Written With My Left Hand

by Nugent Barker

  ‘This injustice!’ he cried, glaring across the room. His deep, melodious voice had risen to a querulous shout.

  He never could escape from the relentless gaze of her eyes, from her low and contemptuous voice.

  ‘ “Plácida would be very old if she lived today,” you said—but still you love her? How can you tell me a silly thing like that? You never saw her heart! I doubt if you ever saw her face, nor can remember it now! It was yourself you saw!’

  Yet it was by her silences that she cowed him mostly. They forced him into silence that he hardly knew how to break. He strode to the piano, the spurs flashing at his heels. ‘Ojala,’ he sighed in a voice of infinite regret as he bent over the keys; ‘oh, Plácida Lola Dolores. . . .’ but I failed to catch any beauty in the song, nor tragedy; only melodrama.

  ‘Bah!’ he exclaimed, springing to his feet, and turning away from the piano as though forever, ‘but for these spurs I might have forgotten all about her!’

  The young woman intercepted him at every turn. She was indeed quite relentless. ‘I hate you! I despise and hate you!’ The soft, rich passion of her voice, subtly edged between the white stretch of teeth, is as vigorous to me now as it was when I stood by, all those years ago, watching the final moments that were too few and had come too suddenly to be called a ‘situation’ in Bizarro’s life. ‘I despise, and hate, and pity you too!’ Pity! Pity for a Calleja!

  ‘Bruja!’

  ‘I hate the sight of you, the sound of you, the thought of you, the stink of your cigars!’

  ‘Bruja! Bruja!’

  She was indeed a hell-cat, a furious woman. She had put her hand into the pocket of her overall—a very vivid green garment that went admirably with her black hair, I remember—and, transferring some of the tiny objects that it contained from one hand to the other, she began to pelt them at him, and I saw they were cigar-stumps.

  ‘Maldito sea! Caspita! Caspita!’

  ‘The stink of your endless cigars!’

  ‘Caspita! Bruja!—bruja! bruja!—bruja!’

  I remember the expression on his face as he ran towards the piano and with both hands crashed out a giant discord as though he would leave forever in that room the signature of his finished life. When he turned, she continued to pelt him with the pitiful cigar-stumps. One of them struck him on the nose. Another lodged in his beard. For a moment he stood facing us, drawn up to his great height, with his back to the open door that led to the ground.

  ‘Puf!’

  In a moment he was gone.

  ‘Let him go! Let him go! Let him plunge to his doom!’ And, God forgive me, I obeyed her. Although I had rushed forward I made no further effort to stop him. I watched him running down the steps, to the spot where his horse was tethered. . . .

  While I stood staring at the man and his beast, a soft voice startled my ear. ‘Will you let me pass, sir, please?’ I stood aside quickly; and then I saw the miracle happen. She was running down the bungalow steps; and within a few seconds, dappled with moonlight, she had sprung like a panther on to the back of the horse, into whose flanks Bizarro was already digging his spurs.

  ‘What? What?’

  I was too late. Though I jumped the full depth of the steps, I was too late. The horse had swept out of the wood, and was now bounding down the slope; and I saw it in the open moonlight gathering up its four hoofs before striking the turf on the verge of the precipice with one thunderous thump, leaving silence behind it—silence, and a vibration of the earth that I shall feel forever.

  I returned to the bungalow because I was hungry and because it seemed to me the only place in which I could wait for the morning. I put out most of the lamps, leaving an afterglow on the black and yellow rugs and cushions, the burning picture of the Toreador, and all the other parading colours by which the melodrama had been flooded. The discord that Bizarro had struck—still floating in my head, if not in the room itself—was now a harmony from which all the discordant notes had ebbed; and under these two influences of softened colour and sound I began to examine the question of whether the Marquis had gone to his death on account of love, duty, bravado, cowardice, or fear?

