this is what you wanted, guv’nor. If you still want it, that is.’
The road humped over a bridge whose iron railing formed also the arch of a low tunnel. Here the dark water of a canal flowed into the open after half a mile underground, still dark until it picked up the reflections of crowded lights on the far side of a wasteland of bricks, splintered wood, and broken glass. Red breath of a main line engine pulsed above the long viaduct, the throb and roar of wheels increasing and then slackening as the train slowed towards a terminus beyond the crowded rooftops.
Five years ago there had been a plan to take a spur from that line across the canal and on through north London to new suburbs in the east. A sprawl of slums packed around cramped courtyards had been demolished, when the company ran into difficulties and, while waiting to acquire fresh capital, found that more prosperous developers had begun to build smart new estates across their path. The railway line was never completed. Now hills and avenues of tall, fashionable houses bordered a gutted, rusty wilderness.
Garston paid off the cabby, who grunted and drove away.
Lights beckoned across the canal. If he continued over the bridge and up that far slope, he knew how dramatically the streets would change. And he knew that there the little chapel was waiting, tucked away in the gloom, one of the few remnants of what had once been a village set well above and remote from London.
Would the others be waiting there for him, to celebrate his ordeal; or was this evening being offered to himself alone?
He did not cross the bridge, but went down the steps to the canal towpath. A dank smell insinuated itself from the tunnel into the fog. He stood on the bank, near the ragged timbers of a wharf, and could just make out a rickety flight of wooden stairs down into the water.
Just as she had told him there would be.
It was all so much darker and colder and fouler than the water in which he had long ago refused to be immersed. He could almost imagine his father and mother, one standing on each side of him at this moment, looking down at that oily flow and asking how he could contemplate such a baptism when he had so contemptuously rejected the white robe and the clean water years ago.
They had been hurt. His earnest criticisms they saw as mockery; his honest disbelief a blasphemy. When the boards in the centre of the chapel were taken up and the tiled symbol of Jordan filled with water, all his friends went willingly in to be taken by the minister and dipped below the rippling surface. Such a different surface from this black one before him now. Yet that other one had been unreal. He had not accepted what they told him about it. This one here had to be real. The promises had to be fulfilled. This time he believed. This time he had to believe.
She had promised.
A great thankfulness caught at his throat, almost as agonizing as one of his coughing bouts. She was there, on the far bank: a more solid shape materialized from the writhings of unstable yellow. He did not speak, but waited, calm now because she was with him. He knew that motionless outline. Even without distinguishing a feature he could tell how she was clad: impenetrably veiled, her cloak hanging sheer and sombre to her toes.
Would she at last show her face when he had reached the far side and been liberated?
She spoke. That unmistakable, hypnotic contralto throbbed across the water.
‘How far will you go?’
‘As far as is demanded of me.’
‘There is no demand. It is for you to offer yourself of your own freewill.’
‘I offer myself.’
‘To the end?’
‘To the end.’
‘You will not turn back?’
‘I shall not turn back.’
‘Then come to me now. Come through.’
He went down two steps. The chill gnawed at his ankles. Water plopped in brief agitation against the landing stage. Ludicrously he felt he should be naked, or at least wearing the virginal white shift which would float out on the surface while the minister gripped him and submerged him and raised him again, accepting and accepted.
The rites of that sect had meant nothing. Here was true meaning—through darkness to light, out of pain into wholeness.
Step by step he descended, gasping against the cold. Then there were no more steps. He lurched out into the canal, gasping as this time he gulped noisome water. He tried to cry out, and swallowed more. His feet were on the bottom, but he could not walk. Trailing weed gripped at his feet. He fought free. When his head broke surface he saw the shrouded figure still there, impassive, waiting for him. He floundered towards the far bank. She made no move; simply waited.
He began to cough, swallowed more poisonous water, and coughed all the worse, swallowed, gasped, waved his arms, and felt the weed and his own dead weight dragging him down.
He had expected immediate release, immediate cool tranquillity. She had promised. Instead there was black terror.
She was waiting. Of his own free will—that was how he must come to her. If he stopped struggling and abandoned himself to the numbing cold and to all that she had offered him, he would drift to her and be cured. Weakness would damn him utterly. Doubt would be death. He tried to give himself to the slow current and to his faith in her. Water closed over his head again, his feet thrashed in the octopus arms of weed. Lights began to prick and explode before his eyes. He seemed to see the lamps above the baptismal cistern in the chapel of his childhood, and their splashing reflections on the surface. If he had submitted then, perhaps he would never have been visited with illness and never been brought to this.
No. He must not waver. He must be strong enough to reach her.
The bank was within reach. He groped for it, missed, and made a despairing lunge. She must have drawn closer while he was floundering in the centre of the canal. Her feet were just above his head. He reached up with one wavering hand. She stooped and gently touched it, and he felt that now was the moment, now she would draw him out.
Pain lanced through his index finger. It was as if she had clamped pincers or her own incredibly iron fingers on his nail and torn it from him. He cried out, sank, and opened himself to the paralysing water again.
When he rose for the last time he seemed to hear her asking again: ‘To the end?’ Because there was no hope now but the promised end and what lay beyond, he said: ‘To the end.’ Now it was only a grotesque bubbling in his lungs, but she would understand. She must understand that he had not faltered.
Her hand was in his hair now.
He would give in. This was the moment. He would close his eyes and miraculously she would draw him out and he would waken on the bank to find that he had honoured the ritual, endured the ordeal, and won through.
There was a last wrench of pain. Surely she had torn a handful of hair from his head?
She had let go, and he was free. Free to sink, and surrender.
* * * *
She pressed the hank of hair in a cambric handkerchief to squeeze out the worst of the moisture. Then she took the little silver patch-box from the folds of her cloak, coiled the hair into it,
