Near the end of September the equinoctial gales set in, and the dark, cavernous avenue rocked its high head, and buried its feet in a spatter of autumn leaves. And the passing residents of Chelsover stopped in their walk with a renewed wonder, lifted their eyes towards an open upper window into which the moon was shining, and muttered in their hearts: ‘There’s that Whessoe again.’
There’s that strange Whessoe, as white as a sheet, crouching at the window while the winds cry Whessoe! The spirit is gone from the old man now. A terrible weariness is within him, left by long weeks of waiting for a letter that has not come; and anger, too deep to raise a murmur in the shrunken body, is there; and hope is near dying, and will be quite dead soon, a dead thing drifting in the wake of the past when a few more nights have run, and Whessoe has spent his final hours of sitting in the library until the day has broken, peering over long shelves, poring over old books in the still moonshine, hunting for some record of a riddle that he is unable to solve. And always the weariness and the anger are nourished by a return of that tremendous solitude whose embracing arms seem stronger now because he can hear the ghosts’ music again. Soaring, whirling, thumping, flying, the phantom tunes are crowding his nights with a fresh fury, while Whessoe sits in his room, ignored. Hell is summoning its powers to drive him away, yet all its energies are concentrated on the house. The entity of the whole place is being usurped, its blood is being sapped, the spirits of evil are taking possession, there will be no house of his in Chelsover soon. . . .
The leaves of the sycamore shiver against the moon. But the shadow in the old man’s mind is deeper than the shadows of the leaves that twist, and twirl, and mould a myriad jests, the whole night long, upon the staring face.
***
Near the dawn of a day in late October, Whessoe found the book for which he had been searching. It was big, and heavy, and time had steeped it in a musty odour; and on its front and side, in golden lettering, these words were seen: The Chelsover Chronicles.
He opened it thoughtfully; peered into its pages; then, with an impish action, weighed it in his hand. A bulky book; a book that required much time for reading. Ho, ho! Utterly foolish to read it here, where at any moment the ghostly crowd might break in upon his studies! So he glided noiselessly up the staircase, with the great book tucked beneath his arm.
As soon as he had entered his bedroom, he pulled up a chair, and began to read. But the windows were closed, and the thick curtains were drawn; and the wind soothed him with its subdued thunders, so that after a time he could not keep from nodding. And because he had not found the information that he wanted, he crept into bed, and there fell asleep.
He awoke some hours later, tired and uneasy; all through his slumbers he had been haunted by the persistent knowledge that he must continue to read. He listened; and thought that he could hear shrill voices out on the old road to Chelsover—boys’ whistling voices—and sometimes the clatter of cart wheels, beyond the heavy curtains. It occurred to him mildly that daylight was come. But the great book lay on a table at his bedside; he stretched out an arm, and took up the heavy volume, resting it against his propped knees.
An hour passed, and Whessoe discovered the secret of Two Gates. The print was small, on a leaf stained yellow with age; nevertheless, he was able to read it easily with his tiny, staring eyes:
. . . Let us conclude this chapter in the Chronicles of Chelsover, in the history of the Environments and of the Approaches, with the name of one Sylvester Whessoe, Colonel of Artillery, who, on his retirement from the Thunders of the Battlefield, spent the remainder of his years in the seclusion of his Ancestral Home. Doubtless the event would have been of little interest to my readers—
He looked up suddenly, straining his ears. Voices were coming up the stairs—their voices, talking and laughing—Sylvester Whessoe read on:
—had not the aged Colonel died rather suddenly, though not very violently, by means of his own hand. A gentle dose of Chloroform, taken in the Silence of the Night. . . .
They were coming now. The ghosts—the ghosts—they were nearing the door. . . . He took the book under the bedclothes, pulled the sheets over his head, and still he read on—‘. . . taken in the Silence of the Night. . . .’
***
The door opened, and a girl’s voice leaped into the room.
‘Oh, dear!’ it cried, ‘how dark it is! As dark as pitch!’
