Manly Wade Wellman - John Thunstone 01 Read Online Free Page B

you’d seen some things I’ve
written in folklore journals, so perhaps you know what I’m looking for. When I
heard a mention of Claines, I came here more or less on impulse. I’m
particularly interested in what you call the Dream Rock out there. You feel
that it’s pagan."
                 “It
was pagan, right enough," said Gates, shaking his head. “What chiefly
disturbs me is the annual turning and what attends it. Midnight , and people hallooing and
doing a sort of dance, right next to the church. It’s like a witches’ Sabbath."
                 Thunstone
had seen witches’ Sabbaths in his time, but forbore to say so. “And you’d like
to stop it," he prompted.
                 “I
would indeed. The night of the annual turning is this coming Sunday, July
4—your own special holiday in America . And it’s also the third Sunday after
Trinity. At morning prayer that day, I propose to deliver a strong sermon
against paganism and sorcery." His heavy hand touched a stack of scribbled
papers on the desk. “I invite you to come to church and hear it."
                 “I’ll
be glad to do that." Thunstone rose and tucked his notebook into his
pocket. “And perhaps we can talk further about Claines— about ancient paganism,
too—when you have time."
                “It would be a pleasure, sir.”
                 Gates
rose and saw him out.
                 Thunstone
walked back toward the center of the little business district. He savored the
pleasant mildness of the bright afternoon. The first day of July here was more
like the middle of May at home in America . England was so far north, he reminded himself;
without the warm Gulf
Stream to cuddle
it, England might be subarctic. England had been subarctic, not too many thousands
of years ago.
                 He
paused to stand and gaze up the street and down. This was England, he
reflected, this little community called a hamlet by Hawes and Gates because it
was not large enough to be called a village; Claines, this strew of houses
along a main thoroughfare called Trail Street—Trail, as though it ran through a
wilderness.
                 For England was like this. Like this everywhere, the
small as well as the great. Great London was an English marvel. Samuel Johnson had
said to Boswell that when a man was tired of London he was tired of life. Johnson had been
right, as usually he had been right about things. But London , for all its Englishness, was also
international. It could be all things to foreigners as to Englishmen. Thunstone
had heard a friend say bitterly that London was no longer a white man's town, one who
in saying that had sounded like the diehard, death-or- glory voice of the
Empire that now was no more. Without agreeing, Thunstone saw what his friend
had meant about throngs of swarthy people speaking in strange tongues. Away
here in Claines, with nothing to bring strangers, there were no strangers
except for himself. There were only the English.
                 All
the more English because the houses were mostly small, matter- of-fact, here
and there even shabby. Because along Trail Street were only a few modest shops,
the Moonraven pub where buses stopped, the post office, Ludlam's store, the
fish-and-chips cubicle, the garage with the surly-looking man with the beard.
Upon Claines the antiquity of England somehow rested, like the hem of a strangely
figured mantle wrought long ago.
                 Trail
Street, so named, Gates had felt, because it must have been a trail before it
ever was a street. Along it, perhaps, pilgrims had trotted their horses
eastward toward London and the Tabard Inn where they would join Geoffrey Chaucer and the
Knight and the sweet Prioress and the Miller and the buxom Wife of Bath for the
pilgrimage to Canterbury . Before those had been cross-gartered, wheat-bearded Saxons, not yet whipped in battle by the Normans and