At the end of a side-street the Norman abbey rose, black and humped and
semi-ruined, the huge dark clouds of the evening sky sailing swiftly
past the ogive of its broken arches. The village had retreated from the
abbey, because the abbey’s furthermost walls were lapped by the floods,
so that it remained, the outer bulwark of man’s encampment upon the
inviolate mound in the midst of the inundations; it remained like some
great dark derelict vessel, half beached upon dry land, half straining
still towards the waters. The street which led to it was a survival of
the ancient town, gabled and narrow, with cobbled ground; Silas tapped
his way over the cobbles. He could not see the enormous mass of tower
and buttress and great doorway, that blocked the end of the street
before him, but he heard the scattered peal of bells, and the deep gloom
of the abbey lost nothing in passing through the enchantment of his
blind fancy. He entered, and was swallowed up in shadows. The roof was
lost in a sombre and indistinguishable vault. The aisles became dim
colonnades, stretching away into uncertain distance. The pillars with
their bulk and gravity of naked stone dwarfed the worshippers that
rustled around their base. The organ rumbled in the transept. Silas
moved among the aisles, handing himself on from pillar to pillar; he
imagined that he moved in a forest, touching his way from tree-trunk to
tree-trunk; he conceived the abbey as illimitable, and relished it the
more because ruin had impaired the intention of the architecture.
The organ from its rumbling broke out into its full volume, a giant
treading in wrath through the forest, a storm rolling among the echoes
of the hills. Night came, and the clouds moved invisibly past overhead,
over the abbey and the floods. Nothing but the dark flats of water lay
between the abbey and the sea; its bells gave their music to the wind,
and the great voice of its organ was more than a man-made thing. The
black shape of the abbey on the edge of the desolate floods bulked like
a natural growth rooted in old centuries, harmonious and consonant with
nature. To the vision of Silas Dene, on which no human limitations were
imposed, and whose mind was fed on sound and thought alone, the abbey
was not less vast than night itself, only a night within the night, an
abode of ordered sound within the gale of sound. In his fancy he was not
clear as to whether it were roofed over, or lay open to the sky; he
could vary his decision according to the vagary of the moment,
alternately picturing the rafters high above his head, or the scudding
moonlit heavens of ragged black and silver. He put his hands upon the
pillars with no thought of man’s construction; they seemed monolithic.
He caressed them, moving between them, leaning against them, and
listening to the organ. He was in a large, dim, mysterious place, that
had a kindred with the floods and with the storm. He knew that all
around him were shadows which, while making no difference to the
perpetual shadow he himself lived in, obscured and hampered the free
coming and going of other men. Darkness was to him a confederate and an
affinity; he would smile when people spoke of nightfall or of an
impenetrable fog. He searched now with his hand until it touched the
shoulder of a kneeling woman.
“Are there any lights in the church?” he whispered.
“Why, surely!” she said, startled, “candles upon the altar.”
He was displeased; he moved behind a column where he knew the shadows
would be deeper. The organ had ceased, and he heard prayers. He shook
with inward mockery, confident that the abbey, which he had endowed with
a personality and had adopted into his own alliance, would reject the
prayers as contemptuously as he himself rejected them. It would await
the renewed majesty of the organ.... To Silas the organ represented no
hymn of praise; it represented only the accompaniment of storm; he was
not even troubled, because he did not notice them, by the infantile
words which the congregation fitted to its chords. It had never occurred
to him to think of the abbey as a holy temple until he came by chance
upon a thing to which his imagination made a kindled and ravenous
response.
For once he had not made for himself the discovery of this new theme in
the course of his reading. He owed it, a resented debt, to the
conversation of his mates in the shops. Silas, listening, had felt his
ever-ready contempt surging within him; it angered him to learn from
illiterate men of a subject that he alone amongst them was fitted to
understand. They skirted round it; but he grasped it avidly, adopting
it, as though a niche in his mind had been always waiting for it. He
took it with him to the abbey, like a man carrying something secret and
deadly under his cloak. Black Mass....
He scarcely knew what it meant. He took it principally as a symbol of
distortion and mockery. It seemed to be one of the phrases and summings
up he had always been searching for, he who liked to condense a large
vague district of imaginings into a final phrase.
When he remembered Black Mass in the ordinary way, he smiled in
satisfaction, and stowed it away as a secret; but when he thought of it
in the abbey he hunched himself as though he were in the throes of some
physical pleasure. In bringing that thought with him into the abbey he
was taunting a tremendous God, a revengeful God; and he exalted
fearfully in the latent implication of his own daring. Surely courage
could go no further than the defiance of God! His ready ecstasy swept
him away. The world he lived in was a reversed world, where darkness
held the place of light; in the world of his soul a similar order should
prevail. Taut-strung, he cast around for some piece of blasphemy, some
monstrous thing that he could do,—he did not know what. He only knew
that now he was brave, though it might be with the courage of hysteria;
presently he would be again afraid. He dreaded the return of his
cowardice. He had not been a coward the day he had killed Hannah; only
afterwards; he must not dwell upon the afterwards.
He had no weapon with him in the church except his voice, and a penknife
in his pocket.
He must achieve something; something! anything!
In the midst of his excitement he took it into his head that a piece of
the ruined masonry, detached by the wind, might fall in upon him and
crush him. Still chattering under his breath to himself, his hands
nervously working, he moved closer to the shelter of the pillar. Here he
felt more secure, but still the gusts of storm sent waves of physical
anxiety through him. He was torn between that small anxiety and the
illimitable defiance.
The organ swelled out again, lifting him upon its great rhythm as a wave
lifts a swimmer.