The Fifth of November Page 3

  ’ How can one understand and interpret something, if one does not know what it is?’

  ‘I don’t deny that one can be sure that certain things happen. That, as I said, a battle was fought at such a place and on such a day. That a man was executed at eight o’clock on such-and-such a morning.’

  ‘I’m glad to hear that, at any rate,’ said Uncle Edward sarcastically, looking round the table.

  ‘How can we be sure of those things,’ put in Dick, flushing at the sound of his own voice, ‘except because there were witnesses to tell us so?’

  ‘A good point, Dick.’ His father looked at him with approval. ‘It’s when it comes to details that we can’t be sure. And, when we go further, and try to understand things—to find out what was really at the back of them—we are worse off still.’

  ‘Why can’t we be sure about details?’ Dick faced his father squarely.

  ‘It’s hard enough to be sure of what happened yesterday, let alone three hundred years ago. I’ll give you an example. Last July, I sat on a coroner’s jury. It was a motor accident: a quite simple case, you would have said, taking place by daylight, on an open road. There were five witnesses, all apparently reasonable people, in full possession of their faculties, and with every opportunity of seeing exactly what happened. Yet each one of those five people gave a different account of an accident which had happened right in front of them.’

  ‘But in an accident, people are liable to be confused. I mean—’

  ‘I don’t mean people involved in the accident, Edward. These were people who happened to be near at the time.’

  Uncle Edward frowned. ‘They must have been committing perjury.’

  ‘No, I assure you. At least, only in so far as they were mistaken as to what they saw.’

  ‘I can hardly credit, Geoffrey, that five honest people could differ as to what took place in front of their noses.’

  ‘They did not differ in all respects, of course. They all agreed that one car had collided with the other. It was in detail that they differed. That’s my point. If witnesses of a thing that happens clearly in front of their eyes can differ; a thing, too, that they are not prejudiced about beforehand, that does not involve their loyalties to one side or another; how can we feel sure that we are getting the truth about what happened hundreds of years ago? Especially a thing that touches so many loyalties as the Gunpowder Plot?’

  ‘And, when it comes to understanding the real causes behind things, we are worse off still. How much do we understand of what goes on in our own day? Can you feel sure, for instance, Edward, that you know all that lay behind the abdication?’

  Uncle Edward flushed again.

  ‘I know quite enough to satisfy me. More than enough.’

  ‘Edward,’ said Mrs. Spence desperately, ‘I’m sorry to interrupt—but finish up your dinner. We want to ring for the next course.’

  ‘My dear, I’m so sorry. Don’t wait for me, I beg of you.’

  And he fell upon the remains, swallowing them down in a few feverish gulps.

  Mr. Spence, however, had not finished with the subject.

  ‘How I should love,’ he said meditatively, after the next course had been put on the table, ‘to be able to go back, even for an hour, to some scene in the past, and see for myself what it was really like.’

  Margaret nudged her brother.

  ‘Like that girl who remembered in trances how she used to be in Egypt three thousand years ago,’ she whispered.

  ‘What’s that?’

  Her father turned to her, and she had to repeat what she had said.

  ‘We—I read about it in the paper,’ she said. ‘She was able to speak ancient Egyptian, and tell all sorts of things she couldn’t possibly have known. All sorts of professors and people tested it, and said it was all right.’

  ‘Or like the Kipling story about the man who remembered what he had done when he was on earth before,’ put in Dick.

  ‘The Most Wonderful Story in the World, wasn’t it called?’ said his father.

  ‘The Finest Story,’ Uncle Edward corrected him.

  Mr. Spence accepted the correction with a smile. ‘Yes. Rather like that. Though I don’t know if that would be so satisfactory as seeing for oneself. I mean, the self of three thousand years ago might not be as observant, shall we say, as the self of to-day. Or as particular. I don’t know that I should be altogether prepared to accept the testimony of myself three thousand years ago.’

  ‘You are incorrigible, Geoffrey. You are bent on making the whole thing impossible,’ said Uncle Edward.

