All Hallows' Eve by Charles Williams Read Free Book Online

nervously, Richard thought. “Couldn’t we have tea?”
    Lady Wallingford entirely ignored this. She said, “Is that covered thing it? Let me see it.”
    Jonathan, with the faintest shrug, obeyed. He went to the easel; he said, over his shoulder, “You’ll understand that this is rather an impression than a portrait,” and he pulled aside the covering. There was a silence, concentrated on the painting. Richard, discreetly in the background, waited for its first quiver.
    The first he observed was in Betty. She was just behind her mother and he saw her yield to a faint shudder. Jonathan saw it too; he almost made a movement towards her and checked it before Lady Wallingford’s immobility. After what seemed like minutes, she said, “What is our Father coming out of, Mr. Drayton?”
    Jonathan pinched his lip, glanced at Betty, and answered, “What you choose, Lady Wallingford.”
    Lady Wallingford said, “You must have some idea. What is he standing on? rock?”
    â€œOh yes, rock,” said Jonathan readily; and then, as if reluctantly truthful, added, “At least, you might as well call it rock.”
    The private view was not going very well. Betty sat down as if her power had failed. Lady Wallingford said, “ Is he standing on it?”
    Jonathan answered, “It doesn’t much matter, perhaps.” He glanced rather anxiously at Richard. Richard took a step forward and said as engagingly as he could, “It’s the whole impression that counts, don’t you think?”
    It was quite certainly the wrong remark. Lady Wallingford took no notice of it. She went on, still addressing herself to Jonathan, “And why are the people so much like insects?”
    Betty made an inarticulate sound. Jonathan and Richard both stared at the painting. It had not occurred to either of them—not even apparently to Jonathan—that the whole mass of inclined backs could be seen almost as a ranked mass of beetles, their oval backs dully reflecting a distant light. Once the word had been spoken, the painting became suddenly sinister. Jonathan broke out but his voice was unconvincing, “They’re not … they weren’t meant … they don’t look like beetles.”
    â€œThey look exactly like beetles,” Lady Wallingford said. “They are not human beings at all. And Father Simon’s face is exactly the same shape.”
    Richard saw that there at least she was right. The oval shape of the face differed only in its features and its downward inclination from the innumerable backs, and in the fact that it reflected no light. It was this lack of reflection which gave it its peculiar deadness; the backs had that dim reflection but this face none. But now he saw it as so similar in shape that it seemed to him for half a second not a face at all, but another back; but this eyed and mouthed as if the living human form ended in a gruesomeness and had a huge beetle for its head, only a beetle that looked out backward through its coat and had a wide speaking mouth there also; a speaking beetle, an orating beetle, but also a dead and watching beetle. He forgot the aesthetic remark he had been about to make.
    Jonathan was saying, “I think that’s rather reading things into it.” It was not, for him, a particularly intelligent remark; but he was distracted by the thought of Betty and yet his voice was as cold as Lady Wallingford’s own. He could manage his words but not his tone.
    Lady Wallingford moved her head a little more forward. Richard saw the movement and suddenly, as she stood in front of him, she too took on the shape of an overgrown insect. Outside the painting her back repeated the shapes in the painting. Richard suddenly found himself believing in the painting. This then was what the hearers of Father Simon looked like. He glanced at the face again, but he supposed he had lost that special angle of sight; it was now