  One of these forces I struck from my list at once, neither did I suppose that Bizarro had suffered from a sense of duty; I was inclined to the thought that cowardice had been crowded out by fear and bravado, and even these, I decided, had been extinguished by anger; anger born of regret for his wasted life; anger brought to a head by the young woman who had proved to be so essential a part of Bizarro’s destiny. She had taken over from Plácida; yet I did not think that she had ever made her presence known to him—her presence on the horse, riding to her death behind the man whom she despised and loved. But who am I to penetrate the motives of a woman?

  A more solid subject for thought was the fact that I had found myself in the unexpected possession of a bungalow; and even this was becoming every moment more unsubstantial because of the dimmed light and the fading aroma of bacon and fried bananas that once upon a time had been so pungent and disturbing. She had removed the frying-pan in her forethought, never thinking of me. What did it matter? Bizarro’s chair, looking out across the veranda, was very comfortable; and I stayed there, unmoving, influenced deeply by the larches, for the wood was languid at the end of summer, and I was languid too.

  Death’s Door

  AT three o’clock in the morning, a young man stood thumping at Death’s Door. It had been a long climb up the hill; and at the summit he found the door closed against him.

  ‘How stupid this is!’ he cried.

  But nobody answered. Very earnestly he wanted to die. For weeks he had been praying for deliverance—deliverance from some heavy trouble whose details he had forgotten during his long climb. Walking back to the edge of that small plateau which surrounded the House of the Dead, the young man tried to jog his memory by peering down through the thickly-clouded distance that separated him from the foot of the hill. And he discovered that if he stared intensely enough in any downward direction, he could see the chequered tracts of fields, the glinting course of rivers, the brown and green clusters of wood and coppice, and the vaster, variegated masses of the towns. But the clouds soon gathered again over these several glimpses; and certainly the shapes and colours had been too obscure to disperse the clouds in his brain. It was some trouble connected with an event of the future—he felt positive of that—the unbearable torture of suspense—rather than any immediate bodily ailment, or even the duller progress of an incurable disease. With the exception of a slight irregularity in his breathing he felt curiously at rest in heart and limb. He turned back, and took up his old stand in front of the door. When would they open it?

  ‘Why don’t you open!’ he shouted, and hammered again.

  The door now claimed his attentions by its strange, enigmatical appearance. In essentials it was exactly as he had expected to find it—immeasurably large, and faultlessly compounded of matter and mind. What puzzled him was something that he could feel in its moral attitude, rather than something that he could see in its material state: the impression, powerfully conveyed to him, that it appeared both eager and reluctant to admit him yet. It was at once tender and cruel. It seemed to be expecting him, and in the same moment hinted that he had come too soon. He felt that he was a truant, that he ought to have stayed at home. The thought made him shudder; and again he became conscious of his unnameable trouble pressing upwards through the heavy clouds that hung between him and earth.

  Brushing the lank hair from his forehead, he tried to collect his vague and jumbled thoughts. With bent brows, and muttering lips, he set himself questions concerning this door. Its size and colour; its thickness and weight; the ease or difficulty with which it might be swung on its awful hinges; whether it would shut in silence, or startle him with a clang. And as soon as the list was completed, he saw how foolishly he had been wasting his time. Surely the whole dread fabric was but a breath! It was then that he remembered the loud reverberations of the knocker, pou
nding and starting through the House of the Dead. . . .

  True: the knocker itself was no less disconcerting. It, at any rate, had been real. He had held it in his fingers—and the hot feverish thing had deafened him with its summons to open . . . to open that intangible door! Deeply troubled, the young man lifted and dropped his hands. Was it possible ever to answer these questions?

  ‘Alas!’ he cried, ‘am I to get no farther than the knocker of Death?’

  When the echoes of his voice had subsided, he raised an arm, and sent a great peal thumping upon the door.

  The last clap of the knocker rolled and was tossed for many moments among the niches and halls and sarcophagi of the House of the Dead. The young man listened earnestly until the utmost tremor had died; then he became aware, with heightened consciousness, of the great building that stood before him. Yet he did not dare to lift his eyes beyond the knocker of the charnel-house. Instead, he let them wander curiously over the landscape: surely there must be some other hill, some other foothold besides that of the bleak plateau on which he was standing? But he could see none—only the grey twilight, hanging back, never consummating the dawn; and everywhere those banked and ballooning clouds, as stagnant as the core of the universe, as grotesque as a dream.