  ‘How does it strike you, Edward? I shouldn’t have expected you, as an orthodox churchman, to take kindly to the idea of reincarnation.’

  ‘I never said that I did,’ Uncle Edward protested. ‘I merely commented on your determination to make any point of view but your own appear impossible.’

  ‘Hear, hear!’ cried Mrs. Spence. ‘Well done, Edward. You give it to him. He’s too fond of his own way. He can always downface us, and pretend we don’t know what we’re talking about.’

  Mr. Spence merely smiled.

  ‘You have a pleasanter alternative, anyway. A trifle fanciful, perhaps, but no more so than the other. Do you remember a play called Berkeley Square?’

  ‘I certainly do,’ replied Uncle Edward. ‘I went to it on purpose to see Jean Forbes-Robertson. She made such a good Peter Pan. Ideal, I thought her. But I must say I was disappointed with the play.’

  ‘From a scientific point of view?’

  ‘Scientific? Not at all. I never thought of it in that way.’

  ‘Why, then?’

  ‘It was so sad,’ said Uncle Edward. ‘It made me feel miserable. When I go to the theatre, I like to see something that cheers me up. There is enough sorrow in real life, to my mind, without seeing more of it in the theatre.’

  This was another regular subject for argument, but Mr. Spence, intent on what was in his mind, for once did not rise to it.

  ‘Do you remember the central idea of the play?’ he asked.

  ‘Naturally.’

  Mr. Spence turned to the children.

  ‘It was about a man who, in an old house in Berkeley Square, somehow went back in time, and met and fell in love with a girl who died long before he was born.’

  ‘Was she a sort of ghost?’

  ‘Hardly. You see, he was the person who went back to her time, instead of her being the one who came forward to his.’

  ‘But—that couldn’t happen, could it?’

  ‘I don’t say it could. All the same, the authors put forward a very interesting suggestion to make it seem less improbable.’

  ‘What was it?’

  ‘Well—your uncle will correct me if I’m wrong, but I think it went like this. They suggested, following modern physical theories of the curvature of space, that time might be curved, too.’

  Dick frowned.

  ‘How, exactly?’

  Mr. Spence felt in his pocket for something to draw on, could not find it, and, after a glance around, cleared a space on the table in front of him. He was about to make a mark on the cloth with a pencil, when a cry from the long-suffering Mrs. Spence restrained him. Smiling, he took the butter-knife instead.

  ‘It won’t hurt,’ he told her. ‘It’s blunt. Now then. Usually, we think of time as a straight line, don’t we? Here’s last holidays.’ He made a dot on the cloth. ‘Here’s next.’

  He made another dot, and drew a straight line to join them.

  ‘We are travelling along this line, from this point to that. At the moment, say, we’ve got to about here.’

  He rested the tip of the butter-knife on a point rather more than half-way along.

  ‘If we think of it this way,’ he went on—’and it’s about the easiest way—then time is a straight line, and, as we move along it, we get farther and farther away from any given point in the past. That’s clear, isn’t it?’

  Both children nodded.

  ‘But suppose
that, instead of being a straight line drawn along a flat surface, there is a line drawn on the surface of a globe? Pick up a billiard ball, and draw a line straight around it. What happens then?’

  ‘You come back to where you started from.’

  ‘Yes. That wouldn’t quite do, perhaps. But allowing for a slight variation, or for a line that wandered about irregularly, there would always be the chance of the line coming close to where it was at some previous time. Time might go on the surface of the ball, like this.’

  He drew a circle on the cloth, and made a line on it.

  ‘Like a bit of string wound round a ball. Or it might go in loops, so to speak.’

  He drew a series of loops and curves on the cloth, like this:

  ‘Suppose now, that our friend in the play lived at a point which we will call X.’

  He drew it on one of his loops.

  ‘Suppose, also, that the girl lived at Y.’

  He put that in too.

  ‘Going the long way round, that is, following the line, there is a great way between Y and X—say, two hundred years. But, if one could only make a short cut, and jump across the gap between Y and X, they would be exceedingly close together.

