Holy Disorders

‘I suppose,’ said the fat man, abandoning his Pareto, ‘that you’ve got a first-class ticket?’

A deathly silence followed this question. The intruder jerked himself slowly up from his paper, like a pugilist who has been unfairly smitten in the belly and is gathering forces ponderously together for retaliation. The others looked on aghast. Even the fat man quailed, unnerved by the ominous delay in answering his query.

‘What’s it got ter do with you?’ asked the intruder at last, slapping his Herald shut. A dramatic hush ensued. ‘Not the bloody ticket-collector, are yer?’ The fat man remained dumb. ‘Just ’cos I ain’t as rich and idle as you, ain’t I got a right ter sit in comfort, eh?’

‘Comfort!’ said the woman with the baby meaningly.

The intruder ignored her, continuing to apostrophize the fat man. ‘Snob, aren’t yer? Too ’igh-and-mighty to ’ave the likes o’ me in the same compartment with yer, are yer? Let me tell you’ – he tapped the fat man abruptly on the waistcoat – ‘one o’ ther things we’re fightin’ this war for is ter get rid o’ the likes o’ you, an’ give the likes er me a chance to spread ourselves a bit.’

He spread himself, illustratively, kicking Fielding on the shin in the process. The baby wailed like a banshee. ‘Caliban,’ said the mother.

‘Nonsense!’ the fat man protested feebly. ‘That’s got nothing to do with whether you’ve got a first-class ticket or not.’

The intruder twisted himself bodily round and thrust his face into that of the fat man. ‘Oh, it ain’t, ain’t it?’ He began to speak very rapidly. ‘When we get socialism, see, which is what we’re fighting for, see, you and yer like’ll ’ave ter show some respect ter me, see, instead of treating me like a lot o’ dirt, see?’ Finding this line of thought exhausted, he transferred his attention to the fat man’s book, removing it, despite faint protests, from his hands. He then inspected it slowly and with care, as a surgeon might some peculiarly loathsome cancer after removal.

‘What’s this?’ he said. ‘Vilfreedo Pareeto,’ he announced to the compartment at large. ‘Ther Mind and Society,’ he read. ‘Oo’s that – some bloody Wop, is it? ’Ere, you,’ he addressed Geoffrey. ‘You ever ’eard of ’im – Vilfreedo Pareeto?’

The fat man looked at Geoffrey appealingly. Treacherously and mendaciously, Geoffrey shook his head. Worlds would not have induced him to admit acquaintance with that sociologist.

The intruder nodded triumphantly, and turned to Fielding. ‘What abaht you?’ he said, waving the volume. ‘You ever ’eard of this?’ As treacherously, but with more truth, Fielding denied it. The fat man turned pale. So solemn were the proceedings, he might have been awaiting sentence from the Inquisition, the only two witnesses for the defence having been suborned against him.

The intruder breathed heavily with satisfaction. Portentously he turned the pages of the book. ‘Listen ter this,’ he commanded. ‘“The principal nu-cle-us in a de-riv-a-tive (a non- log-ico-ex-per-i-ment-al the-ory) is a res-i-due, or a number of res-i-dues, and around it other sec-ond-ar-y res-i-dues cluster.” Does that make sense, I arst yer? Does that make sense?’ He glared at Geoffrey, who feebly shook his head. ‘Sec-ond-ar-y res-i-dues,’ repeated the intruder with scorn. ‘Lot o’ nonsense, if yer arst me. ’Ere’ – he turned back to the fat man again, hurling the book on to his knee – ‘you oughter ’ave something better ter do with yer time than read ’ighbrow books by Wops. And if yer ’aven’t, see, you just mind yer own business, see, and don’t go poking yer nose into other people’s affairs, see?’

He turned back aggressively to the other occupants of the compartment. ‘Anybody got any objection ter my sitting ’ere, first-class or no?’

So successful had been the process of intimidation that no one uttered a sound.

Presently the train started.

All afternoon the train rattled and jolted through the English countryside, towards the red clay of Devon and the slow, immense surge of the Atlantic against the Cornish shore. Geoffrey dozed, gazed automatically out of the window, thought about his fugue, or meditated with growing dismay on the events of the day. The possibility – almost, he decided, the certainty – that he had an enemy within a foot or two of him made Fielding’s company very welcome. Of the why and wherefore of the whole business he thought but briefly; strictly there was nothing to think about. The occurrences which had followed his arriving down to breakfast that morning, in a perfectly normal and peaceable manner, seemed a nightmare phantasmagoria devoid of reason. Almost, he began to wonder if they had taken place at all. The human mind properly assimilates only those things it has become accustomed to; anything out-of-the-way affects it only in a purely superficial and objective sense. Geoffrey contemplated the attack on himself without a shred of real belief.

