1
By one of those fantastic coincidences that make life sometimes seem more artificial than fiction, as well as stranger (said Saunders), it was in a little café in Rue de l’Oeil, Marseilles, that I first noticed Bellingham. Strange that one should have to journey to the south of France to make the acquaintance of a fellow-collegian! For Bellingham, too, was a Jesus man. I had nodded to him a hundred times in the Close, walked with him once or twice for a few hundred yards, and passed him every day in the Chimney going to or from lectures; but I knew next to nothing of him. Once, I remember, we met in the rooms of some other fellow and had coffee. Furnivall was there, who afterwards made something of a hit as an actor; Dodd who got a double first in classics and then, before the results were out, accidentally drowned himself within sight of Trinity Library; Chambers who, under a Greek pseudonym, wrote donnish elderly witticisms for undergraduate journals. Looking back on that inauspicious scene I know that not one of the men I have named possessed half the spiritual force of Bellingham, and yet, had it not been for after-events, I should not now have remembered that he was there at all. He was a tall slackly-built man, rather like a black sackful of uncoordinated bones; he stooped a little, peering out at the world under long bushy eyebrows from behind a large nose. The mouth was large and loose; the cheeks sagged a trifle; the ears stuck out from the head at an angle that, if you looked twice, seemed excessive; and the hands were big and bony with long fingers that moved, sometimes, like a piece of murderous mechanism. It was as if the hands of a strangler had been grafted on to the body of a morose, ungainly saint. I do not describe him as he appeared to me in that college room: that would be impossible, for I simply didn’t observe him. He was no more to me then than an uninteresting ultra-reserved fellow-student drudging at ecclesiastical history and similar stuff. That I failed to single him out is sufficiently amazing to me now. My eyes must have been in my boots. But there it is—he made no impression on my somnolent mind. It was not, as I say, until we met again in that little café in Rue de l’Oeil that I really saw Bellingham. For the thousandth time I looked at him and for the first time I saw him. There was quite a little crowd of us: Hayter of Caius; Mulroyd with his soft voice and Irish cadences; an Oxford man whose name I’ve forgotten; and the Honourable Somebody, a mild-mannered, flaxen-haired boy, a Fabian socialist trying to live down the fact that he was the younger son of a peer. But I’m forgetting myself: these people are merely names to you, and names they must remain. The Oxonian was a chance acquaintance who had encountered our party in Paris and diffidently joined us, a charming fellow who constantly tried—only too successfully, for he remains in my memory as the vaguest phantom—to efface himself. Hayter, whose chief preoccupation, I remember, was the maturing of a new Meerschaum, played the elder brother to the flaxen-haired youngster. Mulroyd was my own particular friend, and it was he who had dragged in Bellingham, the misfit of the party. Bellingham was a curiously solitary man, a ward in Chancery or something of the kind; no one knew anything about his origin or antecedents, and he had no friends. The suspicion that he was lonely, neglected, with nowhere to spend the Long Vacation, made him irresistible to Mulroyd; and that he was conspicuously unsociable Mulroyd regarded as a clarion call of challenge to his own militant kindliness. Well, there’s a rough sketch of the crowd that gathered in that little red-tiled, black-raftered, French hostel. You must imagine us all as sitting or standing about the place, in various negligent attitudes, drinking execrable vin rouge, and talking of routes and train-services and the comparative merits of ales. What turned the conversation towards more ultimate matters I cannot begin to remember, but turn it did. I think it was our Oxonian who interpolated some gloomy observation that set us all thinking of a brooding, inscrutable Destiny which for ever watched, with hard unblinking eyes, our trivial conviviality, listened, with infinite indifference, to our plans of to-day and to-morrow. The remark was succeeded by a pause that was almost a collective shudder, a pause in which, as it seemed to me, we all listened fixedly to our own heart-beats ticking away the handful of moments that divided us from an unknown eternity. You know what it is to be recalled suddenly, wantonly, to a sense of the immensities, to be aware that death, an invisible presence, is in your midst, to feel his lethal breath chilling the warmth of your idle joy. Even Madeleine, the daughter of the house, who had watched us hitherto with laughter in her dark eyes, and innocent invitation on her full lips, was conscious of the abrupt change of temperature. She understood not a word of our speech, but out of the corner of my eye I saw her hand make the sign of the cross and her lips move in prayer. Hayter, shockheaded, long and oval of face, ceased fingering his pipe and seemed lost in contemplation of its mellowing colour. A wistful light shone in Mulroyd’s eyes. The Honourable Somebody—I can’t recall his name—smiled and said ‘Um.’ In that pregnant moment during which we all sat peering over the edge of the unfathomable, questioning the unresponsive darkness, that monosyllable sounded like an incantation, a word mystical and potent. As for me, I looked from one face to the other, trying to read what was written there, and so my glance fell upon Bellingham. Fell and was arrested, for the face of Bellingham was a revelation. What it revealed is difficult to describe in cold prose; a musician could better express it in some moaning, unearthly phrase of music. It was as if there shone from that face not light but darkness, and as if over that head hovered a halo of dark fear, a crown of shuddering doom. The eyes flashed darkness, I say, and yet through them, as through sinister windows, I saw for one instant into the infinite distances of the soul behind them, the unimaginable and secret world in which the real Bellingham, the Bellingham whom none of us in that room had ever seen or approached, lived his isolated life. He was leaning forward, elbows on knees, his chin propped up in those gaunt skeleton hands that were several sizes too big for him. To me, who stood facing him, the effect was incredibly bizarre: it was for all the world as though some monster whose face was hidden from me was crouching at my feet offering the truncated head of Bellingham for my acceptance. The red-knuckled fingers formed a fitting cup for the grotesque sacrifice. I put the horrible fancy behind me and sought to regain a human view of that face. Gaunt and pallid, with high cheekbones and burning eyes, it was a battle-ground of conflicting passions. But the natures and names of the passions I could only surmise. An ascetic and a voluptuary, perhaps, had fought in Bellingham, and his face was the neutral ground that their warfare had violated and laid waste. The merest conjecture, this, and it remained so, until it was proved to be false.
