The Recognitions (Dalkey Archive edition) Read online

  When questions of discipline arose, Gwyon’s face took the look of a man who has been asked a question to which everyone else in the room knows the answer. Or when his son sat whining in disobedience Gwyon stood over him clutching his hands as though restraining the impulse to kill the child, then took him up foreignly by a hand and a foot and swung him back and forth in labored arcs until Wyatt shouted with pleasure.

  It was Aunt May who kept the stern measure of the present, unredeemed though it might be, alive to practical purposes, binding the two of them together like an old piece of baling wire.

  —Go and ask your father, she said often enough, when questions came up in the reading she thrust upon him. —Ask your father what Homoousian means . . . But a good half-hour later she found him, standing still in the hall outside the study door, whispering, —Homoousian? . . . Homo-oisian? . . .

  —What’s the matter? Why haven’t you . . . what is the matter?

  And a few minutes later Wyatt was sent to bed for saying he could not move, as though the mirrors in the arms of the cross on the wall had gripped him from behind.

  Gwyon came out looking confused, and she explained petulantly. —He comes up with all sorts of fabrications, she went on, seeing her chance, —things he invents and pretends they are so, things he picks up Heaven knows where. He’s told me about seven heavens, made out of different kinds of metal, indeed! Last night he said the stars were people’s souls, and sorcerers could tell the good from the bad. Sorcerers! He must pick up this drivel from that dirty old man, that . . . grandfather, indeed! Telling him all sorts of things, witches drawing the moon down from the heavens . . .

  —Umm . . . yes, Gwyon muttered, his hand on his chin, looking down thoughtfully. —In Thessalonica . . .

  —What?

  —Eh? Yes, the umm . . . Thessalonian witches, of course, they . . .

  —Do you mean to say you . . . you’re telling him this . . . filling him full of this nonsense?

  —Well, it’s . . . Vergil himself says umm . . . somewhere in the Bucolics . . .

  —And I suppose that you told him that pearls are the precipitate of sunlight, striking through the water . . .

  —The eighth Bucolic, isn’t it, Carmina vel caelo . . .

  —And he has you to thank, she went on, raising her voice in the dim hall, —for that idiotic story about the Milky Way being the place where light shows through because the solid dome of heaven is badly put together?

  —Theophrastus, yes, umm . . .

  —And that tale about the sky being a sea, the celestial sea, and a man coming down a rope to undo an anchor that’s gotten caught on a tombstone? . . .

  Gwyon had been attending her with the expression of a man who’s come on a bone in a mouthful of fishmeat; now he looked up as though understanding the tenor of her conversation for the first time. He began in a defensive mutter, —Gervase of Tilbury . . .

  —His own father! and a Christian minister, telling him . . . and I’ve blamed that foolish old man.

  —Why . . .

  —Yes, why shouldn’t he be foolish? Falling down a well, and coming up to say he’d seen the stars in broad daylight. Indeed! Of course I thought I had him to thank for that story about evil spirits who keep the path to Paradise dirty, and the path to . . . to Hell clean to fool good people!

  Gwyon, backing into his study, commenced, —Among the Wathi-wathi . . .

  —Wathi- . . . wathi! she cried out. —Is that a thing for a Christian . . .

  —Is it any worse, Gwyon broke out suddenly, his back to the door, his figure filling the doorway; then he lowered his head and spoke more evenly, —any worse than some of the things you give him to read, the man who jumps into the bramble bush and scratches out both his eyes . . .

  —Children . . .

  —The man of double deed, who sows his field without a seed . . .

  But she’d turned away, her heels already in piercing conflict with the sharp creaks of the wood around her: so her trenchant mumbling almost soothed the chill it rode on, summoning not this but fragments of an earlier conversation she’d luckily interrupted, the Town Carpenter with the boy cornered on the porch, confiding —Your Father thinks the Dog Star is a sun, but I’ve seen it, of course. I’ve seen it in daylight. I’ve seen it in broad daylight, I’ve seen all the stars in broad daylight, that day I fell into the well. There’s too much light during the day, the air’s full of it, but get to the bottom of a well, why, I go there still, to look at them, one day I’ll take you down with me and you can see them too, the stars in broad daylight . . .

  She got up the stairs, passed a closet jammed with the empty square tin boxes made and stamped with the labels of better days, when the family oatmeal factory had flourished, there she sniffed, settling the glasses on her nose, but did not pause, to enter her room, steady herself in her chair with the first book to hand, and she called Janet, for supper to be brought her there. The book unfortunately proved to be Buffon’s Natural History, but she sat bound to it, sprung open upon the magot, “generally known by the name of the Barbary Ape. Of all the Apes which have no tail, this animal can best endure the temperature of our climate. We have kept one for many years. In the summer it remained in the open air with pleasure; and in the winter, might be kept in the room without any fire. It was filthy, and of a sullen disposition: it equally made use of a grimace to show its anger, or express its sense of hunger: its motions were violent, its manners awkward, and its physiognomy rather ugly than ridiculous. Whenever it was offended, it grinned and showed its teeth . . .”