Fielding and the woman with the rug slept, shaking and jolting like inanimate beings as the train clattered over points. The young clergyman gazed vacantly into the corridor, and the mother rocked her baby, which had fallen into a fitful slumber, beset in all probability with nightmares. The intruder also had gone to sleep, and was snoring, his chin resting painfully on his tie-pin. The fat man eyed Geoffrey warily, and put down the Daily Mirror, which had been forced on him in a spirit of scornful condescension by the intruder, and which he had been reading unhappily ever since the train left Paddington. He grinned conspiratorially.

‘Devil of a journey,’ he said.

Geoffrey grinned back. ‘I’m afraid you’re worse off than I am. But it’s bad enough in any case.’

The fat man appeared to be considering deeply. When he again spoke, it was with some hesitation. ‘You, sir, are obviously an educated man – I wonder if you can help me out of a difficulty?’

Geoffrey looked at him in surprise. ‘If I can.’

‘An intellectual difficulty merely,’ said the fat man hastily. He seemed to think Geoffrey would imagine he was trying to borrow money. ‘However, I ought to introduce myself first. My name is Peace – Justinian Peace.’

‘Delighted to know you,’ said Geoffrey, and murmured his own name.

‘Ah, the composer,’ said Peace amiably. ‘This is a great pleasure. Well now, Mr Vintner – my whole problem can be summed up in three words: I have doubts.’

‘Good heavens,’ said Geoffrey. ‘Not like Mr Prendergast?’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘In Decline and Fall.’

‘I’m afraid I’ve never read Gibbon,’ said the other. The admission appeared to irritate him in some obscure way. ‘The fact is that by profession I’m a psycho-analyst – quite a successful one, I suppose; successful certainly as far as money goes. The amount of money,’ he said confidentially, ‘which some people will pay for information which they could get from three hours’ intelligent reading in any public library…However’ – he became conscious that he was getting off the point – ‘there it is. I suppose in London I’m pretty well at the top of my profession. You may think we’re all charlatans, of course – a lot of people do’ – Geoffrey hurriedly shook his head – ‘but as far as I’m concerned, at least, I have tried to go about the business methodically and scientifically, and to do the best for my patients. Well, then—’ He paused and mopped his brow to emphasize the fact that he was now coming to the crux of the matter; Geoffrey nodded encouragingly.

‘As you know, the whole of modern psychology – and psycho-analysis in particular – is based on the idea of the unconscious; the conception that there is a section of the mind in some sense separate from the conscious mind, and which is responsible for our dreams, certain of our impulses, and all the complex manifestations of the irrational in human life.’ His phraseology, Geoffrey thought, was taking on the aspect of a popular text-book. ‘From this concept all the conclusions of analytical psychology are derived. Unfortunately, about a month ago it occurred to me to investigate the origins and rationale of this basic conception. A terrible thing happened, Mr Vintner.’ He leaned forward and tapped Geoffrey impressively on the knee. ‘I could not find one shred of experimental or rational proof that the unconscious existed at all.’

He sat back again; it was evident that he regarded this statement as in some sense a personal triumph.

‘The more I thought about it, the more convinced I became that in fact it didn’t exist. We know, after all, nothing at all about the conscious mind, so why postulate, quite arbitrarily, an unconscious, to explain anything we can’t understand? It’s as if,’ he added with some vague recollection of wartime cooking, ‘a man were to say he was eating a mixture of butter and margarine when he had never in his life tasted either.’

Geoffrey regarded Peace with a jaundiced eye. ‘Interesting,’ he muttered. ‘Very interesting,’ he repeated beneath his breath, like a physician who has diagnosed some obscure and offensive complaint. ‘One accepted it, of course, as a thing no longer requiring any investigation, like the movement of the earth round the sun. But I don’t quite see…’

‘But you must see!’ Peace interrupted excitedly. ‘It strikes at the root of my profession, my occupation, my income, my life.’ His voice rose to a squeak. ‘I can’t go on being a psychoanalyst when I don’t believe in the unconscious any longer. It’s as impossible as a vegetarian butcher.’

Geoffrey sighed; his look conveyed that he, at least, could see no way out of the impasse. ‘Surely,’ he said, ‘the matter isn’t as serious as all that.’

Peace shook his head. ‘It is, I’m afraid,’ he said. ‘And when you come to think of it, isn’t psycho-analysis silly? Anything can mean anything, you know. It’s like that series of sums in which whatever number you start with the answer is always twenty-one.’