  Shuffling his feet heavily towards the hill-brow, the young man fancied that there was something which he wanted to remember—it was very elusive—something that he had seen or heard and had not comprehended, somewhere very near him, and at some indefinite period; the thought came to him suddenly that it was related to the moment when he had beheld that utter stagnation of the clouds. Therefore, though it had been his intention to search again for the root of his heart’s trouble, this time he did not peer down into the depths. Turning his face to the sky, he hunted earnestly for the thing that was eluding him; then, sifting it at last from the great hush above his head, he realised that the monotonous sound had never been entirely absent from his subconscious mind—the monotonous thrum of a high wind.

  Here was a problem that filled him with the deepest curiosity; and with straining ears, and restless eyes, he sought to reconcile the monstrous vigour of the wind and the rigid pageant of the clouds. The solution that presented itself at last—at the moment when he had begun to decide that any solution was impossible—appeared to him very convincing and very complete. The wind was blowing in from every quarter of the compass; it was radiating towards every surface-point from the centre of a vast cosmothetical sphere. Examining this theory during aimless wanderings between the hill-brow and the charnel-house, he saw how easily these clouds might be held in their several places by the equal pressure.

  But his thoughts were as aimless as his body. He could not marshal them. His argument was rent by unmanageable flaws. He was cold, and sleepy, and wanted to die, and away went his fine theory as soon as he had found it.

  So the young man continued to wander, and the wind to drum its doleful note over the hill-top. And the persistent sound became a lullaby, so that after a while he was enchanted by the low hum, by the laggard dawn, by the prevalent stagnation that now began to set a sporting-ground for Time upon the bleak and mournful spaces of the plateau. Time passed; hours swelled into days, and the days became weeks; and he, not knowing the long period through which he was drowsing, bestirred himself with the reflection that very soon they would be opening the door. Yet the door did not open. Its grim front loomed ever before him. A profound stillness stalked through the House of the Dead, and the infinite aisles were paved with the silence of all the tombs of the world’s past.

  ‘When will it open?’ he murmured, and abandoned himself to the flight of the years.

  When he awakened again, his apathy had increased, and every thought filled him with indifference, except the perpetual thought that he wanted to die. Even the secret of his unknown trouble had ceased to worry him; searching his heart, he fancied that he wanted to die for no other reason than that of his growing and rather incomprehensible weariness. Then, in opposition to this prevalent thought, there followed a period of many contradictory phases, of much idleness and terrible perturbation of mind, of clear-cut moments when he persuaded himself that he was not apathetic, but patient only . . . the door had told him so very clearly that he had come too soon. Also it was a period in which, one day, turning his face to the sky, he discovered that the ceaseless drumming of the wind was nowhere in the world around him, but in his head. In his head? Ha, ha! In his head. How funny. And he laughed. He laughed boisterously. He laughed until the tears ran down his cheeks, and he knew that he was crying. The thought angered him; and with a great shout he ran towards the charnel-house. But the knocker burnt his fingers, and he fled, ashamed. He stood upon the edge of the plateau, a tiny figure, deeply moved, lifting and dropping its hands. . . .

  The action melted into the drift of the years. Time passed, and now he was on a new part of the plateau, with the door at a vast distance, and he was laughing as he totted up the aeons, trying to count them upon his fingers. Sometimes the clouds, invisibly moving, would mass in huge faces over his head, and he laughed at them, too. For a whole year he leapt on a single leg, up and down, up and down, on a single leg, fretting that there was no one to see him. It was a high time, a wonderful time in which his senses were finely alert, and he was able to think out a million schemes, yet never to accomplish one; was eased of he knew not what, yet never sat and took his ease; a terrible time, in which he hunted for water and drank it only in his dreams, and peeped at the door in his waking moments, and clapped his hands, and danced and sang, and hunted for water, for water, for water . . . until one day his head was bigger than a cloud, and he remembered with perfect clearness of mind and vision the room on Earth in which he had wanted to die.

