The Third Attempt on the Graal

Lionel Rackstraw leant by the open window and looked out over the garden. Behind him Barbara lay, in stillness and apparent sleep; below him at some distance Mr. Gregory Persimmons contemplated the moon. In an ordinary state of mind Lionel might have contemplated it too, as a fantasy less terrible than the sun, which appeared to him often as an ironical heat drawing out of the earth the noxious phantoms it bred therein. But the phantoms of his mind were lost in the horrible, and yet phantasmal, evil that had befallen him; his worst dreams were, if not truer than they had always been — that they could not be-at least more effectual and more omnipotent. The last barricade which material things offered had fallen; the beloved was destroyed, and the home of his repose broken open by the malice of invisible powers. Had she been false, had she left him for another — that would have been tolerable; probably, when he considered himself, he had always felt it. What was there about him to hold, in the calm of intense passion, that impetuous and adorable nature? But this unpredictable madness, without, so far as could be known, cause or explanation, this was the overwhelming of humanity by the spectral forces that mocked humanity. He gathered himself together in a persistent and hopeless patience.

He took out his case and lit a cigarette mechanically. She, he supposed, would never smoke cigarettes again, or, if she did, it would never be the same. At the same time, that question of ways and means which is never far from the minds of the vast majority of the English at any moment, which poisons their sorrows and modifies their joys, which insists on being settled before any experience can be properly tasted, and, if unsatisfactorily settled (as it most frequently is), turns love and death into dancing parodies of themselves, which ruins personal relationship and abstract thought and pleasant hours — this question presented itself also to him. What about money? what about Adrian? what about their home? what about the future? He couldn’t look after Adrian; he couldn’t afford to keep Barbara and a housekeeper; besides, he couldn’t, he supposed, have a housekeeper to live in the same house with Adrian and himself — unless she were old enough. And how did you get old housekeepers, and what did you pay them? Barbara might get better, but obviously after such an attack she couldn’t for a long time be left alone with Adrian; and if she didn’t get better? She had an aunt somewhere in Scotland — a strong Calvinistic Methodist; Lionel cursed as he thought of Adrian growing up in a Calvinistic household. Not, his irony reminded him, that he wasn’t something of a Calvinist himself, with his feeling about the universe; but his kind of Calvinism wouldn’t want to proselytize Adrian, and the aunt’s would. He himself had no available relations — and his friends? Well, friends were all very well, but you couldn’t dump a child on your friends indefinitely. Besides, his best friends — Kenneth, for instance — hadn’t the conveniences. What a world!

Mr. Persimmons, turning from the moon, looked up at the house, saw him, waved a hand, and walked towards the door. It crossed Lionel’s mind that it would be very satisfactory if Adrian could stop at Cully. It was no use his saying that he had no right to think of it; his fancy insisted on thinking of it, and was still doing so when Gregory, entering softly, joined him at the window.

“All quiet?” he asked in a low voice.

“All quiet,” Lionel answered bitterly.

“It occurred to me,” Gregory said —“I don’t know, of course — but it occurred to me that you might be worrying over the boy. You won’t, will you? There’s no need. He can stop with me, here or in London, as long as ever you like. He likes me and I like him.”

“It’s very kind of you,” Lionel said, feeling at once that this would solve a problem, and yet that the solving it would leave him with nothing but the horror of things to deal with. Even such a worrying question as what to do with Adrian was a slight change of torment. But that, he reflected sombrely, was selfish. Selfish, good heavens, selfish! And, after a long pause he said again, “It’s very kind of you.”

“Not a bit,” Gregory answered. “I should even — in a sense — like it. And you must be free. It’s most unfortunate. It seems sometimes as if there was an adverse fate in things — lying in ambush.”

“Ambush?” Lionel asked, relieved yet irritated at being made to talk. What did people like Gregory know of adverse fate? “Not much ambush, I think. It’s pretty obvious, once one’s had a glimpse of the world.”

Religion normally has a mildly stupefying effect on the minds of its disciples, and this Gregory had not altogether escaped. He had thought it would give him half an hour’s pleasant relaxation to worry Lionel, and he had not realized that Lionel was, even in his usual state, beyond this. He went on accordingly: “There seems a hitch in the way things work. Happiness is always just round the corner.”

“No hitch, surely,” Lionel said. “The whole scheme of things is malign and omnipotent. That is the way they work. ‘There is none that doeth good — no, not one.”’

“It depends perhaps on one’s definition of good,” Gregory answered. “There is at least satisfaction and delight.”

“There is no satisfaction and no delight that has not treachery within it,” Lionel said. “There is always Judas; the name of the world that none has dared to speak is Judas.”

Gregory turned his head to see better the young face from which this summary of life issued. He felt perplexed and uncertain; he had expected a door and found an iron barrier.