  That evening Reverend Gwyon ate alone, staring out vacantly over the large dining-room table toward the low table under the window, where his son had finished a little while before.

  Unlike children who are encouraged to down their food by the familiar spoon-scraped prize of happy animals cartooned on the bottom of the dish, Wyatt hurried through every drab meal to meet a Deadly Sin. Or occasionally he forgot his food, troubled by the presence of the underclothed Figure in the table’s center, which he would stare at with the loveless eyes of childhood until interrupted. After he had been told the meaning of the rubric, he could be heard muttering in those dark hallways, —Cave, cave, Dominus videt.

  Even Aunt May, despite her closely embraced anti-Papal inheritance, did not dispute this litany, for she still, like all the women before her, planned another respectable minister in the family. Recent revelations had only prompted her to renew her efforts. Wyatt overheard her one day discussing his future with Janet. The question was whether he would grow up sturdy enough to weather the winters of Lapland, where he would be carrying the Gospel. After that, he never asked the Lord to make him strong and healthy again.

  There were several sides she found herself obliged to shield for him, and possible influences to anticipate and combat, in addition to Rome, which he was taught was the greatest agent of evil, poison, and depravity on earth (Aunt May seemed to know the full history of the Papal court at Avignon, the only time she was ever known to use the word brothel). She rehearsed him in the exquisite careers from the Book of Martyrs, read aloud to him from Doctor Young’s The Last Day, and had him read aloud The Grave of Blair. Together, they read aloud Bishop Beilby Porteus, Death, while she discouraged him from spending time with Janet, from visiting the tenant in the carriage barn, and from going for walks with his grandfather. The parsonage was not a door or two from the church, as is usual, but exposed on a rise almost two blocks away, at the opposite end of town from the direction of the Depot Tavern, an approach guarded by a curve in the highway whose warning arrow pointed the wrong way. It was almost a mile from there to the parsonage, through the short decorous nave of the main street, a mile which the Town Carpenter accomplished quite often and, when he was able and permitted, took his grandson on walks to a recently abandoned bridge works, managing, on these brief excursions, to contribute heavily to the store of “nonsense” which Aunt May battled so valiantly. Between the two men, she could never be quite su
re where Wyatt picked up his prattle about griffins’ eggs, alchemy, and that shocking, disgusting story about the woman and the bull; but when his curiosity turned upon great voyages, and figures like Kublai Khan, Tamerlane, and Prester John, she knew she had the Town Carpenter to thank.

  Now, in the middle hours of a late fall afternoon, she stood on the west porch, pursing her lips, her elbows drawn up in her palms, watching the sky darken above Mount Lamentation. A piercing tinkle from down the hill caused her to draw her elbows in, and close her lips even more tightly. She did not move when she saw Wyatt come round from the entrance to the carriage barn and start up the hill toward her.

  It was neither known, nor did anyone (except perhaps the Town Carpenter) trouble to wonder why the Reverend had named the Barbary ape Heracles. Most, in fact, took the easy way of ignorance, and believed the name of the tenant in the carriage barn to be Hercules, easy enough to explain for he was a sturdy fellow over three feet high, light yellowish-brown with a darker line along his cheeks, and parts of his hands and feet naked of hair. He was active, good-tempered, and took up a whole end of the barn with his cavorting and singing. He slept in an old sleigh. When he thought it was mealtime, when he wanted company, or sometimes it seemed had simply the effervescence of some message to communicate, he rang the sleighbells furiously. A white rabbit given him for company proved his gentle nature mawkish. He sat with it cradled in his arms, singing. But his best friend was still the child who came down to give him cod-liver oil from the same bottle and spoon he used himself (a tie Aunt May did not know of), and spent hours devoting confidences to him. Heracles scratched his chin thoughtfully when asked questions, bowing his head in much the same manner, if anyone had noticed it, as Reverend Gwyon did. For at other hours Gwyon came too, always alone, always smelling better than anyone else, the faint freshness of caraway. He asked questions too.

  But as he grew older, Heracles sang less often. He took to sitting sullenly in the sleigh looking far beyond the walls of the barn, as though dreaming of days under the Moroccan sun, in another generation, stealing from the gardens of the Arabs. He had never met Aunt May. He knew her thin shape, appearing to hang clothes on the line (where she inclined to hang male and female garments separately, or directed Janet to do so), or coming out alone with a trowel and scissors to tend the hawthorn tree on the edge of the upper lawn. He knew her singing voice too, and he hated it. She had never seen Heracles, and never mentioned him, but drew her lips tightly together and looked in another direction when his name came into conversation. So disquieting to her Christian scheme that she had never mentioned it, nor admitted it even to herself, was the sense that this monkey had replaced Camilla.

  —Now where have you been? she demanded as Wyatt came up the steps, but her voice was almost gentle. —And what is the matter, have you been crying? He rubbed his eyes, and then drew his hand down over his face, but did not answer a word. —You look feverish, she said as he took her skirts in the sudden self-effacing embrace of childhood, and thus hobbled, she led him into the house. —Today is your mother’s birthday, she said, once inside, and then, —You have dirt all over your hands.

  —What is a hero? he asked abruptly, separating himself and looking up at her.

