WHITE-STICK
By RICHARD CHURCH
ONCE during an attack of influenza, I was forced to lie in bed for a week. The dear tyrant of the household decided that it was better for me to do so not in my workroom, where as a healthy animal I habitually slept, but in an approved bed- room overlooking Chancery Lane. It was a pleasant room, that caught the morning sun, even in winter. Being on the top floor, I lay aloof the traffic, which ran below, a steady drone with occasional accentuations, like a river above whose music is heard from time to time the leap and plop of a fish.
During that week I gave some concentrated attention to the noises. I was aided, no doubt, by the microscope of fever, which enlarged and intensified each particular vagary of the city life below me. That was two or three years ago, but I can still recall each sound, and the incidence of its registering. Though war has intervened with all its shout and bombast, I can still hear, in the conch-shell of recollection, the last stragglers wandering down Chancery Lane at night, after the closing of the pubs; the snatches of moanful song, the mingling of men's and women's voices in the tipplers' arguments and jokes, while their feet shuffled along, more inclined to polish the pavements than to proceed along them.
And the last bus That last bus become almost a ceremony. I could hear it far down the Lane as it ground up the slope from Temple Bar, through the silent canyon; for by that time the City war asleep, dreaming deep over its own history, mark- ing the centuries by the metronome of the City chimes; fifty years to each quarter from the bells of the Law Courts, and distant Big Ben, and several City Churches; a lovely jangle, solemn, and infinitely melancholy in the silence. For the London silence is quieter than silence. It is underlined by the distant ground-surf of traffic in the West End, the tide of pleasure that peters out, on the eastern side, along the Totten- ham Court Road and the edges of Covent Garden.
It is no exaggeration to call Chancery Lane a canyon at night, when one walks up it, or looks down on it from a top storey. Narrow, dim, and silent, it might be one of those fear-haunted passages described by James Thomson in his City of Dreadful Night, when Nothingness moves more terrify- ing than an infuriated mob. Even the street lights have a sub- dued, a hooded quality there. And what sport the wind makes there, blowing down it as down a whistle, and panpiping off the angles of the chimneys and cowls. There was one spinner on a pot above the Patent Office which kept up, on a windy night, a long, exhausted whine like a dog in torment. I lay in bed not-listening, quietly sweating under the agony of it, and yet enjoying it too, with that detached, observing self which manages somehow or other to squeeze adventure out of the most hideous circumstances and the most boring stretches of time.
That last bus is still passing: for it seems never to come and always to be coming, so leisurely is it on its way to the garage. I suspect that probably the conductor and driver have changed places for that off-duty journey, in order to break the monotony of the day's routine; and the conductor is clumsy with his clutch. But it does come at last; and after it has come, hesitatzd, and passed, I smell the petrol fumes rising up on the already night-washed air, to be followed by the whiff of tobacco smoke from the cigarette which the driver must be enjoying as he stands, easing his cramped legs, on the conductor's plat- form. The smells rise up between the canyon-walls of the Lane as through a flue, and reassure my senses with a caress of familiarity.
With the last bus gone, the silence becomes profound for a few minutes, to be broken suddenly, yet gently, by a bell- sprinkling as the quarters begin to chime from a dozen belfries. Deep, contralto, tinny, they beat against each other, an absurd jangle. And the one stroke that follows is so abrupt as to sound like a frustrated joke. But one o'clock has gone, and probably I fall asleep after that ; or I fell asleep: time has become con- fused, past and present, sickness and health, all mingled, or unified into a vague sense of being. Was it three years ago, in peace ; or is it now, in war, with everything changed? shall think that out in the future, untangling the skein of time as a good and thrifty wife untangles the used string from her parcels.
Then I would wake up, I still wake up, at a certain summons.
I look at the phosphorus hands of my watch. It is always six o'clock. For several hours the lorries have already bum rumbling towards Smithfield and Covent Garden, but they have never awakened me. Yet without fail, at six o'clock precisely, I am alert and listening. And I know what I am listening for. It is so faint that at first I don't hear it when I do hear it, and lie contradicting myself and holding a sort of Berkeleyan argu- ment as to subject and object and the reality of either or both.
Emerging from this philosophic abstraction I make new contact with actuality, which by this time has defined itself and become dominant, so that all my theories of doubt fall back and are lost somewhere tinder the pillow, and are rightly smothered by it. The reality approaches, nearer and nearer, more and more authoritative. I brace my nerves, and listen with an active effort, intensely. There is no longer any doubt. My summoner is approaching, as punctual as ever. I hear him emerge from the garden of Staple Inn, and break rhythm as he is met by the steps at the gate leading into the little cul-de-sac opposite my window. Tap-tap-tap, three strokes at a time, an insistent double-spondee, that never rises or falls in tone or intensity, yet seems to do so by reason of its mesmeric effect on the ear. It is the listener who wavers, as his attention baffles off, perhaps seeking by a sort of side-glance, if hearing can glance, an avenue of escape. But there is none. Chancery Lane stands firm, and time stands regular. Six o'clock of a morning, through the four seasons, dry or wet, light or dark, cold or town-sweltering ; still comes on that faint tap-tap-tap, with a pause, and a tap-tap-tap, and a pause, and a tap-tap-tap. It is uncanny, it is more fatal than all the conjurings of the night. It must be time himself.
For months I could not summon up courage, or materialism enough, to get out of bed and peer down into the dusk of the Lane. But one day, in restored health yet still occupying that room because new habits are easily bred, I broke the spell. I saw no hour-glass or scythe ; only a rather corpulent man in a long overcoat, a cap, and dark spectacles over a huge moustache. From above, the figure just turning the corner into Chancery Lane had a comic slant, foreshortened into gnomic propor- tions. He might have been a walking paper-weight. And his walking-stick, or rather tapping-stick, looked like a white-sugar- wand. I saw it groping along, as a worm does when first break- ing out of earth into the light. It ferruled its way against the edge of the curb, with its three recurrent taps, and its master followed it, his head steady, his body poised. The blind man was going to work.
Time has moved on, and rocked madly since that first sight of the blind man at six o'clock in the morning. The war has played its monstrous tricks, and days and nights of dreadful anticipation have made Chancery Lane change into a hundred fantasies to my mind, so that once again the Berkeleyan theories have been vindicated, and Doctor Johnson's stone has dissolved at the point of the toe. Uncertainty, loss of confidence. Of profession, of economic stability, of faith in Man and even in hi5 Maker, have come down on me like a primitive barbarism. I have heard the mad machines overhead at night, while a black- out city has leapt into spurts of flaming death and destruction. and I have lain trembling on the edge of all sanity, all cense of belief in a recoverable human nature.
And still, at six o'clock in the morning, the quiet gap_xar-tap comes, turning from Staple Inn to Chancery Lane, and dis- appearing, like Browning's Pippa, into the distance of its owls affairs, leaving me once more sane in a world that is still here.
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