THE STREET OF THE EYE
THE STREET OF THE EYE
‘STORIES of the supernatural,’ said Saunders, ‘serve at least one useful purpose: they test a man’s intellectual capacity. Not a very sure test, you may say; but for purposes of rough classification it is sure enough. Incertitude, a sense of imminent surprise, is after all the very salt of life. Denounce the habit of classification as bitterly as you like—and I know well the intellectual perils that attend it—it is none the less true that we do, when we meet a man, like to be able to place him, roughly, in this category or that. And most men, by the way, submit to the process very meekly. You subtle folk’—here Saunders bowed to me in genial irony—‘in attributing to the mass of mankind your own mental complexity flatter them grossly. I have heard you yourself discourse on the folly of the old religious psychology which divided mankind, arbitrarily, into sheep and goats. As philosophy, of course, it is nonsense, and the fathers of the church must have known that as well as you and I do; but as a formula for rough-and-ready justice, it serves. If you are pulling your weight in the boat you are a good man; if you are not pulling your weight you are a bad man—that is a definite and verifiable verdict based on rational calculation. The fun begins when having made our calculation, and acted on it, new factors begin to appear which knock all our arithmetic silly. But in our dealings with men how rarely, on the whole, that happens! You do not agree? Well, you are permitted to disagree so long as you believe me to be sincere in my opinion. All modern thought, I know, is moving away from my idea as fast as, according to you, it is moving away from my church; but I fancy that, in practice, the world will continue to adhere to it. If I were to say that all men are types, that would be not so much a falsehood as a wanton exaggeration of a truth. I know all that can be urged, and justly urged, against pigeon-hole classification; but what impresses and startles me is how easily the greater number of one’s fellow-creatures fit into the pigeon-holes. Unique souls, no doubt; but the human soul is a mystery which I don’t profess to understand and which you profess not to believe in. It is the ordinary workaday mentality of a man that can be labelled with some approach to accuracy. And the supernatural story, as I say, is something of a test. Tell a group of new acquaintances some fairly well authenticated ghost-story, and they will fall apart and regroup in their special classes like a company of soldiers forming up into platoons. There will be the credulous fools on the one hand, ready to believe anything without question; there will be the materialist fools on the other hand, snorting in angry contempt. Between the two—truth is generally found midway between extremes—between the two, preserving a delicate balance between scepticism and credulity, doubting the story, perhaps, but admitting the possibility, will be the wise men. I need hardly add, my dear fellow, that it is among these wise philosophers that I myself am to be found. There you have three well-defined types, and it is noteworthy that I am a bright specimen of the exemplary type. If you wish to be saved you have only to look at me and do your best.’
There was a gleam of laughter in Saunders’s kindly and humorous eyes, a gleam that seemed to apologize for having read me something in the nature of a lecture. I had just told my clerical friend that queer story of Bailey’s about James Dearth and the white horse. It had interested him, and he was far more disposed to take it seriously than I was. It started him talking about the Unseen, a hypothesis in which he has a more than professional concern, and so led him to the bundle of generalities I have just recorded. They impressed me less than Saunders’s remarks usually do, but I knew better than to interrupt him. Whatever be the truth about his theory of types, he himself is certainly a distinguished exception to the theory. One never knows where his talk will lead, and I for my part always listen in the hope that it will lead to a story. Saunders, with his penetrating vision and his unique opportunities, has seen many a naked soul, many a human creature stripped bare, by triumph or catastrophe, of the coverings that hide it from the public eye—yes, and from the eyes of intimate friends no less. He is as full of good stories as of bad sermons. And so I waited now, like a timid angler afraid even to cast in his line lest the troubling of the waters should scare the fish away.
‘The surface mind is dull enough,’ continued Saunders presently, ‘dull enough to justify a label. It is the mysterious region below consciousness, the rich, dark, infinitely fertile subsoil, that passes the wit of man to understand. For the most part, one can only reach it by vague conjecture. But sometimes, here and there, some beautiful or terrible flower shoots up from that underworld into the light of our conscious existence. As for your friend’s experiences at the farm, I think, frankly, that there was sheer devilry in it, black magic. But it isn’t always so. You remember what I told you about poor Bellingham.’
In the pause that followed, my hopes flourished exceedingly. Then I hastened to assure Saunders that he had told me precisely nothing at all about poor Bellingham, whose name I heard for the first time. And so, with a little coaxing, I got the tale from him.
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.