utterly into a pang that was an ecstasy
beyond his dreams. He was divorced now from the universe; he was one
with a rejection of all courteous and lovely things; by the oblation of
the child he was made one with that which is beyond childhood and age
and time--the reflection and negation of the eternity of God. He
existed supernaturally, and in Hell...

When the dissolution of this union and the return began, he knew it as
an overwhelming storm. Heat and cold, the interior and exterior world,
images and wraiths, sounds and odours, warred together within him. Chaos
broke upon him; he felt himself whirled away into an infinite desolation
of anarchy. He strove to concentrate, now on that which was within, now
on some detail of the room which was already spectrally apparent to him;
but fast as he did so it was gone. Panic seized him; he would have
screamed, but to scream would be to be lost. And then again the image of
Adrian floated before him, and he knew that much was yet to be done.
With that image in his heart, he rose slowly and through many mists to
the surface of consciousness, and as it faded gradually to a name and a
thought he knew that the Sabbath was over and the return accomplished.

* * *

"He's very restless," Barbara said to Lionel. "I wonder if the scone
upset him. There, darling, there!"

"He's probably dreaming of going away," Lionel answered softly. "I hope
he won't take a dislike to the place or Persimmons or anything."

"Hush, sweetheart," Barbara murmured. "All's well. All's well."