And on the same day the Reverend Mr. Boody left town very hurriedly. Mr. Perkins had again mentioned him (it seemed) in the pulpit of the Congregational Church. “As a direct result of the maunderings of this primitive and predacious fanatic …” said Mr. Perkins, among other things …!
But was it only that? I hold no brief for poor Mr. Boody; but it seemed to me that the affair wasn’t quite so simple. Though it was true enough, apparently, that several people had seen the two women driving back from the revivalist meeting just before the tragedy, “as if hell possessed them.” And even then (Mr. Greene said) “They were singing!”
A PAIR OF VIKINGS
I.
The first I heard of it—and heard of them—was, of course, from the irrepressible Paul. Naturally. Nothing went on, in that little English country town, that Paul didn’t at once know; and nothing he knew could remain for more than five minutes a secret. He was everywhere, with that long aristocratic nose of his, that hawk-bright and frost-blue stare—whether it was to make quick notes on his little pad for a sketch, or to make a sketch itself, or to take elaborately careful photographs of some obscure “subject” which was later to become, as he put it, an “idea.” You would meet him anywhere, everywhere. Perched on a stile, miles from anywhere, in the middle of the marsh, you would find him waiting to get a very special and particular light on the reeds, meanwhile writing out, in his tiny needle-sharp handwriting, any number of color charts for proposed landscapes which read like poems, like Imagist poems. Once I discovered him astride an old wreck of a steamroller, which had been abandoned by a corner of the muddy little river. And once flat on his belly in the very middle of the path to the shipyards, taking, from that earthworm angle—angleworm?—a peculiar fore-shortened photograph of some up-ended, half-finished fence posts. In fact, he was into everything.
But people, too—he was just as excitable about people, just as curious about them, as about anything else. He was a “collector” of people, and especially the odd and queer ones, or the brilliant ones; and if his extraordinary studio was a perfect museum of oddments—shells, old bottles, misshapen stones, dead leaves, dead insects, broken dolls, whatever had taken his fancy, or struck him as suggestive—so his salons were full of the most surprising people imaginable. He didn’t care where they came from or what they did, so long as they had character, or were handsome, or were amusing—those were the three tests. The social mixtures, at these semi-occasional salons, were simply indescribable—women with blue hair, yogis, dipsomaniac composers, circus dwarfs, countesses, mannequins, chorus girls—but it made no difference, they always seemed to have a good time, Paul saw to that; and of course Paul himself had the best time of all. Whether he was discussing the psychological implications of surrealism with a pale Belgian poet, or giving amusingly amorous advice about her make-up to a pretty, an extremely pretty, young society photographer, it was all the same to him. He enjoyed life immensely.
It was no surprise to me, therefore, when he came under my lighted window, late one summer evening, and told me, laughing excitedly, that he had something to show me.
“What is it?” I said.
“Come down and see.”
When I had joined him in the cobbled street, and repeated my question, he asked one of his own—he asked if I knew that a fair had come to town. As a matter of fact, I did. Early that day I had seen the first of the brightly-striped tents and pavilions going up, and the gaudy gypsy wagons drawn up in a ring on the playing-salts, and the ditch being dug behind a canvas screen, for a latrine, and the fantastic red-and-gold horses of the merry-go-round emerging proudly from their dirty covers. It was the fair’s annual visit to the town, for a week of penny gambling and loud music, but there was nothing so remarkable in that. And I said so.
“Ah—but have you seen it all—have you seen the Drome of Death?”
“The Drome of Death?”
“Yes—and my pair of vikings!”
“Vikings! A pair of vikings! What on earth are you talking about?”
“Then you haven’t seen it all—not by any means. My dear fellow—the most beautiful pair of human beings you ever saw in your life! Come along, or we’ll be too late.”
We hurried along the High Street then, to the little cliff that overlooks the playing-salts, and there below us was all the glare and uproar of the fair—the crowds, the shouts, the strange squealing watery music of the merry-go-round, with its circling and nodding horses, the rows of painted swing-boats, with their tense and silent occupants clinging to the ropes as they darted up from light into shadow, and down into light again—it was all exactly as usual, exactly as it always was. Or so I was thinking, until I heard a sound that seemed to me unfamiliar. It sounded like a motor-bike being accelerated in bursts, each louder than the last—a crescendo of mechanical roars, and then a dying fall, and another crescendo of roars, and a third; and looking down from our parapet to see if I could find where it came from, I saw the Drome of Death for the first time, and then below it, in a dazzle of spotlight, standing on a little raised dais of bright red plush, with the two motor-bicycles beside them, the vikings.
Even at that distance, I could see that Paul must be right. There was something regal in the proud and careless stance of the two blue figures. They stood there above the crowd with a sort of indolent patrician contempt; you feel the same thing in a caged lion or tiger at the zoo. And when we had descended the steep stairway, which quartered down the face of the little cliff, and had pressed through the crowds of merry-makers round the gambling booths and coconut-shy, and came to the foot of the red plush dais, it was at once evident to me that not only had Paul not exaggerated, but that he was guilty of an understatement. The boy and girl—for they seemed hardly more than that—were blindingly, angelically, beautiful. Angelically, because they were both so incredibly fair, so blond, so blue-eyed—but also because there was a fierce purity about them, something untamable, almost unchallengeable. Vikings, yes—Paul had hit the nail on the head, as usual. And the effect was further heightened—now that I looked again—by the fact that the girl, who was otherwise dressed exactly as the boy was, in a blue shirt open at the throat, and loosely fitting dark blue trousers, wore a snug little blue hat, which sat very close to her fair head, with bright silver wings at either side. The effect was really magical; for as she looked over our heads, undazzled by the brilliance of the spotlight in which she stood, it was as if she were already in swift motion, already positively flying. She was speed itself—she was an arrow. And her eyes were the bluest, and the fiercest, I have ever seen.
Meanwhile, the boy had raced the engine of his motor-bike three or four times with a shattering roar, the ticket seller announced through a little megaphone that the performance, the last of the evening, would begin, and people were climbing up the rickety stairs that led to the top of the great varnished cylinder which was called the Drome of Death. A perfect cat’s cradle of wire stays tethered it to earth—I noticed that these, like the wall of the Drome itself, seemed to be brand new—a fact which subsequently, of course, was verified. The boy and girl wheeled their motor-bikes along the runway to a door in the Drome, which an assistant clamped fast behind them, Paul bought the two tickets, and we hurried up the stairs.
“Do you mean to say they’re going to ride round in this mere barrel?” I said, as we seated ourselves, and looked down into the wooden interior. Viewed from the rim, it really looked like an enormous dice-cup. The two vikings stood beside their motorbikes, wiping their hands.