  ‘The authors of Berkeley Square suggested that something of this sort happened. The girl lived in the old house at Y. Under the house’s spell, the man at X, either through some special sensitiveness, or in some obscure way, managed to get away from his track to hers: to jump across the narrow gap, instead of going back the long way round. Do you see?’

  ‘Yes.’ Dick looked at the plan, a puzzled frown still on his face. ‘But—could he jump across? Is it possible? How could it be done?’

  ‘I don’t know, son. Unless, presumably—’

  ‘Practically,’ interrupted Uncle Edward, ‘the idea is preposterous. It made a very charming fancy, in the play, but it was, as I said, too distressing.’

  Mr. Spence disregarded the interruption.

  ‘I’m afraid you’ll have to take it as a parable, or a picture, rather than a fact. Some people will tell you that, in dreams, and trances, and visions, the consciousness escapes from the body, and gets free from those laws of time and space by which the body is bound. If that were so, it might make the jump, mightn’t it?’

  ‘And the earlier time—when the girl lived—would be like a sort of dream?’

  ‘Do you mean, it might never have happened at all?’

  ‘No,’ said Dick quickly. ‘I mean, even though it did happen once, it would be like a dream to the man. It would have to be.’

  ‘Why?’ Margaret asked, looking at her brother.

  ‘Because, when it did originally happen, he wasn’t there. I—oh, I don’t know. It’s all rather complicated, isn’t it?’

  ‘If you ask me,’ put in Uncle Edward again, ‘it’s all nonsense.’

  ‘You don’t really think that, Edward,’ said his brother-in-law. ‘You’d like to think it. You only say it to keep your courage up.’

  Uncle Edward flushed like a girl.

  ‘That is a most extraordinary assertion for you to make, Geoffrey. Most extraordinary.’

  ‘It’s true, though. What about that dream you had when you were a boy, about the railway accident? What about the time you knew when your mother had burnt her hand, though you were hundreds of miles away? Though I wouldn’t need to have heard of them. I know a spoiled mystic when I see one. Still, let that pass.’

  Uncle Edward did not at all want to let it pass, but Mr. Spence went on before he could protest.

  ‘You said it was like a dream, Dick. It all depends on the kind of dream, or the way you look at it. (I’m not trying to lay down the law, Edward. I’m only giving them some of the theories that have been put forward.) A dream might be something inside the dreamer’s head, so to speak, and connected with nothing outside. Or, the dreamer’s mind, in sleep, might—supposing some of the things we read are true—escape from his body, and visit some distant place. Distant in space, or in time. If, for any reason we don’t understand, the place visited was what we call near’—he pointed to X and Y on his plan —‘then, from our point of view, the jump would seem easier.’

  He pushed back his chair.

  ‘That was the sort of suggestion made in the play,’ he said. ‘I don’t accept any responsibility for it, or for any of the others. You can take your choice.’

  Uncle Edward snorted.

  ‘Thank you. I prefer to leave all such matters severely alone.’

  Chapter Five

  Next morning Dick and Margaret woke to start upon a highly concentrated programme planned for them overnight by their uncle. The ignorance of the urchin with the guy, and Mr. Spence’s conversation of the night before, had roused him to a frenzy of historical zeal.

  It was as if he was determined to prove to his nephew and niece that the facts about the Gunpowder Plot were easily verified.

  The two would have preferred a less instructive day, but Uncle Edward laid his plans with such enthusiasm, and spoke of so many details they did not know, that by degrees they caught some of his own excitement.

  At the end of breakfast, when Mr. Spence had gone to work, he went over it again, rubbing his hands.

  ‘First of all, we go to the Tower. There we shall see the cell where Guy Fawkes was taken early in the morning, immediately after he had been brought into the king’s bedchamber. Then we shall see where he was tortured.’

  Margaret drew back a little. She did not want to see that. But Uncle Edward, his eyes alight, went on.

