The next day, in the afternoon, in the great grey suburb, he knew his
long walk had tired him. In the dreadful cemetery alone he had been on
his feet an hour. Instinctively, coming back, they had taken him a
devious course, and it was a desert in which no circling cabman hovered
over possible prey. He paused on a corner and measured the dreariness;
then he made out through the gathered dusk that he was in one of those
tracts of London which are less gloomy by night than by day, because, in
the former case of the civil gift of light. By day there was nothing,
but by night there were lamps, and George Stransom was in a mood that
made lamps good in themselves. It wasn’t that they could show him
anything, it was only that they could burn clear. To his surprise,
however, after a while, they did show him something: the arch of a high
doorway approached by a low terrace of steps, in the depth of which—it
formed a dim vestibule—the raising of a curtain at the moment he passed
gave him a glimpse of an avenue of gloom with a glow of tapers at the
end. He stopped and looked up, recognising the place as a church. The
thought quickly came to him that since he was tired he might rest there;
so that after a moment he had in turn pushed up the leathern curtain and
gone in. It was a temple of the old persuasion, and there had evidently
been a function—perhaps a service for the dead; the high altar was still
a blaze of candles. This was an exhibition he always liked, and he
dropped into a seat with relief. More than it had ever yet come home to
him it struck him as good there should be churches.
This one was almost empty and the other altars were dim; a verger
shuffled about, an old woman coughed, but it seemed to Stransom there was
hospitality in the thick sweet air. Was it only the savour of the
incense or was it something of larger intention? He had at any rate
quitted the great grey suburb and come nearer to the warm centre. He
presently ceased to feel intrusive, gaining at last even a sense of
community with the only worshipper in his neighbourhood, the sombre
presence of a woman, in mourning unrelieved, whose back was all he could
see of her and who had sunk deep into prayer at no great distance from
him. He wished he could sink, like her, to the very bottom, be as
motionless, as rapt in prostration. After a few moments he shifted his
seat; it was almost indelicate to be so aware of her. But Stransom
subsequently quite lost himself, floating away on the sea of light. If
occasions like this had been more frequent in his life he would have had
more present the great original type, set up in a myriad temples, of the
unapproachable shrine he had erected in his mind. That shrine had begun
in vague likeness to church pomps, but the echo had ended by growing more
distinct than the sound. The sound now rang out, the type blazed at him
with all its fires and with a mystery of radiance in which endless
meanings could glow. The thing became as he sat there his appropriate
altar and each starry candle an appropriate vow. He numbered them, named
them, grouped them—it was the silent roll-call of his Dead. They made
together a brightness vast and intense, a brightness in which the mere
chapel of his thoughts grew so dim that as it faded away he asked himself
if he shouldn’t find his real comfort in some material act, some outward
worship.
This idea took possession of him while, at a distance, the black-robed
lady continued prostrate; he was quietly thrilled with his conception,
which at last brought him to his feet in the sudden excitement of a plan.
He wandered softly through the aisles, pausing in the different chapels,
all save one applied to a special devotion. It was in this clear recess,
lampless and unapplied, that he stood longest—the length of time it took
him fully to grasp the conception of gilding it with his bounty. He
should snatch it from no other rites and associate it with nothing
profane; he would simply take it as it should be given up to him and make
it a masterpiece of splendour and a mountain of fire. Tended sacredly
all the year, with the sanctifying church round it, it would always be
ready for his offices. There would be difficulties, but from the first
they presented themselves only as difficulties surmounted. Even for a
person so little affiliated the thing would be a matter of arrangement.
He saw it all in advance, and how bright in especial the place would
become to him in the intermissions of toil and the dusk of afternoons;
how rich in assurance at all times, but especially in the indifferent
world. Before withdrawing he drew nearer again to the spot where he had
first sat down, and in the movement he met the lady whom he had seen
praying and who was now on her way to the door. She passed him quickly,
and he had only a glimpse of her pale face and her unconscious, almost
sightless eyes. For that instant she looked faded and handsome.