‘Well,’ said Geoffrey, ‘couldn’t you start a system of psychoanalysis based only on the conscious mind?’

The other brightened; then his face fell again. ‘I suppose one might,’ he said, ‘but I don’t quite see how it’s possible. Still, I’ll think about it. Thank you for the suggestion.’ He became very despondent; Geoffrey hastened to change the subject.

‘Have you ever been to Tolnbridge before?’

‘Never,’ Peace replied; he seemed to regard this admission of deficiency as the very acme of his troubles. ‘It’s very beautiful, I believe. Are you proposing to stay long?’

Geoffrey, for no very sound reason, became suddenly suspicious. ‘I’m not sure,’ he said.

‘My brother-in-law,’ said Peace didactically, ‘is Precentor at the cathedral there, and I’m going to see my sister – the first time in several years. I confess I’m not looking forward to it. I don’t get on with the clergy’ – he lowered his voice, glancing furtively at its representative in the far corner. ‘I find they regard one as a sort of modern witch-doctor – quite rightly, I suppose,’ he concluded miserably, remembering his doubts.

Geoffrey’s interest was aroused. ‘As it happens,’ he said, ‘I’m going to stay at the clergy-house myself, so we shall probably be seeing something of one another. I shall be playing the services, for a while at all events.’

Peace nodded. ‘Ah, yes,’ he said, ‘that organist fellow was knocked out, of course. My sister told me over the phone this morning. Said she wasn’t surprised – fellow drinks like a fish, apparently. I suppose it would have been my brother-in-law who asked you to come down?’

‘It should have been, by rights. Actually it was a friend of mine, Gervase Fen, who’s staying at the clergy-house at the moment. Presumably he was authorized.’ Knowing Fen, Geoffrey was suddenly seized by a horrible doubt. But plainly the Enemy considered him to be authorized, or they wouldn’t be wasting their time on him.

‘Gervase Fen,’ said Peace meditatively. ‘I seem to know the name.’

‘A detective of sorts.’

‘I see – investigating the attack on this fellow Brooks, I suppose. And it was he who sent for you to act as deputy? Extraordinary the things the police take on themselves nowadays.’

‘Not an official detective – amateur.’

‘Oh.’

‘So you’re really just holidaying, then?’

‘Not entirely. I have to see my brother-in-law about…’ Peace suddenly checked himself. ‘A matter of business. Nothing important.’ Geoffrey did not fail to notice the alteration in his tone; and he seemed to think he had said too much in any case, for he leaned back and automatically took up the Daily Mirror again. Geoffrey felt he had been dismissed. There was one more question he wanted to ask, however.

‘Did you by any chance happen to see me pick up a letter from my seat shortly after I came into the compartment?’ he said.

Peace looked at him curiously for a moment. ‘Yes,’ he said slowly. ‘As it happens, I did. Nothing alarming, I hope.’

‘No, nothing alarming. You didn’t notice how it got there, I suppose?’

The other paused for some moments before replying. ‘I’m afraid not,’ he said at last. ‘No, I’m afraid I didn’t notice at all.’

Geoffrey found himself being pursued with a butterfly-net across the Devon moors. The persons of his pursuers were vague, but they moved with great rapidity. He was not surprised to find Peace running beside him. ‘It is necessary,’ he said to Peace, ‘that we should run the unconscious to ground wherever it may be. We can hide there, and besides, I strongly suspect that Gervase Fen will be somewhere in that neighbourhood too.’ His companion made no reply – he was too much occupied with the baby he was carrying. When they reached the cathedral, the pursuers were a good deal closer, and they ran at full speed to the altar, shouting: ‘Sanctuary! We demand sanctuary!’ They were stopped beneath the rood-screen by a young clergyman. ‘We can’t go on failing indefinitely,’ he said. ‘It is impossible for us to go on failing indefinitely.’ The pursuers were by now very near. Peace dropped the baby. It screamed, and then began to whistle shrilly, like a railway engine. The noise grew in volume, like the swift approach of a tornado…

The engine of a train passing in the opposite direction swept past the compartment, its whistle at full blast, as Geoffrey struggled back to consciousness. Without moving, he opened his eyes and looked about him. Peace slumbered in the opposite comer, the paper dropped from his hands; the intruder still snored; the mother was whispering softly to the baby, which moaned and struggled spasmodically. Fielding sat reading a book – he seemed curiously isolated and strange. Geoffrey felt that if he spoke to him he would turn without recognition in his face, a stranger merely. The clergyman and the woman with the rug were talking together in low tones, their words inaudible above the incessant, monotonous beating of the wheels. Geoffrey sat and stared, first at a disagreeable photograph of Salisbury Cathedral, and then at the ‘Instructions to Passengers in the Event of an Air Raid’, which had been annotated by some passenger with overmuch time on his hands:

DRAW ALL BLINDS AS A PRECAUTION AGAINST – nosey bastards.