‘It doesn’t bear thinking of,’ remarked Hayter, ‘so it’s best to avoid the thought. The animals are better off than we, by a long chalk.’
‘There’s religion,’ said the flaxen-haired Fabian tentatively.
‘Soothing syrup,’ Hayter murmured. ‘Religion doesn’t face death: it only pretends it isn’t there. Gateway to the larger life, and all that cant.’ Hayter was a very positive young man in his way.
Mulroyd tried to banter us back into a more comfortable humour. ‘Material for a first-rate shindy there. Now then, Saunders, speak up for your cloth, my boy!’
‘I shall, when I’ve got it,’ said I. A theological student does not care to talk shop in mixed company. I was shy of posing as a preacher, and not to be drawn.
‘Well, if Saunders won’t, I will.’
The voice was harsh, and tense with emotion. It seemed to come out of the grave itself. We all stared at Bellingham, whom we had become accustomed to regard as almost incapable of contributing to a conversation. We waited. Hayter even forgot that work of chromatic art, his pipe.
‘Death waits for every man,’ said Bellingham. ‘At any moment it may engulf us.’ The triteness of the sermon was redeemed by the personality that blazed in the speaker. ‘And then....’ His voice trailed off into silence.
‘And then?’ enquired Hayter, with a politeness that I fancied covered a sneer.
‘And then,’ said the man of doom, ‘we shall find ourselves in the terrible presence of God.’
For once even the genial Mulroyd was stung to sarcasm. ‘I must say, judging from your tone, you don’t seem to relish the prospect much.’
‘Never mind what I relish,’ answered Bellingham sternly. ‘In that hour you and I will be judged. We shall be forced to look into the eye that at this moment, and always, is looking upon us.’ There was an uncomfortable silence, as well there might be. We had not reckoned upon such an explosion of evangelical fervour, and it embarrassed us as some flagrant breach of manners would have done. Perhaps, heaven help us, we regarded it as a flagrant breach of manners. Bellingham was committing the cardinal sin: he was taking something too seriously.
‘When I was a child,’ went on Bellingham, without ruth, ‘I was told the story of a prisoner condemned to solitary confinement. To this punishment was added the further horror of perpetual watching. A small hole was drilled in the cell-door through which an eye never ceased to peer at the prisoner. That was an allegory, and I have never forgotten it. Even now, you fellows, we are being watched.’
Some of us, I swear, looked round nervously, half expecting to catch sight of that vigilant eye. I, for my part, was angry. ‘That’s not an allegory, Bellingham,’ I said. ‘It’s a damned travesty. You conceive God to be a kind of Peeping Tom, with omnipotence added. I would rather be an atheist than believe that.’
‘Perhaps you would rather be an atheist,’ retorted Bellingham. ‘Perhaps I would rather be an atheist. But I can’t be. Nor can you. Did any of you notice the name of the street?’
‘Name of the street?’ echoed some one. ‘What street?’
‘This street,’ said Bellingham.
‘We’re not in a street. We’re in a café,’ said Hayter truculently. ‘At least I thought so a moment ago. I begin to fancy we must be in a mission-hall.’
At the moment no one could remember having noticed the name. ‘Well, I did notice it,’ said Bellingham. ‘It is the Street of the Eye.’
Mulroyd shrugged his shoulders, a gesture plainly disdainful of this touch of melodrama.
‘Well,’ said I, ‘what of it?’ For the fellow’s morbidity had spoiled my temper. I expected a night of bad dreams.
‘The Street of the Eye,’ repeated Bellingham. ‘We’re all in that street; every man born is in that street. And we shall never get out of it.’
I believe some of us half-suspected that the wine had gone to his head, though how such stuff could make any man tipsy was beyond understanding. He continued to irradiate gloom upon us from under his shaggy brows. Mulroyd, to create a diversion, held out his hands to Madeleine in mock appeal.
‘Du vin, mademoiselle! Nous sommes bien chagrinés.’
The girl’s eyes brightened again. At the merest hint of a renewal of gaiety she rose, radiantly, as if from the dead.
‘Let’s have some champagne,’ Mulroyd suggested, ‘to take the taste of death out of our mouths.’
‘Carpe diem,’ murmured Hayter. ‘Trite. But the first and last word of wisdom.’
‘You can’t escape that way,’ remarked Bellingham, sourly insistent.
But we could stand no more of Bellingham just then. Flinging courtesy to the winds we laughed and sang and shouted him down. ‘Death be damned!’ cried Mulroyd, as we clinked glasses. Never was a toast drunk with more fervour.