“But,” he said doubtfully, “had Judas himself no delight? There is an old story that there is rapture in the worship of treachery and malice and cruelty and sin.”

“Pooh,” Lionel said contemptuously; “it is the ordinary religion disguised; it is the church-going clerk’s religion. Satanism is the clerk at the brothel. Audacious little middleclass cock-sparrow!”

“You are talking wildly,” Gregory said a little angrily. “I have met people who have made me sure that there is a rapture of iniquity.”

“There is a rapture of anything, if you come to that,” Lionel answered; “drink or gambling or poetry or love or (I suppose) satanism. But the one certainty is that the traitor is always and everywhere present in evil and good alike, and all is horrible in the end.”

“There is a way to delight in horror,” Gregory said.

“There is no way to delight in the horrible,” Lionel answered. “Let us pray only that immortality is a dream. But I don’t suppose it is,” he added coldly.

A silence fell upon them, and Gregory was suddenly conscious that he felt a trifle sick. He felt dizzy; he shut his eyes and leant against the wall to save himself lurching. Lionel’s face, as it looked out over the garden, frightened him; it was like a rock seen very far off. He opened his eyes and studied it again, then he glanced back over his shoulder at Barbara lying on the bed. This was Cully; Adrian was asleep in his room; he had overthrown Barbara’s mind. And now he was driven against something else, something immovable, something that affected him as if he had found himself suddenly in a deep pit of smooth rock. Lionel, who had been pursuing his own thoughts, began to speak suddenly, in the high voice of incantation with which he was given to quoting poetry,

“Which way I fly is hell, myself am hell,

And in the lowest deep a lower deep

Still gaping to devour me opens wide,

To which the hell I suffer seems a heaven.“

Gregory stamped his foot, and managed to change it into a mere shifting of position. After all, he wasn’t going to quarrel with Lionel just now, though if he had time he would smash him into splinters. A clerk at a brothel!

“Well,” he said, “there’s just one thing I should like to say. If the doctor doesn’t seem much good when he comes, I have been thinking that I know an old man in London who’s seen some curious things and has funny bits of knowledge. I’ll get him on the telephone tomorrow and ask him to come down. He mayn’t be any good, but he may.”

“It’s really very kind of you,” Lionel said. “But how can anyone do anything?”

“Well, we shall see,” Gregory answered cheerfully. “Hallo, there is the doctor. And Sir Giles. Shall we go and meet them?”

Sir Giles, who had been out all day on an antiquarian visit, had run into the doctor at the gates. They walked up the drive a little distance apart, and at the door he made to annex Persimmons, who, however, put him aside till he had spoken with the doctor. A new examination of the patient brought no new light. The doctor, who refused to stay for the night, but promised to call again in the morning, went off. Lionel returned to his vigil, and Gregory, having patted him on the shoulder, and said cheerfully, “Well, well, don’t despair. We’ll ring up old Manasseh first thing,” went off with Sir Giles to his own room.

“What’s the idea?” Tumulty asked. “And who is old Manasseh, anyhow?”

“Ah, you don’t know everyone yet,” Gregory answered in high glee. “Pity you weren’t here; you’d have liked to see how Mrs. Rackstraw went on. Quite unusual, for an English lady. Unusual for an English doctor, too. Did you think he was a bit bewildered, Tumulty? But you’ll meet Manasseh in the morning.”

“Coming down, is he?” Sir Giles asked. “Well, there’s someone else down here too.”

“Yes,” Gregory said. “The masquerading fellow in grey? Now, if you can tell me who he is —”

“I knew you’d go mad,” Sir Giles said, with satisfaction. “What fellow in grey? I don’t know what hell’s clothes he was wearing, something from his own suburban tape-twister, I expect.”

“Why suburban?” Gregory asked. “He didn’t look to me like the suburbs. And what did he mean by his name being John?”

“His name may be Beelzebub,” Sir Giles answered, “but the man is that lump-cheeked inspector who’s trying to find out who committed the murder. He’s down here.”

Gregory stared. “What, that?” he said. “Why, I thought they’d dropped all that. There’s absolutely nothing to show — What does he want here?”

“Probably either me or you,” Sir Giles answered. “Well, I told you at the beginning, Persimmons, I’m going to damn well see to it he doesn’t have me. I don’t care what insane May dance you get up to, but I’m not going to be dragged in. If the police are after you, they can have you for all I care. I’m leaving tomorrow, and I’m off to Baghdad next week. And, if he asks me anything, I shall tell him.”

“Tell him that you told me you were going to ask Rackstraw to have lunch with you, so that the room —” Gregory began.

“Tell him you’ve been waking up in the night shrieking ‘blood, blood,’ if it’s necessary,” Sir Giles said. “The English police are corrupt enough, of course, but the trouble is one doesn’t know where they’re corrupt, and you may hit on the wrong man. Besides, I’ll see that lurching sewer-rat in Hinnom before I spend good money on him.”