DO NOT LEAVE THE CARRIAGE UNLESS REQUESTED BY A – hot bit.

He blinked sleepily about him, and tried to stop thinking about the heat.

The sirens wailed as the train began braking on the stretch into Taunton. All along the coast, the fierce merciless battle against the invading bombers began. The intruder awoke from his long sleep and gazed blearily out of the window. His hasty movements of departure came as a welcome diversion. He got to his feet, scowled round him, and reached up to the rack above Geoffrey’s head, where his heavy portmanteau lay. It was, of course, not entirely surprising, in view of its weight, that he should have let it slip, and if it had fallen directly on to Geoffrey’s head as he leaned forward to talk to Fielding, the consequences would have been serious. Fortunately, Fielding saw it coming, and pushed Geoffrey against the back of the seat with all his force. The portmanteau landed with a sickening thud on his knees.

A confused clamour arose. The agent of this disturbance did not, however, wait to make his apologies, but was out of the compartment and on to Taunton platform before the train had come to a stop. Geoffrey sat doubled up with agony, nursing his thighs; but happily the human thigh-bone is a solid object, and Peace showed himself a fairly expert doctor. As to a pursuit, that was out of the question. By the time order was restored, the train was in any case on the move again.

‘He might have broken your neck!’ said the woman with the baby indignantly.

‘So he might,’ said Geoffrey painfully. Feeling very sick, he turned to Fielding. ‘Thanks – for the second time today.’

Peace had unlocked the case, and was gazing with bewilderment at the medley of old iron it contained. ‘No wonder it was so heavy,’ he said. ‘But what on earth…?’ Abruptly he decided that this was not the time for investigation. ‘You’d better do some walking before stiffness sets in,’ he told Geoffrey. ‘You’ll find it’ll hurt, of course, but it’s really the best thing.’

Geoffrey crawled to his feet, banged his head against the butterfly-net, and cursed noisily; this, he felt, was the last straw.

‘I’ll go and get a wash,’ he said. ‘One gets so filthy on these journeys.’ Actually he was afraid he was going to be sick.

‘Better let me come with you,’ said Fielding, but Geoffrey brushed him impatiently aside; he was consumed by a hatred of all mankind. ‘I’ll be all right,’ he mumbled.

He swayed down the corridor like a drunk on the deck of a storm-tossed ship. The lavatory, when he reached it, was occupied, but just as he was passing on to the next a young man came out, grinned apologetically, and stood aside to let him in. Geoffrey was contemplating his features gloomily in the mirror preparatory to turning round and locking the door when he realized that the young man had followed him in and was doing this for him.

The young man smiled. ‘Now we’re shut in together,’ he said.

‘Third time lucky,’ said Fielding cheerfully.

Geoffrey groaned, and again shook himself free of a nightmare. He was back in the compartment, whose occupants were regarding him with some concern; even the baby gaped inquiringly at him, as though demanding an explanation.

‘What happened?’ Geoffrey asked conventionally.

‘I got the wind up when you didn’t come back,’ said Fielding, ‘and set out to find you. Fortunately, it wasn’t very difficult, and we were able to lug you back here. How do you feel?’

‘Awful.’

‘You’ll be all right,’ said Peace. ‘The blow must have upset you.

‘I should damn well think it did,’ said Geoffrey indignantly. ‘Where are we?’

‘Just coming into Tolnbridge now.’

Geoffrey groaned again. ‘Past Exeter? He must have got off the train there.’

‘My dear fellow, are you all right? He got off the train at Taunton.’

Geoffrey gazed confusedly about him. ‘No, no – the other. Oh, Lord!’ His head was swimming too much to think clearly. He rubbed it ruefully, feeling it all over. ‘Where’s the bruise?’ he asked. ‘There must be a bruise.’

Peace, who was collecting his things from the rack, looked round in surprise.

‘Where he hit me,’ explained Geoffrey peevishly.

‘My dear chap, nobody hit you,’ said Peace amicably. ‘You must be dreaming. You fainted, that’s all. Fainted.’