Footsteps hurried across the floor. Then the curtains swished back, the blinds tore up, and the vast old room was flooded with the afternoon light. Her eyes glistened as she turned to the young man at her side.
‘How brave of you to want to sleep here! Yes! This is our haunted room—the room where our poor ghost lives. I’ve never seen him, but so I am told.’ She filled the place with laughter. ‘The bed’s too terribly comfy, they say.’
She shuddered a little comically as she approached it. ‘Behold our famous bed!’ She flung back the bedclothes, piling them up.
On the cold sheet lay a heavy book, thickly coated with dust that was disturbed but lightly where the sheets had brushed it; and when she saw it lying there, her laugh went, and her heart stopped, and she stood as white as a ghost.
Interlude
I WAS sitting alone in the coffee-room of the Marine Hotel, Shorehampton, eating my lunch, and counting up the days when summer should come again to enliven my bones; sometimes I stared through the window, at the empty parade and the wintry seas beyond; at other times, leaning back in my chair, I ran my eye over the grey walls, that were almost hidden in obscurity; and my meditations were disturbed by the entrance of a tall man, carrying a square box. Standing motionless in that dim light, he seemed, with his chalk-white, tropical clothing, like a ghost among tombs, rather than a customer seeking his choice from the many tables. Coughing raucously, a waiter drifted from the shadows, flicking the seats of the chairs as he passed; the stranger spoke to him courteously before striding towards the windows, depositing his big box on the carpet, and seating himself at a table next to mine.
I could see, now, that my companion had a face of extreme sunburn, flashing teeth, bright blue eyes, a very low collar, and long wrists; and when, without the least embarrassment, he addressed himself to me, I discovered that his frown was as impetuous as his smile.
‘Well, well, well. You should not have come to Shorehampton,’ I answered, ‘if it affects you in that sad way. It is very stagnant. Why, when I was a boy, I used to stay here often, with my father, and I swear that nothing has changed since that far-off time. In those days they had the same carpets that they have now, the same rather dirty table-cloths, the same jug of water on the sideboard, the same dead smell about the hall. The same curtains, the same loose stair-rods, the same MacWhirters and Landseers. Even the same little waiter, by the cut of his clothes. Even this identical fire, that has taken all these years to burst into flame!’
‘I know! I know! Such places are no better than icehouses!’ Whereupon, he told me a story of the Gaboon River. Then, as though he wanted to dash to pieces the impression that I had formed of him, he jumped up from his chair, and opened the window, so that the blasts came in, blowing the breadcrumbs off our plates, and sending a lively panic through the room.
‘See what you have done to that fire,’ I murmured; ‘look at the weedy thing!’
But the man in the white clothes would not listen to me; he had lifted up the box; and I watched curiously while he stood it on the window-ledge, and opened it with a tiny key.
The box was resting on its side, and, as the lid dropped, it presented the interior to the distant shore. My eyes swept over the desolate beach, and fell at last on the green waves of the sea: a patch of light was floating there, as though a cloth of gold had risen to the surface. A few young boys had been playing by the edge of the sand, and now we could see them kicking off their boots, pulling down their stockings, and otherwise preparing themselves for a plunge into the sunny waters; their tiny figures, scarcely larger than sandhoppers, w
ere thrown into the wildest commotion, and their cries came up to us on the wind.
Knitting his brows, the stranger shut the box, and lifted it to the floor, on which it came to rest with a radiant and metallic clang; at the same instant, the light went from the waves, and I could hear the children shouting with voices that were no longer jubilant, but amazed and mournful.
‘That was a very pretty experiment,’ I said, looking thoughtfully at the box, from which years of travel had obliterated its owner’s name. Hearing these words, the stranger seized his luggage, and bade me accompany him on a little expedition over the town.