“You’re making a ridiculous fuss,” Gregory said. “You don’t really think he’s got evidence?”

“I don’t care a curse,” Sir Giles answered. “You’re not interesting enough to run any risks for, Persimmons; you’re merely an overgrown hobbledehoy stealing beer — the drainings in other people’s pots. And I’m not going to have to poison myself for you. And now who’s this reptile in grey you’re bleating about?”

Gregory had grown used to neglecting half of Sir Giles’s conversation, but for a moment he remembered Lionel’s remark earlier in the evening, and looked nastily across at the other. However, he pulled himself in, and said carelessly, “Oh, a mad fellow we met in the drive. Talked like a clergyman and said he knew seventy kings.”

“Only seventy?” Sir Giles asked. “No other introduction?”

“I didn’t like him,” Gregory admitted, “and he made Ludding foam at the mouth. But he wasn’t doing anything except wander about the drive. He mentioned he was a priest and king himself.” He dropped his voice and came a little nearer. “I wondered at first whether he was anything to do with — the shop. You know what I mean. But somehow he didn’t fit in.”

Sir Giles sat erect. “Priest and king,” he said, half sceptically. “You’re sure you’re not mad, Persimmons?” He stood up sharply. “And his name was John?” he asked intently.

“He said so,” Gregory answered. “But John what?”

Sir Giles walked to the window and looked out, then he came back and looked with increasing doubt at Gregory. “Look here,” he said, “you take my advice and leave that damned bit of silver gilt trumpery alone. Ludding told me about your all going off after it. You may be up against something funnier than you think, Master Gregory.”

“But who is he?” Gregory asked impatiently yet anxiously. “What’s he got to do with the — the Graal?”

“I’m not going to tell you,” Sir Giles said flatly. “I never knew any good come of trying to pretend things mightn’t be when they might. I’ve heard tales — lies, very likely — but tales. Out about Samarcand I heard them and down in Delhi too — and it wasn’t the Dalai Lama either that made the richest man in Bengal give all he had to the temples and become a fakir. I don’t believe in God yet, but I wonder sometimes whether men haven’t got the idea of God from that fellow — if it’s the same one.”

“What have I to do with God?” Gregory said.

“I don’t know whether the Graal belongs to him or he belongs to the Graal,” Sir Giles went on, unheeding. “But you can trace it up to a certain point and you can trace it back from a certain point, and someone had it in between. And if it was he, you’d better go and ask the Archdeacon to pray for you — if he will.”

“Will you tell me who he is?” Gregory asked.

“No, I won’t,” Sir Giles said. “I’ve seen too much to chatter about him. You drop it, while there’s time.”

“I suppose it’s Jesus Christ come to look for His own property?” Gregory sneered.

“Jesus Christ is dead or in heaven or owned by the clergy,” Sir Giles answered. “But they say this man is what he told you — he is king and priest and his name is John. They say so. I don’t know, and I tell you I funk it.” He looked at the open window again.

“Well, run then,” Gregory said. “But I and my great lord will know him and meet him.”

“So you may, for me,” Sir Giles answered, and with no more words disappeared to his own room.

The child Adrian slept long and peacefully, and only his angel, in another state of the created universe, knew what his dreams were. But, except for him and the servants, the night was, for those in Cully, empty of sleep. Lionel lay on the couch that had been hastily made up, watching and listening for any movement from his wife. How far she slept none could tell. She lay motionless, but Lionel doubted, when he was near her, whether it were more than a superimposed and compulsory immobility. Her eyes were shut, but her breath trembled as if some interior haste shook it, and every now and then there issued from her lips a faint and barely perceptible moan, faint but profound. Lionel brooded over this companion of his way, torn apart into the depths of some jungle whose terror he could not begin to conceive. He himself would have been, to however small an extent, prepared; but that Barbara, with her innocent concentration on window-curtains and the novels of Mr. Wodehouse and Adrian’s meals, should be plunged into it, was a fatality against which even his pessimism felt the temptation to rebel.

Not far from his room Sir Giles also lay wakeful, considering episodes and adventures of his past. Brutal with himself no less than with others, he did not attempt to hide from himself that the new arrivals in the village caused him some anxiety. He had known, in his exploration of that zone of madness which encloses humanity, certain events which had been referred by those who had spoken of them to a mysterious power whose habitation was unknown and whose interference was deadly. Once indeed, in a midnight assembly in Beyrout, he had, he thought, dimly seen him; there had been panic and death, and in the midst of the shrinking and alarmed magicians a half-visible presence, clouded and angry and destructive. At the time he had thought that he also had been affected by a general hallucination, but he knew that hallucination was a word which, in these things, meant no more than that certain things seemed to be. Whether they were or not . . . he promised himself again to leave England as soon as possible, and to leave Cully certainly tomorrow.