3

Gibbering Corse

And then the furiously gibbering corse Shakes, panglessly convulsed, and sightless stares. PATMORE

Tolnbridge stands on the river after which it is named about four miles above the sandy, treacherous estuary which flows into the English Channel. Up to Hanoverian times it was a port of some significance; but the growth in the size of shipping, together with the progressive silting-up of the river mouth, which is now penetrated only by a fairly narrow channel, pretty rapidly took from it that eminence, and it has fallen back into its pristine status of a small and rather inconvenient market-town for the farm products of that area of South Devon. There is still a fishing industry and (before the war at least) some holidaying, but the bulk of its prosperity has been transferred to Tolnmouth, a little to the east of the estuary, which as a summer resort is second only to Torquay on the Devon coast. Nor is Tolnbridge of much value from the military or naval point of view; it had received a certain amount of sporadic and spiteful attention from the bombers, but the main part of the attack was concentrated further up the coast, and it suffered little damage.

The cathedral was built during the reign of Edward II, when Tolnbridge was enjoying an unexampled prosperity as the staple port for the wines of Bordeaux and Spain; in style it comes, historically, somewhere about the time of the transition from Early English to Decorated; but few traces of the later method are to be found in it, and it is one of the last, as well as one of the finest, examples of that superb artistry which produced Salisbury Cathedral and many lovely parish churches. Comparatively, it is a small building; but it stands in the centre of the town in a position of such eminence that it appears larger than is really the case. The river bank rises to a natural plateau, about a quarter of a mile back, on which the older part of the town is built. Behind this again there is a long and steeply-sloping hill, at the very summit of which the cathedral stands – the hill itself devoid of buildings, except for the clergy-house at the south-western end. So, from the town, there is a magnificent vista up this long slope, planted with cypress, mountain-ash, and larches, to the grey buttresses and slender, tapering spire which overhang the river. The effect would be overpowering were it not for the two smaller churches in the town below, whose spires, lifted in noble, unsuccessful emulation of their greater companion above, a little restore the balance and relieve the eye. Behind the cathedral, the hill slopes more gently down again to the newer part of the town, with the railway station and the paint factory, whose houses stream down on the northern side to join the old town and peter out to the south in a series of expensive and widely-spaced villas overlooking the estuary.

It is perhaps surprising that Tolnbridge did not share the fate of Crediton and succumb to the See of Exeter. But Exeter’s diocese was large enough already, and Tolnbridge was suffered to remain a cathedral town. About seventy years after the erection of the cathedral, a tallow-maker of the town called Ephraim Pentyre, a miser and a notorious usurer, but a man who gave much money to the Church on the understanding that it should reserve him a front seat at the celestial entertainment, set out by the coast road on a pilgrimage to Canterbury (where he might, had he ever reached it, have encountered Chaucer’s pilgrims in person). So niggardly was he, however, that he refused to take servants for his protection, with the consequence that beyond Weymouth he was set upon, murdered, and incontinently robbed of his offering to the shrine of St Thomas. This incompetence and stinginess earned him his canonization, for his bones were returned to Tolnbridge and buried with much ceremony in the cathedral where their miracles of healing attracted pilgrims from all over the country, Edward III himself visiting the shrine in order to be cured of scurvy (his own legendary abilities in that direction having apparently failed); with what success it is not known. This was the heyday of Tolnbridge’s prosperity, none the less welcomed by the inhabitants because they remembered St Ephraim with dislike, or because worse and blacker crimes than usury had been commonly laid to his account.

After that there was a slow but steady decline. Tolnbridge was too isolated to play any part in the great political and ecclesiastical disturbances which spasmodically racked the country up to the end of the eighteenth century, though upon occasion little symbolic wars were fought out on these issues among the townspeople, only too often with violence and atrocities. The transition from Mariolatry to Protestantism was made without fuss, the more so, as some said, because the old religion was allowed to persist and become vile in secret and abominable rituals. Some emphasis was given to these suggestions by a frenetic outburst of witch trials in the early seventeenth century, and by the equally frenetic outburst of witchcraft and devil-worship which provoked them, and in which several clergy of the diocese were disgracefully involved. It is doubtful, indeed, if there was ever such a concentrated, vehement, and (by the standards of the day) well-justified persecution in the history of Europe; there were daily burnings on the cathedral hill, and, that curious feature of most witch trials, free confessions, given without torture, by some hundreds of women that they had had intercourse with the Devil and participated in the Black Mass. After a few years the commotion died down, as these things will, and left nothing behind but the blackened circle cut into the hillside and the iron post to which the women had been tied for burning. There were no further disturbances in Tolnbridge, of any kind; and by 1939 the town seemed to have settled down into a state of permanent inanition.