This was the origin of the rites more public, yet certainly esoteric,
that he at last found himself able to establish. It took a long time, it
took a year, and both the process and the result would have been—for any
who knew—a vivid picture of his good faith. No one did know, in fact—no
one but the bland ecclesiastics whose acquaintance he had promptly
sought, whose objections he had softly overridden, whose curiosity and
sympathy he had artfully charmed, whose assent to his eccentric
munificence he had eventually won, and who had asked for concessions in
exchange for indulgences. Stransom had of course at an early stage of
his enquiry been referred to the Bishop, and the Bishop had been
delightfully human, the Bishop had been almost amused. Success was
within sight, at any rate from the moment the attitude of those whom it
concerned became liberal in response to liberality. The altar and the
sacred shell that half encircled it, consecrated to an ostensible and
customary worship, were to be splendidly maintained; all that Stransom
reserved to himself was the number of his lights and the free enjoyment
of his intention. When the intention had taken complete effect the
enjoyment became even greater than he had ventured to hope. He liked to
think of this effect when far from it, liked to convince himself of it
yet again when near. He was not often indeed so near as that a visit to
it hadn’t perforce something of the patience of a pilgrimage; but the
time he gave to his devotion came to seem to him more a contribution to
his other interests than a betrayal of them. Even a loaded life might be
easier when one had added a new necessity to it.
How much easier was probably never guessed by those who simply knew there
were hours when he disappeared and for many of whom there was a vulgar
reading of what they used to call his plunges. These plunges were into
depths quieter than the deep sea-caves, and the habit had at the end of a
year or two become the one it would have cost him most to relinquish.
Now they had really, his Dead, something that was indefensibly theirs;
and he liked to think that they might in cases be the Dead of others, as
well as that the Dead of others might be invoked there under the
protection of what he had done. Whoever bent a knee on the carpet he had
laid down appeared to him to act in the spirit of his intention. Each of
his lights had a name for him, and from time to time a new light was
kindled. This was what he had fundamentally agreed for, that there
should always be room for them all. What those who passed or lingered
saw was simply the most resplendent of the altars called suddenly into
vivid usefulness, with a quiet elderly man, for whom it evidently had a
fascination, often seated there in a maze or a doze; but half the
satisfaction of the spot for this mysterious and fitful worshipper was
that he found the years of his life there, and the ties, the affections,
the struggles, the submissions, the conquests, if there had been such, a
record of that adventurous journey in which the beginnings and the
endings of human relations are the lettered mile-stones. He had in
general little taste for the past as a part of his own history; at other
times and in other places it mostly seemed to him pitiful to consider and
impossible to repair; but on these occasions he accepted it with
something of that positive gladness with which one adjusts one’s self to
an ache that begins to succumb to treatment. To the treatment of time
the malady of life begins at a given moment to succumb; and these were
doubtless the hours at which that truth most came home to him. The day
was written for him there on which he had first become acquainted with
death, and the successive phases of the acquaintance were marked each
with a flame.
The flames were gathering thick at present, for Stransom had entered that
dark defile of our earthly descent in which some one dies every day. It
was only yesterday that Kate Creston had flashed out her white fire; yet
already there were younger stars ablaze on the tips of the tapers.
Various persons in whom his interest had not been intense drew closer to
him by entering this company. He went over it, head by head, till he
felt like the shepherd of a huddled flock, with all a shepherd’s vision
of differences imperceptible. He knew his candles apart, up to the
colour of the flame, and would still have known them had their positions
all been changed. To other imaginations they might stand for other
things—that they should stand for something to be hushed before was all
he desired; but he was intensely conscious of the personal note of each
and of the distinguishable way it contributed to the concert. There were
hours at which he almost caught himself wishing that certain of his
friends would now die, that he might establish with them in this manner a
connexion more charming than, as it happened, it was possible to enjoy
with them in life. In regard to those from whom one was separated by the
long curves of the globe such a connexion could only be an improvement:
it brought them instantly within reach. Of course there were gaps in the
constellation, for Stransom knew he could only pretend to act for his
own, and it wasn’t every figure passing before his eyes into the great
obscure that was entitled to a memorial. There was a strange
sanctification in death, but some characters were more sanctified by
being forgotten than by being remembered. The greatest blank in the
shining page was the memory of Acton Hague, of which he inveterately
tried to rid himself. For Acton Hague no flame could ever rise on any
altar of his.