Gregory, after some consideration, had dismissed Sir Giles’s warnings as, on the whole, silly. Things were going very well; by the next night he hoped that both the Graal and Adrian would be, for a while, in his hands or those of his friends. Of all those who lay awake under those midnight stars he was the only one who had a naturally religious spirit; to him only the unknown beyond man’s life presented itself as alive with hierarchical presences arrayed in rising orders to the central throne. To him alone sacraments were living realities; the ointment and the Black Mass, the ritual and order of worship. He beyond any of them demanded a response from the darkness; a rush of ardent faith believed that it came; and in full dependence on that faith acted and influenced his circumstances. Prayer was natural to him as it was not to Sir Giles or Lionel, or, indeed, to Barbara, and to the mind of the devotee the god graciously assented. Conversion was natural to him, and propaganda, and the sacrifice both of himself and others, if that god demanded it. He adored as he lay in vigil, and from that adoration issued the calm strength of a supernatural union. As the morning broke he smiled happily on the serene world around him.

Sir Giles took himself off after breakfast, leaving his small amount of luggage to be sent on. Gregory and Lionel left Ludding to call them if Barbara moved — a nurse was to arrive later — and went to the telephone in the hall. There, after some trouble, Gregory got through to his desired number and, Lionel gathered, to the unknown Manasseh. He explained the circumstances briefly, urging the other to take the next train to Fardles.

“What?” he asked in a moment. “Yes, Cully — near Fardles . . . Well, anything in reason, anything, indeed . . . What? I don’t understand . . . Yes, I know you did, but . . . No, but the point is, that I haven’t . . . Yes, though I don’t know how you knew . . . But I can’t . . . Oh, nonsense! . . . No, but look here, Manasseh, this is serious; the patient’s had some sort of fit or something . . . But you can’t mean it . . . Oh, well, I suppose so . . . But, Manasseh . . . But you wouldn’t . . . No, stop . . . ”

He put the receiver back slowly and turned very gravely to Lionel. “This is terrible,” he said. “You know that chalice I had? Well, I knew Manasseh wanted it. He thinks he can cure Mrs. Rackstraw, and he offers to try, if I’ll give him the chalice.”

“Oh, well,” Lionel said insincerely, “if he wants that — I suppose it’s very valuable? Too valuable for me to buy, I mean?”

“My dear fellow,” Gregory said, “you should have it without a second thought. Do you suppose I should set a miserable chalice against your wife’s health? I like and admire her far too much. But I haven’t got it. Don’t you remember I told you yesterday — but we’ve been through a good deal since then — the Archdeacon’s bolted with it. He insists that it is his, though Colonel Conyers is quite satisfied that it isn’t, and I really think the police might be allowed to judge. He and Kenneth Mornington and a neighbour of mine bolted with it — out of my own house, if you please! And now, when I’d give anything for it, I can’t get hold of it.” He stamped his foot in the apparent anger of frustrated desire.

The little violence seemed to break Lionel’s calm. He caught Gregory’s arm. “But must your friend have that?” he cried. “Won’t anything else in heaven or hell please him? Will he let Babs die in agony because he wants a damned wine-cup? Try him again, try him again!”

Gregory shook his head. “He’ll ring us up in an hour,” he said, “in case we can promise it to him. That’ll give him time to catch the best morning train to Fardles. But what can I do? I know the Archdeacon and Mornington have taken it to the Duke’s house. But they’re all very angry with me, and how can I ask them for it?” He looked up suddenly. “But what about you?” he said, almost with excitement. “You know Mornington well enough — I daren’t even speak to him; there was a row about that book yesterday at the office, and he misunderstood something I said. He’s rather — well, quick to take offence, you know. But he knows your wife, and he might be able to influence that Archdeacon; they’re very thick. Get on the ‘phone to him and try. Try, try anything to save her now.”

He wheeled round to the telephone and explained what he wanted to the local Exchange; then the two of them waited together. “Manasseh’s a hard man,” Gregory went on. “I’ve known him cure people in a marvellous way for nothing at all, but if he’s asked for anything he never makes any compromise. And he doesn’t always succeed, of course, but he does almost always. He works through the mind largely — though he knows about certain healing drugs he brought from the East. No English doctor would look at them or him, naturally, but I’ve never known an English doctor succeed where he failed. Understand, Rackstraw, if you can get the Archdeacon to see that he’s wrong, or to give up the chalice without seeing that he’s wrong, it’s yours absolutely. But don’t waste time arguing. I know it’s no good my arguing with Manasseh, and I don’t think it’s much good your arguing with the Archdeacon. Tell Mornington the whole thing, and get him to see it’s life or death — or worse than life or death. Beg him to bring it down here at once and we’ll have it for Manasseh when he comes. There you are; thank God they’ve been quick.”