The Black Reaper: Tales of Terror by Bernard Capes

‘And believe without resentment?’

‘I think God hands over to His apprentices the moulding of vessels that don’t interest Him.’

The stranger twitched himself erect.

‘I beg you not to be profane,’ he said.

‘I am not,’ said Rose. ‘I don’t know why I confide in you, or what concern I have to know. I can only say my instincts, through bewildering mental suffering, remain religious. You take me out of myself and judge me unfairly on the result.’

‘Stay. You argue that a perishing of the bodily veil reveals the soul. Then the outlook of the latter should be the cleaner.’

‘It gazes through a blind of corruption. It was never designed to stand naked in the world’s market-places.’

‘And whose the fault that it does?’

‘I don’t know. I only feel that I am utterly lonely and helpless.’

The stranger laughed scornfully.

‘You can feel no sympathy with my state?’ said Rose.

‘Not a grain. To be conscious of a soul, yet to remain a craven under the temporal tyranny of the flesh; fearful of revolting, though the least imaginative flight of the spirit carries it at once beyond any bodily influence! Oh, sir! Fortune favours the brave.’

‘She favours the fortunate,’ said the young man, with a melancholy smile. ‘Like a banker, she charges a commission on small accounts. At trifling deposits she turns up her nose. If you would escape her tax, you must keep a fine large balance at her house.’

‘I dislike parables,’ said the stranger drily.

‘Then, here is a fact in illustration. I have an acquaintance, an impoverished author, who anchored his ark of hope on Mount Olympus twenty years ago. During all that time he has never ceased to send forth his doves; only to have them return empty beaked with persistent regularity. Three days ago the olive branch – a mere sprouting twig – came home. For the first time a magazine – an indifferent one – accepted a story of his and offered him a pound for it. He acquiesced; and the same night was returned to him from an important American firm an understamped MS, on which he had to pay excess postage, half a crown. That was Fortune’s commission.’

‘Bully the jade, and she will love you.’

‘Your wisdom has not learned to confute that barbarism?’

The stranger glanced at his companion with some expression of dislike.

‘The sex figures in your ideals, I see,’ said he. ‘Believe my long experience that its mere animal fools constitute its only excuse for existing – though’ (he added under his breath) ‘even they annoy one by their monogamous prejudices.’

‘I won’t hear that with patience,’ said Rose. ‘Each sex in its degree. Each is wearifully peevish over the hateful rivalry between mind and matter; but the male only has the advantage of distractions.’

‘This,’ said the stranger softly, as if to himself, ‘is the woeful proof, indeed, of decadence. Man waives his prerogative of lordship over the irreclaimable savagery of earth. He has warmed his temperate house of clay to be a hot-house to his imagination, till the very walls are frail and eaten with fever.’

‘Christ spoke of no spiritual division between the sexes.’

There followed a brief silence. Preoccupied, the two moved slowly through the fog, that was dashed ever and anon with cloudy blooms of lamplight.

‘I wish to ask you,’ said the stranger at length, ‘in what has the teaching of Christ proved otherwise than so impotent to reform mankind, as to make one sceptical as to the divinity of the teacher?’

‘Why, what is your age?’ asked Rose in a tone of surprise.

‘I am a hundred tonight.’

The astounded young man jumped in his walk.

‘A hundred!’ he exclaimed. ‘And you cannot answer that question yourself?’

‘I asked you to answer it. But never mind. I see faith in you like a garden of everlastings – as it should be – as of course it should be. Yet disbelievers point to inconsistencies. There was a reviling Jew, for instance, to whom Christ is reported to have shown resentment quite incompatible with His teaching.’

‘Whom do you mean?’

‘Cartaphilus; who was said to be condemned to perpetual wandering.’

‘A legend,’ cried Amos scornfully. ‘Bracket it with Nero’s fiddling and the hymning of Memnon.’

A second silence fell. They seemed to move in a dead and stagnant world. Presently said the stranger suddenly—

‘I am quite lost; and so, I suppose, are you?’

‘I haven’t an idea where we are.’

‘It is two o’clock. There isn’t a soul or a mark to guide us. We had best part, and each seek his own way.’

He stopped and held out his hand.

‘Two pieces of advice I should like to give you before we separate. Fall in love and take plenty of exercise.’

‘Must we part?’ said Amos. ‘Frankly, I don’t think I like you. That sounds strange and discourteous after my ingenuous confidences. But you exhale an odd atmosphere of witchery; and your scorn braces me like a tonic. The pupils of your eyes, when I got a glimpse of them, looked like the heads of little black devils peeping out of windows. But you can’t touch my soul on the raw when my nerves are quiescent; and then I would strike any man that called me coward.’

The stranger uttered a quick, chirping laugh, like the sound of a stone on ice.

‘What do you propose?’ he said.

‘I have an idea you are not so lost as you pretend. If we are anywhere near shelter that you know, take me in and I will be a good listener. It is one of my negative virtues.’

‘I don’t know that any addition to my last good counsel would not be an anti-climax.’

He stood musing and rubbing his hairless chin.

‘Exercise – certainly. It is the golden demephitizer of the mind. I am seldom off my feet.’

‘You walk much – and alone?’

‘Not always alone. Periodically I am accompanied by one or another. At this time I have a companion who has tramped with me for some nine months.’

Again he pondered apart. The darkness and the fog hid his face, but he spoke his thoughts aloud.

‘What matter if it does come about? Tomorrow I have the world – the mother of many daughters. And to redeem this soul – a dog of a Christian – a friend at Court!’

He turned quickly to the young man.