  —A hero? she repeated. —A hero is someone who serves something higher than himself with undying devotion.

  —But . . . how does he know what it is? he asked, standing there, grinding one grimy hand in the other before her.

  —The real hero does not need to question, she said. —The Lord tells him his duty.

  —How does He tell him?

  —As He told John Huss, she answered readily, seating herself, reaching back with assurance to summon that “pale thin man in mean attire,” and she started to detail the career of the great Bohemian reformer, from his teachings and triumphs under the good King Wenceslaus to his betrayal by the Emperor Sigismund.

  —And what happened to him then?

  —He was burned at the stake, she said with bitter satisfaction, as footsteps were heard in a hall from the direction of the study, —with the Kyrie eleison on his lips . . . Here, where are you going? What have you been up to . . . ? He had turned away, but Gwyon stood filling the doorway, and between them the child started to cry. Gwyon raised a hand nervously, uncertain whether to punish or defend, and Aunt May took up, —What have you done? I know that guilty look on your face, what is it?

  —Go to your room, Gwyon brought out, trying to rescue him.

  Aunt May started from her chair with, —To his room! . . . but Gwyon’s upraised hand seemed to halt her, and she turned on the small retreating figure with, —To your room, go to your room then, and read . . . read what we’ve been reading, and I’ll be up before supper to see if you know it.

  —What have you been reading? Gwyon asked her, a strain in his voice.

  —He’s learning about the Synod of Dort.

  —Dort? Gwyon mumbled, dropping his hand.

  —Dort. The final perseverance of the saints. Good heavens, you . . .

  —But . . . the child . . .

  —Did you see the guilty look on his face? His sinful . . .

  —Sinned! Where has he sinned . . . already . . .

  —That you, as a Christian minister, can ask that? You . . . Suddenly she came closer to Gwyon, who stepped back into the hall away from the assault of her voice. —Not his sin then, but the prospect, she came on in a hoarse breathless voice, near a whisper, as though she were going to cry out or weep herself, —the prospect draws him on, the prospect of sin.

  She stood there quivering, until the sound of Gwyon’s footsteps had disappeared back down the hall. Then she sniffed, biting her lower lip, and stepped into the hall herself.

  Later that evening Reverend Gwyon stood over the littered desk in his study, staring through the glass at the darkness beyond. —The final perseverance of the saints! he muttered. Then he turned to the door, as though he had heard a sound there. He waited, a hand out to the doorknob, for the faint knock to be repeated, but there was nothing. He had just turned away when he heard a creaking in the corridor, but whether it was someone moving slowly and carefully away, or only renewed betrayal of the constant conflict among those sharp angles of woodwork, he never knew.

  The house was large and, perhaps it was the unchanging, ungratified yearning in the face of Camilla on the living-room mantel, eyed from the wall across by the dour John H., it held a sense of bereavement about it, though no one had come or gone for a long time.

  While even Aunt May’s medieval posture could not credit her stomach as a cauldron where food was cooked by heat from the adjacent liver, she sought evidences of the Lord’s displeasure in foreign catastrophes and other people’s difficulties, and usually found good reason for it. Among provinces where He retained sway was that of creativity; and mortal creative work was definitely one of His damnedest things. She herself had never gone beyond a sampler, atoning there in word and deed for any presumption she might have made, at the age of ten, in assuming creative powers:

  Jesus permit thy gracious name to stand

  As the first efforts of an infants hand

  And while her fingers o’er this canvass move

  Engage her tender heart to seek thy love

  With thy dear children let her share a part

  And write thy name thy self upon her heart

  That absent r was not, like the flaw in Oriental carpets, an intentional measure of humility introduced to appease the Creator of perfection: she had been upset about it now for half a century, and would have torn out her mistake with her teeth as a child, had not a weary parental hand stopped her. (So she worked NO CROSS NO CROWN in needle-point, still hung unfaded in her room.)

  But it was why Wyatt’s first drawing, a picture, he said, of a robin, which looked like the letter E tipped to one side, brought for her approval, met with —Don’t you love our Lord Jesus, after all? He said he did. —Then why do you try to take His place? Our Lord is the only true
creator, and only sinful people try to emulate Him, she went on, her voice sinking to that patient tone it assumed when it promised most danger. —Do you remember Lucifer? who Lucifer is?

  —Lucifer is the morning star, he began hopefully, —Father says . . .

  —Father says! . . . her voice cut him through. —Lucifer was the archangel who refused to serve Our Lord. To sin is to falsify something in the Divine Order, and that is what Lucifer did. His name means Bringer of Light but he was not satisfied to bring the light of Our Lord to man, he tried to steal the power of Our Lord and to bring his own light to man. He tried to become original, she pronounced malignantly, shaping that word round the whole structure of damnation, repeating it, crumpling the drawing of the robin in her hand, —original, to steal Our Lord’s authority, to command his own destiny, to bear his own light! That is why Satan is the Fallen Angel, for he rebelled when he tried to emulate Our Lord Jesus. And he won his own domain, didn’t he. Didn’t he! And his own light is the light of the fires of Hell! Is that what you want? Is that what you want? Is that what you want?