The Light That Can Never Be Put Out

The Weekly Machen

As with last week’s article the following war story by Arthur Machen was published in the Evening News. The tale contains many connective threads with other narratives which constitute his war mythos. Lighting restrictions to guard against German air attacks will return in The Terror, while the three clergyman rings as an echo from The Great Return. As he had done with British saints, Machen now employs Shakespearean characters to rally for the native cause. The result is a brief but satisfactory story full of mystery and fantasy.

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The Light That Can Never Be Put Out
by
Arthur Machen
February 14, 1916

All public lights at Stratford-on-Avon have been extinguished by order of the Mayor—Daily Paper.  

A friend of mine—whose name I shall, of course, be prepared to give, in confidence, to any serious enquirer—has just come back from the Midlands with an extraordinary story of adventures there. I pass it on to the readers of The Evening News with all reserve and all caution; it is theirs to make what they will of it.

My friend is a commercial traveller, and goes his rounds usually in the west and south-west of England. His ‘line’ is cheap blouses, and since the beginning of the war he has been doing extremely well. Working people have been making a lot of money—for them—and, strange to say, they like to see their women folk in pretty things. They cannot be induced to imitate the austere economies of their betters; and so they have been buying five shilling blouses eagerly enough. The firm which employs my friend saw that the great munition centres of the North and of the Midlands would be more profitable than the districts of the south and west, and so they arranged that their ‘star’ traveller should break new ground.

The plan turned out a great success. There was tremendous business to be done from Warwickshire to Yorkshire, from Lancashire to Lincolnshire; my friend, beaming, told me that he had never sent up such orders in the whole of his career. ‘And,’ said he, ‘I am going to give the small towns a chance after I’ve finished with the big ones. I believe there’s money there; everywhere.’

So a few days ago he found himself in a small town in Warwickshire. He had visited three or four of these little places in the course of the day and had done very well. It was nine o’clock at night, and he discovered that he would have to wait for two hours for the Birmingham train—unless he liked to send on his samples and walk to a certain junction, three miles off, where he could catch a good train to Birmingham. They told him the road was straight ahead; he couldn’t miss the way. But he did miss the way.

It was a pitch-dark night: ‘straight ahead’ in the country is sometimes a loose phrase; roads often run into one another and slide off from one another in a queer fashion; a townsman is easily bewildered by black woods and dead silence. Anyhow, the traveller went on and on, but found no junction. He struck a match under a hedge and looked at his watch; it was eleven o’clock, and he was lost and hopeless in the darkness. There was not a light to be seen anywhere; there was nothing for it but to walk on and on till he came to the dawn or a town of some sort, where he could wake up a cross landlord or landlady.

It was midnight when he turned out of the deep shadow of a murmurous wood, and to his utter amazement saw the sky ablaze before him.

‘Like the lights of London in the old days?’ he said. ‘Not a bit of it. Ten times brighter. It was more like getting out of the beastly black London streets that we’re getting used to now into a music-hall or a restaurant, all lighted up. I was looking down into a valley with a river running through it, and a smallish town on the river. And I saw it all quite plainly, as if it had been in the daytime. I don’t know how I saw it; there were no electric lamps or anything of the kind that I could see, but there it was, as if the stones were shining.

‘I came to a big church with a spire by the river, and that was all light. Some sort of service seemed to be going on; the lights were shining through the stained glass, and the organ was rolling and thundering away, and the choir was singing; it sounded like Gregorians, which I don’t like in a general way. I just peeped in at the door, and there were three clergyman before the Communion Table togged up to the nines, and the place all red and green and gold and full of images; so I went out. I wondered what was the matter.

Photo by Palikcap 

‘The streets were worse. I couldn’t see a single lamp lighted; but everywhere was all alight. The houses were all old-looking, whitewash and black timbers, and leaning over the street, and I never saw such a crowd. It was like a fancy-dress ball turned out of Covent Garden. Everybody was dressed up; it was a splendid sight. All the Kings of England seemed to be there with their gold crowns on their heads, and men in bright armour riding with them, and men with spears, and men with bows and arrows. Then there was a wild-looking king walking with his queen, and she was holding up her hands all red with blood. Then there was a man got up like Hamlet all in black, and a girl in white with water dripping from her clothes came just behind him.

‘And then I did feel a bit funny. Just after the Hamlet and Ophelia couple, I could have sworn I saw old George Weir, who used to be with F.R. Benson, with the spade in his hand and everything, just as he used to do the gravedigger, and I knew he’d been dead five or six years.

‘But they came swarming on, one on the top of the other, a perfect host of them. There was a great big red-faced fellow, rolling in his walk, and leering all about him, and smelling like a wine-barrel, and a pack of awful cut-throats at his heels, sneaking and snarling; and then came along an old man with a white beard, with his hands up, and a fellow dressed like Jack Point, in red and yellow patches, follows him, with the tears streaming from his eyes. Then there was a kind of transformation scene, girls in green with silver wings; fairies I suppose they were meant to be.

‘And then they all began to sing. I wrote it down that night in my bedroom:—  

To Holy Church now fare we all,
That we may keep high festival.
So Almand fiend shall not appal,
Neither by night nor day.

For we be come of earth and sea,
Of heaven and hell and of faerie,
Of high and low and each degree,
Both king and clown in this meinie,
So shall we hear with mirth and glee
Missam pro Anglia.  

‘Then everything went black. I was staggering about, and saying “Where am I? Where am I?’ And then there was a policeman, steadying me by the shoulder, and saying, ‘I don’t wonder you’ve lost your way, sir. All public lights out by the Mayor’s orders, and Stratford’s a puzzling place in the dark for strangers.”’

I heard my friend’s story as a parable, and understood by it that there is a light at Stratford-on-Avon that shall never be put out.

 

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The Weekly

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