‘I find the whole idea uncanny,’ said Father Bernard, ‘and somehow-horrid.’
‘Bill didn’t feel this. He felt it was something good - a wholly good visitation. But then - he would be likely to see - something good.’
‘Even if it wasn’t there? I imagine you don’t class Mr Eastcote as one of us rotten swine?’ This casual characterization had been festering in Father Bernard’s mind.
‘No,’ said Rozanov with discouraging curtness. Then, ‘Why, whatever have they done to the Ring?’
The priest and the philosopher gazed at the megaliths which were arranged in a broken circle some sixty yards in diameter. There were nine stones. The earliest reference to them is eighteenth-century, when four of them were standing. The others were uncovered and collected and erected in their present still-disputed positions by a nineteenth-century archaeologist. Six of them are tall and narrow, three (one of these fragmentary) roughly diamond-shaped, suggesting the two sexes. Here even speculation ended. It was hard to believe that mortal men had placed them there at some time for some purpose. There they stood in the pale sad damp light, occupying a temporal moment, wet with rain, transcending history, oblivious of art, resisting understanding, monstrous with unfathomable thought, and dense with mysterious authoritative impacted being. The wind blew the long grasses at their feet, while beyond and between them could be seen rounded hills and woods where here and there grey church towers were successfully illumined by the shifting cloudy light.
‘They’ve spoilt them!’
‘There was a lot of argument,’ said the priest.
‘They’ve taken off all the moss and those yellow rings.’
‘They cleaned them with electric wire brushes. It shows the grain of the stone, but of course all that spotty lichen has gone.’
‘They cleaned them, they scratched them with vile brushes, they dared to touch them, these, the nearest things to gods that our contemptible citizens will ever see.’ Rozanov stood there, his coat blowing, his mouth open, his face crinkled up with pain.
The priest watched him, then ventured to pull at his sleeve so as to urge him back in the direction of the town. Then as they started down the hill it began a little to rain, while they saw before them the sunlight momentarily touching the gilded cupola of the Hall and the golden weathercock of St Olaf’s Church.
‘What do you regret most in your life?’ said the philosopher.
‘What kind of regret? Not to have established unselfish habits. Not to be destined to be alone. Well, no, not that. And you?’
‘Lies. The sin of silence. What do you fear most?’
‘Death.’
‘Death is nothing, you will not know it, you mean pain, you see you still confuse the two.’
‘Oh all right - and you?’
‘To find out that morality is unreal.’
‘But isn’t that just what you think - that it is a phenomenon?’
‘A phenomenon is something. Duty is something, a barrier. But to find out that it is not just an ambiguity with which one lives - but that it is nothing, a fake, absolutely unreal.’
‘To find that there are no barriers?’
‘That there could come a place, a point, where morality simply gave way, did not exist.’
‘There can be no such place.’
‘God would be needed to guarantee that, and any existent God is a demon. If even one thing is permitted it is enough. A prison with one way out is not a prison.’
Father Bernard thought for a moment.
‘Aren’t you just doing what you wouldn’t let me do? I wanted to draw all good out of one good. You want to discredit all good because there is one evil which good can’t get at.’
‘A good image. If in the pilgrimage of life there is any place beyond good and evil, it is our duty to go there.’
‘Our duty?’
‘That is the final paradox. When one reaches a certain point, morality becomes a riddle to which one must find the answer. The holy inevitably moves toward the demonic. Fra Angelico loved Signorelli.’
‘Perhaps he did. But then didn’t Signorelli love Fra Angelico? The demonic moves toward the holy.’
‘No. That is my point. If the holy even knows of the demonic it is lost. The flow is in that direction, the tide runs that way, water flows down hill. That is what “no God” means, which is still a secret even from those who babble it. Everything in the cosmos is reversed, as in some theories in physics. Philosophy teaches us that, in the event, all the greatest minds of our race were not only in error, but childishly so. The holy must try to know the demonic, must at some point frame the riddle and thirst for the answer, and that longing is the perfect contradiction of the love of God.’
‘This sounds like - that awful - doctrine — ’
‘No, not your puerile heresy.’
‘I don’t follow you. Nothing in heaven or earth can alter my duty to my neighbour.’
‘It can put it ever so little out of focus. Have you not felt just that, you who are tainted by the holy?’
The priest considered silently. He said, ‘It’s nonsense. But what is the way out of what you call the prison? Do you mean suicide?’
‘The proof. It could be. There are many gates. But for one man perhaps one gate.’
‘One thing he is tempted to do which would make everything else permissible? Why not murder then?’
‘Why not?’
‘And you become the demon who is God.’
‘We are being carried away by a metaphor, it is my fault, I have lived too long with images. One thinks one is on a high place, at an edge, where the air is purer and clearer.’
‘You had better stop thinking,’ said Father Bernard.
‘I can’t. But don’t worry — ’
‘You’re not tempted to commit suicide or murder?’
‘Certainly not.’
‘But you are - tempted - to do something awful - the - as you said - the proof?’
‘No,’ said Rozanov, ‘no, no.’
They were descending a grassy slope into the abandoned railway cutting, sometimes known as Lovers’ Lane, a place of leafy resort for courting couples, which served as a path from the Common into Burkestown. The cutting ended, on the Common side, in the abrupt bricked-up mouth of a tunnel, and became gradually shallower on the Ennistone side where it ended at a level crossing near to the station. A few drops of rain still fell, and Father Bernard noticed shining drops poised upon the primroses and pendant grasses and raggedy hawthorns, and celandine and fretty chervil and brambles and briar bushes which now rose up above their heads. Suddenly there was a rushing tearing sound as if a ghostly train had emerged from the tunnel, or one of John Robert’s demons were charging in the form of a large animal through the foliage. Something big and heavy and extremely agitated came rolling and bundling down the bank and out on to the level grass in front of the walkers’ feet. This, a moment later, turned out to be Tom McCaffrey and Emmanuel Scarlett-Taylor still engaged in a scuffle which had started at the top of the slope. They sat up laughing still clutching each other, then became aware of witnesses and leapt up, making way.
‘Hello,’ said the priest raising his hand, as he and Rozanov now continued their journey, passing between the two boys who had stood back, one on each side.
‘Hello, Father.’
The walkers heard behind them an outbreak of giggles and fou rire.
‘There’s a happy man,’ said Father Bernard. ‘Happy because innocent, innocent because happy.’
‘Who?’
‘Tom McCaffrey, the one with the long hair, didn’t you recognize him? I don’t know who the other boy is.’
They walked on in silence. The level crossing was in sight. Father Bernard felt a strange pang, a contraction of the heart like an onset of disease. He felt there was something he ought to do while there was still time. He wondered if he would ever talk to the philosopher again. He said, ‘I wish you would do something to help George McCaffrey.’