  To die? Dear God, if only he could die! While there was time! While there was time. . . . He threw back his head, and with wide eyes sought mercy of Heaven. His trouble—God!—had it been THAT? A great voice started behind him, crying:

  ‘I am ready for you. Are you ready for me?’

  ‘I am not! I am not!’ the young man answered, and clutched his head. He knew his trouble now. Its fingers were tightening round his soul. Bracing himself, he turned to look: and for the first time, for one brief moment, his eyes beheld and examined the full enormity of the charnel-house.

  The echoes of the great voice were prolonged by the wind, which began slowly to ebb until its mournful note could be heard no longer over the hill-top. And now a most tender peace fell upon the plateau, and upon the young man. He slept; and if he dreamed at all, it was to dream that some unknown, momentous thing was happening to him, that the scales were being balanced, and that this was the moment of their equipoise. Yet it is unimaginable that he dreamed, so utterly remote was he from all mankind. It would have been possible to walk in that place, to tread the whole course of the barren summit, to peep at his door, at the mounting magnificence of the clouds, and not to know that he was sleeping there.

  And it was from this divine period of rest that he awoke, and found himself falling.

  At first he did not know that he was falling. He supposed that he had walked to the extreme edge of the plateau, and there . . . in air . . . on the wreaths and flecks of clouds . . . was still walking, with his gaze fixed on the door. In another moment he had changed his mind: he was lying very lightly indeed upon the plateau: pressed down into its bleak surface, packed into the ballooning clouds and the whole great hump of hill, there was a supreme buoyancy, which in a strange fashion communicated itself to him.

  And in this belief he remained, until suddenly he realised that he could see no longer the barren hill-top, the House of the Dead, or even the topmost reach of Death’s Door. He was falling . . . falling. . . . A great sickness was in his throat. His lungs were two bursting clouds that he had left behind him, bumping on the brow of the hill. The far-away fields and towns and river-courses were tumbling up to him, he was falling, and dying. That for which he had longed so greatly—he was falling �
�and dying.

  ‘Ho there! You at the door! How stupid you are! I am dying! Will you not open? Why do you not open? I am falling! I am falling! Why are you so stubborn and stupid? Ah, Christ, save me! CHRIST! Can you not hear me? I am dying! I am dying! I am falling! I am falling! I am falling! I am going! I am going! I am going! I am going! Back! Back! Back! Back! Back! . . .’

  The prison doctor sighed.

  ‘Well, nurse, we’ve pulled him through,’ he muttered. ‘Poor brute. In two months’ time I suppose we shall have him well enough to be hanged.’

  Gertie Macnamara

  I CAN remember an old black mill, sir, stood hereabout; a pack of witches haunted it before my father’s time. I don’t suppose you believe in witches? Mr Timothy Weem told my father that when he was a little boy he used to spend night after night in the mill, chatting with the witches, and waiting on ’em, and that the name of the principal witch was Gertie Macnamara.

  It all come of his having to set out one evening with a bottle of barberry juice for his uncle Gideon. Gideon Weem used to suffer from the jaundice, and young Timothy’s mother was famous all over Runcton for her skill in medicine-making out of the sweet leaves of the barberry. Ragged clouds were running across the moon when the boy set out with the bottle; and as soon as he came in sight of the mill, Timothy thought to hisself what a wonderful night for witches. And those were true thoughts, as Mr Weem told my father near sixty years later: for there was the mill-door open, with sounds of swishing and droning and tinkling and gurgling coming through it; and when he peeped inside, sure enough, Timothy saw a number of witches riding about on their besoms, and others squatting and sewing witch-clouts among the rafters, and others sitting at table on the miller’s flour-sacks, drinking dropwort tea, and eating henbane and witches’-butter sandwiches, and talking steeplehats.