As we passed through the empty crescents and terraces of Shorehampton, I had the greatest difficulty in keeping pace with his strides. He, like the stone or stucco fronts of the houses, was utterly silent; and he gave me no idea of our destination until, in the High Street, we stopped at Westaway and Gapp’s, the leading linen-drapers. It was a spiritless place, that had not altered since I was a boy; somewhere along its thread of cramped departments swelled the tones of Mr Westaway, encouraging a customer with a new line in body-linen. We entered, and watched for some minutes the languid business that was being transacted there.
‘Sign, please!’ called a high-pitched voice.
At that moment the stranger opened his box, and the linen-draper’s shop was filled with sunshine.
‘Dear me!’ exclaimed Mr Westaway.
His little eyes began to look about in bewildered fashion. Running to the door, he stared perplexedly into the heavens.
‘This is a very extraordinary thing.’
Indeed, it was very extraordinary; for sunlight has often poured into a shop, but when has it ever poured out of a shop? Plunging through the corridors, Mr Westaway called loudly for his chief assistants; and before his voice had ceased to echo, the little man began to write out tickets at a great pace, extolling the excellence of his summer wares. Bathing-dresses were put up at an exorbitant rate. ‘This Style, 19s 11d.’ ‘Very Fashionable, 17s 6d.’
By this time, many of the residents of Shorehampton were scanning the windows, or pushing their way through the narrow door; and as soon as they had entered, they began to mop their brows in prospect of the sea-bathing that was to come. The chairs were soon filled with impatient customers, women pointed, and shop-girls reached up their arms for selected articles.
Then, in the very midst of the buying and selling, when ‘Sign, please!’ was resounding throughout the linen-draper’s, and Mr Westaway was coining money hand over fist, my friend shut up his box, and we went again upon our travels, he and I, stamping our feet, chafing our hands, and never halting until the bandstand rose before us on its stretch of ornamental grass, with the winds of the adjacent ocean playing beneath the gilded cupola. Two lovers sat in the outermost ring of seats. It was obvious that a sad quarrel had divided the young people; for their faces, each with its trembling lip and furrowed brow, were turned in opposite directions, and their hands lay idly in their laps.
Onto this dismal scene my friend opened his box, and the Shorehampton bandstand was flooded with sunshine.
The gay sight caught the notice of a passer-by, a short, stout man with muffled neck and puffy cheeks; tilting back his bowler hat, and gurgling exclamations of delight, he hurried away, for he happened to be the town trombonist. The news spread quickly to the bandmaster, and from him to the other members of the Shorehampton band; and within a short space of time a great crowd had collected, in eager anticipation of such unseasonable music. Voices buzzed, people changed their seats for better positions, a number went up, two taps came from the conductor’s stand; and there, with baton raised in the glow of the sunshine, and the winter seas pounding beyond, the bandmaster struck up a lively tune.
My attention was now drawn to the two lovers, who had joined hands, and were looking rapturously into each other’s faces. ‘See what you have done,’ I murmured, smiling at my friend; but again he shut down the lid; and on our way from the riotous scene we could hear the music droop, the fiddle expire, the trumpet sink, as though the whole band were a bed of bright flowers drooping and dying. . . .
We found ourselves stumbling on shingle, with seaspray stinging our cheeks. We found a boat, stranded, and here we sat, feeling the hush of the town behind us, watching the waves as they ran back into the sea.
‘All things run back into the sea,’ whispered my friend. ‘The sea itself runs back into the sea.’
Whereupon he plunged his head into the box, and died of the sunstroke.
‘And I come back to my Marine Hotel,’ I thought, a trifle helplessly, some minutes later, surveying the dim tables of the coffee-room and the grey walls beyond. The water jug on the sideboard acknowledged a fitful spurt from the fire; but I was very glad that the strange man, before we left this mournful place, had never turned his box upon it.
The Spurs
I
SOME years ago I was idling through a strange part of the country, and on looking up, I saw a horseman, with a curved nose, and a small peaked beard, riding down the slope from the wood. He passed within a dozen feet of me, holding himself like a god; and as I lay there on the hillside grass I studied every feature of his lean, patrician face in the glow of the sunset that flooded it beneath the broad brim of his hat.