  ‘After that, we will go to the Public Record Office, and see Guy’s confession, signed with his own hand. And the second signature, all shaky, after the torture. Then we must come back, in good time, to fix up the fireworks, before tea.’

  He stopped, and frowned to himself.

  ‘Tcha!’ he said. ‘Dolt that I am. If I’d only thought of it sooner. I shall never forgive myself.’

  ‘What is it, Uncle Edward?’

  ‘I ought to have thought of it. I’m sure it could have been managed.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Why,’ said Uncle Edward, as if it were silly of Dick not to be able to read his mind, ‘the ceremony at the Houses of Parliament, of course.’

  The children looked at one another.

  ‘I could have written to Hulme-Pearson, and got permission for you to see it. He would have obliged me, I’m sure.’

  Then, seeing their faces, he exclaimed, almost irritably, ‘Don’t you know?’

  They shook their heads.

  ‘Why,’ he told them, ‘every year, on the anniversary of the plot, the Houses of Parliament are solemnly searched, to make sure that there is no one else lying in wait to blow them up.’

  Dick gave a wriggle of pleasure.

  ‘You mean they do it still? Even nowadays?’

  ‘Every year.’

  ‘Who does it? The police?’

  ‘No. The Yeomen of the Guard.’ Uncle Edward hunched his shoulders, and leaned forward, as he so often did when he was excited. ‘They’ve done it every year since Guy was found. They turn out, in full uniform, carrying lanterns, and search everywhere. Even today, when the whole place is flooded with electric light, and there’s not the slightest need for lanterns, they still carry them.’

  Dick’s eyes shone.

  ‘I like that,’ he said softly.

  ‘Yes. The whole ritual is kept in every particular. At least, in every particular but one. They have made one concession to modern times.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘In the old days, as soon as the search was over, a soldier was sent on horseback, at full gallop, to the king, to tell him that all was well. Nowadays the vice-chamberlain does it by telephone or telegram.’

  ‘It’s more sensible, really,’ said the practical Margaret.

  Her brother turned on her.

  ‘I don’t know. I think it’s a pity. There’s no sense in the whole thing, if you come to think of it.’

  �
�Another Gunpowder Plot is highly unlikely, to be sure,’ said Uncle Edward. ‘Though, the way things seem to be going, I’d hardly be surprised at any deeds of violence. But I don’t think anyone will try that way again.’

  ‘More likely they’d drop a bomb from an aeroplane.’

  ‘Quite. But I haven’t finished telling you about the ceremony. When the search is all over, and the lanterns are put out, the yeomen are all invited in and given cake and wine.’

  ‘I expect that’s the part they like best.’

  ‘I shouldn’t be surprised.’

  ‘It would have been fun to see it,’ said Dick: and immediately wished he hadn’t, for Uncle Edward burst into more self-reproaches, and could hardly be dissuaded from attempting to telephone to his friend and get permission.

  The children were perfectly sincere in telling him it didn’t matter, because they wanted all the evening for the fireworks, and because they guessed that Uncle Edward would not be able to get permission at such short notice, and would be so cross in consequence that the day would be spoiled.

  They quieted him down at last, and set out for the Tower.

  Their adventures here appealed far more to Dick than to Margaret. The guide who showed them round did not appear to know a great deal about Guy Fawkes, and annoyed Uncle Edward by turning aside his questions and replying with all manner of information about other famous prisoners.

  Uncle Edward at once became rather dictatorial in his manner, and the guide showed every sign of taking offence. Margaret had all she could do to soothe him down. She asked him a number of questions about Lady Jane Grey, to which, mollified, he gave long replies, obviously learned by heart, while Uncle Edward and Dick, in the background, got the information they wanted from a guide-book.

  They discovered that Guy was thrown first of all into a cell in the White Tower, and afterwards taken to one called ‘Little Ease’, next to the Torture Chamber.

  The guide, recalled, and questioned politely by Dick, said yus, he could show them that. He was not sure about the first cell, but, taking the book from Uncle Edward, peered at it, declared himself satisfied, and led them to the place.