Messiah

Four

1

This morning I reread the last section, trying to see it objectively, to match what I have put down with the memory I still bear of that first encounter with John Cave. I have not, I fear, got it. But this is as close as I can come to recalling long-vanished emotions and events.

I was impressed by the man and I was shaken by his purpose. My first impression was, I think, correct: he was a born hypnotist and the text of that extraordinary message was, in the early days at least, thin, illogical and depressing if one had not heard it spoken. Later of course I, among others, composed the words which bear his name and we gave them, I fancy, a polish and an authority which, with his limited education and disregard for the works of the past, he could not have accomplished on his own, even had he wanted to.

I spent the intervening days between my first and second encounters with this strange man in a state of extreme tension and irritability. Clarissa called me several times but I refused to see her, excusing myself from proposed entertainments and hinted tete a tetes, with an abruptness which anyone but the iron-cast Clarissa would have found appallingly rude. She said she understood, however, and she let me off without explaining what it was she understood, or thought she did. I avoided a number of parties and all acquaintances, keeping to my hotel room where I contemplated a quick return to the Hudson and to the darkening autumn.

Iris telephoned me twice and, when she fixed a day at last for me to meet John Cave, I accepted her invitation, a little to my own surprise.

We met in the late afternoon at her house. Only the three of us were present on that occasion. In the set of dialogues which I composed and published in later years I took considerable liberties with our actual conversations, especially this first one: in fact, as hostile critics were quick to suggest, the dialogues were created by me with very little of Cave in them and a good deal of Plato, rearranged to fit the occasion. In time, though, my version was accepted implicitly, if only because there were no longer any hostile critics.

Iris served us tea in the patio. She spoke seldom and, when she did, her voice was low and curiously diffident as she asked Cave some question or instructed me.

Cave himself was relaxed, quite different from my first view of him. In fact, I might not even have recognized his face had I seen him in a group.

He rose promptly when I came out onto the patio; he shook my hand vigorously but briefly and sat down again, indicating that I sit next to him while Iris went for tea. He was smaller and more compact than I'd thought measuring him against myself as one does, unconsciously, with an interesting stranger. He wore a plain brown suit and a white shirt open at the collar, a modified Lord Byron collar which became him. The eyes, which at first I did not dare look at, were, I soon noticed, sheathed… an odd word which was always to occur to me when I saw him at his ease, his eyes half-shut, ordinary, not in the least unusual. Except for a restless folding and unfolding of his hands (suggesting a recently reformed cigarette smoker) he was without physical idiosyncrasy.

'It's a pleasure to meet you' were the first words, I fear, John Cave ever spoke to me; so unlike the dialogue on the spirit which I later composed to celebrate this initial encounter between master and disciple-to-be. 'Iris has told me a lot about you.' His voice was light, without resonance now. He sat far back in his deck chair. Inside the house I could hear Iris moving plates. The late afternoon sun had just that moment gone behind trees and the remaining light was warmly gold.

'And I have followed your… career with interest too,' I said, knowing that 'career' was precisely the word he would not care to hear used but, at that moment, neither of us had got the range of the other. We fired at random.

'Iris told me you write history.'

I shook my head. 'No, I only read it. I think it's all been written anyway.' I was allowed to develop this novel conceit for some moments, attended by a respectful silence from my companion who finally dispatched my faintly hysterical proposition with a vague 'Maybe so'; and then we got to him.

'I haven't been East you know,' he frowned at the palm trees. 'I was born up in Washington state and I've spent all my life in the Northwest, until last year.' He paused as though he expected me to ask him about that year. I did not. I waited for him to do it in his own way. He suddenly turned about in his chair and faced me; those disconcerting eyes suddenly trained upon my own. 'You were there the other night, weren't you?'

'Why, yes.'

'Did you feel it too? Am I right?'

The quick passion with which he said this, exploding all at once the afternoon's serenity, took me off guard. I stammered, 'I don't think I know what you mean. I…'

'You know exactly what I mean, what I meant.' He leaned closer to me and I wondered insanely if his deck chair might not collapse under him. It teetered dangerously. My mind went blank, absorbed by the image of deck chair and prophet together collapsing at my feet. Then, as suddenly, satisfied perhaps with my confusion, he settled back, resumed his earlier ease, exactly as if I had answered him, as though we had come to a crisis and together fashioned an agreement: it was most alarming.

'I want to see New York especially. I've always thought it must look like a cemetery with all those tall gray buildings you see in photographs.' He sighed conventionally: 'So many interesting places in the world. Do you like the West?' Nervously, I said that I did. I still feared a possible repetition of that brief outburst.

'I like the openness,' said Cave, as though he had thought long about this problem. 'I don't think I'd like confinement. I couldn't live in Seattle because of those fogs they used to have; San Francisco's the same. I don't like too many walls, too much fog.' If he'd intended to speak allegorically he could not have found a better audience for I was, even at this early stage, completely receptive to the most obscure histrionics but, in conversation, Cave was perfectly literal. Except when he spoke before a large group, he was quite simple and prosaic and, though conscious always of his dignity and singular destiny, not in the least portentous.

I probably did not put him at his ease for I stammered a good deal and made no sense, but he was gracious, supporting me with his own poise and equanimity.

He talked mostly of places until Iris came back with tea. Then, as the sky became florid with evening and the teacups gradually grew cold, he talked of his work and I listened intently.

'I can talk to you straight,' he said. 'This just happened to me. I didn't start out to do this. No sir, I never would have believed ten years ago that I'd be traveling about, talking to people like one of those crackpot fanatics you've got so many in California.' I took a sip of the black, fast-cooling tea, hoping he was not sufficiently intuitive to guess that I had originally put him down, provisionally of course, as precisely that.

'I don't know how much Iris may have told you or how much you might have heard but it's pretty easy to pass the whole thing off as another joke: a guy coming out of the backwoods with a message.' He cracked his knuckles hard and I winced at the sound. 'Well, I didn't quite come out of the woods. I had a year back at State University and I had a pretty good job in my field with the best firm of funeral directors in Washington state. Then I started on this. I just knew one day and so I began to talk to people and they knew too and I quit my job and started talking to bigger and bigger crowds all along the coast. There wasn't any of this revelation stuff. I just knew one day, that was all; and when I told other people what I knew they seemed to get it. And that's the strange part. Everybody gets ideas about things which he thinks are wonderful but usually nothing happens to the people he tries to tell them to. With me, it's been different from the beginning. People have all listened, and agreed: what I know they know. Isn't that a funny thing? Though most of them probably would never have thought it out until they heard me and it was all clear.' His eyes dropped to his hands; he added softly: 'So since it's been like this, I've gone on. I've made this my life. This is it. I shall come to the people.'

There was silence. The sentence had been spoken which I was later to construct the first dialogue upon: 'I shall come to the people,' the six words which were to change our lives were spoken softly over tea.

Iris looked at me challengingly over Cave's bowed head. I remember little else about that evening. We dined, I think, in the house and Cave was most agreeable, most undemanding. There was no more talk of the mission. He