On reaching the strip of level ground at the foot of the slope, he rode on, until his horse came as near as it dared to the brink of the precipice over which we hung.
I continued to watch the cloaked and upright silhouette of the stranger, who appeared to be gazing into the depths; and everything was still, except for the breeched legs and the twinkling spurs, for they were shivering, as though through an ague; or twitching, as though through fear.
‘It is really no business of mine,’ I thought, about to spring to my feet. Just then the sun went down beyond the horizon of verdured, wandering hills; at the same moment, the rider pulled on his rein, swung round, spurred his horse viciously up the slope, and threw me a look of anguish as he passed; and without a word I climbed after him into the wood, where the full light of the setting sun was still glowing.
I found him tethering his beast beneath the drooping boughs of the larches. Near him lay a low, timbered dwelling, supported on piles and fronted with a shadowy veranda. I heard a woman singing softly, and the gentle chink of china.
My horseman turned towards a flight of wooden steps. He appeared even taller than I had supposed—a kind of Quijote as straight as the stems of the larches, standing with his head flung back, and, as I fancied, waiting for me to approach him. From that moment he took the situation into his hands. He gave me the courtly bow that I had expected. The anguish on his face had gone; and with a sweep of his hat he invited me to ascend with him into his astonishing bungalow.
Standing in the open doorway of a room beyond the veranda, I heard and watched him striking matches and lighting his vividly shaded lamps and candles. One by one the stranger’s treasures were revealed. Indicating the fine extent of his living-room (where size and silence were equally encouraged by the heavy, boldly patterned black and yellow rugs and carpet), my host invited me to sit where I would, and I chose a bow-shaped, tapestry-covered chair beside the long oak table that was nearly black with age.
Having welcomed me with such a flourish, he became preoccupied, to the verge of incivility. For more than a minute I watched him standing deep in thought before a painting of a mounted toreador that flashed from a dull red wall above a divan tossing with crimson, black, and yellow cushions. Turning abruptly from the bullfighter, he made his way amongst the variously carved occasional tables, from one of which there rose a bronze, fantastic creature with a twisted tail; and finally he reached his grand piano, where brackets lighted up the score of a fandango by Albeniz.
I expected him to strike some disconnected chords in tune with his present mood; but instead of that he played and sang to a secret love, mockingly, vehemently, looking up at the ceiling:
O Plácida Lola Dolores,
> With your large dark eyes and your mouth purple-lipped!
The strings were still vibrating when he left the room. Before they had quite ceased, I heard the woman’s voice again, raised in a sudden laugh . . . and when my host returned, striking me afresh with his air of strange distinction, his dark face flashed as he invited me to dinner.
‘You will dine with me.’ I have never heard a more melodious voice than his. He fetched a bottle and glasses, and stood them on a little table. ‘Meanwhile—to the appetite!’—and with a gesture he poured out a dark sherry.
We drew up our chairs. We sat near the open door, with the little table between us, and looked across the veranda into the wood, where the delicate pink of the sunset still lingered. A faint breeze ran through the larches, and I was content, for the trees were languid at the end of summer, and I was languid too.
I was content to let things drift towards me, or to see them slide away into the distance. My life had come to a halt in this strange room, in this comfortable chair. The horse was munching outside.
Presently the man beside me stirred.
‘You will listen to my tale?’ he asked; yet it was more than a question—it was a command.
II
‘It is now many years I haven’t been in Spain,’ he began. ‘During that time I have picked up richly the English language. I possess also the exquisite sensibility of the decadent aristocracy of Galicia.
‘You may call me, if you like, Bizarro: Pedro Alonzo Calleja, the Marqués de Bizarro. In your language, bizarre—what does it mean? Eccentric; fantastic. Well, in the Spanish it means handsome and brave; and in the Basque—a beard.
Written With My Left Hand Page 7